Teisel’s Underground Adventure

Today the landlord came to check the water levels in the basement–so far, so good, no flooding like last year–and Teisel decided this was the time. He was going down in the basement. “The basement” is this creepy, half finished hole in the ground. You have to lift a giant slab of floor to go inside, and it looks like Pyramid Head should live in there, and I hadn’t been down there before today. But the cat went down there, I SAW him go down there, and he was still down there when the landlord left. So I climbed down into the creepy basement to get him and… no cat. I look around some more. No cat. I look around even more than that, but it’s basically a hole in the ground–not a dry, sandy hole, but not a Hobbit hole, either (in fact it was very dank and smelly)–so where could he have gone? But still NO CAT. And he wasn’t in the rest of the house.

Eventually we discovered that he’d gone into a dark, dark crawl space that was so dark, it was hard to tell if it was a hole or if it was solid wall. And I could hear him moving around above me. So, no magic disappearance in the scary basement, just a regular, annoying kind of disappearance. I called him and called him (trying to sound hurt and/or lonely), and then he made an appearance to check on me, decided I didn’t really need his attention, what with being okay and not having any food on me, and promptly disappeared again. This happened a couple of times throughout the afternoon.

I left him alone for a while, and when I went to check on him again, he’d come out of the basement and was on the stairs. I grabbed some wet food–they like this stuff that looks like chum and has fish chunks in it–and he got all excited about that and came running. While he was distracted in the kitchen, I closed up the portal to Hell–I mean, the basement door-slab–so he couldn’t get back in. I don’t think he knows *I* did it, I think he thinks the hole disappeared, because he didn’t seem pissed about it, just confused. (And believe me, he would have been mad if he’d known I did it. He gets mad about stuff.) Then he laid around on the floor all smug-like. He lays down like a tiger when he’s being smug, all flopped down with his front legs out, being very majestic. He does that when he’s up on his cat tree and thinks he’s better than me just because he’s up higher. Well, he was pretty smug about his underground adventure, until I grabbed him and threw him in the bathtub. I told him that’s the price you pay for having an adventure, because he was pretty filthy and smelly. So now he’s had a bath and has been de-smugged. /adventure