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  TOM

  Dave Freer

  About the Author

  Dave Freer is the author or co-author of more than 20 novels. His ‘SLOW TRAIN TO ARCTURUS was a Wall Street Journal sf bestseller. Various other books have also been on the Locus bestseller lists.

  He lives on a remote island off the coast of Australia, with his wife, dogs and cats and chickens. You can get the full bio and links to his other sites from his Amazon Author page. For a complete list of his work and stories which are available nowhere else, see Dave's official website

  Copyright

  TOM by Dave Freer © 2016

  Electronic edition published by Magic Isle Press, May 2016

  Cover art: Mentona | Dreamstime.com © Skypixel Dreamstime.com ©

  Cover design: Joe Freer

  Interior art: Cattallina, Dreamstime.com - Raven Bird Vector Photo ©

  Interior art: © Iras8874 | Dreamstime.com - Black And White Animal Cat Head

  Proofreading: Periwinkle Proofs

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Amazon edition, license notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people, outside the terms set by Amazon. Please respect this: This is how I earn my living. I keep prices reasonable, but if I don’t get paid, I can’t afford to write books.

  Acknowledgements

  Not even a mine of useless information like myself can know quite enough for such an improbable book. I need to thank Dr Nikhil Rao for advice on how not to kill your characters (but almost). Dr Shira Tomboulian for more medical advice for them, Brian Holcomb for his wisdom on the subject of suitable firearms, our vet John O’Dell for telling me a great deal more than I needed to know about the reproduction of cats, and Sharyn Lilley for the worst pun in the book.

  Two of the chapters in this book have appeared in somewhat altered form long ago as short stories — and if I hadn’t had a tight deadline and needed inspiration to write that second one, I might not have remembered what fun — as a character to write — Tom was, so thank you Edwina Harvey.

  As always my deepest thanks go to Barbara, my darling wife, who in addition to putting up with me for a lot of years, is also my firstest first reader, to whose skills both I and the readers owe a great deal. My thanks too, to my friends Melissa Siah, Najmul Hasan, and Sharyn Lilley for reading this for their input on their fields of expertise. Any errors are mine, not theirs.

  The underlying inspiration for those stories, and this book, comes from four feline overlords who do not care if I mention them or not. Unless I don’t thank them profusely, that is…

  Legolas, Batman, Duchess and Robin… thank you for providing me with such a wealth of feline observational experience. Without you there would have been no book… and I would have lost, oddly, a great deal of joy in your service. I would have opened many less doors, and had far more bed to sleep on. I’d have sneezed less, and stepped on fewer mouse-entrails. But I have loved you dearly, my cat-masters.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE CAT WHO CHANGED

  “Mrorw?” Tom eyed the chipped bowl with suspicion, despite the enchanting smell wafting from it, and his extreme hunger. It had been a hard winter for a half-grown cat. Pickings from humans could be good. So could kickings. It was the first time he’d come hunting up on the craggy mountainside. The cold teeth of winter and hunger had forced him to hunt some distance away from the barn he called home. So far it had produced not so much as a skinny field-mouse.

  And now this scrawny human outside the old rotting stone tower was offering him something that smelled like it had to be food for the cat-gods.

  He’d once stolen something that had smelled just like it from the pampered pussy that lived with an old woman on the edge of the village. The wolfed mouthfuls, in between hissing at the fat fluff-ball, had been worth being chased by the old woman and her broom.

  “Here kitty. Have some nice fish,” said the human.

  The words didn’t make a lot of sense to Tom. He knew some human, of course. Not as much as those cats that had successfully domesticated one, but he understood words like “scat!” and “get lost!”

  It was the tone that worried him.

  It was… peculiar.

  Anything odd was a warning sign for a cat who lived by his wits.

  Still, the food in the bowl smelled so good, and he was very hungry. Tom could smell any hint of a taint far better than any human. And this old bag of bones in the star-and-moon spangled robe would never be able to run as fast as him. There was no sign of any visible trap. Cautiously, tail waving he advanced step by step towards the fish.

  Not all traps are steel cages or jaws. The scratched circles on the ground had meant nothing to Tom, anyway. Cats are somewhat more immune to magic than humans, but not completely so. It’s just different for cats.

  Tom woke. Not instantly, alert and ready to run, as he usually did. A feral kitten that didn’t, was soon dead. Instead Tom awoke… clumsily. In bits, as it were, but knowing that something was very, very wrong. He did what any cat would do under the circumstances — he sprang to his feet, in one single bound, claws out, ears back, hissing defiance, ready to flee.

  Well, that was what he set out to do. What he actually did was to go from lying down to falling over in many separate disasters, starting with his front legs betraying him and him landing with his chin on the floor. He failed to stick his claws out. His ears refused to do what they should, his hiss was more of ‘squark’, fit for a bird! His hind legs were just too big and clumsy…

  Only his tail felt right. And it felt ‘right’ by being dead straight up, with the hair on it fluffed, as it did when things were really, really, bad.

  It happened to be true, too. Twisting awkwardly and peering at it, Tom could see his tail, tabby, fluffed and straight. That part of him was right and what it should be. The rest of him was not. His fur had fallen out. And his body was just obscenely wrong. “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” he yowled.

  That sounded wrong too.

  A human mouth was just terrible to howl out of. No better than a human body for springing and fleeing.

  He still did his panicky, angry best.

  It didn’t help him get out of the stone-walled room. He head-butted the wooden door, but that didn’t help, it just hurt his head. The noise he was making had just about the same effect. So, after a few minutes, he did what any sensible cat would do: lay down and thought about it, while giving himself a wash. His tongue couldn’t reach the bits of him that badly needed that washing. What a stupid, useless body this was. He came up with no other answers right then, but a great many questions.

  A while later the door opened. Tom spun to his feet… well, he fell over trying to do that, rediscovering that he was not a cat any more.

  It was the scrawny old human, in his dirty star-and-moon spangled robe. He spoke… but what he said was not ‘Scat!’ or ‘Damned cat!’ or even ‘I’ll kill yer, yer little fleabag!’. As Tom wasn’t sure what he meant, he decided on trying a cautious mew, while keeping a sharp eye out for the first chance to escape.

  All that happened was that the human made the same noises again. And Tom gave him the same reply. The human shook his head and muttered to himself. Then he scratched his beard, and raised his stick. Tom did his best to retreat. He knew what sticks meant, even if he had no idea what the human meant. The stone-walled corner of the room limited his ability to flee. But the old human merely touched him with his stick, while rattling of
f a string of words…

  And then he said: “I have work for you to do, idle boy. Stop lying around, dress yourself and get down to the kitchen!”

  Amazing! The old human had just touched him with that stick and now the human spoke perfect cat…And then it came to Tom that there weren’t even words in cat for ‘dress yourself.’ He tried to meow plaintively, in shock at this new horror. It came out as “Mwhaat’s happened to me?” which was not what he set out to say, even if it was what he wanted to know.

  He got an answer. “I need a new famulus. You’re it.”

  Tom knew he shouldn’t have understood what a ‘famulus’ was. But he did, even if the idea of him, a cat, being an attendant, a servant… was nearly as horrifying as finding himself in this body. “Let me go! I’m a cat,” he protested, despite the fact that having looked at himself, he obviously wasn’t.

  The old human snorted. “You’re a boy, now. I left your tail on though. That’ll stop you running off. They’ll kill you out there if they see it. Now, get on with it, boy. I want my supper, and there’s pots needing to be scrubbed.” And with that he turned and walked out of the room.

  No matter what the human said, Tom was desperate to escape. Even though his mind was still whirling with all this newness and horror, that idea was still his uppermost thought. He looked at the doorway, at the retreating back of the human, as the door swung closed. The latch clicked. Tom stared at it in horror. To a cat that was confinement. And then it came to him slowly… It wasn’t to a human. He’d seen them open doors.

  He didn’t have to like the idea of being in a human body, just to use it. So he tried pretending he was lunging for a bird and stood up on his hind legs.

  It wasn’t quite as easy as they made it look, but Tom was not good at admitting he couldn’t do things. So he tried again, and again, until he more or less got the hang of it. Of course it was nothing on being a cat, but he could reach, now, as far as he could have leaped before. Having managed to stand on two legs… A cat will always seize the main chance, and right now that was the door-handle.

  It took him a little while to succeed at making it work. He couldn’t just stick his claws into it, because what he had now really didn’t classify as ‘claws’. On the other hand the stumpy fifth digit… well, that did make holding things easier. It was a necessary compensation for not having decent claws, Tom supposed.

  The latch clicked and Tom was free.

  To a certain degree of the word ‘free’, anyway.

  He was free in a long, dank, dim stone corridor, lit by a few candles that flickered in iron wall-sconces. The strange things humans dangled on their walls hung there, supporting cobwebs. Tom did his best to creep along the passage, not knowing where out was, painfully aware that humans are just not built to creep as silently as cats, and humans who have only just discovered how to walk on their hind legs, less so.

  The floor was cold, and so was he without fur.

  He was, as far as his new human senses could be stretched, listening and looking very carefully for any sign of danger. And then he saw one, in a silvery framed hole into another passage.

  It was a human. A young one, a male by the look of it, its bare skin pallid, its eyes wide beneath a shock of tangled head-fur, its tabby-striped tail moving in cautious curves. Tom froze.

  So did the human.

  Tom stood, motionless, staring at the human.

  The human did exactly the same thing.

  Eventually, Tom knew he was going to have to lose this competition. His new human eyes were just not as good as cat eyes. He just had to blink. So he did… and so did the human.

  It occurred to Tom, that, although he’d seen naked humans before, down at the pool on the river, none of them had had such a fine tail. He waved his own… and so did the human. The word ‘mirror’ — which he had not previously known, or begun to understand, came to his mind. He tested what the idea implied, by moving his head. The reflection also moved.

  Somehow a pool of still water had been trapped and pressed up against this wall! Tom could not resist looking at himself.

  It was, for a cat, not an appealing sight. Despite the desperate circumstances, Tom tried several poses in this odd skinny human body… and was suddenly aware that the other cat boy in the mirror was about to receive a belt from behind from the scrawny old human.

  It took a wallop from that old human’s staff for him to work out that that applied to him as well, not just the reflection. He turned to flee, but Tom and his new human body were still not getting on quite correctly. His frantic leap bounced him against the far wall and left him in a heap on the floor. Tom got several more whacks from the staff as he cowered there. “I told you to put clothes on and get to the kitchen, boy,” said the old man, crossly.

  “M…clothes. Kitchen. I don’t know,” whimpered Tom, trying to watch for and dodge the next blow.

  It didn’t come. “Hmph. I hadn’t thought of that,” said the old man irascibly. “More wastage of my precious time! Well, get up, boy. I will show you only once.”

  Cautiously, Tom got to his feet, wishing he could trust them to help him run.

  “Back to your room. There’s one of your predecessor’s robes there. You’ll have to look after it. I’m not made of money, you know.”

  The room he had escaped, now that Tom was looking for something more than a way out… still had very little extra to see. A straw pallet, an old blanket — Tom had been on one once — and a three-legged stool, on top of which there lay a bundle of cloth. The old man pointed at it with his stick. “Your robe. Put it on.”

  Tom was still not too sure what to do with the human front-paws, but they did manage to pick the bundle up. A piece of rope fell to the floor.

  He held the robe and looked at it in puzzlement.

  “Put your arms through the arm holes and put the rope around your waist,” said the man with an irritable sigh. “Really, if anyone had said it would be this much trouble… Get on with it!”

  So Tom did his best. It was enough to provoke a snort of what might have been amusement from the old man. “That’s both back-to-front, and upside-down.”

  Tom tried again. It was… odd having something that moved against his skin, but it was warmer, even if it did smell faintly of cheese. Tom knew that smell from the dairy which was close to the barn where Tom had lived. Tying ropes was a whole new mystery, that eventually his master lost patience with, and did it for him, before chasing him down the long passage, past his reflection, and through to another room.

  He did not recognize all of the smells in the kitchen, but quite a few of them were rank, nasty and reeked of decay. Others were appetising… in that a smell of rat was that, to Tom. The old man pointed him at piles of crockery and pots on a long bench next to another door. “As you can’t dress yourself, you probably can’t cook either. Well, you will have to learn. Now clean those.”

  Tom looked at the piles of dishes, plates and pots in horror.

  This human tongue was going to be completely useless for the job.

  And then a huge black mass of bird-feathers flung itself at his face, claws out, shrieking: “Nevermore!”

  Tom ducked just in time, but the raven’s trailing claw left a parting through his hair.

  Tom learned. The first thing he learned was that escape from the tower was not going to be easy. Well, he learned that after ‘how you actually wash pots’ and ‘humans are not as good at catching rats with teeth and claws as cats are.’

  He finally succeeded in catching a big black rat. He fought the temptation to let it go and catch it again a few times, instead of just eating it. It would help to deal with the fact that the mouthfuls of fish were a long time ago. For some reason the thought of crunching the rat’s skull was making him feel slightly queasy instead of hungry.

  And then the old man returned to the kitchen, fortunately, not with his raven.

  “A rat!” he exclaimed. “Excellent, boy! Just what I was needing for my latest experiment!”
The old man looked at the scrabbling, chittering, squeaking creature Tom had, pinched hard, by the neck. “Follow me. You are not to touch anything in my laboratory unless I tell you to!”

  Tom had already tried running away and been unsuccessful… Three times so far. He’d tried not doing what he was told, and learned that it caused pain and bruises. So he followed the old man out of the huge gloomy kitchen, and up a staircase. Stairs were new to his human body. He nearly dropped the rat, while coping with them.

  The door at the top of the stairs was heavy, and studded with metal. The old man went in, muttering. Tom learned, later, that he wasn’t just muttering, that those odd words meant something.

  The room within was noisome —and not just in that it stank of strange and nasty chemical reeks, but there were also many little noises, hissing, bubbling and strange strangled sounding gurgles. A huge iron candelabra, hung from the roof, full of rows of candles, their solidified yellow wax hanging down in long dribbles. The walls were lined with benches or cabinets, and cages. The benches and central table were full of strange metal and glass apparatus, from whence some of the sounds and smells came. Some of the other sounds and smells came from the raven. It sat watching him, head askance, from a perch on the top of a bust of a beautiful woman. She was beautiful even if she wasn’t a cat, Tom was surprised to realize. The raven wasn’t beautiful. It looked ready for murder, but then ravens always do.

  The old man walked over to a strange contraption in the far corner. It had a glass wheel hanging over it, which was slowly rotating, emitting puffs of sulphurous smoke. It dangled over a seething bath of grey glutinous quivering stuff, through which little blue lightnings seemed to crawl. The old man pointed a bony finger at a wide funnel attached to edge of the device. “Put it in there.”

  Tom was rather upset by this. It was his rat! He’d caught it. But something in that tone said: ‘catch yourself another rat.’