Free Darkroom by Graham Masterton

lazily unwinding, and the room was thick with the stench of badly scorched fur.
    Tibbles had been burned all over, so that she was crusty black instead of tortoiseshell, and she was still smoking. Tiny orange sparks winked in the fur around her neck and her haunches.
    â€˜TT! What’s happened? Jesus Christ, TT – you’re on fire!’
    He dodged around the couch, holding out both of his hands to her, expecting her to jump down from her perch. ‘Come on, baby! Come on, Tibs!’ But she spat at him, and cackled, and lashed out with her left paw to warn him off.
    He stopped. ‘Come on, TT. We need to get you into some cold water, pronto. Come on, baby.’
    He edged closer, but she remained rigid and wild-eyed, hissing at him with total hostility. He tried to soothe her. ‘Come on, baby, everything’s going to be OK. What have you been doing, playing with matches? You remember what happened to Harriet, when she played with matches?’
    He was close enough to reach her, but he held back and waited, hoping that she would start to relax. “Then how the pussy cats did mew; what else, poor pussies, could they do?” Come on, TT. I only want to help you.’
    She didn’t blink. He waited nearly half a minute more. At last he said, ‘OK, you want to stay there, smoldering? Have it your way,’ and he pretended to turn away. Immediately, he turned back and tried to grab her by the scruff of the neck, but she hissed and reared up and lashed out at him. The torchère tipped sideways, Tibbles dropped to the floor, but as she fell her claws tore the skin across the back of his hand, and the next thing he knew he was spraying spots of blood across the carpet.
    He sucked his hand and shook it. ‘Jesus, Tibbles, that hurt! What’s got into you?’
    Tibbles had scrambled under the couch. Jim knelt down and peered underneath it. Tibbles stared at him out of the shadows, one lip caught in her tooth so that she looked as if she were sneering.
    â€˜Tibbles, it’s no use hiding under there. You need treatment.’ He waited, and waited, but she didn’t show any signs of coming out. After a while he straightened himself up and checked around the room. He couldn’t understand what could have burned Tibbles so badly. There were no candles anywhere. No naked wires. The grate was clogged up with paper ash but that had all gone cold, long ago. Even the sunlight that filtered through the grimy French windows was as weak as watery tea.
    Jim bent down again. Tibbles had retreated even further, where the springs were showing through the sagging hessian. Maybe it was better to leave her. As far as he could see, her burns were mainly superficial, and maybe she needed some time to herself, so that she could recover from the shock.
    He waited for a while longer, and then he stood up and went back into the kitchen for his beer. He caught sight of himself in one of the glass-fronted cabinets and thought he looked like one of the photographs in the living room.
Mystified Man in 1930s Kitchen
. Well, he thought, I
am
mystified. Cats don’t spontaneously catch fire, do they? If you brush a cat the wrong way, briskly enough, static electricity can build up in its fur, and you can sometimes produce a crackling noise, or even sparks. But enough sparks to set it alight? That didn’t seem at all likely.
    He suddenly thought of Bobby Tubbs and Sara Miller. Another case of spontaneous combustion. Or what had
looked
like spontaneous combustion. He couldn’t seriously compare what had happened to Tibbles to the way in which those two had been totally incinerated, down to the bone. But it was coincidental, wasn’t it? Two unexplained burnings in two days.
    He went back into the living room. To his surprise, Tibbles had emerged from under the couch and was sitting right in the center of the rumpled-up hearthrug. She was no longer smoldering but her fur was badly charred and in