"The Eyes of the Panther" (1897)

Ambrose Bierce had a way of getting in the grill of things to come in the 20th century. Here he's paying his respects to the werewolf strain of 19th-century horror (strictly speaking, the werecat, or more specifically the werepanther), acquitting himself competently as usual with ingenious twists of perception and expectation. In 1930 Val Lewton wrote a story inspired by it, "The Bagheeta," and a decade later produced the movie Cat People, which feels much like this story. A man wants to marry a woman but she won't have him because she says she is insane and it wouldn't be fair to him. She explains herself with a story about the accidental death of her older sister, smothered by her mother who was in a panic because of a panther stalking them from an open window. Nobody, including we the readers, understand why this makes her insane, but that's the story. Later, in the formal twist (heads up, spoiler-phobes), the man is menaced by a panther, or the eyes of a panther, in his window. Exercising his Second Amendment rights, he riddles it with bullets to death. Actually, he only fires once. It turns out to be the woman. The way I read the story first, blissfully unaware and unthinking of the "were" implications, I took her as insane to think she was insane. Stuff like that happens. People think weird ways, especially in horror stories. Then I thought, OK, well maybe the insanity is some paranoid compulsion thing that has turned her into a kind of stalker. I did catch all the foreshadowing of feline attributes, notably the glowing eyes, but took it literally, as descriptive. And it can be read that way! This is the real connection with Cat People. We don't know in either case that these haunted women actually turn into panthers (the specific feline in the movie too). They might just think they do, prowling the night as insomniacs. A further twist has been articulated by the critic S.T. Joshi, arguing the man knows it's her when he fires his gun. He kills her for spurning him. Hey, that works too. And don't forget it also works as a mystical story of a werepanther (as does the movie). There's something deceptively slight about Bierce, but the more you read him the more you can feel him operating at these deeper multiple levels with a good deal of skill. He was willing to be heartless (some called him "Bitter Bierce") and he often worked within the disciplines of the twist ending, which tempt gimmickry. But don't be fooled by the horror gewgaws. There's usually a lot more going on in Bierce.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos