Freddy was oblivious. ‘It didn’t happen here. We were on vacation in Salzkammergut. I was about nine years old. And there was a cat there. Not ours. Perhaps it belonged to our neighbour, I don’t know. There was a little villa not far from us that belonged to some professor from Vienna. In any case, the cat had a habit of wandering around our garden. Whenever I went into the garden I would find it there, walking around as if it owned the place, or standing still and turning its head from side to side and listening. It wasn’t a big cat, and it had black and orange patches on its coat. A couple of times I even caught it coming down the corridor, perfectly cool and collected, without the slightest sign of fear. Its impertinence began to annoy me. A cat should be frightened and run away, but this one wasn’t frightened in the least. In the end it really upset me, but I went on waiting. Once or twice I tried to approach it. I would approach very slowly and it never ran away. When I was close enough to touch it, it would simply walk calmly away … This disdainful contempt infuriated me more and more. I could hardly think of anything else, and it preoccupied me even in my sleep. One night I dreamed that the cat came into my room, the room I shared with Poldy, and approached my bed with its calm, unhurried walk and, at the foot of the bed, raised its head to look at me. In my dream I was asleep and I didn’t want to wake up for the sake of this impertinent cat. I thought that I would wait and see what it wanted. Because it was standing and looking at me as if it was making up its mind about something. I saw that its eyes were a reddish-brown and they had a sharp glint in them. Before then, when I was awake, I hadn’t noticed its eyes. In short: I lay and looked at it and it looked at me and I knew for certain that it was planning to do me some harm. After standing there for a while, it jumped onto my bed, at my feet, and began walking slowly over my body, towards my head. I didn’t move. Close to my head it stopped, paused for a moment, looked at me with its red-brown eyes, which at close range were unnaturally big and round. Then it slowly coiled itself around my neck. I felt a slight, almost pleasant pressure, and an intense warmth on my neck. But the pressure increased, it became difficult to breathe, and I suddenly realised that it intended to strangle me. I whipped my hand out of the blanket and grabbed it by the neck. With a great effort I managed to pull it off me. I shook it in front of my eyes, with my hand round its neck and its body hanging and dangling down. But I immediately realised that its neck was hard as iron, and the harder I squeezed the more it hurt my hand. I looked intently at its head again, and found that its eyes had completely disappeared. And its head, too, was no longer the head of a cat but some strange thing, more like an inanimate object than an animal. I flung it onto the floor with all my strength. It fell with a noise like a heavy metal object. I looked at the place where it had fallen, at the foot of the bed, and to my amazement I saw that the cat, the very same cat, was getting up, stretching itself as if after a pleasant doze, and raising its head to look at me. Then it jumped up onto the bed again, and the whole thing repeated itself in every detail over and over again.