To the human world, Mrs. Jannie Thornhill was a mysterious old woman. She lived on the outskirts of town, rarely making a sight of herself. People often saw her wandering about, going to the store in her little coat and long dress that came down to her ankles. Few spoke to her, mostly store clerks and waiters. Those who did said she spoke with a warm, yet guarded voice, the sound of an old lady who didn’t want to become too close.
Only a group of five people had been to her home. They were equal parts film and cleanup crew. Her house was a dainty mess; a small, almost cottage-like home with a once-flourishing yard. Garbage was strewn throughout the grass around her lot and if one grew close enough they could see stacks of boxes in the front windows. The crew came and tried to help her clear out her home. While they were there they learned she had sixteen adult cats living with her, wandering in the muck of her abode - one by accident and the rest from shops. The crew wasn’t there for very long: shortly after arriving she tossed them out in rage, threatening to call the police.
The cats didn’t know Mrs. Thornhill’s name. They didn’t know anyone’s name, but the lady of the house was the most important. Few had a relationship with her beyond food and they knew she gave them shelter. When they arrived as kittens they called her Mother; but as adulthood set in they simply called her Madam.
The fifteen cats she’d gotten from the shops all came at relatively the same time, though they were of all sorts of ages. They had once been miserable and thought they were going to a land of plenty, a world where they would be loved as individual cats and maybe have friends: but they came to a maze of a home with tall towers so tempting to climb but also so easy to knock over or dislodge. The food bowls were scattered among the midden, and rations were often shared as some bowls became impossible to get to after a ‘garbage-slide.’ For the younger cats, they forgot the world they came from and only knew the crowded home and the cats that lived there.
One cat came by accident. Her name was Claire. She came from the outside world during a rainstorm, wearing a tattered bloody collar and sporting a limp and an open wound. She had squeezed in through a hole in the wall, but her coming prompted a pile of trash to fall and block it, making her escape impossible. So she healed in the home, meshing in with the family of cats and simply slipping into Madame’s mind unannounced as one of her cats.
For three weeks she stayed in the home, getting to know the cats, and began to do something strange: predict. She would warn cats of a coming garbage-slide before anything began to shift and noone could decisively know when it was going to topple. She would know early in the morning if Madame was going to forget to feed them. She predicted the coming of the Poison Stones and the death of the rats and mice they often hunted in the rubbish to feed on. The cats came to regard her as a sort of leader, and trusted her judgement for it had been right so many times.
On the fourth week of her coming, she began to act strangely. She told the cats that something terrible was coming; something none of them had ever experienced, that they would be forced to struggle through alone. For that week nothing happened and the cats under Madame’s care began to wonder if she was losing her touch.
Then the Strange Smell occured. It started off as a little twinge every few sniffs, and only in the kitchen where the cats often raided for food when too many bowls ended up inaccessible. Then it suddenly pervaded the entire house; it made all the cats dizzy and nauseous, and it made them feel like their heads were swelling painfully. The very young and old cats grew sleepy to the point of occasionally near-passing out. The cats vomited, and their noses began to run almost continually, and they started forgetting things. They grew clumsy and unwell.
Sixteen lowered to thirteen. Then The Incident happened.
They were lucky. The house was brick and the room where The Incident occurred was almost a perfect square. The fire billowed out of it rapidly though, and few had time to escape. The fire’s sudden coming had blasted the door off one hinge - the back door - and the cats were able to escape. Scattered out into the snow, thirteen became ten.
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