Hell Cat of the Holt

by Mark Cassell

  “Just this please,” I said and glanced at Harriet. This was the first time I’d spoken since falling into the river and as I spoke, I could still taste the bitter water.

  “Have you noticed any of the fungus?” Harriet asked me.

  Moments like this, I hated. I had to talk, what if I said something stupid? These kinds of thoughts came at me in waves. Sometimes I’d be the most confident person you’d meet, other times not. What if the shop assistant laughed at me? A cool sweat prickled my forehead.

  “No,” I whispered. It was the truth. Kind of. I thought of the burnt and black trees I’d seen earlier that morning.

  “It’s everywhere.” Her eyes were wide. “I bet there’s some of it outside, out the back of the shop, already creeping across the walls.”

  “It’s probably just a weed,” the young girl said.

  “It’s more than that. When you touch it, it gets everywhere.” She clutched her purse to her chest and gave me a crooked smile. “See …” She pointed at my boot, “… it’s everywhere.”

  Mud caked my boot. My shoes were soaked from falling into the river, and earlier I’d thrown them out onto the back step to dry out. The boots I now wore had hardly been worn and already they were streaked in mud – dark mud, almost black though. I didn’t say anything, my mouth drying up like I hoped my shoes soon would. I kept my eyes on my purse as I pulled out a pound coin.

  Harriet started talking again.

  My cheeks burned by the time I stepped out onto the street, and the woman’s voice faded behind me. I snatched up my collar and headed home. As I passed Murphy’s photo on the telegraph pole, I glanced at it while keeping my pace. Nearing my lane, the fog thickened as though eager to join twilight.

  The sound of an approaching vehicle from behind made me move closer to the bushes. Headlights speared the fog and pushed a haze of white into the sky. A roadside rescue truck passed and it made me think of the crashed van – if that was for the guy who’d wrecked his van, I wasn’t impressed with the response time. It made me think of how he’d been certain he saw the Black Cat.

  Big cats, small cats, whatever. All I wanted was to find Murphy.

  Harriet’s cottage was on the other side of Clive’s, with an immaculate garden that shamed ours. Sickening, in truth, even though this past winter had been cold and wet. She was right, the apparent black fungus covered her driveway. Also, peculiar dark vines encased a section of the wall.

  Whatever the stuff was, she just needed weed killer – I should probably add some to my next shopping list in case it spread into my garden.

  For a moment, I considered going for a longer walk than I had earlier that morning. Not really looking for Murphy – who was I kidding? Sure, I’d be looking for him – but I could do with clearing my head. However, I had to get on with some work, even though there really wasn’t much of the afternoon left. It looked like I’d be working through the evening.

  As suspected, the rescue truck pulled up alongside the crashed van where the man was climbing out. He looked like he’d been sleeping.

  A glance into Clive’s garden and I saw him crouched at his front door, placing two empty glass bottles on the doorstep. This I marvelled at. I remembered my grandparents used to have a milk delivery every morning, way back when I was a little girl. I didn’t realise it was still a thing.

  Clive watched me approach my gate and smiled.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hello, Anne.”

  I trundled up the path, key in hand … and I saw smudges of the black stuff over the lower door panel. Not much, but enough for me to pull a tissue from my pocket and wipe it off. It was kind of like charcoal. Not really a fungus at all. Although my knowledge of fungi was zero if you didn’t include those closed-cup mushrooms I cooked with.

  Inside, the first thing I did after removing my coat was pick up the cracked photo frame I’d knocked off the sideboard earlier. Reminding myself I should do some housekeeping, I straightened it along the line of dust where it once stood.

  Behind the sideboard and in the thin shadows down near the skirting, something seemed to be wedged. It looked like card or a piece of paper.

  I rolled up a sleeve and reached down behind the unit. Although awkward, I managed to pinch an edge. It hissed against the wall as I brought whatever it was into the grey light from the window.

  A perforated sheet of notepad paper.

  It was aged yellow and gritty with dust. I didn’t recognise the rushed, uppercase handwriting, so I assumed neither Gran nor Grandad had written it. Without taking my eyes off the two scrawled words, I stabbed the light switch beside me.

  BLOOD

  BREATH

  The sound of shattering glass, cracking and smashing, stole me from a deep sleep. I squinted into the blue light of my bedroom. When you wake from a sudden sound, your first thought is whether it was real. You’re unable to comprehend what it was, where it came from and whether you heard it in the first place. That was me right at that moment. Had I heard it or had it been in a dream?

  I lifted my head from the pillow, listening hard. I held my breath.

  A scream made my stomach twist. Inhuman.

  It was feline.

  Murphy?

  I leapt up, kicked away the duvet and scrambled for the curtains. I wrenched them aside and pressed my forehead to the cold glass. The contact froze my skin, and if I wasn’t already fully awake, I was now.

  On the street below, in a haze of fog, two shapes hurtled across the road, one after the other. Two cats. Neither one was Murphy. Both looked like tabbies. The pair began mewling, a painful sound that sent a shiver up my neck and into my scalp.

  Outside Clive’s house, halfway down the path, shards of milk bottle glass reflected the moonlight. His porch door hung wide, gently swinging. I stretched my neck to see if he was out there, but he wasn’t from what I could tell. When I looked back at the cats, they were no longer there. All that remained was a faint white mist that rolled across the garden.

  Several seconds passed as I waited for movement. Where was he?

  Still nothing.

  Why was his door open?

  Perhaps he was in trouble.

  I snatched up my clothes, caring little for fashion. I even grabbed a hat and wedged that over my messy locks. In no time at all, I had my boots on and ran out into the street. The cold stole away my echoing footsteps as I came out onto the quiet road. Dirt and twigs covered the tarmac. No sign of the cats.

  I circled the fence and trees that separated our gardens, and came to Clive’s front gate. The iron was cold to the touch and it squeaked as I pushed it. I avoided most of the broken glass, their lethal curves reflecting a tiny moon. Some of the smaller pieces crunched as I headed for his porch. Both doors hung wide, offering only a dark gloom from within. I hoped he was okay.

  “Clive?” I called into the darkness. My voice sounded strange on the night air.

  The silence remained.

  I prodded the doorbell button and it buzzed through the house. No one answered. Nor could I hear footsteps.

  But the doors were open. Why? I didn’t know if I should go in. What if he was unable to come to the door? Perhaps he’d hurt himself. Or worse.

  Without a choice, I entered the porch. Palm flat, I nudged the inside door. It creaked and swung inward to thump against something. I stepped over the threshold and past a pair of Wellington boots. One had toppled over, the sole caked in mud. Clumps of it peppered the lounge carpet. A stale smell washed over me as I made my way further into his home, reinforced by the heating that I suspected was cranked up. Making my way through his house without invitation made me feel like an intruder. The moon’s silvery-blue rays crept through the open curtains to blend with several lamps that offered pockets of yellow light.

  There was Clive.

  Although seated in an armchair beside a dim lampshade, the shadows seemed to fold in around him. For the first time I saw him without that mustard-yellow jumper of his. Instead, he wore a
dressing gown. Grey, curly hair sprouted from his thin chest in sporadic tufts over a photo frame he clutched in arthritic knuckles. He was still, his head slightly slumped. My heart lurched; my immediate thought was that he was dead.

  Slowly, I approached …

  He looked up. “Anne?” His voice was barely audible. Thank God, he wasn’t dead.

  With his mouth down-turned, his eyes were tiny; he looked like the old man he truly was. His hair stuck up in all directions.

  “Clive,” I said, “everything okay?”

  He hugged the photo closer to his chest.

  I navigated around a tumbled pile of books and got closer.

  “Clive?” I lowered myself onto the sofa beside him and the stink of body odour wafted over me.

  Despite the heat, his bottom jaw quivered as though he was cold. I had no idea whose photo it was he held.

  “She died last year,” he told me. “She was everything to me.”

  I assumed he spoke of his wife, Janice. She sadly died just before I moved back to Mabley Holt. A lovely lady who always offered a smile when I saw her. Gran and Grandad used to spend a lot of time with their neighbours. Although with Harriet, not so much.

  “Oh, Clive, I’m so sorry.” What to say to that kind of thing? I’d always been useless in these situations, never knowing the best way to reply.

  He lowered the photo.

  The wooden frame was chipped and dusty along the top, the photo itself faded and crinkled, possibly sun-bleached. Although it was in black and white, a radiant sunshine was evident in their squinting grins. It featured a much younger Clive and his wife standing before a railing, with the sea stretched out behind them. He wore sharp trousers and highly-buffed shoes, and she wore a dress and held a small handbag.

  “Janice,” he said and lifted his sad eyes to look at me.

  “She was always kind to me, when I was a kid.”

  “She was kind.”

  A sharp crack sounded across the room, near the bay window.

  I started, sitting upright. “What was that?”

  “No idea.” He placed the photo on the sofa. His knees clicked as he pushed himself up and stooped. It made him appear much smaller than he actually was.

  I stood and edged round the sofa, treading carefully past several cans of cheap lager. There was a torn TV mag screwed up underneath a dinner plate. A fly took off from mouldy bread crusts and buzzed past my head.

  Again, that crack. I jumped and the back of my leg hit the side unit.

  In the bay window, dark patterns that looked like fungus had crawled across the glass. Even as I watched, it splayed and reached into the wooden corners. The glass cracked like a web. More fungus grew.

  “Clive …”

  “I see it.”

  “What the hell is it?” I thought of the way I’d seen it around the village. “Why’s this stuff everywhere?”

  When I turned back to him, something shimmered behind him in the doorway: a fleeting shift of grey and white, something in the shadows. It was like someone walked past in the hallway that led to the kitchen.

  Clive straightened up. “She’s there, isn’t she?”

  The more I looked, the less I saw. Just the hallway and the faint beams of moonlight pressing through the blinds to spotlight the kitchen sink.

  “I don’t—” My tongue stuck to my teeth.

  Again, glass cracked behind me.

  I spun round.

  In the lower section of the bay window, that black stuff sprouted even thicker and crumbled onto the window sill. For the briefest of moments in the gloom, I saw an image in the broken glass.

  A face. One I recognised.

  An older face than in the photograph Clive had held a moment ago: Janice.

  Her image was somehow etched in the window, smeared in the fungus. Yet the more I looked, the more it morphed into the jagged cracks and black filth it really was.

  Wasn’t it?

  Had I actually seen his wife’s face?

  I was just tired.

  The next morning, I woke early from a broken sleep of blanket wrestling. The slightest of sounds, whether imaginary or not, kept yanking me from sleep. And every time I’d jerk awake, I saw again how Janice’s image shifted in the broken glass and fungus.

  It was of course ludicrous. No way had I seen an apparition of Clive’s dead wife. It was all down to tiredness, stress. Let’s face it I’d been piling a lot on my shoulders: losing my family and allowing work to stack up, and more recently having car problems, and now Murphy going missing.

  Now I was seeing the impossible.

  I needed more than sleep, I needed a holiday.

  Although I doubted it, I hoped Clive had a better sleep than I did. If not, perhaps he was having a long lay-in. Yet I could not shove aside thoughts of him still on the sofa clutching the photo frame. I’d left him there after he insisted I should leave. He’d not said anything more about seeing a ghost.

  Ghosts. Damn it. Totally ridiculous.

  The remainder of the morning went by with my head in my work, and somehow, I got through enough to be pleased with. This time of year was always busy; it wasn’t long until my clients’ tax returns had to be completed. I was good at numbers, but they still did my head in. Incredibly, I even managed to eat some lunch. Mid-afternoon took me to the point where I became cross-eyed. However, I was more than happy with how much work I’d completed.

  Time to focus on something else, which of course led me outside to search for Murphy. Patches of fog and a gradually darkening sky proved how far away spring really was.

  As I passed Clive’s house, I saw he hadn’t cleared his path of broken bottles. Nor had he cleaned up the fungus, or indeed done anything about the cracked bay window. For a moment I considered knocking to see if he was okay.

  I didn’t.

  Further along the lane and I paused in front of Harriet’s immaculate garden. Evidently, she’d prepared it for the daffodils that would soon erupt from her pristine borders that ran either side of those gleaming paving slabs. The fungus was no longer there, and I assumed she’d spent the day gardening. Beside her front door, the frayed rope dangling from an iron bell swayed. It looked like she’d even painted the bell.

  My foot sank into the ground when I turned to walk off. I’d not stepped in mud; it was that muck. Black clumps dotted the tarmac in the direction of the bridleway across the road. The way it was spaced out, it looked like footprints.

  Or, more to the point, paw prints. Just dark, black dirt. It was coincidence that it looked like paw prints, right?

  But … they were as large as my fist.

  Thinking of how it had spread in Harriet’s front garden and across her drive, I wondered if there was any in my garden now.

  From behind the houses, something banged. Followed by a series of crashes and clatters that echoed into the quiet countryside. It sounded like garden furniture collapsing, and scuffing concrete. But from whose garden? I couldn’t quite tell.

  I ran to my gate and up the path, cutting across the driveway. Whatever the commotion, it was escalating. Definitely in Clive’s garden. I bounded past the wheelie bin and rushed through the shiplapped gate, thumbing the latch in one move without losing a step. In my garden, I slammed against the fence and tiptoed, hooking fingers over the wood.

  “Clive?”

  He stood in the middle of his patio staring into the bushes that led out to the fields beyond our gardens.

  Cats.

  I saw the curling tails of a couple vanishing through the bushes and up over the back fence. The sounds of clambering and scratching claws on wood faded. Beyond the garden, rushing into the fields, were perhaps a dozen of them. A white one, a ginger. Grey. Black and whites. All hurtling across the muddy field. There was a black one – Murphy! – but it was too small, the tail too slender.

  “Murphy?” I yelled. My heart raced with them.

  No Murphy.

  Clive still hadn’t looked at me, and we both watched them va
nish into the tree line that separated the churned field and the river. A haze of fog teased the ground, drifting through the grass.

  “He wasn’t with them,” Clive said without turning.

  His garden was a mess of cracked plant pots and scattered furniture. A chair lay in the flower bed.

  “I didn’t see him.” His hair was as unkempt as it had been the previous night. Unsurprisingly, dark loops of wrinkled skin hung beneath his eyes. “I always look out for him.”

  “But …” I said.

  “Where did they all come from?” he said for me.

  “Yeah, where—”

  “I’ve no idea.” He looked at me. “They were all suddenly in my garden.”

  “Why?” And why wasn’t Murphy with them?

  “Like they appeared from nowhere,” he added.

  “Whose are they?”

  He shook his head, and looked back across the field. I couldn’t be certain but maybe I saw a final tail vanish into the foliage.

  We stood there in silence for a minute or two, perhaps it was only seconds, but evidently we had the same questions and confusion going around in our heads. I thought of how he’d acted the night before. His face was unreadable, his brow wrinkled more than usual.

  Finally, I said, “How you feeling this morning?”

  “She speaks to me.” His expression didn’t change.

  For the briefest of moments, I wondered who he spoke of. Of course … it was Janice. I’d seen the apparition of his dead wife in the window, hadn’t I? Even though I had no explanation for it. Could I have hallucinated?

  He shook his head as though reading my thoughts. “You saw her. I know you did.”

  A coldness spread down my spine.

  “Janice,” he said.

  “I have to go,” I told him. I’m not the tallest of people and tiptoeing to see over the fence was starting to kill my ankles. Plus, I had to get away from him. I didn’t want to face this madness. His madness. “I have a lot to do, and seeing ghosts is not helping.” I felt my cheeks and ears warm.