Absently he licked a whisker. He considered himself the epitome of tough tomcats, yet now he felt strangely reluctant to leave the safety of the bedroom. Shivers of fear coursed up his rigid back, and his paws had begun to sweat.

Trying to get hold of himself, he cocked an ear toward the closed door. Hearing no creak in the hall, he approached the door warily, and pawed it open. Crouching, he slunk down the dark hall, his whiskers tingling with apprehension.

He stared into the bathroom, looking nervously past the shower door into the tiled cubicle. When he found it empty, he slipped on down the hall along the dog-scented carpet toward the spare bedroom.

That room was at the back, without the streetlight to brighten its interior. The shades were up. He could see no movement beyond the black glass. He jumped on the desk, pressed his face against a cold pane of glass, and looked out.

He could see no one in the backyard. He could hear no sound, now, from anywhere in the house. Yet still he could not stop his skin from rippling in long, chilling shivers.

Terror had plagued him ever since that night in the alley when he saw Samuel Beckwhite murdered. He could not escape these constant replays of that bright arc swinging up, the dull thud of shattering bone. That moment of violence had altered his every thought, his every reaction. Sometimes he wondered if he was going bonkers, tipping over the edge. And it was far more than his witness to Beckwhite's death, and his subsequent pursuit, that had transformed him.

The weirdness started before that. He was, and had been for some weeks, experiencing a strange identity change. He was totally out of touch with the normal cat world. His initial amazement when he realized he could understand human speech had been almost more than he could handle.

Nothing that life could serve up could equal the shock of that first moment when human speech became clear. When Clyde said in a low, controlled voice, "If you don't take that mouse outside, Joe, you are going to find yourself warming a cat coffin with the lid nailed down."

He had understood each individual word. He had taken the mouse outdoors, so upset at his sudden cognitive ability that he turned the squirming morsel loose, let it go free to scamper away.

He had stood on the porch shivering with astonishment at his sudden understanding of human speech.

A normal, ordinary cat knows the call to meals, he knows and tolerates his master's sharp commands such as Get off the table! and Stop that damned clawing! Any cat with a home knows the love words, the baby talk. But words such as those are recognized partly through tone of voice, partly through frequent repetition. No cat is able to decode every human word, or to comprehend abstract human meaning.

But he, Joe Grey, was able to do exactly that. Was suddenly able to absorb each subtle implication, to sort out all the intricacies of human innuendo. From that moment, when Clyde shouted at him about the mouse, he had understood every word between Clyde and his poker-playing buddies or his girlfriends; he was highly amused by Clyde's tangled telephone conversations when he tried to keep each woman ignorant of his involvement with the others. Though he didn't know what women saw in Clyde.

Clyde Damen was thirty-eight, of medium height, with straight black hair and thick shoulders. He had been married once, but he didn't talk about it. Joe hadn't known him then. Clyde had no great beauty or charm that Joe could see, yet there were always women cooking dinner for him, bringing over steaks or casseroles, snuggling up on the couch with the lights low and a CD playing something soft and throbbing.

Since Joe began to understand every intimate word between Clyde and his lady friends, their visits had been both embarrassing and boring. Usually, he left the house.

Human speech would be fine if it did not run to such crass inanities. For instance, he understood the TV news, knew the economy was in bad shape, knew that the president had recalled his ambassadors to half a dozen Eastern countries, but why all the fuss? The basic moves were little different than the eternal manipulations of two tomcats, or of cat and mouse. So what was the big deal? Did they have to go on about it? Well, maybe he didn't have the right frame of reference.

And in the daytime, prowling the bushes or sleeping in the neighbors' flower beds, every pair of gossiping housewives pelted his brain with unwanted gossip and inane opinions. And the neighborhood men, working on their cars or digging crabgrass were just as annoying. These conversations were no longer just noise; now he was a suddenly a captive audience, drawn to paying unwilling attention. The human world had, in short, intruded into his world, distracting him from hunting and frustrating his leisure hours with trivia.

Face it, he was no longer a normal cat, his time divided between satisfying bouts of fighting, mating, eating, sleeping, and bullying his housemates, both feline and canine, and bullying Clyde. He was jumpy and off his feed; he had lost all heart for bullying and almost for lovemaking.

Beyond the spare room windows, out in the dark backyard, nothing moved. And the room itself could conceal no one-it held only the seldom-used guest bed with boxes of canned dog food underneath, and Clyde's weight lifting equipment and his messy desk.

He moved away from the distressing scene of Clyde's bachelor decor and crept on down the hall to the dining alcove, passing the kitchen door. Surely the dogs would wake if someone were breaking into the kitchen. Or at least the three other cats would wake and make a fuss, subsequently waking the dogs. Then, heading for the living room, he heard the scraping again.

Itwas coming from the front windows. Someone was outside the windows trying to get inside. Enraged, forgetting fear, he crept across the worn faux-Persian rug, keeping low, stalking the sound. The shades were up, the draperies open-Clyde seldom bothered to pull them unless he had female guests.

Beyond the windows, dawn was beginning to touch the night sky, its first thin light seeping down between pale clouds. He leaped to the sill, to look out.

A face looked back. A human face, inches from his face. He was so startled he backed away and fell off the narrow ledge.

Landing clumsily, he looked up at the glass. The thin, pale face remained, grinning with high amusement. Joe stood staring, his whiskers trembling, his paws growing slick with sweat. It was the man, the same man. Beckwhite's killer.

He could smell freshly cut wood; and beneath the window shone a raw scar where a screwdriver, or a hand drill, perhaps, had pierced through.

Realizing the man would soon have the window open, he spun around and made for the kitchen. Leaping at the closed door he yowled and scratched until Barney, the golden, woke bellowing, then Rube began to boom. Their combined warning shook the house.

But there was no sound from the bedroom; likely Clyde hadn't even stopped snoring.

And then, at a break in the dogs' barking he heard a car start. He raced to the front window, and leaped up.

A dark car was pulling away without lights. It spun a U, slowed going past the house, then moved out fast, and was gone. Far down the block it switched on its headlights, flashing suddenly onto the tree trunks and bushes as it swept past.

The street lay quiet. The killer was gone.

Up and down the street, the neighbors' windows were all dark. The oak trees stood black against the slowly fading sky. Joe sat down in the middle of the worn rug, where the threads were showing, and licked at an imagined flea.

But it wasn't a flea, it was an involuntary twitch generated by fear. He was nervous as a mouse in a tin pail.

This was just too much. This attempted break-in was the last dog hair in the milk bowl. His digression from normal cat had left him a bundle of raw feelings anyway. Now, this confrontation was more than he wanted to deal with. More than he knew how to deal with.