The Biggest Cat

It always made things easier if the building was old, a heap of concrete and grimed glass that had little in the way of physical locks and nothing at all when it came to more sophisticated security systems that cost real money and made a real difference. This was a prime example of the type, an office block that had somehow managed to survive the turn of the century and now seemed to be waiting for demolition, living on borrowed time. Breaking and entering in this case would be done more for the need of secrecy when simply walking in through the front door would have been no problem at all.

Melissa never failed to be amused when she heard the supposed description of her job in the words of another person. Inevitably they imagined her tapping away at an archaic word processor, delving into filing cabinets full of dusty old records or doggedly scribbling shorthand into a paper notepad. To them an investigative journalist was no different from the stereotype that existed in the mind of the average person to describe any common hack that churned out newsprint for the gutter press on a daily basis.

They were so far off the mark that she often wondered what such people would have said in response to seeing her scale the treacherous fire escape to reach the roof of the building. Did they imagine a conventional reporter popping the lock on the tiny hut that housed the winch for the internal lift with a pouch of professional picks and slip inside? There was no way to hold a pencil and pad as you gripped the lift cable between hands clad in gloves designed to defeat the friction generated as you slid down to the car below.

If you made a living by chasing the stories that Melissa had made her concern, such skills were not simply useful, they were a necessity.

She yanked the trapdoor in the roof of the lift car open and dropped inside without a moment of hesitation. The lights inside were out, but she was used to operating in the dark and she found the panel of buttons to direct the lift to a specific floor a moment later. She counted the buttons until she found the one she wanted and soon the lift was in motion, grinding down the shaft.

Melissa used the time it took to reach her chosen floor to deliberately slow her breathing and take stock. She was more than equal to the task that she had set herself, physically solid and diligently fit as well as young and reckless enough to ignore the inherent danger of the situation. Her thick brown hair was pinned to the back of her head and she had made no attempt to cover her hazel eyes or the pale freckles that marked her cheeks. In her experience it was enough to be wearing grey jeans and a black jacket when running around on this kind of a job. Covering your head with anything intended to conceal your identity was more likely to get you noticed than going without.

She was always careful when it came to the risks she took in pursuit of a lead, but even she had to admit that tonight she was taking far more of a chance than she was used to. Entering a building that she had no time to familiarise herself with, agreeing to meet with an unknown informant and all to receive a piece of information that she had not been able to verify.

But if the pieces fell into place and this was the one that, as she suspected, could complete the puzzle then it would all be worth the gamble. With this one snippet of vital information, Melissa would be so much closer to finally bringing Thomas Rubin’s world crashing down around him.

As the lift came to a lurching halt and the doors trundled open, she took a deep breath and moved warily out into the gloom of the corridor and towards the room where she had been told the contact was waiting.

To the world at large, Thomas Rubin was no more than a harmless eccentric who dabbled in one interest after another and was never harmed by the inevitable failure of his ventures due to the fact that he was a member of the independently wealthy upper class. It had even been suggested that if there were ever a real man who could be compared to the fictional Bruce Wayne, it would have been Rubin himself.

The argument ran that were the character real, Bruce Wayne could never have pulled off the feat of living the life of his vigilante alter ego and would instead have settled down to become something like the charming Rubin. The witty soul who had thought the idea up at a cocktail party had been trying to discover an angle from which he could poke fun at the man who had the money and the good looks by suggesting that he was far too simple to hide a secret identity beneath his amiable charm and easy smile.

It was a stark irony that he was totally and utterly wrong.

Thomas Rubin may have been born into money, but he had also been born into a restless need to control his own fate that threatened to spill over into madness. Possessed of a fevered intellect, he had spent his youth watching father descend into helpless idiocy and dependence as a degenerative condition slowly destroyed his mind and rendered him a vegetable. The memory haunted him endlessly and the knowledge that the sickness was genetic and thus something that he may have inherited alongside his wealth drove him to save himself from the same fate.

Rubin had devoted the largest part of his fortunes to curing himself, employing the very best in the relevant fields of medicine to create a solution. For him there had been no object in terms of cost or morality and the cure he sought, while it remained a mystery to all but the man himself, came at a cost to both Rubin and those who created it.

There was no doubt that the treatment he received was a success, but the side effects of the supposed cure manifested in a violent exaggeration of his already unstable mind. Driven by the paranoid fear that the transgressions he had made in order to secure his cure would result in his ultimate downfall, he disposed of the men who had created it for him in order to silence them.

By now so steeped in the criminal underworld where he had been forced to search for his unethical needs, Rubin plunged deeper into the mire of crime rather than try to escape from its clutches. He was already incriminated and deeply in debt to the world of organised crime and a man so desperate to retain control and unhinged by his massive dosages of unstable chemicals was not about to become the stooge of any figure in the criminal fraternity.

After a bloody rise to power, Rubin now lead a double life that was a mocking parody of the comicbook character to which he had been compared. By day he was a harmless oddball, but by night he was a powerful and influential figure in the underworld who had so far escaped the notice of the law.

But he had not escaped the notice of Melissa Rose, not after he had deprived her of her own mother in the massacre of those who had laboured to create the very chemical cocktail that saved his life. She had followed his careful trail for years now and she had never been closer to bringing him down than she was that very night.

Melissa sensed something was very wrong almost the moment she opened the door and stepped inside. The room was in total darkness, but that was no surprise due to the clandestine nature of the meeting. It was the fact that though she could sense that she was not alone, the contact who must have been in the room and waiting for her with some trepidation, made no effort to declare their presence as she stood there in the darkness.

She was about to speak when there was the sound of a switch being thrown and suddenly the room was bathed in the intense glow of four floodlights, one stood in every corner. The light blinded her and sent her staggering back towards the door with no thought other than to get as far away as fast as possible.

But before she was even able to turn around and make for the corridor, Melissa felt the sudden sensation of something sinking into the flesh in the small of her back. A moment later she was hit by the full charge of a Taser and fell, twitching to the floor.

Helpless and racked with pain, she could offer no resistance as a bag was pulled over her head and painful restraints shackled her at the wrists and ankles.

Despite the fact that she was unable to offer any resistance, her unseen assailants were taking no chances and the last thing that Melissa felt was a sharp blow to the back of the neck before she slipped into unconsciousness.

Thomas Rubin nodded his thanks to the little people who had shown him to his limousine and opened the door while he slipped inside. He failed to make eye contact with any of them out of habit and it would have been impossible for him to have picked them out of a line up. There were just so many people who simply did not matter a jot in the grand scheme of things that he often wondered if there would really be any consequences if her chose to kill one or two of them on occasion. Done discreetly and out of sight, he suspected that the world would just move on regardless of the fact that it had been deprived of one amongst so many drones.

The interior of the limousine was unlit and the shadows prevented anyone outside from seeing the shape of a human body slumped in the backward facing seats. Rubin paid the figure little attention himself until the door was firmly closed and the car had pulled away from the kerb. But even then it was with an air of leisurely disinterest that he pressed a button to turn on the subtle lighting and finally regarded his companion in the rear of the vehicle.

Melissa Rose sat, unmoving and tightly restrained on the expensive leather seats of the limousine. Her limbs were still bound so that she could not move and as an extra precaution her ankles had been secured to a metal ring that was concealed beneath the carpet that covered the floor of the compartment with a length of rope wound from metal fibres. She was gagged with a rubber bit and her face showed signs of the struggle that the rest of her clothes concealed and suggested that she had not been subdued without considerable effort on her own part.

Rubin looked her up and down, seemingly intrigued by the signs of violence that he saw, as if they interested him as more than simply evidence of a beating. He put down his walking stick and leaned forwards to get a better look at the woman who had been making his business her own for quite a while now.

A good twenty years her senior, Rubin had little interest in her body in a truly physical sense. He was in excellent condition for his age, his tall and rather spare frame probably better kept than many men half his years. The first touches of grey were remarkably still only just appearing in his immaculate black hair and he was considered by those who thought him no more than a harmless bachelor to be very handsome. But in truth he had lost interest in the opposite sex a long time ago and his own had never interested him in that manner either.

He was however, confused by the feelings that were being stirred in his gut as he studied Melissa more intently. It was not that he was being filled with a sudden passion for the woman, being captivated by her beauty, the very idea would have amused him no end. To him it seemed that there was something that almost excited him when he considered the lengths to which she had gone to pursue her vendetta. He could imagine this tenacious girl scaling walls and crawling through impossibly small spaces in order to reach her goal.

Rubin unbuttoned her jacket and studied the shape of her chest, cupping the breasts and feeling the muscles of her stomach more like he was testing the ripeness of fruit than being aroused by the contact. Leaving her torso alone, he squeezed her thighs and studied the shape of her legs with no hint of gentleness or concern for the pressure he was exerting on her limbs.

At the sensation of being roughly handled, Melissa stirred slightly and let out a groan of discomfort, shifting and pulling against the restraints that held her.

If Rubin even noticed her begin to come around, he made no move to stop what he was doing and simply continued to put his hands wherever the mood took him. He was far too lost in his own thoughts to care what state his captive might be in and sure enough of her being tied down to worry that she could even attempt to stop him. It was not Melissa Rose’s body as it was that fascinated him; it was more what he was intending to do with it that kept him occupied.

Satisfied with his observations, Rubin leaned back and retrieved his walking stick from the seat beside him. He smiled as he cruelly jabbed the tip into Melissa’s stomach, the sudden pain from the impact jolting her into a state of agonised awareness.

“Time to wake up,” he chided her as he yanked the bit from her mouth, “I don’t like to see people wasting my time with pointless theatrics and shows of ridiculous bravado.”

Melissa managed to raise her head and look Rubin in the eye, her face a picture of disdain.

“That’s good,” he nodded, “I’ll thank you to look me in the eye when I talk to you.”

“People know where I was going last night,” Melissa saw no point in beating about the bush. “When I don’t turn up as planned they’ll call the police,” she tried to make her tone as serious as she was able, “then the police will follow the trail I left for them right to you.”

“Oh please,” Rubin actually laughed, “who do you think set up the trap you walked into just a matter of hours ago?” He shook his head. “I seem to recall that one of the conditions of the meeting was that you tell no one a thing about it. Now a smart person would have agreed and told someone anyway, but not a person who is as hell bent on their goal as you. I staked a lot on the fact that you have been like an animal on the scent for so long that the glimpse of your prey would simply be too much for you, that it would defeat your common sense and make you take a risk. And it seems that I was right, as here you are,” he gestured to her with his walking stick before holding a hand to his ear with a mocking expression, “and the sound of the erstwhile police bearing down upon me is oddly still absent.”

“Then what are you waiting for?”

“I don’t really follow,” Rubin laughed again.

“Just finish me off, at least that way I don’t have to listen to your voice anymore.”

“I suppose that’s what you’d expect of me?”

“It’s what you did to my Mother, after she worked on your damn cure.”

“Hmm,” Rubin shook his head, “that was a very long time ago. You should learn to let bygones be bygones or you’ll end up losing your whole life to that kind of thing. Take me for example; I’ve moved on from that whole thing to such a degree that I can’t even recall the number of scientists I had to have killed, let alone the names and the faces.”

“Shut up,” Melissa screamed in rage at his callous recounting of the event. “Shut the hell up!”

“You need to work on your temper as well,” he sighed. “Anyway, I’m tired of killing people as a first resort, it’s very final. I’ve been thinking that perhaps it’s time I tried to put people to better uses rather than just having them killed. I see so many people in the course of my day who it seems to me could be put to far better uses that they are, mainly because they have been left to their own devices. I think that it would be a very easy thing for me to find more appropriate things for them to be doing and in the long run they’d be happier as well.”

Rubin paused as if he wanted to let the brilliance of his patently insane statement sink in.

“But we all have to start somewhere,” he nodded at Melissa, “and you have the honour of being the first unhappy soul who I intend to put to better use.”

Melissa felt a black pit of dread open in the bottom of her bowels.

“I always wanted a pet as a child, but I could never have one because of the terrible allergies that they set off in me. A shame for me as I would have loved a cat, such graceful and lovely creatures and with such spirit as well.” Rubin paused for a moment and Melissa wondered if he was simply lost on an insane train of thought, dreaming of cats he might have owned over the years. “Now you,” he snapped back to reality, “you remind me of a cat in many ways. Agile, resourceful and possessed of ferocity that makes you formidable as well as intriguing. I think that you would make the perfect cat, just the pet I have been looking for.”

That was it, Melissa thought, the final proof that she was in the clutches of a madman.

“What the hell do you mean?” she shook her head. “I’m not a cat and I’m not about to be any kind of pet to a bastard like you.”

“Well of course you’re not,” Rubin seemed surprised that she was even making such a statement, “not yet anyway. But I have the means to change all that as well as give you a course in what would be expected of an obedient pet. No, I think you’ll make a very nice cat when all is said and done, and the obvious bonus for me is that no fur means no irritation for my allergies.”

Before Melissa could fully digest his words, Rubin smashed his stick into the side of her head and once more rendered her unconscious.

With that done he turned his head and amused himself for the rest of the journey by watching the course taken by raindrops as they slid down the window of the limousine.

To say that Melissa regained consciousness would not have been strictly true, from the point where she blacked out in the back of the limousine from the impact of Rubin’s walking stick; she was kept in a controlled state of sedation by various means. Through a rigidly controlled programme of drugs and hypnosis, her mind never managed to return to full clarity. And when she finally was allowed to regain consciousness for the first time, it would not have been possible to call her Melissa Rose any longer.

As soon as the limousine arrived at its destination, a tall and exceptionally modern building owned entirely by Rubin, it pulled into a subterranean parking garage and came to a gentle halt.

Rubin himself sat quietly and watched as Melissa’s inert form was pulled out of the car and dumped into a waiting wheelchair by a pair of silent orderlies. Once their charge was secure, they pushed her across the concrete floor and into a waiting lift.

As the doors slid closed, he smiled at the thought of the changes that would have taken place when he saw her next.

Inside the lift the orderlies chatted to one another in low voices, ignoring the pitiful state of the woman in the wheelchair. They were more than aware of the true nature of the man who employed them and in truth were indebted to him for keeping them hidden from the law themselves. Like the majority of those on Rubin’s payroll, they knew very well that the unspoken rule of working for the man was to do as they were told and ask no questions when an explanation was not given.

It was an arrangement that worked well for them. And at the end of the day, what did one beaten up woman matter to either of them? The chances were that they had done worse themselves and neither was about to experience a change of heart and become Melissa’s champion. The simple fear of their employer’s wrath was enough to keep them in line and doom her to her fate.

The doors of the lift opened and Melissa was wheeled out into a cramped lobby decorated in sterile white. Swinging double doors stood in three of the walls and a small reception desk was manned by a woman who looked suspiciously like a heavyweight boxer in drag and doing a bad impersonation of a nurse.

“This is the special patient,” one of the orderlies pointed at Melissa as he spoke to the woman behind the desk.

The woman glanced at Melissa as though she was a sack of rancid meat and pushed a clipboard across the desk without saying a word. Her lack of civility did not seem to bother either of the orderlies and the one who had spoken scrawled in the appropriate place and tossed the clipboard back onto the desk as though trying to outdo the show of rudeness that had gone before.

Not to be outdone, the nurse simply made an incomprehensible grunt and twitched her head in the general direction of the nearest doors.

The first orderly looked at the second and shook his head.

His colleague returned the gesture as they wheeled Melissa towards the doors.

The exchange between the two seemed to indicate that even amongst criminals and lowlifes, as far as manners went, there really was a limit.

It was a cruel twist of fate that the very rooms in which Melissa was being wheeled had once housed the very laboratories where her mother had laboured for Thomas Rubin. After the massacre of the scientists who had worked there, the space had been converted to serve the function of a small, but extremely capable medical unit.

When one was involved in organised crime and had to deal with the consequences of violence on a daily basis, it paid dividends to have access to such a facility and know that no questions would be asked. The resident medical staff was on call to perform everything from mundane operations such as treating bullet wounds or setting broken bones all the way up to replacing organs or carrying out emergency plastic surgery when needed.

But the task that had been set for them in the case of Melissa would be their greatest challenge to date. They were required not simply to operate on the woman, but use all of their collective skills to transform her into a pet for the amusement of their employer.

None of the medical staff were concerned on an ethical basis. Much like the other people in Rubin’s employ, they were guilty of crimes that meant they could not practice medicine in the outside world. Their only real concern was in failing to complete the task that had been set for them and as a result they had poured all their talents into a plan that would be presented to their employer for his approval.

Only when the last of the slides had been shown and the lights had come back on had they seen that Thomas Rubin was smiling, and only then had they let out a breath of relief and left to start work on their subject.

The constant sedation was thought to be the best thing for all parties concerned, there were some radical alterations that had to be made to Melissa’s body and none of the medical staff wanted to deal with the consequences of her laying eyes on them before the hypno-conditioning regime that would complete her transformation could begin.

So it was that she never saw the inside of the rooms in which she was kept in those days as anything other than a white blur.

The first stage of the process was the preparation of Melissa’s body, the alterations that would form the basis of her transformation into a human cat.

On the morning of her second day in captivity, Melissa was prepared for her operation by the staff that would assist the surgeons in the theatre.

She had been wheeled in on a gurney, still wearing the clothes in which she had been captured and the first task was to remove them.

This was no sensual striptease; the assistants simply produced rugged scissors and proceeded to cut her clothes away in the most efficient way possible. They sliced through the laces of her boots and pulled them from her feet, tossing them into a waiting bin beside the gurney. Her jacket was cut up the arms and her jeans slit from ankle to waist up each leg, the pieces yanked from under her body and discarded. The T-shirt that she wore beneath was removed in the same manner, which left only her bra and panties. These took the least time of all and after no more than a few short minutes, Melissa lay on the gurney, totally naked and exposed.

She was not left alone for long and soon the assistants returned with a tray holding a bowl of water, more delicate scissors and a pair of simple razors. These they used to shave Melissa’s groin, armpits and even eyebrows, making sure that every hair was removed with minute attention to detail. The scissors they used to chop away handfuls of the hair on her head, cutting it ever shorter until they were forced to resort to the razors once more in order to render her bald.

Their final task was to wash and disinfect her body, cleaning every inch of her skin so that she was ready for the operating table. This done they gave a signal to the waiting team of surgeons and wheeled Melissa over to them.

The first of the men to get his hands on Melissa had been a dental specialist before his fall from grace and it was his job to replace the teeth of an evolved ape with something more appropriate to a predatory feline. But as he had been given free rein in his area of expertise (mainly on the grounds that blame for any failure could then be laid squarely at his own door at a later date), he had decided that less was more and would only replace four of her teeth.

To this end he had crafted from a synthetic material four caps that would bond with Melissa’s own teeth, specifically her canines, and enlarge them by some half an inch. These new fangs would be impressive enough to the eye, but not sharp enough to tear the flesh of her lips and mouth.

A plastic frame was pushed into Melissa’s mouth to hold open her lips and expose her teeth and with this in place the dental expert set to work.

His first job was to grind down the existing canine teeth, and he did this using a brutal piece of technology that simply abraded the material of the tooth, wearing away the enamel and then the material beneath with an alarming speed.

As callous and removed from the process as they were his colleagues could not help but wince at the sound of the teeth being ground down as he worked. For his own part the sound did not concern him in the slightest as he was totally absorbed in his work.

Soon he was done with the torturous tool and deftly working the caps into place on top of the stumps that remained of Melissa’s own canines. The adhesive that he used would bond them to the natural material of the stumps so closely that one could not be separated from the other by any but the most drastic of methods.

There was no time to allow the dental implants even the shortest amount of time that it would have been sensible to let them settle in Melissa’s mouth. The medical team was working on a tight schedule on the instructions of Thomas Rubin himself and they would mark the end of one surgical procedure by immediately beginning the next.

Next was the turn of the optical specialist, with his tray of delicate objects in one hand and a device in the other that would pin open her eyes in a similar manner to that which had spread her lips for the dental work.

His tool of choice was a pair of complicated tweezers with filaments at the tips so thin that they were almost invisible to the naked eye and he paired this with a suturing iron just as delicate. Aided by goggles that magnified his eyes to an almost comical degree, he used the former to remove from a dish of nutrient jelly a perfectly formed lens in the form of a green feline iris. Once he had the thing in position over Melissa’s own hazel iris, he used the latter to burn the surface of her eye on a minute level, sealing it to the optical organ.

To call the thing a contact lens would have perhaps missed the point. It was better described as a layer of synthetically grown cells that would function in much the same way as the human iris beneath. While the lens was not capable of allowing the person to whom it was grafted to see in conditions similar to the extremes of an actual cat, it would mimic the way in which their vertical pupils moved in reaction to light, taking its cue from Melissa’s own human pupil beneath.

With the lens in place, the optical specialist dripped a solution onto the surface of Melissa’s eyes that would soothe the points where they had been attached and speed their recovery. Finally he sealed her eyes shut with wadded surgical padding and tape.

The dental and optical specialists now shuffled to the edge of the room as if repelled by the aura of the man who was preparing to begin work on Melissa’s inert form. Neither of the men could have been taken for an upstanding member of their profession, each having been driven into the open arms of Thomas Rubin as a result of individual acts of malpractice. But both were scandalised and more than a little fearful of the man whom they called, behind his back at least, the Sawbones.

None of them knew what background the Sawbones came from or where exactly his expertise could be said to lie, but he was a personal favourite of their employer and therefore the unspoken master of the work carried out by the clinic. The rumour ran that he had achieved his position in the affections of Rubin on account of the fact that he had not and would never question what the man wanted or refuse to carry out his whims in the operating theatre.

Physically the Sawbones was a short and rather nondescript man who rarely spoke apart from when required to communicate instructions to his colleagues in a quiet, but firm voice. Of course this subdued demeanour served only to add to the feeling that the man was somewhat sinister and not to be trusted in any way shape or form.

Despite the fact that none of his colleagues were sure of his qualifications, the Sawbones was trusted with carrying out procedures that involved deep delving into the human body as well as more external operations such as plastic and reconstructive surgery. His would be the task of moving beyond the more cosmetic changes that the others had made to Melissa’s body. It would be up to him to wield the knife and make the alterations that turned her into Rubin’s disturbing vision of a human cat.

Where his colleagues had begun to work on her face, the Sawbones instead moved to Melissa’s hands after he came to the operating table. While he was skilled in modern medical practices, the first action that he took harked back to the tasks given to surgeons in past ages when confronted with a diseased limb.

Armed with a lethally sharp and heavy blade that was mounted with a handle in the manner of a saw, he systematically removed each of the fingers on Melissa’s hands above the knuckles. The ease with which he sawed through skin, muscle and bone was frightening to watch and within a matter of mere minutes he was done.

Without a hint of emotion upon his face, he staunched the bleeding from the exposed stumps and closed the wounds with expertly placed stiches. Once the last of the fingers had been sewn up, the Sawbones turned his attention to her thumbs. But rather than remove these in the same manner as he had the fingers, he amputated the entire digit from the hand, leaving nothing at all behind once he had finished sewing up the resulting void.

This mangling of her hands was simply the first step in the plan to transform Melissa into a pet for Rubin’s amusement and although they looked horrendous to behold, there was no doubt that the changes he had made brought the shape of the appendages closer to those of a cat’s paws than those of a human being.

In the new role for which she was being prepared, what need would she have for opposable digits?

Rubin did not intend for his pet to be able to do such things as write her name, use a keyboard or even be able to easily open a door, because why on earth would a pet need to do such a thing?

The next part of Melissa’s body to which the Sawbones paid attention was her upper lip, which he marked with a specially designed pen from the bottom of her nose to the centre of her mouth. Moments later he retraced the line that ran down her philtrum with a wickedly sharp scalpel, cutting her upper lip into two halves. He quickly followed the first cut with two more at forty five degrees to the original, effectively removing the entirety of her upper lip and leaving her altered teeth and the gum from which they protruded grotesquely exposed. That done he proceeded to slice perhaps a quarter of an inch of flesh from the tip of her nose, adding to the nauseating wound in the middle of Melissa’s ravaged face.

Not pausing in his work, the Sawbones plucked a complicated prosthetic from a sterile container nearby and lowered it into the gruesome hole that he had made in Melissa’s face. For a man of his high level of skills and low level of morals, it was a matter of no great difficulty to marry up the blood vessels and nerve endings that would attach the thing to the flesh around it.

Though described as a prosthetic, the implant was in truth a simple affair of vat-grown synthetic flesh that contained rudimentary circulatory and nervous systems sufficient to allow Melissa some small degree of feeling once it was sewn onto her face. In appearance, despite the fact it was grey in pigment; the thing could clearly be seen to resemble the muzzle and nose of a cat.

With his work on her front completed, the Sawbones called for the theatre assistants to turn Melissa onto her back. They lifted her with all the care and delicacy they were capable of, laying her onto her stomach and ensuring that her newly altered facial features were supported in a cushioned frame at the end of the operating table that would keep them clear of the surface. When they had completed their task, her naked back was exposed to the bright lights of the theatre and the signs of the extreme surgery that had been carried out upon her body was almost totally hidden from sight.

The Sawbones once again used his pen to mark Melissa’s flesh, this time picking out a point at the base of her spine and just above her buttocks. Satisfied with the position of his marks, he wasted no time in cutting into the flesh and muscle below, pulling back layer after layer until he exposed the bones of her coccyx.

As he had done with other parts of her body, the Sawbones showed no delicacy or hesitation beyond that which was necessary to avoid harming his subject. He gripped the coccyx in one hand and used his sturdy scalpel to slice down through the nerve fibres between the bones, severing the redundant vertebrae from the base of her spine. Dropping the amputated tissue onto a tray held by one of the assistants, he signalled for another to bring him an object that was submerged in a low basin of sterile liquid nearby.

Once the object had been plucked from the liquid and handed to the Sawbones, it was clear to see that it was the same basic colour and texture as the feline muzzle that had been grafted onto Melissa’s face. But this new prosthetic was very different in shape, being no more than an inch in width and perhaps two feet in length. Tapering to a graceful point at one end and a bundle of delicate fibres from the other, this was clearly destined to be attached to her body at the base of the spine.

Every cat needed a tail, and Melissa’s new appendage was soon being grafted on to the exposed nerve endings that had only moments before been connected to her coccyx. Every individual fibre was painstakingly married with a synthetic fibre within the tail one after another in a process that lasted literally for hours. Once his work was done, the muscles stitched back in place and the skin pulled around the base of the tail, the Sawbones could be sure that Melissa would be able to move the thing as easily as any other part of her body.

Having done all they were able for the time being, the surgeons withdrew from the theatre and left the drastically altered form on the operating table to the assistants who fussed over her, checking and cleaning every inch of her body for fear of infection setting in or signs of the implants being rejected by her immune system. Once they were done, they covered Melissa with the flimsiest of gowns and moved her to a small room nearby where she was laid upon a bed and left to rest only in a physical sense.

Now that her physical transformation was underway, her mental metamorphosis would begin in earnest as well.

Almost as soon as Melissa was secure in her bed, a complicated apparatus that covered most of her cranium was placed over her head, linking her to a bank of computers and more baffling equipment that lined two of the walls in the room. The apparatus was designed to subtly bombard the ears with sound and the eyes with visual stimuli while at the same time extend monofilament wires through the skin, skull and on into the very matter of the brain.

Taken together all of these methods worked to not only convince the subject and influence their thinking with the most advanced methods of hypnosis and suggestion, but in addition the probes extending into the brain made radical changes to the structure within in order to reinforce the desired effects. Once these changes had been made to the internal landscape of the brain and its tissues, the actual way in which a person’s mind functioned could be altered to ensure that the content of the suggestions was an integral part of the architecture of the brain itself. In this manner a desired suggestion could be written into a human mind in such a way that it was as fundamental to the way the person thought and acted as genuine concepts that had been learnt as far back as infancy.

There was no coincidence that Rubin possessed access to such a technique and at the same time was able to command almost total obedience from those who worked for him. In the whole of his organisation there was not one individual who had not been subjected to this same treatment to a greater or lesser degree. But the true beauty of the procedure was of course the fact that the suggestions placed in the minds of those who worked for Rubin were always concluded with the suggestion that there had been no use of the technique at all.

In the past the process had been used to do anything from removing incriminating information from the memories of witnesses to totally altering the identity of people that needed to be made to disappear, but for one reason or another were too valuable to simply be killed. But the challenge presented by what was to be done to Melissa was something totally new and very much unique.

As the waves of conditioning swept over her partially conscious mind, there was no attempt to convince her that she has seen or failed to see a certain something, no subtle changes made to allow a new identity to come to the fore and no crude demands for information locked away in her memory.

Instead the probes attacked the structures and connections in Melissa’s mind that held together the very concept of herself as a human being. They tore down the memories and associations upon which her identity was based from the most basic definition of her humanity to the highest concepts of her intellect and opinions. Soon they had deconstructed the fundaments of her psyche to the extent that had she regained consciousness, there would have been nothing remaining inside her head to animate her body or give her life beyond that of a vegetable.

Once the destructive work had been done, the true nature of the suggestion was able to seep into Melissa’s blanked mind and begin to construct its own stronghold in the void created. New neural pathways formed and connections began to spread from one portion of her brain to another as the suggestion took a hold.

Where there had been the central conception of Melissa Rose, the human being, there was now the growing identity of a feline entity in its place. The world of intelligent human interaction and existence as a sentient being capable of self-determination was replaced with animal instincts, a mode of existence centred upon the physical and contentment that lasted from one moment to the next.

Melissa became a simpler creature with every moment that passed. She still retained the basic ability to recognise things for what they were and discerned their purpose, but the deeper meanings that were so fundamental to the human perception of the world simply fell away and were lost to her. From that point on to her a tree would simply be a tree, a flower a flower and a sunset nothing more than a changing of the light as the poetic beauty of such things disappeared from her thoughts forever.

Human beings were recast as another kind of creature entirely, they walked on two legs where she crawled on all fours, used hands to manipulate baffling objects for no discernible purpose in ways that were impossible for her paws and they lacked even a tail to express their feelings. These strange creatures were for the most part beneath her in terms of their importance and she would make a point of ignoring them until they realised their lowly position; if not then she would be forced to hurt them to make them understand.

But of course there was just one exception to the rule.

She had no concept of names, but she knew the human Thomas Rubin by way of a deeply-rooted sensation that cast him as her unquestioned master and the focus of all her primitive emotional attachments. Of course he did not own her in any sense of the word, but she was devoted to the very thought of him for a reason that she could not truly understand or comprehend any more than she could the fact that she was his pet.

If she knew one thing above all others, it was that she wanted to be near Rubin, needed to command his attention and would do anything to please him.

By the time the morning came, the woman who only days before had been devoted to bringing about the downfall of Thomas Rubin had been mentally transformed into an animal that was devoted simply to bringing him pleasure and happiness.

Melissa’s second day in the operating theatre would involve none of the invasive surgery that had characterised the first. She was already suitably warped in mind and body to have become the human pet that Rubin desired, and now all that remained was to complete the illusion and wrap his creation in a skin suitable for such a bizarre and unusual creature.

As this stage of the transformation was a matter of simple procedures, the surgeons were not present and the work would instead be carried out by the theatre assistants who were more than qualified for the task ahead.

The subject arrived still in a state of heavy sedation from which she would not be awakened until the process was complete and had been judged a success. She was wheeled in on a gurney, moved to the operating table and once in place stripped of the gown that had been covering her altered body.

Holding a hood made of shiny black latex in his hands; the first of the assistants lifted Melissa’s head from the table and pulled it over her shaved cranium. He took great care to align the hood perfectly, stretching the specially made material over the shape of her muzzle and smoothing it over the artificial portion of her face so that it fitted like a second skin. The hood concealed every detail of Melissa’s face save for her eyes, mouth and two small holes for her nostrils and of course sported a pair of feline ears mounted on top of her head.

Another assistant was at the same time absorbed in the task of fitting a pair of black latex gloves to her drastically altered hands. Like the appendages themselves, the gloves had no thumbs and shortened fingers, but the palms were also fitted with grey pads of rubber as well. The effect was to make the hands look even more like the paws of a feline and restrict her ability to manipulate anything in the least bit complicated.

Next was a pair of stockings, fitted to Melissa’s feet by yet another assistant. These had pads only on the balls of the feet, in order to encourage her to move on that portion of the foot and thus more closely imitate the pose of a cat.

Melissa’s groin was covered by a pair of latex shorts with a hole for her tail that clung to her so tightly that they were able to hide nothing from the eye. Indeed, that was the intention as the assistants made sure that the material reached between her buttocks and into the lips of her vagina. In the case of the former, there was provision for the call of nature and in the latter a robust sheath of rubber was pushed into the inside of her vaginal cavity. Rubin had been quite specific in his demand that his pet be fully functional, but also that precautions be taken to avoid accidents in that department.

The rest of Melissa’s body was covered by a bodysuit of latex that matched the material of the hood, gloves and boots. It covered her from neck to wrist and from wrist to ankle with a specially made extension that swallowed her tail, and at first seemed to be somewhat loose on her body. But that began to change as soon as the warmth of her skin activated the adhesive that lined both the inside of the bodysuit and the garments that she had been dressed in before it.

Designed to bond with her skin at a molecular level, the adhesive drew the latex closer and closer to Melissa’s body as it did so. To the casual observer the process could have been mistaken for air being drawn out of the suit as the contours and shape of her body became ever clearer beneath the black rubber. Soon every detail of her feet could be seen down to the individual toes, then the curve of her calves and the width of her thighs before the rounded mass of her buttocks and tail. The muscles of her stomach were picked out in shining black and then the shape of her breasts with the nipples defined in perfect detail. Her arms ending in rubber paws reflected the light of the operating theatre and the feline aspect of the hood was pulled impossibly tight across her skull as her face became a melding of human and animal rendered in latex.

There was no going back from this point, the nature of the adhesive meant that it could simply not be removed from Melissa’s body without causing horrific damage to the skin beneath. For all intents and purposes, this layer of black latex was the skin of the human cat that she had become and when she came around she would think it no more unnatural than any other element of her altered self.

Soon the final round of checks had been completed and the rubber cat woman was transferred back to the gurney and wheeled out of the theatre for the final time.

It would not have been accurate to call her Melissa from that point on as all semblance of the woman she had been was gone. She had been transformed in both body and mind and now existed as something that was not human in the strictest sense of the word.

She was better thought of as a pet and a toy, because that was in effect all she was capable of being.

That was all that Thomas Rubin wanted her to be.

Thomas Rubin was a happier man than he had been in as long as he could remember, he knew that his run of good luck and positive emotions would come to an end sooner or later, but he was enjoying it all the same. Things were going his way in the scams and rackets that he had a finger in and more than one of the latest crop of rivals and adversaries who were getting in his way had turned up with a bullet between their eyes at a fortuitous moment.

If he was honest, he could ascribe it to the meticulous planning and ruthless energy he had been pouring into his concerns for some time now. But there was always a more whimsical side to him that liked to think it was something to do with what he had come to regard as his good luck charm.

No matter what seemed to be on the agenda in a meeting, as longs as he had his new pet by his side things always somehow went his way and people came quickly around to his way of thinking.

It was true what they said about cats, they really did seem to lower his levels of stress. Though he had to admit, he was puzzled by the fact that his pet often had the opposite effect on people. Were there really so many grown men who were fearful of a simple feline?

Despite what others might think, he was delighted to be able to come back to his penthouse and know that there was someone waiting to greet him, always pleased to see him after the trials and tribulations of the day.

He closed the door of the private apartment behind him and called out in as warm a voice as he was able.

“Mabel,” Rubin had no idea where the name had come from, but it had stuck and now she answered to it as though she had been born to it. In a way, he supposed that she had as there was no trace of any other name in her head and he had quite forgotten the one she had before.

As the sound of a small bell could be heard approaching, he wondered if the name had come from there. He had been forced to put a collar and bell on her simply to be warned of her approaching. There were limits to the number of times in a week that a man wanted to be literally pounced on by a pet that weighed more than ninety pounds and moved like lightning, even if the results were seldom less than pleasant.

Mabel came into the hallway on all fours, she seemed uncomfortable standing on her hind legs unless he insisted and supported her while she did so. She moved faster and with more confidence than a human would have in her position thanks to practice and the conviction that she was simply supposed to move in that manner.

The light from the fittings made her latex skin shine and her movements seem even more fluid than normal as she made her way towards him. She made no effort to look up and make eye contact, but he knew her well enough to tell when she was trying to appear haughty and indifferent. No matter how hard she tried, the twisting and lashing of her tail always gave her true thoughts away.

She came to a halt before him and sat upright on her haunches, eyes chancing a glance upwards and revealing the realisation that he had seen through her attempt to seem disinterested. She let out a plaintive, feline moan and pawed at his thighs with both of her paw-like hands, her head rising to reach his groin and rub gently against it with her nose.

Rubin smiled as he bent down and scooped his pet up in his arms, enjoying the smooth feel of the latex and the sensation of her warm flesh beneath. He was far from tired and the sound of Mabel’s delighted purring became louder as he carried her into the bedroom and deposited her on the bed.

He stripped quickly, Mabel’s feline eyes watching him intently as he did so.

The way in which she reclined on the bed, showing off the length and shape of her body almost made him laugh at her foibles. She was a hopeless tease and even now seemed to think that he needed to be reminded of the fact that she was there and that she wanted him to make love to her, as though might wander off when she was no more than a few feet from him.

It had been a stroke of inspiration to equate the scent of him with catnip in her mind; in a way it meant that she truly did go crazy for him.

Mabel hated the fact that he wore those pointless things over his body, they were scratchy, they smelled of other females and they just got in the way. She had licked them once in an attempt to teach him to clean himself and she had not been able to get the taste out of her mouth for days afterwards.

But then there were so many things that she tried to teach him and he failed to learn.

Perhaps she was right in her sneaking suspicion that he was stupid after all?

What other explanation could there be when he was always wandering off in the way that he did? No matter how she tried to explain to him that someone would simply come along and provide food and water, he still disappeared for hours on end. Even worse he always came back empty-handed and she was worried that he was as a bad hunter as well as being stupid.

Sometimes she wondered why she bothered trying to educate him at all.

But when he climbed onto the bed and ran his hands down the length of her body, it came back to her.

She kept trying because he stroked her whenever she wanted to be stroked, because he gave her what she wanted when she wanted it.

She had to admit that he was quite good at that, if nothing else.

Like most female cats, Mabel spent a great deal of time in heat and she found that nothing soothed her better than the attentions of her bald and rather stupid companion.

She responded to his touch, sitting up on her haunches again and placing her paws on his shoulders. His long, deformed fingers may have looked terrible, but she found that they were able to do things to her body that her own paws simply could not. They found her breasts, massaging the nipples and then travelled down to her buttocks where they played with the base of her tail.

Mabel leaned into him, her feline muzzle opening to let out a low and almost silent groan as her rubber lips brushed his throat. She inched herself forwards and felt the shaft of his penis rub against the smooth skin of her belly, firm and very much erect.

She lifted her own groin and climbed bodily up and into his lap so that the smooth lips of her vagina brushed the head and then slowly lowered herself onto him. She allowed herself to be penetrated, feeling the sensation of every moment as she sank his penis into her own body.

He held her there for a moment and then laid her back onto the bed, turning her over with his member still inside her. He stepped his legs over hers and pushed forwards so that her rear was raised from the bed and her face buried in the covers and only then did he begin to move.

Mabel pawed and writhed in the bedclothes as she felt the weight of his body pressing down on her and the sensation of his penis spreading out and through her body. She felt alive from the tip of her nose, to the end of her paws and all the way to the tip of her tail as they moved together and she recalled that although he was almost bald and definitely stupid, he did have his uses.

Later, while he slept, Mabel played with his penis as if it were a mouse.

She batted it between her paws and watched intently as it flopped from one side to the other.

All the time she had to battle the urge to pounce on it and sink her teeth into the soft flesh.

She knew that one day she would probably lose the battle with herself and wondered what his reaction to that would be.

Who could tell; maybe he would finally learn something about hunting from the experience?

But in truth she was sure that he was simply too dull for that to be the case.

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