The Cattails of Doody Newman

Chapter Five ^^ Docar

The night before I met the gecko, a bizarre thing happened to me. Not that the next night wasn't strange, but the night before was the strangest thing that had happened to me—I mean, before the Orange Gecko and the fireflies and the rainbow came into my life. It was during the midnight crazies. I walked down the hallway and saw what looked like my shadow on the wall. I turned to check it out and it did the opposite of what I did, like it was looking at me as I was looking at it. I ran up and down the stairs a few times to see if I could lose it, but no luck. The shadow moved with me. Then I sat down, but the shadow didn't, it stayed standing. I wasn't staring at it, but when I turned around it was still standing. I was a little afraid, and a little interested at the same time.

So, I turned to it and asked, "Who are you?"

It was silent.

I asked again, "Who are you and what do you want?"

Again silence

I wondered what the thing could be. I'd always thought it was a part of me since my shadow stayed with me everywhere I went. It seemed to feed on my fear, because I noticed when I got scared, it grew bigger, taller, and a little wider. One time, it even grew as high as the ceiling. I started to feel uncomfortable, as this brown tabby had never seen anything like it before... I couldn't understand what it was and if it really was not a part of me, then where had my original shadow gone? The situation had gotten so far out of hand, that I decided to scat, so I flew down the stairs and ran into the master bedroom as fast as I could. As I slid under the bed, I smacked right into Xander.

He was sleeping, so when I bumped into him and knocked his toupee to the side, he woke up with a jolt, sat up and fixed his faux hair hat, and asked what was the matter. I was breathing so hard, and my heart was beating so loud, you could hear it all over the house. I told him what I had seen, and his face turned even whiter than it already was. The toupee he'd just fixed fell to the side again.

That's when he told me a story he had heard a long time ago, when he was living on the street. Once, a group of street cats would sit around the fire and spin yarns (as they put it.)

Xander sat up, as he said this was not a story to tell lying down. But the tale he shared next was the strangest story this brown tabby has ever heard.

A long time ago, there lived a big tomcat named Docar. He was savagely bad, not just breaking-the-rules kinda bad, like, I hate to even think of it, evil. He didn't like anyone, and nobody liked him. He was a loner who had lived on the streets his whole life, and always tried to make the girl cats cry. The tomcats, well, he had a point to prove to them, and would start a fight any chance he could. If there was a tough tomcat new to the area, Docar wanted to set the record straight that he was the biggest and baddest cat in the neighborhood. He worked his way across town fighting every tom from every block. And he won every fight because he made sure of it; he would not give up until the cat he was scrapping with either gave up or he won.

As the story goes, there was a fog that came through the town that lasted for three days and three nights. The fog wasn't the normal smoke-gray-looking color. It was more of a dark charcoal. You couldn't see anything in front of you. Just like when it gets pitch black outside at night. Except this continued for 72 hours straight. Preventing anyone from seeing anything anywhere. It made the air hard to breathe, and it was so thick it produced a rain-like effect on everything outside. The storytellers say it was the eeriest looking three days anyone had ever seen.

Docar was not scared. He walked around for three days and nights looking for some tomcat to fight, but nobody would go outside in the strange phenomena. He walked and called to anyone who would listen, but nobody budged. The whole city fell silent due to the unusual weather. On the second day, as he was turning into an alley, he heard a low growly and ghastly voice, say, "Docar, you are the baddest and most feared cat in all the city, are you not?"