"Gardner Dozois - A Cat Horror Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

couldn’t! You think you’re safe with your humans because they feed you and give
you a warm place to sleep, but you never know when they’re going to turn on you
and torture[6] you. You’ll never know why they do it, either, but sooner or later,
they will. They all will. None of them are any different!”

“They wait until you’re sick,” a burly tom named Hobbes said. “They wait
until you’re feeling really bad, and then they take you to the Pain Place, to the
Torture Place, and they hurt you more —”

Another tom shuddered. “It’s true! The humans there stick things up your
ass! And they stab you, with things that hurt! And they drain your blood out of
you!”

“They cut you!” a queen named Jasmine said, her voice thrilling with horror.
“They cut you open! My humans took me there, to the Pain Place, with all its bad
smells and its sick smells and the sounds of the People screaming in agony while
dogs sit around and watch them, and they left me there, locked in a
Box-You-Can’t-Get-Out-Of, and I went to sleep, and when I woke up, my belly had
been slashed open! I could feel the cut, deeper than a cut from any fight. It hurt for a
long time, even when my humans came and got me and took me back to the lair
again. It hurt for a long time!”

They were crouched close together now, almost touching their heads in a
circle.

“They kill People there, too,” Blackie said. “The humans kill them. And not
just the humans who live in-the Pain Place. Your precious humans. The very same
ones who live with you and give you Food. They kill you, themselves!”

There were a few wails of protest, and the People pressed closer together,
shuddering.
 “I have seen it,” Blackie continued inexorably. “When they cut my balls off, in
the Pain Place, before they took me back to the lair and I ran away, they brought my
lair-mate in, an old queen named Stuff who had lived with the humans before I joined
them. Our humans brought her in, and they held her down while she fought to get
away, both of them held her down, and then another human stabbed her with a Pain
Stick, and she struggled for a while, and then she died! I could smell that she was
dead! They’d killed her! Our humans! They held her down and killed her — and
they patted her while they were doing it!”

Someone moaned with dread, and then fell silent.

“And that’s what will happen to all of you! Every one of you! If a dog or a
Fast Dead Thing or some other kind of monster or demon doesn’t get you, then, at
the end, your own humans will kill you!”

This was almost too much. They pressed close together for comfort, too
scared even to wail or moan now.

There was a crazed light in Blackie’s eyes. “I saw Stuff’s ghost last night. I