Hell Cat of the Holt

by Mark Cassell

  From my left, in the front garden adjacent to his, I heard footsteps. For a moment, I thought of the Black Cat.

  “Anne?”

  I stumbled on the loose paving as I turned. Leo’s face appeared between overgrown bushes and a broken wooden trellis.

  “What are you doing over there?” I demanded, not meaning to shout at him.

  His smile wasn’t reassuring. “Come round, I have someone you need to meet.”

  “Who?” I stupidly asked, thinking only of the photograph and the madness I’d witnessed in the field. “Why?”

  He stepped away from the bushes where I assumed he returned to his neighbour’s front door. I went back out onto the road, and he watched me skirt the bushes and head up the path towards him. It was more unkempt than his front garden. I stepped over a trailing vine that had pushed out from the undergrowth. Its slick skin sported a row of vicious-looking barbs.

  “You okay?” he asked when I stood beside him.

  I shook my head. My mouth opened but the words froze on my lips.

  “Anne?”

  “The …” I said without knowing where to begin. “I saw the fog and shadows take Harriet in some kind of miniature hurricane. It snapped her up and she vanished. And I found the roadside rescue truck. The men weren’t in there. And …” I swallowed, realising I was babbling. “And now I’ve found a photo that shows my Grandparents with Clive and Janice around a rock.”

  Leo nodded. “This is getting worse.” He had his woolly hat bunched high on his head as he rubbed his forehead. He looked about as worn down as I felt.

  I tried to say more but couldn’t.

  “I have a massive headache,” he said. He pulled the hat down and did a bad job of straightening it.

  We both turned to face the front door. He rapped knuckles on the wood as he slid a key into the lock. “Pippa,” he called and twisted the key, “I’m here with a friend.”

  It was strange that he should let himself in with a key, which made me think perhaps the two were seeing each other. We stepped into the house. None of the lounge lights were on, although from a back room a faint yellow glow reached out at us.

  Entering this house, owned by a woman who’d painted both me scrambling from the river and a stained rug from a childhood accident, was peculiar for too many reasons. I could not believe I was even entertaining the idea, but I guessed she was some kind of medium or clairvoyant. I didn’t know the difference or if they were indeed the same because up until that moment, I’d never even considered the possibility of any of it.

  The smell of paint didn’t come as a surprise, yet underneath that was a whiff of dog. Not unpleasant though, just that animal musk. As we neared the back room, a golden retriever ambled towards us.

  Leo crouched and vigorously rubbed the dog’s head.

  “Georgie,” he said, “how the devil are you?”

  I looked beyond them and into a room that seemed to be covered wall to wall with canvasses.

  “Pippa,” Leo said and stood up, “this is Anne.”

  In the corner of the room with her back to us, a woman sat before a large easel. Several smaller ones arced around the room behind this and obscured the window and a surrounding wall that looked like it had recently been repaired.

  “Hello, Anne.” Her voice was small. Her dark hair was pulled back in a messy pony tail. She swiftly pulled up her hood, and still faced away from us.

  “Hi,” I answered, feeling incredibly tiny among all the amazing artwork. Most were acrylic paintings, with several pencil sketches strewn about the floor and pinned between larger pieces. Many paintings were typically colourful landscapes, similar to those that surrounded Mabley Holt. I recognised the local church and its steeple. In contrast, there were several where it looked like people had been crucified and even burned at the stake. Grim. Her talent was such that her brush strokes depicted motion; the rushing water beneath a bridge, the swaying body hanged from a branch, the roar of flames.

  All gruesome stuff.

  “We’re trying to find the centre of all this weird shit,” Leo explained.

  I wanted to demand why this woman had painted things she couldn’t possibly know, but instead I muttered, “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  “It’s a pleas—” Pippa began, but then she jerked upright. Grabbed one of her brushes and leaned in towards the easel to continue painting.

  “She often does that,” Leo said to me.

  I watched the young woman make frantic sweeps with the brush. Browns and green slapped across the canvas. Flecks of paint peppered the floor and her clothes. She dabbed her brush in a chipped mug that brimmed with black paint, and began dotting the landscape with it, darkening particular areas. I wondered if all artists used mugs for painting. My eyes kept drifting back towards the woman burning at the stake. That pained look on her face. A witch, I had no doubt.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Half-hidden behind a cloth streaked with rainbow colours, one canvas revealed an impressive black cat, its flank glistening beneath moonlight. The eyes burned red above a stitched mouth. One side of its head was bald, scarred.

  “The Black Cat of the Holt,” I said. Grandad had seen it and so had I.

  Pippa’s frantic brushstrokes created an outline of a truck. With all that I’d so far witnessed, I was not surprised.

  “I’ve just found that,” I whispered to Leo, “just up the road.”

  In addition to what I’d already discovered, Pippa added the next piece to the mystery. We watched in silence as the story unfolded. For a full ten minutes, maybe longer, I dared not budge.

  She used whites and greys to paint the shimmering form of a spirit half in, half out of the cab. Folds of shadow traced its limbs. The bulk of the roadside rescue driver hid the spirit’s head as it dragged the unconscious man from the cab.

  Pippa went about putting the finishing touches to the painting, where it explained the disappearance of the other man, the man with whom I’d briefly spoken. A vortex of darkness churned in the bottom corner of the canvas. Again, such was Pippa’s talent of depicted motion, I saw how the shadows – this was the Shadow Fabric – rippled and churned, warping reality.

  All that remained of the van driver was his screaming face.

  I assumed the roadside rescue man had followed soon after, luckily unconscious.

  During the time I watched this story unfold, I’d undone my coat. My scalp itched and I felt as though a headache was fast approaching; the paint fumes, stress, terror; the combination of all this shit.

  I needed some fresh air.

  Finally, Pippa dropped her brush to the floorboards and it bounced in a black splash. She reached to the side and picked up a pair of dark glasses I’d not noticed. Standing, she put them on and adjusted her hoodie.

  She turned.

  The only part of her face I could see was her nose. The sunglasses hid her eyes, a scarf hid her mouth and cheeks, and the hoodie covered the rest of her head. Perhaps she was scarred. Like the Cat.

  “The men have been taken through the Fabric,” she said. This time her voice was stronger, clearer. Muffled though, behind the scarf. “For the Construct.”

  I was about to ask what she meant, when Leo interrupted.

  “A demon is building a construct?”

  “Yes,” Pippa answered him.

  “It’s using the flesh of those men,” Leo explained, seeing my expression, “to build a vessel to walk the earth again.”

  “Th—” My tongue failed me. I swallowed. “Those poor men.” I looked at another painting. This one was of what looked like a witch burning on a pyre while the villagers looked on. “I’m not exactly sure how much more I can handle.”

  “I understand,” Pippa said, “I was once innocent to all this chaos, then I seemed to get sucked in. Those Black Cat sightings have been going on for years, centuries in fact, but you already know that. It’s all part of the picture.”

  “What is going on?” I asked. “I don’t
understand any of this. How have you painted things you couldn’t possibly know?”

  She stepped forward and I flinched … She came up short, standing before me in the centre of the room. At her feet, Georgie nestled against her leg.

  “Your neighbour,” she said. “He’s in danger.”

  Looking at this woman, the way her paint-smeared cardigan hung from frail shoulders, I guessed she was in her forties. Even though I couldn’t see her eyes, the skin of her nose looked young. I wondered if she was closer to thirty years old.

  Leo looked from me to the woman. “No time for a cup of tea then, Pip?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  I scanned the paintings once again. As I opened my mouth to ask about the one she’d painted of me falling into the river, she grabbed hold of both our arms. Her fingers dug in.

  “You must go,” she said, her voice low. “Now!”

  I stood behind Leo as he entered Clive’s porch to hammer on the inside door. After leaving Pippa’s studio, we had rushed to my neighbour’s house, the artist’s urgent words chasing us through the night. Leo knocked again, and rang the doorbell.

  I didn’t expect an answer. There were no footsteps from inside, nothing. As I listened to the silence, I wondered about Harriet and how I’d seen a shadowy whirlwind steal her away.

  Not giving my elderly neighbour enough time to even get to the door, Leo tried the handle. It turned, and he glanced at me. I shrugged, unsurprised that it was open. I had, after all, done the same the previous night … which seemed such a long time ago.

  We entered Clive’s house.

  The first thing that hit me was the smell of the sea with an underlying stink of something like overcooked vegetables. It reminded me of a visit to one of Gran’s friends when I was younger, who lived in a warden-controlled block of flats. I remembered how the long walk down the hallway always reeked of a multitude of dinners.

  Several lampshades forced back shadows. Again, I thought of the way the shadows had taken Harriet. I hoped the shadows here were harmless. Similar to the previous night when I’d entered alone, moonlight leaked around the curtains. I expected to see him in his chair, but it was empty.

  “Clive?” Leo called, his voice startling me. My thoughts had begun to drift towards the possibility of seeing Janice’s ghost again.

  “Clive,” Leo called again, “are you in here?”

  Floorboards creaked beneath each footfall as we made our way through the lounge. Nothing had changed much since I was last in his home.

  From upstairs, something thumped. Loud.

  Leo and I froze.

  The light fitting swayed. Another two thumps echoed down to us, but not as loud as the first. With Leo in the lead, we charged for the stairs, and in seconds we were on the landing. That heavy stink was even stronger.

  “Clive?” I shouted and slapped the light switch. The brightness made me squint.

  Something moved in the room at the far end of the hall.

  Leo had his head round the nearest doorframe as I barged past him, heading for the end of the landing. I shoved the door wide. About to call Clive’s name again, I halted on the threshold. Gloom filled what once had perhaps served as a guest room. A white haze of fog pushed against the window beside a single bed, barely illuminating anything. An unremarkable chest of drawers sat beside it. In the other corner was—

  I inhaled the foul, cold air.

  At first, I could not make out what I looked at. I did not want to turn on the light; the light from behind me was enough to allow me to see.

  Bloody handprints covered the walls and the rumpled bedspread. But it was not that which turned my stomach.

  “Jesus Christ.” Bile rose in my throat.

  Splayed over two walls and part of the ceiling, framed by peeled and blackened wallpaper, a sheet of tangled limbs quivered. Shredded clothes, darkened by what I assumed was blood, seemed stitched with glistening skin that was impossibly stretched in places between patches of hair. The greasy stitches that wove through the chunks of flesh looked like those that held the Black Cat’s lips closed.

  A chill crawled up my spine as I spotted several hairy nipples, again too far from one another. Jagged splinters of ribcage and other bones stuck at odd angles from the skin, their ends dripping that familiar black filth.

  I felt Leo’s breath on my neck as he peered over my shoulder. Although his mouth was close to my ear, his voice sounded miles away as he said, “What the fuck?”

  More to myself than to him, I said: “Where are their heads?” Again, bile rose in my throat. Somehow, I managed to swallow it down, the bitterness snatching me from my daze. In the space of twenty-four hours – had it been that long? – I had seen the Black Cat for myself, a ghost, and now this Frankenstein horror.

  The woven skin and bone, of jean material and T-shirt and shirts, was like a patchwork quilt. But it was the stitches, they … they somehow twitched as though with a life of their own. I remembered how Leo had mentioned the darkness was sentient, a veil between worlds, he’d said. Those stitches were indeed a part of the Shadow Fabric. If I’d ever needed proof, then here it was.

  On the floor below this nightmare, a heap of crimson muck had soaked into the carpet. What I assumed had been the thumps we’d heard were fleshy sacks of muscle and offal that quivered amid barbed vines – similar to the one I’d stepped over in Pippa’s garden. The vines snaked and twitched, flexing upwards as though trying to reach for the appendages above.

  “Leo …” I whispered.

  He squeezed past me, into the room. I had no desire to get any closer and so stepped back. Even so, I glimpsed a tattoo on what I guessed had once been a man’s arm.

  “It’s the van driver.” I recognised it from when the man had waved towards where he’d spotted the Black Cat.

  Faint wisps of what looked like tendrils of smoke coiled around the stitched parts, weaving in and out of the flesh. Yellow pus oozed, trickling down the swollen lumps.

  I clamped my mouth so tight my jaw ached.

  “This is not good,” Leo mumbled.

  “You’re not kidding!” I wanted to hit him for his understatement. A familiar feeling of tightening lungs took hold, but I refused to give in to any hysteria.

  Some of the stitches twitched and curled like beckoning fingers, trying to reconnect to the ragged flesh above. Absurdly they reminded me of a baby’s tiny hand reaching for its mother, desperate to clamp those little digits around a finger.

  Leo took a step forward.

  “What are you doing?” For the first time since meeting this man, I wondered if I could even trust him. Perhaps he was behind it all.

  I backed up, watching as he advanced on the thing. Now out in the hallway, I got ready to turn and run. But out of the corner of my eye, something moved. Something in between me and the top of the stairs. The shadows parted.

  There stood Janice.

  My dead neighbour’s incorporeal form shimmered, little more than a smudge against a backdrop of the landing, the bannister and balustrades.

  Every inch of my skin cooled and I felt my jaw slacken. I turned on legs that threatened to trip me, and I grabbed at the door frame, almost missing it. My hand slid in fungus. Repulsed, I lurched away to find myself beside Leo in the centre of the room.

  Out in the hall, the image of Janice slid in and out of focus, faint spirals of fog and shadow blended with her hazy form.

  Leo yelled.

  I turned.

  Black tendrils of solid shadow had looped around his wrist, blistering the skin. His sleeve had ridden high up his forearm as he wrestled with it. The stink of burning flesh filled the room. He had a tattoo of that familiar symbol I’d seen on both the rocks and the Necromeleons book. Quick thoughts fired through my brain as I lunged to help: although the symbol looked more like a scar, it could’ve even been from an old burn. For the first time, I saw the shape comparable to an hourglass.

  “Anne!” Leo shouted through his agony. “Get out!”
>
  Behind him, the room darkened.

  A blend of fog and shadow leaked from the seething mass of glistening flesh and bone. Was this the Fabric? Whatever it was, it had taken over the room, obscuring the bedroom furniture. As that darkness wrapped around more of his body and arm, he managed to snatch something from his boot. A knife?

  In a tornado of darkness, he was gone.

  “Leo!” I yelled.

  I grabbed at the door frame again, only this time held on tight, caring little for the sticky shit that oozed between my fingers. One second he’d been there and the next, he wasn’t; he’d vanished into the draping void behind him.

  In the corner, the stitched monstrosity of those two headless bodies writhed in a torrent of black waves. Between that Frankenstein monster and me, glinting in the strange light of the room, was Leo’s knife. More an ornamental knife, like a sacrificial dagger that belonged in those Hammer Horror movies Grandad loved.

  A darkness spread up the wall, seeming to ooze from the plaster itself. It splayed outwards behind the abomination like creeping damp spores, further darkening the room. With one last thrash of wobbling, pus-slick limbs, its entire fleshy body slid backwards to sink into the dark mass.

  It was as though the wall wasn’t even there.

  In a cacophony of slurps and crackles and squelches, the stitched lump of fat flesh that had once been two men, disappeared into the void. And like filthy water sucked down a plughole, the darkness shrank, closing in, giving way once again to the wall. Black smears remained. And bloody handprints.

  The knife remained on the floor among heaped red and black muck. Faint coils of fog teased the blade.

  The knife. It was Leo’s, but I suspected I needed it. I needed a weapon, certainly. I needed something; I felt so naked. With my boot, I nudged it free from the muck, then grabbed it. I turned and stumbled from the room.

  I’d forgotten about the ghost of Janice.

  Janice stood before me, blocking my retreat. She wore the dress I’d seen in Clive’s photo, only her form was transparent. Like your everyday ghost, I saw straight through her: the balustrade behind, the outlines of the bedroom doors beyond, and the window at the end of the landing. Her face shimmered in coils of light, a faint luminescence amid twists of shadow.