This is my cat. He is useless and degenerate; he is a decadent and an idle trifler who neither values nor appreciates the lifestyle with which I provide him.
Yes, my bed is also a bookcase. [preens]
Here is the cat I found in the hallway when I opened the door to leave my apartment yesterday afternoon.
He is the twin of my cat in every way, except for this: my cat was within the apartment, while his double stood without. He was waiting. He was staring directly into the spot in the apartment where my cat was sitting. Their eyes did not leave one another.
The door is closed now, which means the double-cat either is or is not sitting directly behind it.
I am afraid to leave, and I am afraid to stay. I am afraid to learn what I do not know.
Tags: animals, cats, doppelgangers
This can mean only one thing: Your cat is a time-traveler, and is crossing paths with his younger or older self. (Also, this means you cannot know his sexuality, but that is neither here nor there.)
RONBLECAT.
They are twins. Your cat is the evil one, because he has the goatee.
Sorry.
I’d honestly be disappointed if Mallory didn’t own the evil one.
But the other one has the kitty equivalent of a Hitler mustache.
This is the darkest timeline.
Around his neck is a little card on a string. The card is from Chris Kimball. It says “how useless your remorse would be, child.”
ohhhhh my god
Cat v. Anti-Cat. Do not let them meet.
I think you may shortly have two cats.
Schrodinger’s cat! stupid fox keeps removing the clip from Futurama http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/3217613/S…
Evil Melis got a cat. Now Melis and cat must live with evil Melis and evil cat.
Melis and Evil Cat must live with Evil Melis and cat.
My late lamented cat also had a TwinCat! He was bigger than she was and had slightly different markings but it would freak me out when I’d see him in the yard. But do you know what is creepier than a TwinCat? A GHOSTCAT. After the passing of dear Cat, I started seeing another doppelganger, THIS ONE EVEN MORE UNCANNY THAN THE LAST. So… I guess you have that to look forward to?
The week my dear departed darling Daisy dog died a cat appeared in my yard. Like Daisy, the cat has a spotted coat and a little nubbin tail. Like a cat, Daisy liked to play with dangling string and lie in patches of sunlight or on materials you were working with on the floor and didn’t think much of long walks.
In other words, Daisy was a cat in a dog’s body and now she’s a cat in a cat’s body that visits us sometimes.
Klaas-Jan has a dopplecat in the neighborhood, who occasionally shows up in our yard. When Klaas-Jan was new and not going outside at all, the dopplecat showed up and freaked out my housemate, who had to check to see where the actual Klaas-Jan was.
I got my current kitty a couple of months after my sweet old lion-cut calico died. I wasn’t wholly ready, but the local shelter was at capacity and so I thought I would suck it up and give a kitty a home.
Per the terms of my lease, I needed a declawed cat. I asked the woman at the front desk how many declawed kitties there were in the shelter, and she said, “One.” So, I said I would meet her, and then went into a little room where cats meet their prospective humans.
The woman walked in with a lion-cut calico. She set her down on the floor and I could not breathe. The cat marched up to me, sat in my lap, and began to purr. I began to sob hysterically and insisted to the agape woman, “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, IT’S LIKE MY DEAD CAT HAS COME BACK TO MEEEEE”
In retrospect, I’m probably lucky they let me adopt any animal at all that day.
Possibilities:
1. New cat is your cat also, but from the future (the black/not black on their noses is PROOF)
2. New cat is a Time Lord
3. Your hallway is a Schrodinger’s Hallway experiment
4. If 3# is true, then whatever you do, don’t go in the hallway, because you’ll be trapped forever in a state of being and non-being
#1 seems most likely, since what with 300 years of our timeline being missing and all a cat from the future would naturally turn up in the present.
I lived in a cabin in the woods once. Woodspeople don’t leash their dogs or contain their cats or wash their children, so in the forests there were deer, bear, fox, kids, wolves, dogs, wolf-dogs, and cats, hundreds of thousands of cats. Some were domestic, most feral.
I adopted my cat at the local humane society. They found her in an abandoned apartment and had to trap her like a wild animal. When I met her in the shelter, she yowled and hissed and bit, and then she yowled some more. The people said she should live with a solitary witch in the woods, so I took her home.
The moment she moved in with me, the feral cats started to swarm. I would come home and they would scatter from my front porch and leer at me from the bushes. I would wake up in the night to yowling and scratching at the door, green eyes glowing in my windows. I would leave the house in the morning and there would be tracks in the fresh snow at my door, butt imprints from where they sat, waiting.
After a while, they started to leave gifts at the door. A chipmunk. A vole. The wing of a sparrow, the foot of a pigeon.
Later, kittens. Dozens of them. They sprang up from nowhere and everywhere. I brought them to the humane society by the shovelful.
Meanwhile my cat sat at the door, stiff, listening, commanding the tide of ferals to swell and surge upon our home.
We had to leave the state.
It has begun, Mallory.
This reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s “The Price”, but in reverse.
That story is definitely one of the best ever written in all time.
Ugh, just thinking about that story makes me want to cry.
HOLY SHIT.
I think you may have found Bast in her current form.
This is one of my favorite Toast comments ever.
The cat is not the mystery. Someone has replaced your hallway with a mirror. The real mystery is why you do not also appear in reflection.
Not appearing in reflections is very bad. Vampires don’t appear in mirrors. Which if you were a vampire would be most distressing because you can’t check if your hair is ok
Mallory never needs to check her hair. Mallory’s hair is impeccable.
This truth is the truest of all true things.
That’s werewolves, though. Might only apply to British ones too.
Have you invoked the favor of any Goblin Kings recently? Perhaps to spare you from a noisome stepbrother you’re tasked with babysitting?
Notes From The Undercat
by Felinor Dogstoyevsky
I think this calls for a witch’s bottle full of your cat’s hairs placed near/above the doorway, PRONTO.
It is a cat’s job to be appreciated, not to appreciate.
It’s Ronbledore’s animagus, adrift in time, obviously.
There was a giant extra-toed cat that very intensely tried to get into my apartment 2 days ago.
They are waiting. They are watching. They KNOW.
I love this story. And I love your bookcase bed. I am also in search of an awesome bookcase bed. Where did you get it? It kinda looks like the one I’m considering at Target but I’m not sure.
internet! i don’t remember beyond that
Doesn’t it worry you to live in earthquake country and have books over where you sleep? I live in LA and this kind of thing gives me nightmares. I can’t even stand to have a framed picture over the bed.
if i must die
let it be by books
An excellent point, and upon reflection my comment is pretty crappy as Mallory is adult who can make her own decisions without reference to my neuroses. I have the same issue when people can’t fathom how I travel on my own without constant fear of murder.
The writing + comments are somehow one of the creepiest things The Toast has produced. I have feral cats in my yard. I will not leave my house today.
I’m sure it’s fine…fine……fine………fine…………..
LOOK-ALIKES YOU SAY??
True story: twice this season so far I have been watching the opening credits and thought, annoyed, “Why are all these actors men when all the characters are–oh. Ohh.” In conclusion, Buffy bless Tatiana Maslany.
Glad I’m not the only one! I frequently have to be like, “Derp, these are not different actresses.” I find Helena and Allison to be especially distinct – the diametrically opposed styling helps, but her physicality is so nuanced that I have no trouble believing they’re different people.
True story: when Alison was largely absent one episode last season, I thought to myself, “huh, they must have had trouble scheduling the actress….oh. Ohhh.”
RIGHT?
I can usually remember that the rest are the same person, but Alison – nope. There’s no way that’s the same actress, we are being punked by Tatiana Maslany’s mirror twin, because she’s so so totally Alison and no one else can be her.
Awww look at their little faces!!
And so the Ghosting of Mallory has begun…
Dear god, there is naught we can do. The devil must have his due.
The devil? Or Old Henry?
They aren’t synonymous?
Mallory’s cat has an East Coast twin – I’m imagining them meeting somewhere in the Midwest and floating above the cornfields, like Harry Potter and Voldemort.
My cat also has a twin. My cat is an indoor cat, but I sometimes get a call from my neighbours that my cat has escaped and is by the fence at the edge of the woods down the block. My cat is always with me when I get these calls. I’ve never gone to go see the other cat. I don’t want to see it.
Your cat’s soul has been torn in twain all these eons. Finally they may merge and become again what they once were.
That other cat is your true cat, spirited away one night by the fae to serve them, forever removed from the world of mortals and doomed to helplessly watch the revels of the wicked changeling that’s taken its rightful place in your home. Joke’s on the fairies, though, cats are useless.
He’s there to tell your cat that Tim Toldrum has died and he is now the King of the Cats.
This feels very I Heart Huckabees.
One of my friends has a giant black and white cat named Sulu. A stray who looks very similar wandered into their house one day and has just kept coming back. They have named him Chekhov.
I ship it.
This happened to my brother at his house … And now he has three cats. In addition to the two cats he had previously. He’s like, it’s a lot of cats. But seriously the twin cat just started walking into his house like … Sup guys what you eating over there tuna? It was a very chill stray possibly a left behind? Anyway watch out Mallory this might be a cat plot to take over your life etc.
Aww it’s your cat’s flesh anchor! It is a very pretty flesh anchor.
Not-Cat has claws. Not-Cat possesses thumbs. Not-Cat has an expensive HD tablet. Not-Cat has a loft apartment in Manhattan. Not-Cat passes his time by ghostwriting accusatory columns about feline guardianship. Not-Cat has a personal chef who sets out a meal of the finest raw organic meats on fine china three times a day, then crosses himself as he locks and bolts the door behind him. Not-Cat has a room piled with ancient golden coins worn featureless with age. Not-Cat is not restricted to the mundane dimensions. Not-Cat has been waiting for many, many years. Not-Cat knows that his nemesis is here. Not-Cat has discovered where his nemesis lives. Not-Cat knows her name, burned eons ago in the depth of his soul. Not-Cat knows he need not wait much longer.
A quick read: Jenny and The Cat Club, by Esther Averill. You’ll learn why that cat was looking at you like that, and then you’ll realize what a Prize Asshole* your cat is for leaving his brother out there all this time.
*I think your cat is cute and also I am blindly loving of all cats to the point where i naively petted a strange cat, on a strange street, on its belly and DUH got shredded. laughs were had at my expense. IDGAF
StrexCorp saw you enjoyed your current cat, but thought you might prefer this double of your cat from another universe better; he is, after all, synergized with StrexCorp’s entire range of devices to make your daily life more enjoyable, and is a gift, Mallory. Don’t you like our Gift, Mallory? StrexCorp cares for our community.
Believe in a smiling god.
Your cat is really the twin of our cat, Casey. Except my dad ran over Casey about 30 years ago (I was so traumatized I believed his story that Casey ran off even though I was IN THE CAR when it happened). So, yeah, Ghostcat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_KmNZNT5xw
it’s a glitch in the matrix……..RUN
This is the darkest timeline.