Catland - a humorous fantasy

Chapter Ten: Catland

What exactly he had expected, Greg could never have explained.  Dimly he had pictured a kingdom of shoeboxes and egg crates, ruled over by a consortium of miaowling, self-important alley cats.  Never in his wildest daydreams had he imagined anything like the sight that now lay before him.  He had always considered himself to be fairly imaginative.  It seemed he had been wrong.

They were in a high place, looking down on Catland, which sprawled before them in all its vivid, untidy glory.  Structures of a thousand shapes and colors reared up beneath them on all sides.  Steeples and porches, shacks and mansions and porticos, grand boulevards and twisting byways—all of these lay tumbled together, interlocking and intersecting, built upon and beneath and between one another, with all the mad density of a beehive and all the mad improvisation of a shantytown.  Color there was abounding, and texture too, and detail enough to baffle the brain.  Between the cobbled-up mounds and mountains of this eclectic paradise—in the lanes and veins of this pulsating, willy-nilly city—a thousand cats poured hither and thither, rushing and strolling and perambulating, forming the pulse and beat and purpose of the whole dizzying place, which seemed its own new kind of lifeform—the city as superorganism.  Greg gaped.  He goggled.  He stammered.  He thought for a moment he might fall.

Leopold glanced over at him.  "Not bad, is it?" he inquired archly.

It was impossible not to like Leopold at moments like this.  His arrogance was so stark and frank and unbashful that it became sincerely charming, in an almost childlike way.

"It's beautiful," Greg managed to choke out.  It was not the most eloquent thing he had ever said, but it was among the truest.  In its madcap, chimerical way, Catland was beautiful.  There was something in its sheer, staggering unlikelihood that made it profoundly—for lack of a better word—human.

Leopold turned to Millicent.  "And you, my dear?  You haven't been here in quite some time, I believe.  Are you dazzled by it all over again?"

Millicent's fur bristled.  She gave a quick shake of her head and shoulders, as if dislodging a troublesome fly.

"If I've not been back here, Leo Bannockburn, you may stake your oath I've had my reasons.  It's little pleasure it gives me to see the old cesspool teeming again.  I've pledged to help you, and help you I shall, or die in the doing of it.  But don't be asking me to cheer you along in your happy little reunion."

There was obviously some kind of backstory here.  Embarrassed, Greg looked at his feet.  His paws.  Whatever.

Leopold just smiled.

"Well, I for one am pleased to see the old place again," he declared.  "And pleased to see it more or less unchanged.  This dark new regime has not crushed the spirit of Catland.  Not yet."

"No indeed," replied Millicent.  "And who's to say it's not a better job they're doing of ruling it?  Who knows, my precious Leo?  Mayhap your people aren't missing you at all."

This took the smile right off Leopold's face.  His eye avoided Millicent's.  He stepped to the lip of the ledge they were standing on and peered down.

"We'd best be making our way down," he said.  "We're too exposed up here."

Greg's eyes followed Leopold's—and then widened cartoonishly as he realized what "making their way down" meant.

A jagged system of rope ladders was laced across the rock-face below them.  The ladders were browned and worn with use, often frayed around the edges, and plunged at crazy angles across the nearly-sheer slope.  Their rope rungs hung loose above a dizzying, bone-shattering fall.  It was easy to see why this particular entrance to Catland had fallen into disuse.  The puzzle, in fact, was why in God's name it had ever been used in the first place.