The video blurs; Magpie’s turned his body, showing us more of his surroundings.
“A cave?” says Roomie. “No—a mine?”
Or the inside of a stomach. Though I catch glimpses of wooden struts, the walls themselves are red and marbled through with a pale flesh color. I focus on the struts. It’s not biological. My imagination is running away from me.
The camera lowers as Magpie crouches, showing his white whiskers.
Roomie says something, but I don’t hear it. I’m lost in the memory of finding my first Magpie whisker. Before then, I didn’t know cats shed them. I’d held it up to my former roommate, asking if it was a wire. When I found it, it reminded me of the plastic that held on the price tags for clothing, hard, thin. But the shape wasn’t right.
“Oh, no, he just lost a whisker. No big deal. It’s kind of like shedding, I guess.”
Something so much a part of him, so vital to his functioning as a cat, yet he lost them, grew them back, without care or concern. Those whiskers would never fail him.
Roomie reaches back and grabs me, pointing to something white on the screen.
I startle back to reality and focus on where she’s pointing. Magpie is under something with curving golden legs. It must be a desk. I frown at a shape at the top of the frame, a pinkish colored blob. It extends out.
“W—is that—?”
Something blurs in front of Magpie, bouncing to rest near his nose. His tabby paw shoots forward, batting it. I startle as I recognize the lumpy whites as crumpled papers. They’re easily two inches deep.
After touching the paper, Magpie shies from it, looks up. Past the underside of the desk, I see thick fingers unfurling. Another paper drops from its palm.
“Is it…people?” I ask.
The speakers grate with a sound like a rhino hide rubbing against a cheese grater. The rhythm is familiar, though I can’t place it.
The arm disappears. The camera blurs again and then Magpie is following a pink person-creature-thing into another room. The feet—shaped much like human feet, but squashier, and with two big toes—folds and pushes off not far from the cat’s nose.
In the new room, the cat looks around. Figures are red silhouettes against a golden glowing wall. They are hanging upside down across from what looks like a large, ornate chair. A throne. The giant bends, lowering himself into it.
Blur. Magpie’s under the throne looking out from between the giant’s pink legs. He faces the figures. I can’t tell if they’re people or not—some of them have ears like a sheep, others, no ears at all—but I can tell that they’re moaning. You can hear them, though Magpie’s camera doesn’t show their mouths.
Something blurs through the air, bounces off the floor, then hits something beneath one of the figures.
Thooommm. It’s the same sound as the golden pill! Roomie makes a horrid, muted gulp as the back of my neck tightens up, giving me the ghost of a headache. I grab my head, but nothing happens to me.
I peek back up at the screen in time to see rows of capsules lined up beneath the tortured figures.
How many of those things are out there?
The figure above the ringing capsule writhes, beginning to scream, the sound like a kettle whistle. Even through pixelation, its suffering is clear.
“Oh man…” says Roomie. “Oh, man…” She squirms in her seat.
A spark. Another blur. One of the capsules has cracked open. Magpie turns away to sneak back to the door, but not before I catch the sight of something red spraying out of it, hitting and dissolving another writhing figure. A sound—like an old cassette tape slowed down, low and eerie—erupts from the speakers. It sounds like laughter, awful laughter.
Magpie freezes, turns to look. We see the face of the thing on the throne: swollen and pink, somewhere between a melted wax portrait and a pig.
Only…
Roomie swears.
The giant reaches into a bowl next to it. Something rat-sized—familiar—flails in its many-fingered hand, up until the pig-thing, with long teeth like a shark’s, bites its head off.
A muscle contraction sharps through the back of my mouth. Saliva shoots in uncomfortably. I swallow, holding back another wave of nausea, unrelated to the shaky camera.
I think of the thing on my patio earlier in the week. I wonder what Roomie did with it.
The giant tosses the rest of the carcass to the floor. It comes to rest in front of Magpie. In the same moment that I confirm yes, that’s what he brought us the other night.
Magpie dashes back beneath the throne.
“Oh-h-h!”
It’s the giant-thing’s voice. It’s changed, turned to giant-sized baby talk. He’s noticed the cat. He is calling my cat.
A pink knee appears on the ground before Magpie. Then a second. Then a hand grabs the underside of the throne, gripping it the way I do when I need to see under the bed. This is Magpie’s world.
Magpie looks left, looks right, the details of the giant-pig-demon-monster mercifully blurred.
The corner of the camera shows a clawed, double-thumbed hand reaching towards us—
Magnum is suddenly a storm of claws. I wince as his war scream tears out of the speakers.
Crimson lines race to the surface of the pig man’s hand. The many-teethèd thing grabs his arm. He looks at it a moment.
And then he laughs.
He rolls back, distended belly a hill in the air, and though the sound is like tearing leaves and the moan of a faulty automobile, it is unmistakably laughter. His eyes are lines of mirth, even as the hanging figures behind him flail in agonies.
Pain. Just entertainment to him.
The screen blurs to one side, and then the video ends.
I lean back in my chair. That was two hours of film. Where has my cat been for two days? I stare at the blank screen.
Suddenly, Roomie rips the cord out of her laptop and stands up. She is at the doorway before I can stop her.
“Where are you going?” Then the thought hits me with double horror. “The party!”
She can’t leave me here alone. What if that thing—
Her footsteps are already thudding down the stairs.
“It’s important,” she shouts. “But I’ll be back before the party. Don’t worry.”
“But—”
“I’m going!”
The door slams.
* * *
One of our neighbors professed to be a burger-grilling savant, so I let him take the cooking duties off my hands. I busied myself inside, digging out napkins nobody had asked for, half my head still upstairs beneath the skirt of my bed. Was the noise of the party scaring him even more?
The doorbell rang. I closed the napkin cupboard and hurried to the door.
It was the Bichetto family. The three sisters stood in the front. Sabrina gave me a tight smile as the middle one, Sofi, gave me one of her own, shy-but-charming. But Marianna, the littlest at eight, flung herself into me in a big hug. I wrapped my arms around her, giving her back a pat.
“Miss Katherynnn!”
She said it like I was her best friend, not some old neighbor lady who happened to have a cat. I smiled even harder, pushing thoughts of the video out of my head. This was reality. That was just…something awful on a screen.
Marianna nuzzled her cheek into my stomach, then looked up. “Where’s Magpie?”
My teeth clenched. The expected awful feeling dropped into my stomach, heavier than lead.
Don’t cry, don’t cry.
“Well, kiddo, I—”
A green-haired head pushed her way around the Bichetto father. Roomie!
She held a slick-looking blue plastic bag in one hand, clenched white-knuckle tight. But her voice was relaxed when she spoke. “Where’s Magpie?” she echoed. “Upstairs, recovering from a surprise vet visit.”
“Aw, poor kitty,” said Marianna, still hanging on t
o me.
“Is he okay?” asked Sabrina.
Roomie grabbed my gaze, just for a second, the smile deadening. Quickly, I pulled myself together and nodded.
“Yeah,” said Roomie, brightening back up. “He’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, sweetie,” I said to the little one. “But I don’t think you’ll be seeing him tonight.”
“Aww. Okay!” Marianna let go of me.
“You kids go eat something!” Roomie said to the whole family, waving them towards the patio.
“Mal, can I see your laces?” asked Sofi.
Roomie didn’t miss a beat. “Sure, just a sec, gotta put something away. Kath, can you…?”
I smiled and took the plastic bowl of homemade salsa from Sabrina, her family’s contribution. After a conversation with her parents that I still don’t remember, I went outside to put it on our paper-cactus-lined table.
By the time I set it down, Roomie stood next to me, changed into her blue Aloha shirt and green sneakers, taking a bowl of wobbly green ambrosia from the next-door neighbor, chatting away like nothing.
“Yeah, Magnum complained the whole trip, but he’ll be fine by tomorrow,” she said without so much as a glance at me. “He’s just pouting now.”
The neighbor laughed.
Seeing Roomie fake normalcy, I knew I could, too. I squared my shoulders and followed her lead for the rest of the night. Before I knew it, the last guest was leaving. It was after dark by the time Roomie and I finished cleaning up.
All in all, our first neighborhood barbeque went off splendidly.
* * *
Roomie and I are still living in the same house. Our personal economies mean we’re stuck here.
We still have neighbors over to pick through the box of Magpie’s treasures.
We still cook our burgers outside on the patio, and Magpie still lays on the warm concrete nearby, supervising the flipping of the burgers, the cleaning of the grill.
But his territory has contracted significantly. He limits his visits to houses in the cul-de-sac and our front and back yards.
And if she glimpses the juniper bushes rustling outside, Roomie’s hand goes to the butt of the gun she wears on her hip during our waking hours, the same one she bought the night Magpie came back.
Some may say that makes her a coward. Seeing what we’ve seen, I think it makes her smart. That’s why I’m getting my carry permit, too.
Because some nights, when the rest of the neighborhood has gone to bed, we hear the strange sounds in the distant desert, the ones that used to sound like the moan of a train or the hum of a racing motorcycle.
We hear them and all three of us look out at our yard, seeing past the cinder block walls, as though we can see into the barren land beyond, and wonder if someone—something—will someday come out of it, looking for us.
Special Thanks…
…to Pammy at the (very real) Way of Cats blog, for revealing the inner life of domestic cats to all her readers.
…Brooke D. for the constant support and thoroughness.
…Pixel J. Cat, even though he doesn’t use his indoor meow.
Also by Danielle Williams
WONDER Out Where the Sun Always Shines
HORROR The Bureaucrat
What the Cat Brought Back
HUMOR Magic Fashion Frenchies #1: Love Potion Commotion!
The Purrfect Christmas
FORTHCOMING A Gingersnap Cat Christmas
Steel City, Veiled Kingdom
Magic Fashion Frenchies #2: Salute a Pooch!
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About the Author
Danielle Williams believes her outrageous imagination can be attributed to a healthy childhood diet of computer games, Bruce Coville books, Twilight Zone reruns, and Martin H. Greenberg horror anthologies.
She graduated from Brigham Young University in the 2000’s and currently resides in the Wild West with her patient husband and threenager cat.
Hints of fantasy and science fiction always sneak into whatever she’s writing.
For more info about Danielle and her upcoming ebooks, visit PixelvaniaPublishing.com.
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