<\/p>\n
I squatted down next to an old Nissan Sentra, the scent of salt-covered
\npavement and black rubber filling my nostrils.\u00a0 From my vantage
\npoint I could see two wool-capped heads bobbing\u00a0 in parallel
\nroutes some fifteen yards apart between other rows of cars in the
\nparking lot.\u00a0 At the edge of a row,\u00a0 both Pyle and Williams
\npaused, squinted in the near-dusk light, and ascertained their
\nprey.\u00a0 Pyle whistled once, high and sharp, and a second later he
\nblitzed from his position in a bent-forward scurry, ululating like an
\nAfghani warlord.\u00a0 His prey hunched low for a split second, then
\nshot off in the opposite direction of Pyle’s flailing arms and
\nfluttering tongue–right towards Williams.\u00a0\u00a0 Williams dove
\nout from behind a minivan arms first, his oversized canvas jacket
\nclenched in his hands and opening like a net.\u00a0 The creature tried
\nto dodge, but he jerked in a sleeve and tripped it up then quickly
\nsmothered the hissing beast.\u00a0 Pyle arrived a split-second behind
\nin mid-air, still shrieking like an asylum escapee, both feet jutting
\nout before him.\u00a0 He landed squarely on top of the writhing mass
\nwith practiced precision and then threw up his arms and puffed out his
\nchest, Olympic gymnast style.<\/p>\n
“Stuck the landing!” he said, then crowed wildly.\u00a0 He lifted one foot then the other.<\/p>\n
“Is it dead?” I asked, moving out from my hiding spot.<\/p>\n
“We’ll see.”<\/p>\n
Williams unwrapped his jacket and pulled it away.\u00a0 Revealed there
\non the cracked blacktop was a large cat with a broken spine.\u00a0 It
\nwas black and tan and one bright orange eye rolled up to look at us
\nwith intense spite.\u00a0 It had no tail, and its front two paws
\ntwitched like a newborn’s fist, claws extended toward us.\u00a0 Even
\nwith the life slowly evaporating out of its mangy body it wanted to
\nkill us, or at least snatch something from our pockets.<\/p>\n
“The fucker, the son of a bitch.\u00a0 The bastard.\u00a0 The
\npink-tongued little shit.”\u00a0 Pyle was pacing, staring down into the
\ncat’s one eye.\u00a0 “Dying now, arentcha?\u00a0 How’s that feel?
\nHow’s that feel to lo-oose?”<\/p>\n
“He’s the biggest one yet,” Williams said.<\/p>\n
“He’s big enough.\u00a0 C’mon, get this over with and we’ll skin ‘im.”<\/p>\n
“Sure, sure.”<\/p>\n
Williams knelt beside the cat, and it’s one eye spun inside its
\nhateful, mud-caked face, watching his hands reach towards it.\u00a0 One
\nhand on the head, another about the shoulders.\u00a0 One good wrench
\nand Williams killed another killer.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
You shouldn’t worry about these felines.\u00a0 Well, you should, but not in a sympathetic or pitying way.<\/p>\n
“Pull that lamp closer.”<\/p>\n
These aren’t your pedestrian, everyday strays.\u00a0 These are a lot
\nbigger for one thing.\u00a0 About one and a half feet tall.\u00a0 Three
\nfeet from nose to tail, maybe.\u00a0 Whiskers like wire.\u00a0 Rotten
\ngreen copper wire.<\/p>\n
“Pass the hacksaw.”<\/p>\n
They invariably have one eye and no tail.\u00a0 The ears are almost
\nalways rotated and laid back.\u00a0 Their fur is multi-colored or
\ntwilight.<\/p>\n
“Hold that there.\u00a0 Good.”<\/p>\n
They have no sweet meow, only a hiss.<\/p>\n
“Ready?”<\/p>\n
There is more than one way to skin a cat.<\/p>\n
“Ready.”<\/p>\n
Pyle’s and Williams’ method is actually quite surgical.<\/p>\n
“Go!”<\/p>\n
Pyle starts to saw the head off, slicing between two upper
\nvertebrae.\u00a0 As the wound starts to open, Williams stuffs it with
\ngauze and tries to keep the mess to a minimum.\u00a0 After the last
\nvisceral strand has been severed, Pyle rolls the head across the table,
\nguiding it with the saw.\u00a0 He lays the saw down and picks up a tool
\nthat is like an extended, narrow shoehorn, a tool he made
\nhimself.\u00a0 He grasps the cat’s head with one latex-wrapped hand and
\nwith a quick, expert motion, uses the tool to pop out the cat’s
\nsolitary eye.\u00a0 The bright red-amber of its iris still catches the
\nlight and gleams.\u00a0 He holds up the prize.<\/p>\n
“Thiefy.\u00a0 Very thiefy, this one.\u00a0 I’d bet a hundred on it.”<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Williams strings up the body over a bucket surrounded by taped-down copies of the Akron Beacon-Journal<\/em>. I turned to watch Pyle as he dipped the eyeball carefully into a “For easy threading later,” he said.<\/p>\n “We’ve got a while to wait,” said Williams.\u00a0 “Let’s grab a beer.”<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n We left Pyle’s and Williams house and its weird basement cum<\/em> I’d come here for a long weekend, thinking to mainly spend my time with We sat down at a table against the wall, each with a Pabst and a Pyle is a graphic artist and Williams an experimental “We’d seen the cats before,” Pyle explained, “but we’d always given While Pyle and Williams talk, they both finger and fidget with the “These are what we’re after,” Pyle said.\u00a0 This is what they use against us and what we use against them.”<\/p>\n “It’s kind of simple in a weird way,” said Williams.\u00a0 “These Akron, Rubber City.\u00a0 A Depression-era boomtown that, since the It’s the same story in a hundred other US cities, but no one has ever “They look into your eyes,” says Pyle.\u00a0 “And they hiss. “They don’t even feel it,” Williams says.\u00a0 “It’s shocking to me Pyle leaned forward.\u00a0 “So then it starts.\u00a0 You go home and Williams cuts in, talking excitedly.\u00a0 “Cat’s got your So what can you do?<\/p>\n Pyle smiles wide.\u00a0 “Talisman.\u00a0 This little red-eye trinket ***<\/p>\n Back in the basement, Williams and Pyle busily made preparations. Williams spread-eagled the cat and anchored down its four legs with Covering the inside layer of the skin was a crazy layout of jumbled What could be read there were half-formed lines of poetry, thumbnail “Once upon a time…”<\/p>\n I couldn’t say anything.<\/p>\n “Like I said,” smiled Pyle.\u00a0 “Thiefy.”<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n We went up the stairs through the house and then climbed out of Pyle’s “We don’t know what happens,” Williams said. “If you watch them, “Back into Akron’s aura.\u00a0 If there is such a thing,” says Before I left, Pyle handed me a necklace.\u00a0 It was the eye of the I put on the necklace and felt the eye resting right below my Adam’s
\nAs far as supernatural creatures go, these cats are pretty
\nconcrete.\u00a0 They don’t ooze green blood; there isn’t a reservoir of
\nunholy light confined inside their bodies’ dark cavities–normal blood,
\nbut it smells like newly melted rubber.\u00a0 I watched for a second as
\nthe body started to drain, a steady flow of blood funneled through the
\nneck hole and spit-spatting into the old, stained bucket.<\/p>\n
\npreservative–also one of his own concoctions–that would harden the
\neye.\u00a0 Before setting it down to dry, he skillfully skewered it
\nwith a kabob stick.<\/p>\n
\nlaboratory and walked down Market Street towards the Lime Spider.
\nIt was late afternoon, and the streets were mostly empty except for the
\noccasional passerby who kept their eyes on the chipping concrete
\nsidewalk.\u00a0 The sky was Akron gray, as usual, and the cold was
\nsneaking down my neck.<\/p>\n
\nfriends and maybe get up to the art museum in Cleveland, but Ernesto
\nhad told me about these two hunters he’d met awhile ago and I decided
\nto arrange a visit.\u00a0 Luckily for me, they were on the prowl this
\nweekend and invited me and my tape recorder along.<\/p>\n
\ncigarette.\u00a0 Pyle is thin but compactly muscular; his friend is
\nscrawny with wild eyes and a sawtooth smile.\u00a0 Williams grew up
\nwith several siblings, paid his way through high school with factory
\njobs, inhaling glass dust and carbon monoxide.\u00a0 Once he got to
\ncollege he never had enough money to pay for an orthodontist to remove
\nhis braces–so he did it himself one night with a pair of pliers and a
\nbottle of Johnny Walker for a novocain substitute.\u00a0 Despite their
\nsurroundings and backgrounds, they still smile constantly and their
\nbodies emanate a foreign kind of heat.<\/p>\n
\nmathematician.\u00a0 These are the kind of people you rarely find in
\nAkron anymore: motivated dreamers.<\/p>\n
\nthem a wide berth, y’know?\u00a0 I always thought they were the
\noccasional freak of nature, but then when I started to notice them more
\nand more often, I got the shivers.\u00a0 I had dreams about them,
\nnightmares.\u00a0 Even then something inside me knew what they were
\nbefore I even investigated.”<\/p>\n
\nnecklaces around their necks: a simple hemp cord threaded through a
\ncatseye pendant.<\/p>\n
\ncats.\u00a0 They can look into your soul, or, if you don’t believe in
\nthe soul, at least your mind.\u00a0 These are creatures who can steal
\nyour thoughts.” He said it so matter-of-factly that I don’t even
\nbalk.\u00a0 He took another drag of his Basic Light then
\ncontinued.\u00a0 “Not just your thoughts.\u00a0 Your dreams.\u00a0 Your
\naspirations.\u00a0 For some reason, these creatures evolved, maybe even
\nspawned up out of the overflowing dumpsters–pure mindkillers.
\nThey feed on rats and rotten milk, but they subsist<\/em> on human
\ndreams.\u00a0 It’s their drug.\u00a0 They go crazy for it and they’ll
\nhunt you down.\u00a0 And here in Akron…they’re thriving.”<\/p>\n
\neighties, has become a Boom-era depression.\u00a0 The Goodyear chimneys
\nstill cough up their black smoke, but the people here, like the smoke,
\ndrift and evaporate, waft through their lives and smell up the
\nair.\u00a0 They are a hungry people with no aspirations beyond bread
\nand water.\u00a0 They are a tired people with no sense to lie
\ndown.\u00a0 The ones that have work are so grateful to have pay that
\nthey don’t mind the labor that grinds them down, and the unemployed
\ndon’t move beyond their front porches, much less out of town.<\/p>\n
\nwanted to ask why.\u00a0 No one has wanted to investigate the
\ncircumstances.\u00a0 To the inhabitants inside these cities’ walls,
\nthat’s just the way things are.\u00a0 Buffalo.\u00a0 Youngstown.
\nKernersville.\u00a0 Wheeling.\u00a0 Dark…dark in the daytime.<\/p>\n
\nThat’s all there is to it.\u00a0 They don’t have to bite ya or claw ya,
\nthey just have to sit in the alley in the dark, and when some fool
\nwalks by–maybe some student on their way to class or maybe some guy
\nhitting the bricks looking for a new job or maybe even some
\nstay-at-home momma carrying groceries back to her kids–all the cat has
\nto do is wait for them to look down that alley either out of boredom or
\nfear and he catches their eye with his bright red stare.”<\/p>\n
\nhow easy it is for these creatures to do it.\u00a0 How you’d think
\nsomething like this would cause you to have a seizure or go dizzy or at
\nthe very least give you a vague sense of dread, but there’s no emotion,
\nno primal nervous response when it happens.\u00a0 I know.\u00a0 It
\nhappened to me.”<\/p>\n
\nthen you find yourself doing things you don’t really think about
\ndoing.\u00a0 Little scraps of paper that you jotted ideas on, doodles,
\nsketches, three word notes, whatever…you throw them away.\u00a0 If
\nyou find one in your pocket or on the fridge under a magnet, you just
\ntake it and throw it in the trash.\u00a0 You lose interest in books or
\nphotographs.\u00a0 If you do get up the strength to open a book, the
\nwords are jumbled, you can’t concentrate.\u00a0 So you’re cut off right
\nthere.\u00a0 A lot of people, they’re inspired, you know?
\nInspired by other people’s words or pictures to do something
\ntheirselves.\u00a0 The cat’s eye burns out yours.”<\/p>\n
\ntongue.\u00a0 You heard that, right?\u00a0 Everyone knows that.
\nBut where’d it come from?\u00a0 This is it.\u00a0 There is no longer
\nany urge to communicate, much less explore, to expand the borders of
\nyour knowledge.\u00a0 So the victims stop talking to other people, they
\nstop singing in the shower and even become sheepish when faced with
\nauthority whether its the cops or even a boss.\u00a0 They question
\nnothing.\u00a0 They accept everything that happens to them.\u00a0 And
\nwhen you get enough people like that, the entire civilization starts to
\nsuffer.\u00a0 You get cities like Akron, mired down in unthinking,
\nunflinching ennui.\u00a0 Dreamless apathy.\u00a0 A cold, hard bitch of
\na town where even the hunters like ourselves find it hard to get up in
\nthe morning.”<\/p>\n
\nwill protect you.\u00a0 The cats don’t associate with each other.
\nThey’re all loners, strays…God knows how or what they fuck, but its
\nnot each other.\u00a0 They can’t stand to see another thiefy eye
\nlooking back at them, so we take these and hand them out.
\nObviously there’s not enough for the entire city, so you gotta come to
\nus for one.\u00a0 It sounds a little harsh, but we have to be
\nselective.\u00a0 We get the word out.\u00a0 If you’re skeptical, don’t
\nbother then.\u00a0 But those who do want to protect their artistic
\nsanity or even just their unrealized dreams…they make the
\neffort.\u00a0 They’ll come get one.\u00a0 Until the day we wipe all the
\nfuckers out…we just gotta play it close to the vest.\u00a0 Give ’em
\nto the people who can do the most good.\u00a0 Aside from that, though,
\nwe can still help the others who’ve already been robbed.”<\/p>\n
\nThe cat’s body was now drained of blood and slightly shrunken.
\nPyle cleared off the second-hand stainless steel table that dominated
\nthe center of the room, and Williams took the carcass down and laid it
\non the table.\u00a0 The two of them scrubbed down the cat’s corpse and
\nshaved it quickly but thoroughly, the long, coarse hair coming off in
\nmangy clumps, revealing gray-pink flesh beneath.<\/p>\n
\nstraps.\u00a0 Pyle used a thick scalpel to slice across the belly of
\nthe creature.\u00a0 After making his incisions, he slowly peeled the
\nskin away from the muscle tissue, working with tweezers and a wooden
\ntongue depressor.\u00a0 The whole process took about fifteen minutes,
\nand what he finally pulled away was a large flag of skin which he held
\nup for me to see.<\/p>\n
\ntattoos, a mosaic of words, sketches, and symbols all wrought in a dark
\nblue-green like ink. At the edges, where the cat’s belly was, the words
\nand symbols overlapped each other so many times that it was hard to
\nmake out anything, but the mass gradually separated into identifiable
\nlanguage as it reached towards the skin that clung to the cat’s spine.<\/p>\n
\nsketches of nude figures, and small squares of schematic designs.
\nThere were mathematic equations partially solved, punch lines to jokes,
\nand sporadic lines from mental diaries.\u00a0 One line struck me in
\nparticular as I turned my head this way and that to examine the entire
\nlabyrinth of printed thoughts:<\/p>\n
\nbedroom window onto the roof.\u00a0 Up there he had several old skins
\nstretched out and tacked down with tenpenny nails.\u00a0 They were all
\nin various states of decay, some more gray than pink, and the oldest
\nones were the ones with the least amount of writing on them.<\/p>\n
\nnothing disappears.\u00a0 It’s always overnight and only if no one’s
\naround.\u00a0 The tats fade and evaporate, back into the atmosphere.”<\/p>\n
\nPyle.\u00a0 “I think so.\u00a0 More and more often I am overhearing
\npeople.\u00a0 They say, ‘Oh, I just thought of something,’ or ‘I just
\nremembered…’\u00a0 It’s great.”<\/p>\n
\ncat we just caught that morning.\u00a0 “Take it,” he said with a
\nwink.\u00a0 “And if you ever see one of these fuckers in your city,
\ncall us up.\u00a0 We’re training new hunters all the time.”<\/p>\n
\napple.\u00a0 Strange protection, but necessary in a city like
\nthis.\u00a0 I called up Ernesto, and the two of us went back to playing
\nmusic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,352],"tags":[68,353],"class_list":["post-2473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cass","category-gsarchive","tag-cassander","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2473"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2839,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473\/revisions\/2839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}