t
At first, only one or two bells swayed gently. Then, a large number of bells started to rock more violently, filling the room with loud noises. The four of us were completely astounded; none of us could move or say anything for a while.
I then noticed that the bell facing the window did not move. It was probably because the civet did not like the sun, so I asked Dali to pull the curtains up.
After that, I took out a marker from my bag. On the edge of the table, I wrote some common words above each bell. I thought it would be possible to communicate with the cat spirit with a makeshift Ouija board.
However, after only writing two words, I heard a plop behind me, and when I turned my head, Dali had fallen to the floor.
“Dali! What’s wrong?” I asked.
I quickly ran over to him, but just as I reached him, Dali suddenly grabbed my wrist and squeezed it with great strength. Then he slowly opened his eyes. They looked just like the strange eyes that the little girl had last night. Then the corner of his lips slowly curved up into a strange expression—like that of a humorless smile.
This shocked me to the core. I struggled and freed myself from his grasp and backed away from him as quickly as I could, but I was met with an even more bizarre sight—Dali jumped onto the table and squatted on it while licking the back of his hands.
The rest of us were stupefied. Wang Yuanchao pulled out his gun and pointed it at Dali. I pushed the gun down, signaling him not to do anything just yet. It would be best to just observe for a while.
I worked up my courage and asked, “Who are you?”
Dali did not pay any attention to me. He kept concentrating on his ‘paws.’ After asking him the third time, he suddenly turned around and let out an obvious ‘meow’ before pouncing at us!
We automatically stepped away, but it turned out that his target wasn’t us at all. It was the swamp eels which were still in a plastic bag on the floor. Dali buried his face into the plastic bag and started devouring the living eels inside. He chewed them and then swallowed them whole—bones and all. Although I knew that we had more pressing matters at hand, my first thought was whether Dali would choke on the fish bones.
I called his name with concern, and when Dali turned around, there was half an eel sticking out of his mouth. The eel was still alive and it writhed in his mouth, but Dali just sucked and swallowed it whole as if it was a noodle strand.
Once he’d had his fill, he sat on the floor, licked his hands and then wiped his face, just like how a cat would clean itself after a meal.
“Cat Spirit,” I said politely, “now that you are full, can you please return to your resting place?”
When he heard that, Dali suddenly lunged towards the cat figurine under the table and slammed it to the floor. As it rolled away, I thought, was the cat spirit trying to release its true body from the figurine?
Fortunately, the material that made up the figurine was hard and durable enough that it suffered no damage. It was probably made of porcelain and bone powder which contributed to its durability.
Dali continued to pounce on the cat figurine. Although the cat spirit had possessed a human body, its movements and behavior were still exactly like that of a cat. It seemed that Dali couldn’t grasp the figurine with his fingers but could only manage to push it around the same way cats pushed around a ball.
I didn’t know why he was doing it, but no matter what, this figurine was still important evidence for this case. If it got damaged or tainted, things could be set back and the case might never be solved, so I yelled, “We must block him from getting the figurine!”
Dali still had his eyes on the figurine and was busy stalking and pouncing at it. Wang Yuanchao jumped from a chair and threw himself at Dali. The two were then locked in a struggle. Dali snarled and hissed while violently clawing at Wang Yuanchao, trying to get away from him.
Wang Yuanchao blocked Dali’s attacks with his arms, and I could clearly see how Dali’s scratches left trails of blood on Wang Yuanchao’s skin.
I took advantage of the time when Dali was preoccupied with Wang Yuanchao to quickly pick up the cat figurine and handed it to Huang Xiaotao.
“Take it back to the evidence room now!” I ordered.
“What about him?” asked Huang Xiaotao in a panic, pointing at Dali.
“Don’t worry, we’ll deal with him. Go!” I cried.
Dali noticed that Huang Xiaotao was leaving with the cat figurine, so he slipped through Wang Yuanchao’s grip and went after Huang Xiaotao. Wang Yuanchao kicked a chair to block Dali’s path, but to our surprise, Dali dodged the chair with what could only be described as feline agility. He leapt over the chair, spun three hundred sixty degrees mid-air, then landed firmly and lightly on his ‘four feet.’
Shit, even circus acrobats couldn’t do that!
Wang Yuanchao picked up another chair, screamed and lunged towards Dali.
I pulled the curtains apart, and the bright light of the afternoon sun streamed into the room. Dali immediately stopped in his spot and blocked his eyes with his hands as if the light was extremely painful to him.
The chair in Wang Yuanchao’s hands smashed Dali’s back with a loud crash. I got worried and shouted, “Don’t hurt him too much, Old Wang!”
As soon as I spoke, Dali jumped and kicked Wang Yuanchao’s squarely on his chest, shoving him back a few meters. But Wang Yuanchao soon got back onto his feet and prepared to fight Dali again. He rushed towards Dali and threw an onslaught of attacks at him. Wang Yuanchao’s martial arts skills seemed to be too much for the cat spirit, but it had the supernatural nimbleness of a cat, so Dali kept bounding from one spot to another all over the room, knocking things over and breaking everything in his path. He continued to slip through Wang Yuanchao’s grasp like a slippery eel.
I thought of what scared cats the most, and suddenly noticed the half bottle of white liquor on the table.
“Give me a lighter!” I shouted to Wang Yuanchao.
Between their fight, Wang Yuanchao threw his lighter over to me. I caught it and poured the white liquor into my mouth. It burned the inside of my mouth so much I almost shed tears. Then I lit up the lighter and sprayed the liquor out of my mouth while facing towards Dali—creating an impressive fireball!
Dali screamed and quickly fled to the corner of the room.
I poured more liquor into my mouth, but there wasn’t much left in the bottle, so it probably wouldn’t cause such a strong reaction from Dali this time. But just as I was about to spray out the liquor, I saw Dali shivering and curling up into a ball in the corner of the room. He put up his two ‘paws’ in front of his face to protect himself. Then, all of a sudden, his eyes rolled back and he fainted.
I didn’t see that coming at all, and the shock caused me to accidentally gulp down the mouthful of liquor, which proceeded to burn my throat and stomach.
I walked over to Dali and patted his face. After a while, he woke up in a daze and mumbled, “Dude, what happened to me?”
“You fainted,” I told him. If he found out what really happened, the shock he suffered would probably knock him out again.
Dali noticed a weird taste in his mouth which cause him to spit several times. He then found a small fishbone between his teeth.
“Hello, how did this get here? I don’t remember having fish for lunch.”
Just as I was trying to come up with a made-up reason for how the fishbone ended up in his mouth, Dali interrupted me with, “Holy shit, look at the state of this room! Looks like it’s been hit by a hurricane!”
“The cat spirit just came out of the cat figurine,” I explained.
“Dude, seriously? What did it look like?”
“It just looked like a big black cat. It jumped around and wreaked havoc to the whole room. We almost couldn’t deal with it.”
I was worried that Dali might start asking more questions, but fortunately, my friend was more of a simple-minded kind of guy. His only comments were, “Jeez, dude! Why didn’t you wake me up! I wanna see what a cat spirit looks like too! Why the hell did I faint at such a crucial moment?”
I poured him a glass of water and told him to gargle. Soon after that, Huang Xiaotao returned. She saw that everything had gone back to normal so she was about to say something, but I signaled her with my eyes not to talk.
Long after the incident, a friend who had knowledge about this type of phenomenon told me that what I did was incredibly dangerous! We were lucky that the cat spirit did not take Dali’s life in panic! I was evidently good for nothing except autopsies and solving murder cases. As for dealing with supernatural beings, I was just as clueless and ignorant as the next guy.