I was asleep against her side, which is where I am most nights now, when the wall above the dresser lit up and something long and pale slid across it sideways, stretched itself tall against the corner, and then was gone before I had even finished sitting up.
I want to be fair to myself here. Any reasonable animal, woken from a deep sleep by a shape of light crossing the wall of his own bedroom without permission, would investigate. This is not optional behavior. This is the job.
She didn’t stir. Her breathing stayed slow and even, one arm still loosely over where I’d been a second ago, now empty and getting cold, which I noted with some resentment because I hadn’t asked to leave that spot, I’d been removed from it by circumstances beyond my control.
I got down off the bed as quietly as a cat of my dimensions is capable of getting down off anything, which is to say not quietly at all, but she didn’t wake, and I crossed the room to the dresser to get a better angle on the wall in case the thing came back.
It came back. A second light, further off, slower, dragged the same pale shape across the corner of the ceiling this time instead of the wall, stretching long and thin before folding itself into the crack where the ceiling meets the window frame and vanishing there completely.
I went up on my back legs against the dresser to get my front paws onto the shape before it could do that again. I did not catch anything. I did not expect to catch anything, if I am being honest in this diary the way I have always tried to be, but a cat has to at least register his objection to a light that comes into his room uninvited and climbs his walls like it owns them.
There was a third one almost right away, and this one was faster and wider, washing the whole wall pale all at once instead of sliding across it in a line, and I abandoned the dresser entirely and went straight for the gap in the curtain where the light seemed to be getting in, on the theory that if I could find the hole, I could deal with whatever was coming through it.
The gap in the curtain showed me the street below, dark and empty except for two red lights getting smaller very quickly, and nothing else. No explanation. No creature. Just the ordinary black shapes of the yard and somebody’s porch light three houses down, steady and yellow and completely uninterested in me.
I sat in the curtain gap for a while anyway, in case whatever it was intended to come back for another pass. My tail did the thing it does when I’m deciding whether to be angry or merely alert, flicking twice and then holding still, flicking twice and holding still. The glass was cold against my nose when I leaned into it to get a better look down the street, cold enough that I pulled back from it almost immediately and sat with my paws tucked instead, watching from a more dignified distance.
Nothing else came. I gave it what felt like a very long and very patient amount of time, the kind of vigil that deserves to be remembered as a serious one, and still nothing else came, and eventually the cold of the window glass and the general pointlessness of guarding a street that had already finished doing whatever it was going to do got the better of my resolve.
I went back to the bed. She had turned over in my absence, taking up more of the warm spot than I had left her, which struck me as a bit much considering whose spot it technically was, but I am not a creature who holds a grudge over territory recovered fairly during an unguarded moment, so I worked my way back in along her side instead of reclaiming the old spot outright, which I felt was the generous thing to do.
She made a small sound, not quite a word, and her arm came back over me without her ever really waking up, like her body had been keeping the spot open the whole time regardless of what her sleeping mind thought was happening.
I lay there a while longer with one ear still aimed loosely at the window, half expecting a fourth light to come sliding across the wall and require another response from me, but the room stayed dark and plain and ordinary, the way it is supposed to stay, and after a while I stopped listening for it on purpose and just happened to still be listening anyway.
Whatever those lights were doing out there, they were not doing it in my room anymore, and a cat can only be expected to hold a perimeter for so long before his own warm spot starts calling him back to more pressing concerns, like sleep, and being pinned under somebody’s arm in a way that makes it very inconvenient to get up again even if a fifth light were to show up and demand my full attention.
None did. I checked twice more before I let myself actually drift off, lifting my head off the pillow edge each time to confirm the wall was still just a wall, and both times it was, pale and blank and entirely too innocent-looking for something that had been climbing itself an hour earlier.