Chapter 11: The Principles of Natural Communication

“You’ve done quite well,” the cat remarked after a while. “I think you ought to sleep in the woods tonight.”

Violet looked up from where she’d been delicately squishing a little pad of chewed witch hazel leaves over top of her bee stung hand. They felt cool and slightly tingly, the itch and throb of the sting reduced just a little.

“…Why?” She asked, knowing better than to reject the suggestion outright.

And indeed the cat gave a rather sensible answer.

“You’ll have to do it eventually,” it said with a shrug. “So why not now?”

That was about the same sort of logic that had pushed her into the woods to begin with, and Violet squirmed beneath its weight, unable to come up with a counterargument.

She glanced plaintively around her, into the pressing closeness of the surrounding woods. They were dim and murky enough in daylight, to even imagine how they’d be in the middle of the night….

A part of her wanted badly to refuse, but the fear motivating that reaction curdled into something close to shame before it could fully take form. If she refused the cat and retreated back home then it would do serious damage to the momentum of her journey.

As frightening as it was, as potentially dangerous, Violet knew she’d need to face this, just as she’d faced everything up to this point.

Violet took a small breath.

“Can you tell me more about talking animals?” She asked.

The cat’s ears perked.

“You answered a question with a question,” it remarked, delighted. “You’re learning.”

Learning? Learning what?

But Violet didn’t ask that. It was just another of the cat’s inscrutable non-sequiturs. She waited, arms folded, and finally the cat laughed.

“What would you like to know?” It asked.

“I’m trying to understand how it all works. You talk like a human, but the bees don’t, and when I tried to talk to them it wasn’t talking at all….” She trailed off, ever more confused.

“Like I said: human-speak, in whatever language might be fashionable from place to place, is a specialized talent that requires lots of practice. I’ve picked it up because I like talking to humans—some of them, anyway. A honeybee or a bat or a songbird might not, because in their lives humans are not terribly important.”

“Then…how do I talk to them?” Something occurred to Violet even as the last words passed her lips. “How do you talk to them?”

The cat yawned, showing a great many sharp, white teeth. The blood was about entirely gone from them now.

“I’m not typically in the habit of speaking with my prey, but when I choose to understand them they sometimes say interesting things.”

“Choose to understand?” Violet asked.

“Like you did with the bees,” the cat explained. “You found their voice for a moment, then got scared and backed away. You could compare it to a radio frequency. It’s always there, but you can tune it out if you don’t want to hear it. …At least for most creatures.”

Violet considered this for a moment. The concept of deliberately shutting someone’s voice out of comprehension felt strange to her. Surely, once a person learned how to communicate with another they couldn’t just discard that ability. Yet clearly that wasn’t the case, at least here.

But the cat had ended its answer with a half grumbled remark that only made Violet feel curiosity and unease in equal measures.

“Most creatures?” She echoed, suspecting the cat had wanted her to ask that very question.

“You ought to know the major exception already,” the cat said. “You’ve already encountered one.”

Violet blinked. For a moment she thought the cat might be referring to itself, but of course that wasn’t right. Then it hit her.

Demons.

“When a demon attempts speech it can always be heard, no matter what.” The cat continued.

Violet clutched her notebook a little bit tighter but made herself think clearly, remembering the surreal nightmarishness of her nighttime encounter with the drainpipe demon. Its voice had pulsed through her mind in shivers and bursts, numbing the synapses and freezing her in place. Yet…after she’d trapped it and walked away, that same terrible noise had crumbled into nothingness.

“There’s….” She searched for the right word but came up empty handed. “There’s a distance, if you move away from it….”

“A proximity, yes,” the cat said, plucking the lost word effortlessly from the aether. “But the point is, if you’re close to a demon then it can speak to you and probably make itself understood. Can you remember what yours was saying?”

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A little grimace scrunched the corners of Violet’s face. She didn’t much want to think about the demon, especially now that she was deep into the woods, but still the words came back to her, floating on acidy little pockets of dread.

“How come they know how to talk?” Violet asked instead, reluctant to repeat the fractured nonsense that had poured from the demon’s center. “Didn’t you say it takes practice?”

“It does,” the cat confirmed. “But that’s not how a demon operates.”

“Then how?” Violet asked, already knowing she wouldn’t like the answer.

“When a demon happens upon a soul, perhaps one locked up tight within the body of a nice little girl,” the cat’s smile went momentarily razor sharp before softening again. “…They tend to go after the brighter bits, the ones filled with warmth and memory and experience, no matter what kind. They love that sort of thing. And with those memories come words and meaning, association and little flickers of coherence. They’re always very quick to figure out how to use those effectively when it comes time to start hunting again. If ever you hear a human voice in the woods, draw your sigil and close your eyes.”

Violet nodded faintly, feeling slightly ill. None of this was anything new, she supposed that somewhere in the back of her mind she’d known it already, but it was all built upon implications that she didn’t want to contemplate.

“Like a radio….” She muttered, half to herself. “The voice is there but the person isn’t.”

They walked in silence for a long while, the forest slowly brightening around them as the colors of the sunrise fell through the treetops. Violet picked a few mint leaves, still glimmering with dew, and chewed them, trying her best not to think about demons or bees or….

“Wait,” she said. “Could you choose not to understand me if you wanted?”

“Sorry, I didn’t catch that.” The cat said, holding a serious expression for only a half moment before it began to snicker.

Violet huffed.

“Could you?” She asked again.

The cat nodded, still clearly amused by its own joke.

“Of course. But that doesn’t mean I would.”

“Okay.” Violet said, but intermingled with the curious sense of relief she felt was something not unlike worry. It wasn’t directed towards the cat but instead lanced off into some dark corner of herself, where nothing recognizable lay.

“That being said,” the cat continued, breaking from a thoughtful moment. “It would be unfair. I can tune you out, but it’s not like you could ignore me.”

Violet considered, but of course the cat was right. They were both talking like humans, no difference between them at all. She couldn’t fall away from that short of plugging her own ears.

“I still don’t get the…the switch,” she said, unable to find a better word to describe the curious network of communication styles she’d landed on top of. “Like, even if I were to speak to someone in a foreign language, I’d still have my own in the back of my mind. I wouldn’t forget it.”

At this the cat only smiled.

“I think you’re suffering a misconception.” It said.

“A misconception of what?”

“That human-speak is anything like how the rest of nature communicates. Tell me what you felt when you listened to the bees.”

Violet shifted in place. What came to mind most clearly was a sense of wrongness and unknowable dread, but even as they welled up Violet made herself discard them. They were reactions from after the experience, once she had realized what was happening. In those few seconds she had been completely entranced there had been other feelings, deep and slow and warm like fresh honey rolling over her skin. And that warmth had taken the center out of her mind, letting the Queen’s will envelop her entirely. It had been directionless all around her, since she was not a part of the hive, but Violet had felt the power of it, a push to obey that swept the bees forward in their routines.

“I didn’t feel like myself.” She said at last, toying with one frayed corner of her notebook’s canvas cover.

“You weren’t. To communicate as an animal you need to set a part of yourself aside, which you did with remarkable ease back at the hive. I expected you to stand and have a one sided conversation with the hive for a bit, but instead….” The cat gave her a firm nod, clearly pleased.

“Which part do you set aside?” Violet asked.

“Hmm?”

“Which part of yourself do you have to set aside in order to talk to me?”

The cat was silent for a moment, smile slipping, then offered her an amiable shrug.

“I like human-speak,” it said at last. “There’s a shallowness to it that still says a great deal. I can communicate fine, decadent intricacies that contain ideas worth the world…all without a bit of passion or effort. There exists within words the ability to be separated from the immediacy of the species. I’m still a cat, but a cat with more than—”

It mewled.

Violet almost jumped. Save a few rumbling purrs, she’d never heard the cat make such a feline noise before. It surprised her.

She looked down at the cat, but suddenly it was as though she were viewing a stranger. The cat’s entire bearing was different, lower and with none of the proud uprightness she’d come to identify it by. A slinking slyness suffused its motions and in the cat’s great silvery eyes Violet could see nothing that she recognized.

“Cat?” She asked, knowing even as she spoke that the word would be nothing but noise. The cat was still there, she insisted to herself, masked only by a different perspective, but all the same she felt swamped by a sudden and terrible loneliness.

And suddenly the cat, her cat, was back.

“Did I scare you?” It asked.

Slowly, Violet shook her head. She looked over the cat once more, but its familiarity felt hollow.

“Is that what you look like when you’re hunting?” She asked.

“Mostly. But sometimes I let the prey see something familiar and safe before I come after them. Fear toughens the meat.”

“What do they say?”

The cat contemplated.

“I once had a bat describe the concept and feeling of flight, as shorthand for explaining why it would be safe from me, I believe. I attempted to explain my own method of travel, but no progress was being made, so I zipped over and bit its head off.”

“Oh.” Violet said, unable to suppress a wince.

At this the cat gently cleared its throat.

“I take it you’ll be spending the night out here, beneath the stars?” It asked, steering the conversation back to its half forgotten beginnings.

Violet felt her shoulders hunch a little, almost on their own, then took a deep breath and nodded. The motion was small and reluctant.

“You have to stay with me.” She said as firmly as she could, leaving no room for disagreement in her voice.

“Very well.” The cat agreed.

“I mean it,” Violet pressed, reassured but not totally convinced the cat had her good will in mind. “No leaving, and no mean tricks either. I don’t want to be alone for this.”

For a moment she thought the cat might try to wriggle out of her demand, but it only nodded.

“You do need to get used to being out here at night,” the cat said. “But I won’t scare you unless it’s for educational purposes.”

“What?”

The cat raised a paw, like a person about a swear an oath.

“I promise.” It said, not entirely able to hide a very sharp toothed smile.

Violet hesitated, still caught off guard, then sighed and decided to let the issue go. At least she’d see it coming now. Maybe.