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I’m trying to track down a sci-fi short story about a lonely woman who hears a voice that flirts with her. It then tells her that it (he) loves her and that all she has to do is to die in order for them to be happy together.
It tells her to kill her cat, which she does, and then the voice says, it worked, the cat is here!
At the end there is a room with a dead cat and a dead woman who has hanged herself.
This sounds like it could be the short story "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe from 1843. If it is this one you seem to have either mixed up multiple stories or misremembered this.
This story is told from the first-person narrative and tells the tale of a man who becomes an alcoholic, maims then kills his cat. His house is burnt down and he finds a new cat that looks very similar to the old one except for a white patch on its chest. He comes to despise this new cat, who he takes home and eventually tries to kill it, and in doing so he ends up killing his wife. The story ends with the cat sitting on the corpse of his wife.
It tells her to kill her cat, which she does
One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;—hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;—hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence;—hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin—a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it—if such a thing were possible—even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.
"The Black Cat" - Edgar Allan Poe
At the end there is a room with a dead cat and a dead woman who has hanged her self.
Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and awe. In the next a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb.
"The Black Cat" - Edgar Allan Poe
Whilst there is no voice, per se, in the story, the narrator does write about his own thoughts and often ponders killing both of the cats, more so the second one, throughout much of the story, for example:
And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast—whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed—a brute beast to work out for me—for me, a man fashioned in the image of the High God—so much of insufferable woe! Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of rest any more! During the former the creature left me no moment alone, and in the latter I started hourly from dreams of unutterable fear to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight—an incarnate nightmare that I had no power to shake off—incumbent eternally upon my heart!
"The Black Cat" - Edgar Allan Poe
