Cruella, Mike A.'s version of the painting
From the series Not Everyone Sees the Same Cat
Based on Mike A.’s conviction that she is obviously the villain. “Feels like Cruella Deville to me. The black dress, the witchy cat, the blood moon, the old-fashioned streetlamp …”
Nobody knew exactly when the disappearances started because the city specialized in forgetting.
At first, it was the insignificant people:
a clockmaker from the southern district,
a woman who sold violets near the bridge,
a councilman nobody particularly liked.
The newspapers blamed migration, debt, lovers, politics. The usual explanations people produce when they are afraid of imagination.
But Inspector Vale noticed something else.
Everyone described, sooner or later, the same figure: a woman dressed in black, seen under old streetlamps, always carrying a cat as if it were not an animal but a confidant.
Some swore she spoke to it. Others insisted the cat answered.
And above her, almost always, there was a red moon hanging too low over the city.
So, Inspector Vale began waiting near the bridge.
Night after night he stood hidden beneath the stone archway overlooking the river, coat buttoned to his throat against the damp cold, watching the empty street.
Nothing happened.
Or almost nothing.
Each night, precisely at midnight, a black cat crossed the street just as the lamps flickered.
The cat always appeared from the same alley.
The cat always crossed at the same pace.
The cat never once looked hurried.
Inspector Vale observed carefully. He took notes. He measured times. He checked electrical records for the lamps. He interviewed the night watchman responsible for the district lighting.
After nearly three weeks he was ready to abandon the whole absurd investigation.
That afternoon, in the market square, he overheard two women speaking beside a vegetable stall. “I never sleep during the full moon,” one complained while selecting onions. “And tonight it comes again.”
Inspector Vale stopped walking.
Something had indeed been missing during all his nights by the bridge.
The moon had not yet been full.
So, there he was again that evening, hidden beneath the bridge while the city folded itself slowly into silence. Above him hung the moon, swollen and bright red, so low it seemed less part of the sky than something suspended deliberately above the rooftops.
At midnight the lamp began to blink, just as the cat appeared.
It stepped calmly onto the empty street, black fur absorbing what little light remained, and for the first time Inspector Vale noticed something deeply unsettling: the animal cast no shadow.
When the lamps flickered back to life, there, beneath the final streetlamp, stood the woman.
Tall. Thin. Entirely dressed in black.
Her sleeves were long and elegant, the dress severe in its simplicity, almost old-fashioned. A narrow waist. Pale hands. Lips painted dark red
And above her face rose something Inspector Vale could not fully understand.
A tall black shape.
A hat perhaps.
Or hair arranged impossibly high.
The woman did not move. The cat has crossed the street and stopped in front of her. Then, suddenly, leaped into her arms.
Inspector Vale felt a brief wave of dizziness.
For one impossible instant he could no longer tell where the cat ended and the woman began, as though fur and fabric and shadow had merged into a single living thing beneath the red moon.
He straightened instinctively, irritated by his own imagination.
Inspector Vale considered himself a rational man. Streets remained streets. Cats remained cats. Women remained separate from the shadows surrounding them.
Yet beneath that moon these distinctions no longer felt entirely reliable.
A perfume drifted through the air.
Not sweet. Not floral. Something darker. Ancient. Like burned flowers sealed for years inside old wooden drawers.
And then came the melody.
At first, he thought it was distant music carried by the wind from another part of the city. But no. It came from the woman herself. Or perhaps from the cat.
A low murmuring sound, somewhere between singing and speaking.
The two voices seemed to fold into one another until he could no longer separate human from animal, language from melody.
Inspector Vale tried to remember why he had come there in the first place. But his thoughts arrived already weakened. Then, with a sudden wave of confusion, he realized he was no longer standing beneath the bridge. One foot rested already on the empty street. He could not remember deciding to move.
The woman finally lifted her eyes toward him.
She did not seem surprised to find him there.
If anything, she seemed patient.
And with the last clear movement of his mind, Inspector Vale understood something terrible about the missing people.
They had not been taken.
They had crossed.