Read Online Darkroom by Graham Masterton - Free Book Online Page A

out.
    â€˜Come to take Tibbles off your hands,’ said Jim.
    â€˜Hey – soon as you like. Gives me the willies, your cat.’
    Jim sat down and took a mouthful of cold beer. ‘She hasn’t been misbehaving herself, has she? Hasn’t made any mess?’
    â€˜Oh, no, she’s a very
clean
cat, I’ll have to admit that. But she’s a very
strange
cat, isn’t she?’
    â€˜What happened?’
    â€˜You won’t believe this. Sunday night we were sitting in the parlor watching TV when she walks in, takes a sniff around, then jumps up on to the table where we keep all the family photographs.’
    â€˜I’m sorry. She didn’t break anything, did she? She’s not allowed to jump on the furniture.’
    Dennis held his stomach for a moment, and burped. ‘Sorry. Too much beer. But I can never do that chat room thing unless I’m halfway drunk.’ He adopted a monotonous, nerd-like voice. ‘“Dear Mr Washinsky, I’ve written a terrific new action-adventure movie,
Dead From The Neck Upward
, especially for Bruce Willis. Please give me Mr Willis’s address so that I can deliver it to him personally in a brown-paper bag. I just know that once Mr Willis has had the chance to read it he’ll insist on starring in it.”’
    Jim smiled. ‘Come on, Dennis. You have to let people have their dreams. They know as well as you do that they’re never going to come true.’
    â€˜Jim – you always were soft. You should see some of the scripts my students send me, complete with totally impossible camera directions and casts of thousands. Scene one: exterior; a high aerial shot; the Battle of Gettysburg; day.’
    Jim laughed. ‘So tell me about Tibbles.’
    â€˜Oh, yes. Tibbles jumps up on to the table and starts to nose at the photographs. Then suddenly she knocks one over, with her nose. It’s a picture of my half-sister, Isabelle.’
    â€˜You should have whacked her. Tibbles understands whacks.’
    â€˜Well, whatever, Mary shoos her off, and stands the picture up again. The next thing we know, she jumps up again and knocks it over a second time. So this time Mary takes the picture and puts it up on the fireplace. Tibbles doesn’t try to get up on the table again, but later on we go into the kitchen, and we hear this crash. Tibbles has only jumped up on to the fireplace and knocked the picture into the hearth.’
    â€˜I’m really sorry. Like you say, she can act a little strange. I think she’s probably descended from a long line of witches’ cats.’
    â€˜You’re not kidding. A half-hour later Isabelle’s husband Michael calls up and says that Isabelle has fallen down the front steps and broken her hip.’
    â€˜Coincidence,’ said Jim.
    â€˜You can call it what you like. I call it weird. Tibbles knocks the same picture over, three times; and how many steps does Isabelle fall down? Three.’
    Mary appeared, with a long-suffering Tibbles hanging from her arm. ‘I found her under the bed. Her, and seven dead spiders.’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Jim. ‘She likes chasing spiders. She kind of – well, she
collects
spiders, live or dead.’
    Dennis shook his head. ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

Five
    F rom the moment he dropped her on to the threshold, Tibbles sniffed at their new apartment with deep suspicion. She smelled the shoes heaped up in the entrance hall and violently sneezed, and when she walked into the living room she stopped and looked around, and her tail slowly lifted as if she could sense something there that she didn’t like at all.
    Jim went through to the kitchen with his bags of groceries, but then he came back to see what she thought. ‘Well, TT, how does it grab you? It’s kind of well-worn, I’ll admit. Decrepit, even. But it has
atmosphere,
doesn’t it?’
    Tibbles padded across the hearthrug