Page:Weird Tales v01n03 (1923-05).djvu/24

 



OOK!" said the nurse to the young interne on the second floor of Dr. Winslow's sanatorium. "See what I found in the table drawers of 112—the patient who was discharged last evening. Do you suppose this horrible story can be true?"

The interne took the manuscript with a blase air. He had read so many of these ravings on paper!

"This one is really unusual," said the nurse, noticing his manner. "Please read it."

Mildly interested, the interne began to read:

HY AM I here in this place of madness, this house of diseased minds? Because of a cat!

And it is a cat that takes me away from this place—to go to my death! And maybe this cat will follow on to haunt me in some other world, as it has in this. Who knows?

This doom had its beginning, as far as this life is concerned, when I was a boy in my grandmother's house. My grandmother had a great yellow Tartar cat that she loved as only a lonely old woman can love a cat.

Perhaps it was because I was jealous of the love and attention my grandmother lavished on Toi Wah—a boy's natural antipathy for anything that