his eyes toward that miserable wall, that wall of pain and horror.
And his trouble has taken possession of me. The frightened cat has driven his fear into the very marrow of my bones. I am paralyzed with craven foreboding. Like the cat, I am unable to move my eyes from the mysterious gray wall, the wall which is hiding from me some blood-curdling happening that I have not the courage to try to imagine. Kara Kedi trembles and shivers in the protecting grasp of my two cold hands. Then suddenly an even more terrible thing happens.
Kara Kedi tears himself free from my embrace, drops from my knees, leaps into the air three or four times and falls to the floor in violent convulsions. His throat is torn by raucous cries, cries which are no more like the familiar miauing of his normal life than the sinister gurglings of an epileptic in the midst of a seizure are like the healthy human voice. . . .
*****
I think I suffered a temporary period of derangement. I have a feverish recollection that I seized my revolver and stood a long time with the weapon pointed at the ominous wall, waiting for the wall to open and admit some shape of terror. . . .
My poor, pretty young neighbor, the giddy little person of accommodating virtue whose bracelets rattled so gayly in her sunny garden, is dead. They found her body this morning.
Nobody has the slightest inkling of what the motive of the crime may have been. The assassin does not appear to have taken anything. The poor little corpse still wears all its gaudy jewelry. Nor was there any sign of a struggle or of violence. An extraordinarily long gold pin, an ornament but a deadly weapon at need, was found driven into her body below the fifth rib. And the eyes of the dead woman, wide open and staring, are dilated with a horror that is one of the most dreadful things I have ever seen.
Everybody is mystified. Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything. It is likely that the mystery will never be solved. Till the body was found, nobody had any suspicion that anything was wrong.
Nobody, that is, but Kara Kedi—Kara Kedi and I.
Kara Kedi followed me over when I went into the little cottage to look at the body. He glanced carelessly at the pathetic little corpse; then he looked away. It appears that dead people have no particular interest for Kara Kedi. But he did look at me again, with a strange earnest expression in his eyes.
Then he walked out of the open door, crossed the garden pensively, and moved out on a branch of the great fig-tree to meditate. To meditate—perhaps to ruminate his memories.
