by Rick Hautala
“As if,” Manda mumbled as she crumpled up the note and tossed it toward the trashcan. She missed but left it where it had landed between the wastebasket and the refrigerator. Opening the refrigerator, she scanned the shelves for something to eat. When her gaze alighted on the half-opened can of cat food covered with Saran-Wrap on the bottom shelf, she realized that Muggins hadn’t greeted her at the door. Turning quickly, she scanned the darkening apartment.
No dark blob on the couch where Muggins usually slept...
No silhouette on the windowsill, looking longingly out at the city lights...
“Muggins...?” she called out, her voice twisting up as she moved into the living room. She couldn’t ignore the icy clutching sensation in her stomach.
“Muggsie...?”
No answering meow from the bedroom...
She glanced at the floor by the window where she kept Muggins’ litter box. The litter was undisturbed, exactly the way she had left it this morning before rushing off to catch the bus to work.
“Damn, if that jerk let Muggsie get out...”
Manda stomped to the front door, undid the deadbolt, opened the door, and glanced up and down the dimly lit hallway.
Of course, the cat wasn’t there.
Muggins was an indoor cat. Living in the city, he had to be, but Manda knew if he ever did manage to get out, he’d be off chasing pigeons and rats, or wandering the alleys. A dull, burning sensation stung the back of her eyes. Her vision blurred as tears gathered.
“Muggins...?” she called out softly, looking up and down the corridor once more, then drawing back into the apartment and closing the door.
“Oh, Jesus! Oh, fuck! Goddamn!” she shouted in frustration.
She clenched her hands into fists and pounded her upper thighs. It’d be just like Rob to space off something like this. Muggins had probably slipped out without him even realizing it...probably darted between his feet and bolted when he was leaving to meet up with Marty and Sheena at the bar.
Or maybe that’s why Rob had gone down to Gritty’s...because he knew Muggins had gotten out, and he didn’t want to face Manda’s wrath when she got home and found her cat was A.W.O.L.
So mad she was sputtering, Manda strode over to the portable phone by the couch, grabbed it, then fished the telephone directory out of the desk drawer. She looked up the number for Gritty’s and hurriedly dialed. A woman answered on the third ring. Manda asked if she would check to see if Rob Stone was there. The woman wasn’t very helpful. She said they didn’t have a PA system, but Manda told her it was a family emergency, so the woman said she’d check.
Crossing her arms tightly over her chest, Manda stalked back and forth across the living room floor while waiting for the woman to get back to her. She was surprised when she heard Rob’s voice above the background din of the pub.
“Hey, what’s up, babe? You comin’ down or what?”
“Where’s Muggins?” Manda snapped, so suddenly and loudly it sounded to her like a bark over the phone.
After a short pause during which all she could hear was the background noise of the crowded bar, Rob spoke up.
“Huh?”
Manda exhaled loudly, imagining for a moment that her breath was a ball of dragon’s fire that could melt the mouthpiece of the phone.
“Muggins! My goddamned cat, you moron! You didn’t let him get out this morning, did you?”
There was another pause, longer this time. When Rob finally spoke, he sounded confused and tentative, like he thought she might be playing some kind of practical joke on him.
“I—ah, look, Manda.” He didn’t sound at all sure of himself. “I...umm, I have no idea what you’re talking about, ‘kay? A cat?”
“Jesus, Rob! Yes! A cat! My cat, Muggins! He wasn’t in the apartment when I got home from work. If you let him get out, I swear to God I...I’ll...”
Her voice trailed away because, in fact, she had no idea what she would do. Probably end up plastering PET MISSING posters on the telephone poles in the vicinity of their apartment building. Over the years, she had seen plenty of missing pet posters around town and had always considered it a touching but futile gesture.
What were the odds that a missing pet would ever show up?
The city had more than its share of stray cats and dogs, and if a pet was really valuable, chances were it had been stolen to be resold.
But Muggins was no prize. As much as Manda loved him, he was nothing but a “mutt cat,” as she lovingly called him. If Muggins was gone and missing, it meant only one of two things—either he was wandering around scrounging for food...or else he was dead, maybe flattened by the same city bus she had taken home from work that day.
“Manda? Honey?” Rob said.
Manda could barely hear him above the music and laughter in the bar. She took a steadying breath, trying hard to focus.
“Muggins...is...missing,” she said, enunciating each word so there would be no mistake. Tears spilled from her eyes and ran like drops of heated oil down both cheeks. “If you know what happened to him, just tell me. Even if you fucked up and let him get out or something, just fucking tell me, okay? Otherwise...otherwise...”
“I haven’t got a fucking clue what you’re talking about, babe,” Rob said. Manda detected a slur in his voice and guessed that he had been at the pub for a while. “As far as I know, we don’t—you don’t even own a cat.” He sniffed with laughter, like he was still half-expecting a punch line. “You always told me you were allergic to them, remember?”
“Wha—”
Manda’s voice choked off. She had no idea what to say to that.
Had Rob gone nuts?
Or did I?
What the hell is he talking about, no cat?
She glanced over her shoulder at the refrigerator. Moving swiftly, she walked over to it and flung the door open. Bending down so fast both of her knees made loud popping sounds, she started to reach for the can of cat food on the bottom shelf when her hand suddenly froze.
It wasn’t there.
The opened cat food was gone.
The only thing on the bottom shelf was Rob’s twelve pack of Miller Lite and something that looked like either very old meat or very new cheese.
“Where’d it go?” Manda whispered into the phone. Her voice was like metal filings, shredding the inside of her throat.
“What’s that babe?” Rob yelled. “I can’t quite hear you.”
Manda backed away from the refrigerator, pausing in the doorway to glance into the living room to the corner where she kept Muggins’ litter box.
It wasn’t there, either.
Moving slowly, like she was walking in a dream, she went over to where the litter box should have been and stared down at the threadbare carpet. Even if Rob had taken it out and emptied it, which wasn’t very likely, and then forgotten to put it back, there wasn’t a trace of litter in the corner from when Muggins scratched the fake sand to cover up his poops.
“What’s going on?” she mumbled, no longer aware that she was still talking into the phone. “Jesus Christ! What in the hell is going on?”
“You gonna join us or what?” Rob asked. His voice buzzed like an insect in her ear, but Manda made no attempt to understand what he had said. Her hand felt suddenly heavy and numb as she lowered the phone from her ear, switched it off, and let it drop to the floor. When it hit, it sounded like the plastic casing cracked, but she didn’t care.
Leaning back against the wall, Manda covered her face with both hands and sobbed as she slid slowly down into a sitting position. Bending her knees and leaning her head forward, she started crying and kept crying as the apartment grew steadily darker with the descending night. And whenever the thought hit her that Muggins was gone—really gone!—she didn’t have the strength to scream as she stared into the deepening darkness that seeped like dense smoke the living room.
5
As it turned out, Rob did have too much to drink at Gritty’s, and Sheena ended up calling
to say that she and Marty were taking him back to their place to sleep it off.
What the fuck difference does it make? Manda wondered after hanging up the phone. It wasn’t like he had a real job to go to in the morning. All he was doing with his time was writing and, judging by the scant pages she had read so far of his “novel in progress,” he wasn’t doing much of that. In the morning, as she got ready for work, she kept one ear tuned toward the front door, hoping she would hear ole’ Muggins meowing to be let in after a night out on the town.
But he didn’t show up.
Tears filled Manda’s eyes as she eased the apartment door shut behind her and started down to the street to catch the bus for South Portland. She considered calling in sick, or at least showing up an hour or two late so she could look for her cat, but that might mean she’d lose her job. With Rob not pulling in his half of the rent, she couldn’t afford to lose her job, such as it was.
Things only got worse when she got to work and found the package from Swann House propped up on her desk. A Post-it note was stuck to the front which read—
“I TOLD YOU TO RETURN THIS!!! - Jason”
Manda crumpled up the note and dropped it onto the floor. She couldn’t tear her gaze away from the package. One of the last things she had done yesterday was repackage the book, check to make sure the publisher’s address was correct, and send it out with the last mail pick-up.
And here it was, back on her desk the next day with the postage canceled and RETURN TO SENDER stamped in bright red letters on front and back.
She started to reach for the package but jerked her hand back, not quite daring to touch it. Leaning closer, she stared uncomprehendingly at the postmark.
How the hell could it have come back so fast?
It had gone out late yesterday afternoon, but here it was with a postmark canceled in Des Moines.
Still not daring to touch the package, Manda leaned close to it, her nostrils widening as she sniffed the air. She caught a faint whiff of...something. She wasn’t sure quite what. Maybe a hint of...
“Burned hair?” she muttered, wincing as she pulled back quickly. Before she could catch her breath, the backroom door slammed open. She turned around quickly expecting to see Jason glowering at her, but it was only Jesse from the café, looking for a carton of napkins. Manda watched him, waiting until he got what he was after and left. Then she turned back to the package.
Her impulse was to toss it into the trash compactor behind the store. So what if the return credit never showed up? As long as the thing was out of her life forever.
Like Muggins, she thought as a chill teased between her shoulder blades. Out of my life...forever...like he’d never even existed.
Manda knew that, one way or another, she had to get rid of the book before Jason saw it. She could just imagine his reaction.
“Wait a second,” she whispered, snapping her fingers and nodding as a thought took shape. “That’s it. Jason’s doing this. He took the package out of the out-going mail and put it back here just to mess with my mind. That has to be it!”
She was tempted all the more to toss the book into the trash just to be rid of it, but then a better idea struck her.
If Jason was screwing with her mind, why not screw back?
Grabbing a box cutter from her desk, she sliced open the back of the envelope. The new blade cut quickly and cleanly through the padded stuffing, exposing the black cover of the book. For a second or two, Manda didn’t even notice that the blade had also sliced into her hand, on her wrist just above the heel of her thumb. It wasn’t until a large, red drop of blood landed with an audible plop on the back of the book that she cried out in pain and surprise.
“Mother-fucker!” she screamed as she reached for a tissue from the desk dispenser and pressed the wad against the fresh gash. Dull, stinging pain spread like poison up her wrist and down into her fingers, bringing tears to her eyes. Within seconds, the tissue was saturated with blood. She grabbed another one to staunch the flow, then blotted the tears that were streaming down her face. After a moment, once she had regained her composure, she lifted the wad of tissues and inspected the wound.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad as it felt, but she thought she must have sliced open a vein because the blood was flowing so freely.
“Son of a bitch,” Manda muttered as she leaned back against the table and pressed the tissue hard against her wrist. She could feel her pulse, throbbing in her hand, and she wondered about the possibility of infection. After a minute or two, she peeled back the tissue, glad to see that the blood flow had finally slowed if not stopped entirely. She heaved a sigh of relief, turned, and looked down at the package on the table.
The returned book was lying title side up. Manda couldn’t tear her eyes away from the fake-leather cover. The textured black surface caught the overhead lighting just right, making it swirl with an inward-turning whirlpool of light that was flecked with deep, rich red intermingled with dense, light-less black.
Reaching blindly behind her, Manda took down a new padded book mailer. All the while, the black book cover held her gaze. The longer she stared at it, the more she could feel herself being pulled into it. The subtle interplay of light and shadows, of black and deep, clotted red danced across the cover like the wind-ruffled surface of a pond at twilight. It looked amazingly three-dimensional. Waves of vertigo swept through her. She felt herself falling forward as she leaned closer and stared, gape-mouthed, into the rippling black surface. She was only vaguely aware of the crazy thought that—somehow—she could see into or through the book into …
—What?
She snapped back to reality when the backroom door burst open, and Chris and Cindy, two co-workers, entered, engaged in an animated conversation. Manda turned her back to them so they wouldn’t see her tear-stained eyes.
“Yo, Manda,” Chris called out. “You still planning to come tonight?”
“Tonight...?” Manda asked, still not turning around and busying herself with the new padded envelope. In spite of the cut on her wrist, she wanted to do what she had thought of.
“Billy’s gig. At Free Street Taverna. It’s tonight. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah...Sure,” she replied, nodding automatically. She had forgotten all about Billy’s gig and was totally focused on getting Psychic Black Holes sealed up and addressed to Jason Aceto’s home.
“That’s show the lousy son of a bitch!” she muttered.
“You say something?” Chris asked.
“Huh? Oh, no. Nothing.” Amanda shook her head. “Just talking to myself.”
6
“Rob...?”
The air in the apartment sounded curiously muffled as Manda closed the door behind her, making sure to lock the deadbolt and the security chain.
The silence within absorbed both her voice and the sound of her footsteps as she kicked her shoes off. No lights were on. Only the soft, blue glow of the streetlight outside their building filtered through the unwashed windows, casting a powdery haze over everything.
Is Rob even home? She wondered, stepping into the living room. Maybe he actually got some writing done today and is in the bedroom, taking a nap.
Manda’s hand brushed over the wall switch. The sudden glare of light stung her eyes. Unconsciously, she felt the bulge of the bandage that covered the cut on her left wrist.
“Robbie...?” she called out, louder now, as if defying the darkness to stifle her voice. She walked boldly to the bedroom door, swung it open, and snapped on the light.
The bed was empty, undisturbed, just the way she had left it that morning. She knew Rob well enough to know that he would never have remade the bed if he had come home any time during the day. Chances were, he was still at Marty and Sheena’s, sleeping it off.
Manda listened to the hungry grumble of her stomach and decided to eat something before she called Marty and Sheena and told Rob to come home. Billy’s gig didn’t start until 9:30, but she wanted to get there early enough so she could ha
ng out. After the last few days at work, she needed some serious R&R. Tomorrow was the last day of her workweek, and on Monday, she and Rob were planning to go kayaking with some friends on Sebago Lake.
Her bare feet whispered on the threadbare rug as she walked from the bedroom into the kitchen. Along the way, she snapped on every light she could reach. She wasn’t sure why. Rob always left lights on, and she always complained about it because she had to work to pay the bills while he just hung around the apartment, pretending to be working on his novel.
Tonight, for some reason, she wanted to feel safer, and leaving as many lights on as possible seemed to help.
A little, anyway.
She entered the kitchen and hesitated, glancing over her shoulder to where Muggins’ litter box used to be—should have been—in the living room. She still had no idea what was going on with that whole situation, and she was anxious to find Rob so she could ask him about it.
Why had he acted like she was crazy or something, thinking she had a cat?
Of course she had a cat!
She’d had Muggins long before she and Rob met and moved in together. So what was this bullshit about her not having a cat? And why was Muggins’ litter box missing? Was Rob messing with her mind the same way Jason was?
Manda tried to ignore the waves of paranoia that swept over her, but she couldn’t.
Maybe that was it.
Maybe Rob and Jason were in on this together, trying to make her go crazy or something.
But why?
Rob barely knew Jason, and the few times they had been together, they hadn’t exactly hit it off, probably because Jason had made it so obvious that he wanted to sleep with her.
Manda heaved a heavy sigh as she opened the refrigerator and inspected her prospects for at least a half-decent meal. They weren’t very good. A wave of helplessness swept over her when she stared at the bottom shelf and—still—didn’t see the half-full can of cat food she knew, she just knew was supposed to be there.
