Free Cat Out of Hell by Lynne Truss

keyboard clatter. Over the years, the usage of the room had inevitably changed – from being a silent reading room, it had become a silent writing room. But its seriousness had survived the transition. Where many other campus libraries had become more like internet cafes, our great reading room was a place of intense, solitary learning. Mary had been ideally suited to her position here, presiding over so much heightened mental processing. Others might have been intimidated by it, but not her. Down each side of the room were the individual, lockable carrels that she could, at her discretion, allocate to research students and academics. It had surprised me to find out, when she first assumed her position, that not all students aspired to a carrel. I would have thought that having a tiny private panelled room of one’s own within the library, with a book shelf, lamp and desk, would have been any studious person’s fantasy environment. But the rental feewas perhaps off-putting; whatever the cause, they often stood empty. Mary had told me that, once in a while, she would take a key to an unused carrel and lock herself inside for a couple of hours – “Just to get a break from Tawny,” was what she used to say.
    It was to one of the carrels that Tawny now led me. She held the key.
    “Now this is really strange ,” she said, in a whisper. “We think it must have happened the weekend before Mary – Oh.”
    She stopped. She couldn’t say it, so I had to say it for her. It is the common lot of the grieving, I’ve discovered, to spend half your time saving other people’s feelings.
    “The weekend before Mary died?” I said, helpfully.
    “Yes.”
    I braced myself. I looked around. I didn’t know yet what she was talking about. She had said the words, “It must have happened.” But what could happen here? Nothing had “happened” in this reading room, aside from some gargantuan efforts at mental application, for about a hundred years. We had stopped outside carrel number 17, which I now faintly remembered was the little private space that Mary had joked about retreating to. Tawny turned the key, but I almost stopped her. Was I up to this? What if there was something in here – something personal to Mary – that would break my heart afresh?
    “The thing is,” Tawny said, very quietly, “the caretaker said he had seen a cat prowling about in the library, and he’d tried to catch him. But of course he never expected this.”
    “ A cat ?”
    “Shhh,” she said. I had forgotten to whisper. Some of the “readers” looked round. We looked back at them, and I weakly gestured an apology.
    As if to compensate for my outburst, she lowered her voicestill further, and turned her big wide eyes to mine. “We don’t know how he got in,” she said. Her voice was so low that it was little more than aspirated mouthing. “But he’s on the CCTV. He’s huge. Anyway, there’s a bit of a smell, so you’d better –”
    “Tawny, could you hang on a minute –” I said, but it was too late. She had opened the door.
    “Oh my God,” I said. I stumbled back.
    “Alec! Quick, oh, sit down. I’m so sorry. Wait here, I’ll get someone.”
    “No, no. Stay,” I said. “Oh my God.”
    I held on to the door jamb and tried to make sense of the scene inside the carrel, holding my hand over my face. The best way I can describe it is this: imagine you had placed a small, orderly panelled room in a jungle clearing and come back a week later when all the larger wild beasts had taken turns frenziedly tearing it to pieces, slaughtering inside it, and treating it as a lavatory. That’s what this little carrel looked like inside – it had been both savaged and defiled. The walls were slashed and splintered, papers were torn and scattered, books looked as if they had exploded, blood was spattered in flying arcs. The smell, of course, was cat urine; and you could almost hear the echo of the feline shrieks and yowls that must have