Midnight Echo 8

by AHWA

  At the door she paused for a moment looking out over the room.

  Thought about cleanup.

  It would take a lot of gnomes.

  Always a Price

  Joanne Anderton

  (Winner, AHWA Short Story Competition, 2012)

  It didn’t start the night of Sylvia’s party, not like everyone thinks it did. I’m the only one who knows this. After all, I brought the damned cat home.

  Sylvia had a way of dealing with the cancer that made us all uncomfortable, but we didn’t have the balls to say anything. We went along with it all. Allowed it to become the centre of our lives, never dared raise our own problems, those trifling matters that simply could not compare. We referred to the lump in her left tit as Ziggy like she wanted. We even organised the mastectomy party she demanded, complete with male strippers, a game of ‘pin the boob on the hospital patient’ and enough booze to poison any clump of inconveniently mutating cells. Always with a smile, that same, strained grin we all shared. Don’t know how the others handled it, but I dealt with Sylv’s illness the same way I dealt with everything—a small razor, and a fuck load of gin.

  We were all taking turns with the body paint, covering her too-thin body with countless new boobs in a garish variety of colours, when the cat strolled in. It’d been living in our shared townhouse for two months now; well fed, patted, cleaned, but it looked just as mangy and feral as it had the day I brought it home. I’d told the girls I’d rescued it, found it pathetic and alone in a pile of garbage and coaxed it into a box with a can of sardines. This wasn’t exactly true. But we all cling to our secrets and comforting delusions, don’t we?

  It walked right up to Sylv’s bare feet, sat and stared up at her.

  Couple of Sylv’s work friends started cooing. It didn’t last long. Despite its name, Mr Muddles was not the kind of cat you cooed at. There was something in the way it looked at her, with those too-smart, hard yellow eyes. There was something in the way it dug long claws deep into the floorboards, gouging great gashes that bled sap, like the wood was still fresh. Its matted fur stuck out at irregular angles, its smooth cat-lines made jagged and harsh.

  In the tense silence, Sylvia knelt. Mr Muddles placed a paw on her naked knee, instantly drawing blood in a neat pattern. She didn’t move. Careful paw by careful paw it crawled its way into her lap, across her stomach, and onto her chest. There, it began to knead.

  None of us tried to stop it. Maybe it was the surreal nature of the sight—Sylvia, naked but for white cotton undies and bra, bright with paint, hands lifted but not grasping, not even touching the small black cat pummelling her tits. Her mouth was slightly open, her eyes wide, but she looked surprised, nothing more, not in any pain.

  Not even when those strong paws sunk through her skin, and into her flesh.

  It wasn’t messy. I kinda thought it would be messy. Blood and muscle, ruptured meat and pumping veins, and screaming, lots of screaming. Instead those paws just slipped inside her like her skin was pale mist. A terrible rumbling rattled through the cat, and wide, slick tears fell dirty from its eyes, but still, it kneaded.

  And then, with a snort and the flick of a tail, it was done.

  Mr Muddles traced bloodied paws back across the floorboards, onto the clean cream carpet, and disappeared inside my bedroom.

  Sylvia fell onto her side, shuddering.

  I could never quite remember everything that happened next. The screaming finally started, but not from her. At least three of us called 000; Kylie from the home phone, Sylv’s old school friend Cathy and workmate Peta from their mobiles. Tanya was holding her, cradling her head while two chicks whose names I’d never really learned pressed towels and tissues onto all her small puncture wounds.

  I went in search of Mr Muddles.

  It was curled at the very back of the wardrobe in a nest of all my best clothes. It licked the blood off its paws with an attentive dark tongue.

  “Why her first?” I whispered. Its eyes glowered, oh-so amused. “I brought you here. Why’d you choose her?”

  And then I was being dragged back to the lounge room floor where Sylvia was sitting upright and clean. And the ambos bundled her off to the hospital for tests, more tests. And when the results came back, it was all gone. Sylvia’s breast cancer, every last trace in every last gland and every last mound of soft flesh gone. Just gone.

  So that’s when they thought it all started. But they, of course, were wrong.

  Sylvia was not the kind to keep quiet about Mr Muddles. It started before she even left the hospital. A young boy, shaved head starkly pale beneath colourless lights, small and frail in his crackly sheets. I refused to bring Mr Muddles in, refused to even touch it, so Sylvia roped her friends in. They brought the cat in a cardboard box lined with more of my fur-clogged clothes. I stood guard at the door while it plunged its claws into the child’s bones, drawing out his invisible disease.

  After that, word spread. I wasn’t sure how. Maybe there are networks of the sick and the dying that I was not privy to. However it happened, they started to arrive at our door. In ones, at first, then groups. A hell of a lot of cancer. We quickly learned the cat had a knack for cancer. Couldn’t help anything degenerative, could only take out something that wasn’t supposed to be there, not repair ageing brain cells or tired hearts.

  Maybe that was why it hadn’t tried to help me.

  Sylvia set up the lounge room like a surgery. Or a butcher. Vinyl-covered table, clear plastic sheets taped to the walls, floor and ceiling. Lots of lamps, bright bulbs. Old green couches in the hallway. Mr Muddles got special treatment. Real fish for dinner. Bottled-fucking-water.

  I started finding worse things than blood and fur on the hems of my jeans. Things that looked like bits of meat, or the fine white stems of nerves, or honeycomb bone, all dark and lumpy with sickness, chewed and thrown back up again. The wardrobe stunk like a dead thing, and cat shit, and cat spit, and blood, and things I couldn’t even name. The smell infused all my clothes, no matter how much I washed them or hung them out in the sun.

  But no one else could smell it, and Sylvia wouldn’t let me kick it out. “He likes you,” she’d say, as though that thing could feel affection. “Likes your smells. Feels safe there. Let him stay in your room, let him be comfortable and sleep. He deserves it, and he’s not doing any real harm.”

  The final straw. I left the house, and returned to the spot where I had found the creature in the first place.

  It was, indeed, in a heap of trash down a narrow alleyway, I hadn’t lied that much. Dodgy-looking Chinese takeaway on one side, with faded pictures of sweet and sour pork or crispy duck plastered inside the dirty windows. Nondescript building painted in black, with nothing but a gold number and the faint scent of cigarettes hovering in an aura around it, on the other. I couldn’t have said what drew me to this place to begin with, in the middle of the night a few mere months ago. I’d been drunk, I remembered that much, drunk until I was numb. And the darkness had wrapped cool hands around my face, and I’d thought it must be easier to have someone else do it, you know. That way, no one hates you when you’re gone. They hate the arsehole who hurt you, instead. They might wonder, ‘How could she be so stupid?’ or ‘Why’d she get so drunk?’ or ‘What was she even doing there after dark in the first place?’ but that’s different. I was okay with that.

  Even in the sunlight the place looked the same. Liquid shadows in all the corners stretched out to touch my boots. Puddles lapped at me—thick with the mud that had given the cat its name—bins and rubbish and sick against the walls. But the smell was wrong; I hadn’t noticed that the first time. Now, it smelled like the inside of my wardrobe.

  She was still there, right at the back, hidden from the street, hidden from anyone not looking for her. First time, a single streetlamp totally out of place had beamed its halo down on her, but it wasn’t t
here now. Still, she was glowing. Her long hair spilled tangled and ropey over her shoulders and onto the cement. Her fingernails were bloody, gnawed down to the quick, and they strained and pressed as she gripped her knees. She wore a simple grey dress, shapeless, pushed up to her waist, her legs held high and wide open as she struggled to give birth.

  I halted, shuddered. I should have got drunk again first.

  “Back?” she panted, face red and wet with sweat.

  The small dark things falling out of her weren’t fully formed yet, but they wiggled and moved in the mud regardless. I didn’t want to look at them, or where they were coming from, so I met her eyes instead. Cat’s eyes, just as yellow as Mr Muddles, and the same amused expression.

  “It’s not working,” I hissed. “It’s not doing what you said it’d do.” The tiny cats moved around me, rolling to their feet, growing, stretching into shape even as they took their first few steps. My stomach clenched, and I forced myself not to be sick.

  “Not true, that.” She grinned, her teeth small and sharp. “Working a lot, all the time. Just not for you.”

  “Why the fuck not?” I kicked a small cat-thing aside as it tried to rub against my shoes.

  “Might not be ready.” She finished her birthing with final push and a grunt, and smoothed her dress back down. Apparently the blood and the fluids running down the inside of her thighs didn’t bother her. “Everything in its own time.” Hand lifted towards me, she leaned forward. “And own price.”

  “Price?” I snapped at her. “No one else paid a fucking price! Sylvia didn’t pay a goddamned thing! Why should I—”

  And that was when I noticed she was attached to the alleyway wall. It looked like wings, spread out from her head and back, dark and thick and seeping into the pockmarked bricks. She folded her legs, drew them underneath her, and it pulled and rippled with her shifting weight. Not feathers, nothing so beautiful. Instead, it was fur. Clumps of saliva-stiff fur, bound with bloody ropes of something that could be flesh.

  I glanced down at my shoes. The same putrid stuff was congealing around the hem of my jeans.

  “Always a price,” she said.

  I ran then, away from her laughter like a cat’s yowling, her unnatural children squashing and cracking beneath my feet. I stopped only when the alley was so very far away, found myself someplace small, dank and open early, and drank my shakes away. Drank until I was steeled, ready to do what needed to be done. What I should have done in the first place.

  I arrived home to darkness, the patients gone, the girls asleep. No one to see me take the biggest kitchen knife I could find out of its drawer, and test its sharpness. No one to notice that I was too drunk to even cut myself correctly. The red line I left on the inside of my upper wrist was wonky, but so were all the others, the old scars pale down my arms and legs. I’d only ever shown them to Sylvia. She’d laughed, said it was a phase, and shown me her own.

  Tanya slept on a mattress out the front of my bedroom, ready in case Mr Muddles needed her. I stepped over her, careful not to wake her, and closed the door behind me. My bedroom stunk. I knelt in front of the open wardrobe and parted my remaining clothes like leaves in a jungle. In the dark I couldn’t quite see whatever felt so hot and wet against my hands.

  Then two bright yellow eyes opened. I crawled forward, wrapped my hand around the mangy scruff of the creature’s neck and lifted it up, out of the nest it had made. I brought it close to my face. It didn’t struggle, didn’t so much as hiss, just held my gaze and somehow I could tell it was laughing at me.

  “Fuck you and your price,” I spat in the thing’s face and plunged my knife deep into its chest, so deep the blade went right through, and stuck out on the other side of its skinny little body.

  No screaming, no thrashing, those eyes still glowed. I pulled out the knife, blood ran down my arm, turned the blade around. Should have done this all so long ago. None of the bullshit half-arsed attempts, no more cries for fucking attention or whatever the hell my so-called friends and long-lost family thought of me, time to cut it all out, because the only thing that ever felt right was this, the hot slice of the knife—

  And Mr Muddles plunged its long-clawed paws into my head. At first they just scored deep scratches against my temples and into my eyes and down my cheeks. I tried to shake it loose but the unnatural bastard held on so tightly, and all I did was tear off strips of my own skin. Until it went deeper. And it was kneading in my brain, surgical slices of curved scalpels, back paws on my chest, blood down my arm, fingers wrapped around its lice-crawling fur.

  I couldn’t tell how long it took, wasn’t the same as watching, but I knew as soon as it was done. I let go. The knife fell with a thump and a splatter. And for the first time in a long time, longer than I could remember, I felt no need to pick it up again. There was nothing left that needed cutting out. Mr Muddles tumbled all paws and head and opened body into my lap. I pressed hands to my face, but I wasn’t that hurt. My eyes were whole and round, my cheeks stung with a few finely raised scratches.

  Mr Muddles twitched, stretched, and half-fell half-dragged itself off my lap and deep into the wardrobe. Deeper than it should go. I followed, knees slipping, clothes heavy and damp against my face. My fingers dug for purchase in so much wet, matted fur.

  All I could see was Mr Muddle’s eyes, lidded now and dimmed, jerking as it retched. Over and over. I reached for the cat, but only found more of that sodden, matted fur, a great wall of it. One final jerk and terrible noise, and those eyes closed. For a moment, I felt frozen in the darkness, lost in my own wardrobe, drunk on the smell, wrapped in a filthy womb.

  Then another set of yellow eyes opened, larger, glowing, above me.

  “Your piece,” a soft, amused voice whispered. “Last piece. Sharp piece.” Something shifted. Warm fingers rested on the back of my hand.

  Light flickered on from a bulb that shouldn’t be there, drilled into the back of the wardrobe. A woman hung there, from fresh wings of flesh and cat fur, and knelt on a small pedestal of bonemeal. She was so very much like the woman from the alleyway, almost identical, but her skin was darker, and her hair short, pale, spiky, the way Sylv had styled it before it all fell out.

  Mr Muddles lay limp in her lap. She drew her hand from mine and stroked it with tender fingers, nails clean. “We told you,” she said, and held the cat to her face, pressed its fur against the tears rolling down her cheeks. Even as I watched, stunned, stuck in the muck I couldn’t bring myself to look as her stomach bulged and grew. “Always a price. And someone always pays.”

  Blood Lilies

  Shauna O’Meara

  (Winner, AHWA Flash Fiction Competition, 2012)

  Dust motes rose as the doctor stood in the stuffy bedroom. “I’m afraid I can do nothing more,” he said, straightening his silken dobuku.

  “I see. Well, thank you for your time.”

  Ayumu felt hot tears prick his eyes as Obaasan’s words sent the young healer on his way.

  “Modern medicine… pah!” Obaasan exclaimed, smoothing the kakebuton covers about her. Ever-mindful of appearances even though sight eluded her, Obaasan’s ashen hair was restrained elegantly with a carved wooden comb. She turned her wizened face to Ayumu, perched like a sparrow beside her bed, “I need your help, Ayumu.”

  Ayumu leaned forward, “Anything, Okaasan … er, Obaa-chan.” He stiffened, ashamed of the slip. He could barely recall his mother, however, fierce loyalty kept him from replacing her faded memory with the face of the grandmother who’d taken on her role.

  Obaasan smiled kindly, pretending not to notice. “A red flower grows in the high mountain field beyond the forest. It is said to restore sight. Fetch one. I can send no-one else.”

  Later, as Ayumu trotted through the lilac mist hanging low over the dewy rice field beside the house, he heard Obaasan call, “Don’t pick anything else.”r />
  * * *

  It took half a day for Ayumu to reach the mountaintop field. The dense beech forest had given way to barren, rocky outcrops and the chilly air was thin. A rose pink sun glowed weakly through veils of white cloud. A field of crimson lilies spread before him.

  Ayumu began gathering the red blooms in his basket.

  A short way into the thigh-high vegetation, something cracked beneath his sandal. Ayumu kicked aside dead leaves and fallen petals to reveal a scattering of long bones. A deer, he thought, marvelling at the clean-picked remains.

  Many more bones followed, giving Ayumu the impression of walking across dry tinder. The small boy might have been concerned had it not been common knowledge the field was a favoured hunting ground of the daimyo’s samurai. Indeed, Ayumu’s heavy tread and swishing hemp kosode had already stirred several deer from their grazing.

  Moving on, Ayumu noticed a pair of white lilies. The two blooms gave off an intoxicating smell not shared by their crimson siblings and, thinking of the joy their perfume would give blind Obaasan, Ayumu added them to his basket.

  * * *

  That evening, Ayumu boiled the red petals with medicinal herbs.

  “It’s working!” Obaasan cried after consuming the draught. A smile creased her features as the shadows in her vision scattered to dew before clearing away like rising fog. Before her stood Ayumu, his raven hair and bright black eyes so like those of her daughter. “I see my boy! Oh, Ayumu! We did it!”

  Ayumu spun around the room before remembering the white lilies he’d left in the basket. Running to fetch them, he called, “I brought you a gift, Obaa-chan.” Returning to the room, Ayumu brought the twin lilies up to his face. “They smell so good.”

  Obaasan cried, “No, Ayumu!” but was unable to prevent her smiling grandson from putting the flowers to his nose and inhaling deeply.

  * * *