Seven-eyed Cats

I was walking up a stony hillside at night. A pale red moon hung low in the sky. It washed the hills in an ethereal, pink haze. The craggy hills of the countryside were dotted with sparse, somber trees that offered strange shade as they cast their shapes in long-reaching fingers over the barren earth. I walked over a wind-scoured rise of stone and espied a lonely wooden cottage.

My destination, perhaps. 

I moved with tired limbs to the door of that lonely place, and raised my arm to knock. Before I could begin my rapping, I heard a sound from around the side of the house that paused my action. A struggling, mewling cry. 

My hand fell slowly to my side, the door forgotten. I veered away from the cottage, slanting sideways as I walked towards the outer corner as if hoping to spare my body the sight of whatever had made the noise. 

A cat. A tiny thing, laying on its side in a pool of some dark fluid. Its little chest heaved in silhouette and the strange mewling came again. The sound was part feline, part anguish, part something tinny and discomfiting. Like a cry ripped prematurely from a throat by a wailing wind. 

I peered around the corner of the building, my hand rested against the old wood to steady myself. It was warm under my palm, yet silent within. 

The cat was alive, this much I could see, but it did not move save its hummingbird-quick panting. 

I lurched forward. Dueling voices of curiosity and animal uneasiness shouted in my head as I approached the tiny shape. I came to rest and stooped low over the scene, the sanguine moon glittered up in reflection out of the pool around the creature. I reached out a tentative hand and brushed at its heaving ribcage. A somatic plea to steady it. To demonstrate I meant it no harm. The frantic, ragged breathing did not abate as my fingers raked gently through the soft fur of the thing. It cried again, and craned its head up at me. 

The cat, or what I had thought was a cat, opened its eyes. One, then two, then three. More. 

All blearily opened up to me until seven gold-speckled pinpricks blazed fearfully up at me. One set in the center of a maddeningly feline skull, and three more to either side of that. Like some quizzical spider. Well, one short of a spider, anyways.  

“Leave it be!” A voice shouted, muffled behind wooden slats.

I flinched at the noise, as did the cat under the pads of my fingers. It tensed its little body and unleashed another cry, this one louder than the others. Different. 

The cry lingered in the air for an unnatural length of time, and just as silence had reclaimed the hillside, a sharp crack, as of a twig breaking, found my ears. I lurched upright, recoiling from the creature that still laid on the ground. My fingers were slick and warm. I whipped my head around and squinted fiercely in the direction of the sound. Desperate to conjoin a definite shape to the sound that had already begun to paint vivid, unsavory pictures inside the walls of my skull.  

From a nearby copse of trees I saw the glitter of eyes. Seven, in a neat row, all trained on me as I stood rigid in the dim light of the moon. Larger than the babe’s. They seemed to radiate out at me, the shine of a nocturnal animal’s eyes. Predator’s eyes. 

A rumbling growl drifted out from the trees. Sonorous and somehow lilting. We stared at each other for what felt like eons. My two, thrown wide and dry, locked with the seven coiled menacingly in the darkness. It blinked asynchronously. Then melted into the shadows entirely.

The small cry came again, but from far away this time. I stole a glance behind me, and saw only a tiny shimmering pool where the cat had lain. The sound of soft, padding limbs skittered at the edges of my hearing.

More voices answered it. From all around me. I was surrounded. Slowly, a sea of yellow orbs began to surface in the darkness from every direction. shining as if by their own light. 

Hundreds of them, in multiples of seven.