RATS NEST

by Mat Laporte

  The cat rises up from the floor and arches its back. As it does, the mother places the carved meat in front of the cat’s favorite chair and the remaining three women sit down on the bench . The cat curls its voluminous body into its chair across the table from the women and directly in front of the ample serving of steak. The entire portion is roughly the size of an adult human’s back, carved expertly by the mother into serviceable chunks, which the cat sniffs, and then carefully, and thoughtfully licks.

  The cat takes its time before delivering its appraisal of the feast. It licks one of its large paws and lays it on the table. Its giant claws emerge; the tips lodge themselves in the well-worn tabletop and then retract back into its foot pads. The claws emerge, retract, and emerge again, twice more.

  The youngest daughter giggles and covers her eyes at the sight of the cat’s performance.

  Then the cat begins to purr, a heavy rumble that causes the table and the bench that the four women are seated upon, to vibrate. The purr contains within it a message and each of the women, in turn, understands what it means: that ‘the meat is good,’ the big cat approves, and that now they may eat.

  All four women lunge madly at the chubby victuals arranged by the mother so appealingly across the length of the serving plate. They eat with their hands; mumbles of enjoyment fill the one room cabin in the middle of the always dark forest, under the perpetually spinning moon, as the cat continues to purr harmoniously and lap up the meat juice from in between its two enormous paws.

  Content Worms

  ‘Outbreak of content worms in Unit 9,’ the mechanical voice said from the one-way speaker, then a red light flashed, signalling that the message had ended. Providence pushed a button to indicate he had received it, fumbled the receiver back into its cradle, and schlepped open the folding doors of the com-booth. He’d been working the same beat for 33 years. The alarms were all rote. He no longer cared. He used to think that, by doing his job as a peace officer, and later on as a math detective, he helped make the world a bit better, or at least kept it from sliding further into chaos, but those feelings changed, ten years ago, when his wife and daughter were sucked into an ether well; basically a wormhole into the ether realm.

  They were rescued, but they were rescued too late. When someone falls into a well or they are exposed to pure ether for too long, they come back a vape—just the physical husk of a person—the rest of them remains in the ether realm where, some people believe, their physical form is manipulated by invisible and malevolent creatures.

  Providence didn’t buy it though. He thought that he could go into the ether realm and get back what it had taken from him. So, one day, while out on a routine call, he stumbled upon a fresh, burgeoning ether well that had yet to be reported. He sized up his odds, said his prayers, so to speak, plugged his nose, and jumped inside. Three weeks later, they found him, raving mad but, by some miracle, he hadn’t turned vape.

  Providence became known as the first person to return from the ether relatively unscathed. He even brought back something with him—an unbreakable conviction that the physical world was being controlled and predetermined by creatures inside the ether—and the real kicker, he told people, what he’d learned from his experiences there, including his inability to rescue his wife and daughter’s remains—was that he alone had been chosen to lead a singularly futile and irredeemable life. Ever since his rescue, he knew that, wherever he went, and whatever he did there, whatever the days laid out in front of him, and whatever illusions of good, or merely satisfactory fortune he seemed to be enjoying in his paltry excuse for a life, he’d been allowed to return from the ether realm intact for one reason: to be the recipient of some extended and strenuous torture. He wanted to stick around just long enough to find out why.

  The part of the city where Providence worked had no street lights and the houses and offices kept their power turned off at night to conserve electricity. Providence stumbled through the darkness by memory, putting one soiled white sneaker in front of the other. A vape creature shuffled along the sidewalk behind him, breathing a tethered green cloud from its mouth. Providence registered its presence, but didn’t pay close attention. He hated wasting time on those wretched things and there were more of them in the city every day as more people fell victim to the ether wells.

  But this particular vape creature had an ulterior motive. It excreted a green jelly from its shrivelled lips, which, as it got closer, it gobbed it onto the back of Providence’s cheap windbreaker. This stinking splat landed on Providence’s collar, slathered his neck and stuck to his cheek. He turned to face the vape; its green cloud of breath, and the jelly it excreted were harmless, but approaching a non-vape, touching them, breathing on them, or excreting jelly on them, were strictly prohibited according to the law that Providence was paid a meager wage to uphold.

  Providence took a gun from his windbreaker pocket and pointed it at the creature. He hoped it would just go away. But the vape just stood there, shaking and salivating, as though coming to terms with the misery of its own existence in the midst of their exchange.

  Another green breath emerged from its mouth, a milky puff that floated up into the sky—a sign that it was heavily etherized, mostly out of the physical world and not an immediate threat. Providence laughed at the gross futility of the vape creature and wiped the slime from the back of his neck. The green stuff smelled like rotting fish but Providence’s mind was too dulled by pills, booze, and a lifetime of vile experiences to mind.

  The vape creature took a few more steps toward him, a clear provocation according to the law, so Providence shot it twice. It staggered as both green slime and ether escaped from a new hole in its stomach. Then it fell, as more green gas escaped from its face.

  Another day, another dead vape, Providence thought. He returned the pistol to his windbreaker pocket and continued walking toward his car. A small crowd of civilians gathered to watch the vape creature’s last gasps. Soon, Providence wouldn’t be able to remember what had happened, only that his standard issue revolver was two bullets lighter.

  His real concern lay on the other side of the block in Unit 9, a public hotel where an infestation of content worms had just been reported. This meant that real people were at risk. If content worms were allowed to infest a building for too long, they would eventually open an ether well that could start sucking people in. Providence couldn’t let what happened to his wife and daughter happen to others. He never talked about what he’d seen in the ether, what had wrecked him and changed him so irrevocably in there. Everyone assumed it was too painful to talk about and they were right.

  Providence drove the short distance to Unit 9. A bunch of firefighters, paramedics, cops and civilians stood around the parking lot, looking agitated, their bodies coloured red, yellow and blue by the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles.

  Providence approached the two nearest math detec-tives and lit a cigarette as sparks ignited inside Unit 9 like flashes of frenetic brain activity.

  “Bernays, Dayroulx…” Providence said, chewing the end of his cigarette.

  Bernays and Dayroulx looked at him like he was a dog in a tuxedo or someone who had pulled a large working light bulb from out of his ear.

  “I don’t believe it,” Dayroulx said, squinting at Providence.

  “No way!” said Bernays, a bit more animated, causing Providence to look away in disgust. He wasn’t accustomed to, nor was he in the mood for being scrutinized or talked to in loud cheerful tones, especially Bernays’ slimy impersonation of cheer.

  “No way!” Bernays repeated and put a greasy hand on Providence’s plastic windbreaker. “But he feels real!”

  Providence moved away from Bernays’ pawing. He mouthed the last of his sodden filter and let it topple out of his mouth onto the ground, where it smoked some more before fizzling out.

  “I’ve been fooled by ether fakes before,” said Dayroulx and blew a puff of
cigarette smoke in Providence’s face, then looked around the other side to make sure it didn’t pass straight through him, which it didn’t.

  “The man. The myth. The mostly real skin,” Bernays said with more annoying gusto and reached out to pat Providence down again.

  Providence pulled away and otherwise ignored them both. He studied the upper levels of the Unit 9 hotel where the lights continued to flash on and off in rapid succession. He felt the familiar pull: That way leads to suffering and tragedy, the kind of understanding that can only be got by agony, Providence thought.

  “I’m going in,” he said, devoid of enthusiasm.

  Bernays and Dayroulx looked at each other. They weren’t sure who or what Providence had become since he jumped into that ether well, but he didn’t seem to care what happened to himself anymore.

  “You sure?” Dayroulx said but he was already walking away.

  They both stifled a laugh as they watched Providence’s bowling-pin-shaped body stumble toward the entrance of Unit 9, the flag of his comb-over coming undone, flapping in the wind as though waving goodbye, his soiled sneakers and windbreaker a fitting uniform for his increasingly infectious lack of hope.

  When Providence opened the ground floor doors and stepped inside Unit 9, he felt the atmosphere change. The lobby was dark except for a lamp on the concierge’s desk that seemed to be fighting to stay alive. Providence stuck his right index finger in his mouth, then took it back out. Before he could perform that rudimentary test, he noticed his movements were more sluggish than usual, and with his wet index finger, he guesstimated that the atmosphere was at least two degrees denser inside than out.

  This new level of sluggishness he was feeling would have been comedic to him had time not been such an issue. It was getting harder to breathe and if he was going to find whatever it was he felt fated to find inside Unit 9, he needed to find it fast. Eventually the whole place would become an ether well, yet another portal to that horrible realm, in a city already riddled with them.

  Providence licked his lips in slow motion. The air tasted like burnt marshmallows. He could literally follow his nose to the place where he suspected the infestation of content worms originated from. With great effort he crossed the lumpy linoleum of the hotel lobby. His middle-aged smoker’s body heaved slowly up the stairs to the second floor. Within seconds he was soaked with sweat, his red pulpy face glistening, his comb-over reduced to a few spindly threads tracing weak lines across his forehead.

  When he reached the second floor he knew that he would not have the energy to descend those stairs and exit Unit 9 to safety ever again. This is where I’m going to die, he thought and looked around at the peeling yellow wallpaper, the mostly broken lights and the blood red carpet littered with plaster, stuffing, and hair, and then he thought again, I guess that makes sense.

  He made a shape with his mouth like he was saying the word ‘bake’ or had a hair stuck in his throat. The air was so thick with content worms that breathing it in was like trying to swallow a piece of dry toast whole. This was the expression he was wearing when Mantra first caught sight of him in the hallway, on the second floor of the Unit 9 hotel, and she would never forget it.

  “I’ve been waiting for this,” she said out loud, getting up out of the once comfortable, now gutted wing-backed lobby chair and floated across the five feet of red carpet to situate herself in front of Providence. She was wearing a black cloak up to her chin and only her face was visible; though round and bright, it wasn’t made of skin at all. Her eyes stood out from her unmoving visage, hard and uniformly black; her cloak shimmered and reflected in the warm glow of the hallway like velvet with a delicate finish.

  Providence fingered his fat throat as she approached, trying to undo a button, anything that might help him take one last breath.

  “Poor Providence,” she said, “you need to stay alive a while longer so you can hear what I have to tell you.” She took his hand in hers and led him into the nearest room. Her cloak flickered in and out of the perceptible world, an indication of an otherwise invisible tether—her connection back to the ether realm where she was from.

  Providence rolled his eyes and fell onto the hotel bed. He gasped and writhed on the blue duvet, his face purple. From his oxygen-starved perspective, it looked as though black discs were falling from the ceiling and landing directly onto his eyeballs. He tried to brush them off.

  Mantra disappeared for a second and came back with a vape creature in tow. It looked complacent, a bubble of green ether tethered to its mouth like a green buoy alerting no one of its whereabouts.

  Mantra said a few words Providence couldn’t make out and then the vape creature bent over and exhaled a sticky green cloud into his ear. He recoiled but wasn’t strong enough to fight the vape creature off. He rolled over on his side as his mouth filled with the taste of blood and mould. Providence felt his airways open almost immediately and then the pressure in his chest and brain began to dissolve. A trail of green vapour drifted out of his mouth and hung in a little damp sack above his head. He rolled back over and watched as the vape creature waddled back into the shadows of the room and was replaced by Mantra’s solid black eyes staring down at him.

  She began telling him the story she had travelled from the ether realm to tell him. But his brain couldn’t process that complexity of information anymore. He’d gone too long without oxygen, and with the limited cognition the vapour flowing through his system afforded him, he could only make out simple words:

  …stone-ud, ice fur, lantern, grave-ud, made, full-height, ud-solid door, warm die, rose, glass shade nod, winter, torture, great fur-ud, at any rate, sacred old demands, finger blows, nod, agree, valley of complex equipment, whistle crawl, die, oil, machine, knowledge, tongue bed, set in motion, nod nod, vibration-ud, ud-chain of, unstable, higher veils, spike sheep, machine-ud, drawback, effort, nod, the slowly-ud, blood , walking, legible, actual officer-ud, interval deciphered, wheel, surprise, face-parts-ud, help, wound, shoulder dip, edge, blindness, strap, alarm, turning-point, in chains, bottomless stairs, boat, grave, house, keel, foreign, dig, old night basement-ud, beard, shiny solvent, wax, deep low room, sign of feet, water, water needles, waters, back gear, nod, ud, ud-solid…

  Eventually Providence lost the ability to recognize words completely. They became isolated sounds, devoid of semantic content, and a giant smile appeared on his face as most of him migrated to the ether. He found what he’d been looking for, but it had nothing to do with Mantra’s story.

  “Nod if you agree,” Mantra kept saying, “nod if you agree.”

  Her story concerned the intricate workings of fate in the physical world—the predetermined design that had guided Providence for most of his life—and the plans that she and her people had to take control of both realms by way of the ether wells.

  Providence lay on his back, a cloud of milky green vapour tethered to his mouth, his eyes staring into oblivion. Mantra stood above him, a round, skinless face with black, opaque eyes, as more vape creatures filed into the room. The air in Unit 9 had reached maximum density. No human being could survive there; only ether-based creatures like Mantra, the vape creatures, and now Providence, could survive in an atmosphere like that.

  Providence got up from the bed. He drooled and shuffled and found a place to stand in the shadows of the Unit 9 hotel room with the other vape creatures (each of them with a milky green cloud hovering above them like an extra, half-formed head) and awaited Mantra’s orders.

  Horst

  Horst saved stacks of his old notebooks and found himself looking through them when he couldn’t sleep. On one particular night, restless, grappling with a problem he couldn’t articulate, Horst found himself in his office, once again, sliding his hand under a pile of old notebooks and pulling out the one closest to the bottom. The cover was marbled, black and white, with a space blanked out to write a name and subject. Wedged between the cardboard covers
and in between some of the ruled pages were some cat hairs and dust balls. He plucked these out and started turning through the pages.

  The handwriting inside was familiar but noticeably different from his handwriting in the present. There was something looser, fatter and, he hated to admit it, duller about the handwriting he saw on the cheap notebook paper in front of him. This was probably his handwriting from five or six years ago, he guessed. Looking at those particular notes, he realized that he had become less forgiving of himself since writing them.

  He flipped through a few more pages without focusing on what was there. He turned a few more pages absentmindedly and then stopped. This was usually the point in his insomniac’s routine when he’d turn on the TV, or eat something, but this time he remained seated, holding the notebook open in front of him. Something he had observed on the periphery of one of the pages had alerted his subconscious. He wasn’t sure what it could be, considering he hadn’t been paying any attention, but the feeling was that something had arrived, asking to be attended to—scrutinizing him at the same time—and it wouldn’t go away.

  Horst studied the open page in front of him. There were some lazy sentence fragments, a few failed attempt at a paragraph, and somewhere toward the margin on the left hand page, a clump of hastily written words that read, ‘the column of air,’ underlined. Even though those words were written in handwriting that was consistent, even identical, to the handwriting throughout the rest of the notebook, Horst knew, without a doubt, that those words had been written by someone else.