The Philosophical Strangler(81)

But the Cat wasn’t having any of it. A strange, strange woman. But she had a will of iron, and she just didn’t give a damn.

She started off by peering at Jeffreys through her bottle-bottom spectacles, inspecting him like he was a side of wormy meat.

“Boy, do you look like a side of wormy meat,” she said. “Why don’t you wash those scalps once in a while? They’re collecting flies. But it probably wouldn’t do any good—I’m sure you stink like the pits of hell all by yourself.”

She had a great, loud, piercing voice, the Cat, on the rare occasions when she wasn’t speaking softly. That day she wasn’t speaking softly. Oh no, not at all.

Jeffreys started to bellow with rage, but the Cat’s voice cut right through it like a foghorn.

“You have got to be the sorriest slob I ever saw,” she continued. “Why don’t you do the world a favor and tighten your necktie? And where did you get those babes’ skulls hanging from your ears, anyway? Did you fight off the mongrels in the garbage pit for ’em? No, can’t be that—you couldn’t scare off a puppy. Of course! I know! Must have been your own tots—died laughing at your dick when you waved it in their faces. And what’s with the blood-drinking business, anyway? I know! You need it to—”

That was as far as she got, before the guards chained her and gagged her. I’m glad Greyboar wasn’t there. Cool as he usually was, he would have lost it then. I’ll grant you, he would have taken plenty of guards with him, but he’d still never have made it to the front of the courtroom. Not even Greyboar could have fought his way through all the troops they had in the place.

Jeffreys was in a rare humor, let me tell you! Fact is, he was so apoplectic that he couldn’t think of a suitable sentence. The Church came to the rescue. Luigi Carnale, Cardinal Fornacaese, asked leave to address the bench. Jeffreys garbled something the Cardinal took for an assent, and he said:

“May I recommend to the Royal Justice that the defendant—whose horrid crimes have now been compounded by contempt of court—deserves nothing less than the ancient sentence of immuration, so sadly unused in these excessively liberal modern times.”

Oh boy, I thought to myself, that was about the worst thing I could think of to do to the Cat. The woman absolutely hated being confined. And this—immuration.

Naturally, Jeffreys was ecstatic.

“Of course! Of course! Perfect!” And so he pounded his gavel—actually, he only pounded it once because he swung so hard the little axe got stuck in the bench, but never mind—and sentenced the accused to immuration. The guards started to haul the Cat away—quick, your Royal Justice in Sfinctria—but the Cardinal stopped them.

“A moment, Your Honor! I believe—well, I’m afraid the Church must insist—that the felon should be immured in that portion of the Durance Pile set aside for offenders against God. Is not her crime equivalent to heresy? What greater scorn could she have shown for the Lord Above than to have so foully disfigured His beloved servant?”

Well, Jeffreys wasn’t going to argue the point, so the Cat was sentenced to immuration in the heretics’ quarter of the Pile, and that was that. She was hauled off, and we slid out of there with the crowd.





“Immuration,” groaned Greyboar. “You know how the Cat hates being cooped up, it’ll kill her.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “that’s the whole idea. You wall up the condemned in a sealed room, buried under a pile of rock, and leave them there to die. Not too quick, of course—there’ll be a separate room full of dried food, enough to keep you going for years if you ration it proper. And a water supply, just a trickle, but enough to keep you alive forever. And that’s it. There you are, alone in a room dark as death, forgotten by the world. Eventually you die, but no one will ever know when. It’s an old sentence, immuration, hasn’t been used hardly in centuries. There’s people in rooms in the Durance Pile were immured a thousand years ago. Nobody’s ever opened their crypts.”

“But at least she’ll be alive for a while,” said Jenny. “And they haven’t really hurt her or nothing.”

“So we’ve got time to figure out how to rescue her!” piped up Angela.

I glared at her. “What’s this ‘we’ business?” I demanded. “I mean, you’ve been a great help, even if I didn’t like the idea and still don’t, but that’s it. From here on you girls are out of it.”

Jenny and Angela glared right back.

“You can go jump in a lake!” said Jenny.