The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

piggy pink skin in place of my nice coat. Those creepy things instead of paws! I hiss, horrified at the violent intimacy of it. But she’s counting on me. Think, cat.

I go to the Bible. I nudge it off the table. As it falls to the floor with a great crash, I feel the house shake. It’s like an echo, but louder.

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.

Gd it. Sometimes it’s annoying, being right. An idea has been forming in my mind for a while. I may be just an indoor cat, but I have seen the many faces of the lord, and I know there are strange things in the world. Lauren thinks she knows everything, but she doesn’t. We are not like a staircase. We’re like the horrible doll on the mantelpiece. Lauren and I fit inside one another. When you tap on one it reverberates through all of them.

Think, think!

When I opened the refrigerator door I was angry. Maybe angrier than I have ever been. I didn’t feel the cord connecting me to Ted. I was myself, alone.

So I make myself angry. It’s not hard. I think about Ted and what he’s done to Lauren. It’s really difficult to think about. She was right about one thing; what a stupid cat I am, really. I believed his lies, didn’t want to know the truth. I just wanted to sleep and be stroked. I was a coward. But I don’t want to be a coward any more. I’m going to save her.

My tail bristles, becomes a spike of rage. The fire begins at the tip, spreads down the length of my switching tail, into me. It’s not like the heat when Lauren hurt me. I made this feeling. It’s my fire.

The walls begin to shudder. The crashing sound begins far away, and then it is all around me. The hall shivers like a bad TV picture. The floor is a sea, tossing.

I pad to the front door, slipping and yowing. Just because I am deciding to be brave doesn’t mean I’m not scared. I am so scared. What I see through my peephole isn’t really the outdoors. I understand that now. Now, I see with a shiver that the three locks are not fast. The door is unlocked, of course. I don’t have to go up, I have to go out. And everyone knows how you get in and out of a house. I give a little row. I didn’t really want to be right. I stand on my hind legs and pull on the handle with my paws. The door swings wide. The white flame greets me. I am blinded; it’s like being inside a star. The cord is a line of fire, burning about my neck. What will happen? Will I burn up? I kind of hope so. I don’t know what’s out there.

I step out of the house. The cord burns hot as a furnace, surrounds me in a forge of white heat. The world tosses and flips. Blinding stars suck me out into nothing. Nausea rises and I choke. All the air is crushed from my lungs.

The blinding white retreats; the stars shrink to small holes in the hot dark, through which I catch flashes of movement, colour, pale light. Moonlight, I think. So that’s what it looks like.

The world tosses like a boat on rough seas. Ted’s familiar scent fills my nose. We are being carried on his back, in a bag I think, or a sack – there are small holes stabbed in it, for air I suppose. I am too big. My skin is exposed and hairless like some kind of worm. My paws have become long fleshy spiders. My nose is not an adorable soft bump but a horrible pointy thing. Worst of all, where my tail should be there is a blank nothing.

Oh Lord. I wriggle but I can’t move. I think we’re restrained, tied up maybe. All around, there is sound. Leaves, owls, frogs. Other things I don’t know the name of. It all has a clarity I have never heard before. The air is different too. I can feel that, even through the bag. It’s cooler, sharper somehow – and it’s moving.

Lauren sobs, and I feel it burst up through my unfamiliar chest, my cavernous ribcage. I feel the tears coming from my tiny weak eyes. It’s just as horrible as I thought it would be.

I made it, I tell her silently. I’m in the body.

‘Thank you, Olivia.’ She squeezes me tightly, and I squeeze back.

Lauren, why is the air moving, like it’s alive?

‘It’s wind,’ she whispers. ‘That’s wind, Olivia. We’re outside.’

Oh my goodness. Oh gosh. For a moment I am too overwhelmed to think. Then I ask, Where are we?

‘We’re in the woods,’ she says. ‘Can’t you smell it?’

As she says it, the scent hits me too. It is incredible. Like minerals and beetles and fresh water and hot earth and trees – God, the scent of the trees. Up close, it’s like a symphony. I could never have dreamed it.

‘He has the knife,’ Lauren says. ‘Can you believe it? He buried it.’

Maybe he’s just taking us for a walk, I say, hopefully. Maybe he’s got the knife because he’s scared of bears.

‘Kittens don’t come back from the woods,’ she says.

We are quiet after that. More than anything I want to go back inside. But I can’t leave Lauren alone. I have to be brave.

He walks for an hour on rough ground. He climbs steep rock faces and wades across streams, goes through valleys and over hills. Very quickly we are in the wild.

He stops in a place that smells of stone where trees speak to one another in the night, over the sound of running water. From what I can