I just reread the title of this blog. It sounds like one of the titles to what were my favorite books growing up - those Hardy Boys Mystery novels (the original ones, mind you - not those crappy "Undercover Brothers" ones that stink up bookstore shelves now).
If only Frank and Joe (and perhaps their somewhat rotund friend Chet Morton) could be around to help me solve the mystery of "The Ghost Cat of Old Ford Road."
(TUESDAY)
It all started late last Tuesday evening. I drove home as I normally do - and backed my van down the driveway. I left the van running while I opened the garage door and turned on the interior light. As soon as I hit the switch, I heard a muffled rustling in the rear righthand corner of the room. Thinking that I might be having some auditory hallucinations, I shrugged it off and started to walk back toward the van.
Another bit of rustling and out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a black and white blur go streaking behind some shelving. After getting over the initial surprise at having a relatively large animal (not huge - but large - as compared to, lets's say, a sparrow) banging around inside I spent the next ten minutes poking and prodding behind the pile of junk in the back of my garage trying to determine what it was that I had seen and heard.
The flash again! Yes - this time I had seen it relatively clearly. It was definitely a cat. A black and white cat.
I rummaged around in the garage for a little while longer. Moving things, lifting things, uncovering hiding places, et cetera. I neither saw nor heard the beast again that evening.
After pulling the van into the garage, I began to think about what had just happened....I'm sure that you observant readers noticed earlier that I wrote that I had to "open the garage door" when I got back. This obviously means that my garage door had been SHUT AND LOCKED all day long. I had opened it for approximately 15 seconds while I drove the van out in the morning while leaving for work - and other than that, it had been shut and locked since approximately 6pm the night before.
And as far as I knew, there was no animal in the garage when I had locked the door more than 24 hours previously.
The evening passed. I made several trips out to the garage to get things out of the van, to get firewood, and to unceremoniously bang on the lawnmower with a fork. The latter was meant to startle the "ghost cat" into revealing itself. It never happened.
(WEDNESDAY)
I got up the next day, did my usual routine, checked the garage again (still nothing), and left the house for work around 8am.
When I returned at around 6pm, I again did the usual - backed the van up the driveway, got out and opened the garage door, flicked on the interior light - this time there was no rustling. I banged on the lawnmower a couple of times to make sure that there was nothing inside. No movement, no noise, no nothing. So I went out and backed the van inside.
I parked, turned off the vehicle, got out, and walked around to the passenger side so that I could get all my stuff together to bring inside the house. I put on my backpack and grabbed a few cds and my coffee cup and went to open the door to the house.
My eyes happened to be drawn down toward the doormat. There, on the matted wicker, lay multiple relatively freshly-squeezed pieces of cat shit.
I nearly dropped my coffee-cup in a slow motion cinematic way just to illustrate the shock paired with fear that I was feeling. But instead, I went inside and got a dustpan, collected the "leavings" and launched them into the yard.
I went back inside and made myself some dinner. As I ate, I thought about this conundrum again.
"Okay," I thought to myself, "I made sure that there was no cat in the garage this morning, right?
"Yes," I answered myself.
"So...how the fuck did a cat get into a locked garage in order to leave a pile of shit on my door mat?" I asked myself, knowing full-well that I didn't know the answer.
"I don't know," I answered myself needlessly.
I called my wife and told her about the cat shit. She thought that was pretty weird, as well - especially as we had hardly seen any cats in the general vicinity of the house since we began living there in September.
I checked the garage a few more times on Wednesday evening, but there was no sign of my feline buddy the ghost shitter.
(THURSDAY)
On Thursday, I did all my normal morning stuff. Except this time, I pulled the van out of the garage and spent about 15 minutes looking through as much of the contents as I could get to before I left for work. No sign of the cat. Or its shit.
I made sure that there were no hairy feline-like creatures in the garage before I left for the day. I shut the door slowly - while simultaneously scanning the surrounding environs - making sure that nothing darted in before I could get the door to the ground.
I left and didn't think about it again until about three-quarters of the way through the workday when I wrote to my friend Jeff via AOL instant messenger during the day and told him about the ghost cat. Here is a short excerpt:
Bushead78: On a bodily function note...yesterday, I found a pile of cat shit on the doormat in front of the door to my kitchen - INSIDE OF MY LOCKED GARAGE.
GaryBuseyLives: wait wait...WHAT?
Bushead78: I think that I have a ghost cat shitting on my door mat.
GaryBuseyLives: old on...I need...I need air...air...okay...holy shit that's funny. Shitting ghost cat.
Until I got home.
I opened the garage door - went inside and flicked on the lights. And on the other side of the garage - in a wide-open space between the snowblower and the a pile of boxes that we had yet to unpack upon moving in - was ANOTHER BIG PILE OF FRESH CAT SHIT.
And these were huge turds, by the way - giant hair-covered cat plops. Apparently this ghost cat had been eating antacid tablets or sawdust or something in order to save up its shit in an effort to unleash it in a hellacious constipated fury all over the floor of my garage.
This shit looked fresh. Like it had just stopped steaming in the chill winter air.
In a relative panic, I looked all over the garage again...no cat. But when it comes down to it, I don't suppose that you're really supposed to be able to see a shitting ghost cat anyway, right? I bit freaked out, I managed to once again play dustpan lacrosse with the semi-frozen cat shit and tossed it into the road at the end of my driveway.
I have not seen or heard the cat since - nor have I seen any cat "remnants" since last Thursday. Perhaps this ghost cat has moved on from the apparent purgatory that was my garage - to pet heaven (or more likely hell).
Or maybe, just maybe - it's now taking colossal cat shits in some other sorry bastard's garage.
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