I will be posting my first three science fiction novels, starting with “The Time of The Cat.” That is book one of the Gaia Ascendant Trilogy. It has been available for several years on all Internet book-selling sites. It is also available through physical bookstores (but probably only on special orders). The original schedule was to upload a chapter a day, but that proved too much for many readers, so the new pace is a new chapter every Friday. That gives readers the weekend to catch up and also doesn’t clutter up subscribers’ emails.
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Eric S. Martell
Here is Chapter 1 of 61 of The Time of The Cat. I hope you enjoy the story.
Copyright © 2014 Eric S. Martell
All rights reserved.
Cover Design by Krzysztof (Kris) Krygier
Interior Format by The Illustrated Author Design Services
Printed in the USA
Second Initiative Press
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
ONE
THE DRUNK
It was just another spring day in the city until the drunk limped by. He was a bearded urban outdoorsman type stumbling down the sidewalk. He was pretty typical. Inebriated, unwashed body and a filthy mouth that opened a little too often. It was nearly summer, and the weather was warming up. I didn’t think it was hot yet, but he was suffering from the heat. I got a quick whiff of his horrible body odor on the breeze as he staggered by. It was a safe bet that he had no interest in water, either for drinking or washing.
The drunk’s teeth were yellowed and broken, and he slurred parts of a melancholy song as he limped along with alcohol showing in his gait.
“She doesn’t give you time uhhn, uh, as she locks up your arm in hers,” he crooned in a scratchy baritone.
I couldn’t quite think of the name of the song, and it didn’t help that he was slightly out of tune.
He continued with an unpleasant quaver in his voice, “And you follow, uhhn, uh direction completely disappears. Uhhn, there’s a hidden door she leads you to.”
The passersby veered to the edge of the street to give him as wide a berth as possible. He staggered and stopped to lean on a bicycle rack diagonally in front of where I was standing.
I was across the street from the door of a non-nondescript, three-story building which happened to be the tallest building on this part of Steinway. There was a closed pet shop next door and the other side boasted a mosque and a couple of sickly trees.
The mosque was obvious to any casual observer. It was decorated garishly with gold columns on either side of the front entrance and windows with filigreed cutouts. The view of the building was one reason I was standing by a shoe store entrance. I’d also picked this location because it was shaded by another dejected oak. The poor tree was making the best of its ill fortune to be planted by the street. I felt sorry for it but was glad of the shade.
The drunk started on the next line of the song, “These days, uhhn, just like a river running through ...”
His voice trailed off. Then he abruptly leaned over and voided the contents of his stomach, managing to splash some on the feet of a swiftly walking pedestrian. There was a considerable amount of cursing, but the drunk seemed oblivious. The violated woman stomped her feet, shook her fist at him, and then continued toward a corner restaurant. Uncaring, the drunk staggered across the street, moving away from me and toward the mosque.
I looked both ways down the sidewalk, keeping tabs on the pedestrians in case someone was on to me. Mentally, though, I was still trying to place the drunk’s tune when suddenly there was a screech of brakes on the street as someone swerved to miss him and cut off another car. The screech was followed by horns and some more shouted curses. Typical big-city behavior; lots of noise and swearing but no actual physical contact.
I glanced at the narrowly avoided collision, and when I turned back, the drunk wasn’t on the far sidewalk. He wasn’t up the street or down the street either. He hadn’t gone into the closed pet shop; the hand-written sign on the front notified any interested parties that it was “Close for Vacates.”
The sign’s message had me mystified. I couldn’t decide if the owners had closed permanently and were vacating the property or had simply gone off on vacation.
He certainly wasn’t the type who would go into a mosque. He was obviously drunk and would have been denied entrance or worse. I thought he must have gone into the three-story building. The only problem was that it was entirely too nice-looking a building for him to have any business inside or to find anyone there who would be willing to give him any sort of sanctuary or anything but a push towards the exit.
I wasn’t busy at the moment. In fact, I was waiting for the man I’d been following to come out of the mosque. I do that sometimes. My consulting business is very discrete and quite expensive and often involves locating some pretty unsavory characters, sometimes in unsavory locations. Anyway, I wasn’t busy, so I watched for the drunk to come out while I waited for my target.
You must understand that I’m not normally interested in drunks. I am, however, interested in people doing unusual or unexpected things because my experience has taught me that this can be important. Anyway, I remained on watch, but I walked over and relaxed in the front seat of my car. It was parked nearby, under the unhappy tree in the darkest patch of shade that I could find. The wind was cool, but the sun was hot, so the shade was definitely appreciated.
The street was heavy with the usual traffic; a mix of private vehicles and some cabs along with delivery trucks and the occasional bus. The atmosphere was thick with exhaust fumes: both from the automobiles and the numerous restaurants in the area. The exhaust fans from the restaurants exhaled a thick, cloying smell of burnt grease, intermixed with some more appetizing odors of various types of food. The sidewalk was covered with black spots where chewing gum had been discarded, indicating with a high degree of accuracy the type of thinking (or lack thereof) that was predominant among the local residents.
Sixty-two minutes later, my target came out of the mosque. He walked out of the door, paused, and glanced both directions, then headed toward a black Mercedes 600 S Class that he’d thoughtfully parked right in front of a fire hydrant. I’d been sort of hoping for the fire department or parking patrol to come by, but they hadn’t shown up in the time that I’d been there. My hope on that score was simply a form of amusement based on my imagination of the expression on the guy’s face when he saw his car had been booted.
He walked down the street, stopped, and looked both ways again. If he was trying to act nonchalantly, he was failing miserably. Without another pause, he walked swiftly around to the street side, unlocked the car door, and got in. He pulled out into traffic without even a sideways glance, causing a considerable amount of honking and cursing. I’m used to the commotion, but it still keeps me on edge. I’d previously placed a GPS tracker on the frame of the vehicle, so I didn’t worry about following.
Instead, I went into a doughnut shop and got a cup of iced mocha and then stood around under the tree outside for another ten minutes while I sipped my drink. Still no drunk. Crossing the street gave me a closer view of the door, where I guessed that he had entered. It was a brass door with two windows that gave me a view into the lobby. There was nothing inside but a small lobby with a pot holding a dusty, artificial palm and a plain-looking metal elevator door at the rear.
I was about to quit looking through the glass door, but there was something that looked like a second elevator on one of the side walls. It hadn’t been there a moment ago. It just somehow appeared. The appearance made me doubt myself, but I’m good at observing details, so it was only a flicker of doubt. That door had popped into existence right by the corner of the room. Its edge touched the edge of the original elevator’s frame on the back wall.
As I watched, the new door flicked open far more quickly than any normal elevator. A slightly deformed hand on a skinny wrist reached out and pressed the adjacent call button for the elevator at the back. I couldn’t see who or what the hand was attached to. The rear wall elevator opened, and a man-shaped figure with unusual taste in haberdashery shot out of the side elevator and then disappeared into the back one. The doors both closed; the back elevator light flickered for a moment. It didn’t go up or down, just turned red and then faded out slowly.
I wondered what I had just seen. An ordinary person passing by probably wouldn’t have noticed anything. The entire action occurred in only a second or two.
Most people don’t really look anyhow. I was reminded of this fact when I suddenly realized that the sidewall elevator door had disappeared again and I’d missed its disappearance. That was weird enough to keep me looking through the glass, just in case something else happened.
The being...creature, whatever it was, that had changed elevators was or appeared to be, only superficially human. I’d gotten the impression of smooth skin with rippling muscles, but the angularity of the shape was definitely not within the normal human spectrum. And the clothing! The clothes would probably be a hit in any number of edgy clubs in the Village, but most people wouldn’t be wearing something that odd looking even if they were that odd looking.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve seen some pretty strange people, not only in New York. However, what I’d seen definitely did not look human.