Thankfully, it didn’t take me long to find my hounds. Such is their unnatural bark, their chilling, unearthly timbre, that they can be heard for miles around. I just had to follow the eerie noise of hellish baying. I found them in a field, gazing up in to the thick foliage of a large tree. It was an impressive sight to see – twenty-five demonic hell hounds jumping up, snapping their jaws and snarling with mad frustration. I could see a cat, high up in the branches, looking down on the pack. Regardless of the fact the hounds are slavering, unearthly demons from hell; regardless of the fact they eat souls for breakfast and spit fire from their jaws; regardless of the fact they emanate a foul air of the purest evil; like all cats who have just found a point of certain safety from its pursuers, this one looked down on them with assured contempt and a steady gaze of feline superiority. It even hissed at them from time to time, to demonstrate its mettle.
I was thankful for the tree; and for canine instinct. Pack mentality had clearly kicked in and my hounds had singled out the cat, before giving collective chase. Almost as if in collusion with me – to help me round up my lads quickly and easily – the cat had found a tree and held them there until I arrived.
It was still mid-morning. Needless to say though, my plans to find a publisher had, by this time, nose-dived. The exhaustion of the morning had left me feeling pretty low. The trauma of seeing so many cats ripped apart, before my very eyes, had affected me.
Despite the fact she had come for me with a shotgun, my heart went out to the old woman at the cattery. I knew that she had been devastated by our unearthly visitation. But there was something else. When my dogs ran riot in that room, I suffered a terrible feeling of helplessness. It made me feel useless; impotent. Sometimes I do wonder why I exist and in the honeyed light of this June morning, I wondered if there was any real point to my existence. Here I was, a god, certainly – but a god without purpose. I couldn’t even control my own dogs, for crying out loud. I’m hardly the blueprint for a formidable deity.
That morning I woke up feeling that I could take on the world. I had known that my cookbook was meant to be. I had known I had something to offer. I had known that I was special – and that the world would benefit.
But that evening I trudged to bed, feeling like the failure I have always been.
