Dreamerly

Dreamerly from the book 'Catfantasic' and the short story 'The Dreaming Kind'

The Dreaming Kind (by CS Friedman)

They are shadowy dream-creatures from the dreamlands. Cats hunt them as is a Cat-Custum as old as the worlds themselfs. The passage between worlds weakens them. Their inner light dim, often flickering, and their edges dissolved as the wind brushed against them, trailing off into thin wisps of fog. They came in a thousand shapes, no two alike: from tapering worms of amber-gray mist to the deep carmine crabs that scuttled over unseen pebbles and stones in their path to an invisible sea. And all seemed wrong to Hunter-In-Darkness.
He had hunted them once, in his kittenhood, but had quickly learned the futility of such action .In the world of dreams these creatures had substance and might be hunted, slain, and eaten, but in the waking lands they were wraithlike and could not be grasped, either by claws or in the teeth. One was left only a foul tasting residue wherever contact had supposedly been made, a bitter reminder that something had not been caught. It was better to leave such things to one's shadow-self, and devote one's waking hours to the capture of more solid prey.

They stank of wrongness, and decay; they frightened him, and only as he watched them gather about the gleaming white manhouse did he finally admit that there were more of them every night, and that they seemed to be gathering for some purpose.

That the nights were growing colder didn't help matters. He was heavily armed against the winter's chill with a coat of fur that grew thicker each night, but his paws were unaccustomed to treading frozen ground and the scar which cut across his face, marking the place where a bullet had once struck him, ached painfully when the temperature dropped too low. Both played havoc with his temper.

When the dreamcreatures approached he often swung at them, claws extended, even though he knew in the back of his mind that no waking creature could hurt them. He tried anyway, giving vent to his irritation and discomfort, and only snarled in frustration when his paw passed through them. He had hunted them in the dreamlands, and never understood why here, in the waking world, they were intangible; now the situation was becoming intolerable, as they followed during his hunt and claimed his kill and he was powerless to drive them away.


Continue in the first 'Catfantasic' book and the short story 'The Dreaming Kind'