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The night is very dark, and very still, but at the edge of Pottsfield, where the fence splinters away into a copse of tall oaks, something is moving. From the sound of the foliage crunching, it must be very large, and very heavy as it lumbers between the trees. There is a thrum in the air, that makes Enoch’s fur prickle, breath, panting, just to move is exertion.
The hound comes this way often, making its way from its winter home to its summer hunting grounds.
But this time, Enoch has baited the trap.
He sees its eyes first, fixed straight ahead as it carefully makes its way past Pottsfield, it is not looking at him, he is not sure it is looking at anything.
But they are bright, big and beautiful and luminous, nearly as bright as the catskin’s, shining in the night.
It does not look towards Pottsfield, it will not, not unless it is given good reason.
Enoch mewls.
The great beast’s head snaps towards him.
It’s flanks heave, and the air steams and grows damp and warm with each breath. Enoch blinks, flicks his tail and watches it’s massive head twitch, following the movement.
It has spotted him.
Very carefully, Enoch lowers his ears, pins them back against his skull and lowers himself, claws digging into the fence.
The hound’s ears prick forward in interest, and it’s mouth gapes open.
Enoch flees.
The thunder of the earth shaking beneath vast paws tells him the hound is following.
The chase is on.
The cat is light and nimble, Enoch flings himself from the fence and ducks into the corn, the hound races after, sparing no thought for dodging between the stalks, only plowing straight on, flattening them in its pursuit.
Enoch breaks through the corn, onto the main drag and darts straight across into the vast empty fields pockmarked with empty graves.
He makes a beeline for the nearest.
If he can just make it, he can take a plunge, he will land on his feet, he always does, and the hound will not be able to follow into the narrow confines of the grave.
He leaps, his back paws leave the ground and the full weight of the hound slams into his spine.
The hound’s teeth are deep in the cat’s jugular before they even hit the ground, and Enoch is soon devoured.
And, like the turtles before him, Enoch becomes.
It is theft, plain and simple, snatching his neighbor’s hound from out beneath his nose.
But Enoch has stolen from his neighbor before, and long before that, it was he who had been stolen from.
In his original, rawest state, Enoch thinks he might have been something close to water.
Dark and wet, and buried in the soil.
But along came the corn roots, burrowing into the earth, and the corn had seized upon him and drunk him up, pulling him, steadily, carefully, drawing him up from its roots and into its stem and up into its fruit where he had blossomed, withered, and become corn.
The corn had come down and Enoch with it, harvested by careless hands, and accidentally cast aside, and then came the mice.
Enoch awoke from within the mouse’s stomach and climbed his way into its mind, and had, for the first time, been privy to a world of sounds and shapes and colors.
For a long time, he had lived like that, until the day he strayed too close to where the old black barn cat chose to lay.
With sharp teeth he had been set upon, and sharp teeth he inherited.
There is not much that will eat a cat, as it turns out.
And so Enoch had remained a cat for a very long time.
Long enough to start a town, long enough to wake the dead.
But Enoch is ready for a change. Ready to see the world through new eyes, to taste it with new hunger.
So Enoch lifts his head, and it is different, heavy and long and brimming with sharp teeth. He raises his snout from the ruins of what he once was, unrecognizable as a cat, unrecognizable as himself, unrecognizable as anything more than a mangled heap of blood and bones, and he breathes in a wealth of fresh scents, and he sees an unfamiliar landscape through eyes that are not quite so suited to the dark as he once was, and he feels an unfamiliar thrumming, growing, building in his chest.
So Enoch looks up at the moon through new eyes, and he howls.