Why am I here in this place of madness, this house of diseased minds? Because of a cat!
And it is a cat that takes me away from this place—to go to my death! And maybe this cat will follow on to haunt me in some other world, as it has in this. Who knows?
This doom had its beginning, as far as this life is concerned, when I was a boy, a lonely boy in my grandmother’s house. My grandmother had a great yellow Tartar cat that she loved as only a lonely old woman can love a cat.
Perhaps it was because I was jealous of the love and attention my grandmother lavished on Toi Wah—a boy’s natural antipathy for anything that usurps the place he thinks is his by right. Or perhaps it was the same inborn cruelty, the same impish impulse to inflict suffering on a helpless dumb creature, which I have observed in other boys.
Anyway, with or without reason, I hated this self-complacent, supercilious animal that looked at me out of topaz eyes, with a look that seemed to see through and beyond me, as if I did not exist.
I hated her with a hatred that could be satisfied only with her death, and I thought and brooded for hours, that should have been devoted to my studies, of ways and means to bring this death about.
I must be fair to myself. Toi Wah hated me too. I could sense it as I sat by my grandmother’s chair before the fire and looked across at Toi Wah, who lay in a chair on the opposite side. At such times I would always catch her watching me out of half-closed eyes, stealthily, furtively, never off her guard.
If she lay in my grandmother’s lap and I leaned over to stroke her beautiful yellow fur, I could feel her actually shrink from my hand, and she would never purr, as she always did when my grandmother stroked her.
Sometimes I would hold her on my lap and pretend that I loved her. But as I stroked her, my hands would itch and twitch with the desire to clinch my hand in her satiny skin, and with the other hand choke her until she died.