Words With Fiends

by Ali Brandon

  The head judge, with a sour expression, gestured her to rejoin the other competitors on the sidelines. She did as requested, only to have Hamlet pad over and take a seat beside her, which drew still more laughter from the crowd. The judges conferred for a few moments before motioning Darla and the rest back onto the mat.

  “We’ve made our decision,” the head judge announced. “Darla Pettistone, step forward. Unfortunately, Ms. Pettistone, you are hereby disqualified from the competition for bringing an unauthorized animal onto the mat.”

  The announcement drew a chorus of boos, but the judge ignored the disturbance. “Step back, please. The remaining competitors rank as follows. First place, Thompson; second place, Selinger; third place, Merrill.”

  Disbelief swept Darla as the other names were called. Now, her outrage was directed at Hamlet. This was what the cat had come all the way to the competition to do? Bowing her way off the mat, she snatched him up, grunting only a little under the burden, and stalked over to where Reese and Robert waited.

  “Tough break, Red,” Reese said with a shake of his head, appearing sincerely disappointed on her behalf. “But you looked really good out there.”

  “Ms. P, it was great!” Robert crowed. “I mean, I’m real sorry that Hamlet, you know, got you kicked out and stuff, but you should have seen him.”

  He held up her cell phone, which he’d been holding onto for her. Pressing the camera app, he scrolled to a video clip and hit the “Play” button. “I got it all on video. I thought you’d want to see how you did. Look, Hamlet was doing the kata right along with you.”

  As Darla watched, her initial reaction of horror morphed into resigned amusement. There she was, looking like a serious student of the martial arts, while behind her—and most definitely unbeknownst to her!—Hamlet wandered onto the edge of the mat, weaving and bobbing and putting out the occasional paw. The contrast of her determined moves and Hamlet’s shadow routine was priceless, she had to admit. Had the same thing happened to anyone else, she probably would have been rolling on the floor laughing with the rest of them.

  “All right, it’s funny,” she conceded. She took back her phone and wallet, reaching beneath her loose jacket to tuck both items into the broad elastic band of her gi trousers for safekeeping. “But, Robert, if you post this on YouTube, I’ll kill you!”

  Then, hefting the cat’s weight so that she could hold him more comfortably, she turned to Reese and said, “At least we solved the mystery of why my bag was so heavy.”

  “Yeah, Robert told me how you found him in there,” Reese said. “Smart cat. I guess he was able to unzip himself from the inside and crawl out. Sorry he got you disqualified, but you’re lucky he didn’t go wandering off in the gymnasium, instead. We might never have found him in a place this size.”

  “You’re right.” Torn between relief and frustration, Darla sighed and hugged the feline a little tighter. “Okay, let me get him back into the bag, and maybe I can find something to tie the zipper pulls together so he can’t do it again.”

  But barely had she said that when another announcement came over the loudspeaker. “Beginning sparring, ages sixteen and up, report to mat three.”

  “Hey, that’s me,” Robert exclaimed in excitement. “I gotta go fight now.”

  “Reese, go ahead with him,” Darla told him. “I’ll take care of Hamlet, and be down there in a minute.”

  While the two men made their way to the designated spot, Darla started back up the bleacher steps, wishing Hamlet had thought to stow his harness in the bag with him. That way, maybe she could have walked him around the gym pretending he was a service animal. The feline didn’t seem at all distressed by the noise and the crowd, she realized in surprise. To the contrary, he seemed quite content to lounge in her arms and watch the goings-on. With any luck, maybe he would snooze in the bag until they were ready to return home.

  Halfway to her seat, she saw Chris Valentine bending over to talk to someone in the next row. Good for him, she thought. The teen would surely know that rumors would be making their way around the dojo grapevine about what had happened at the TAMA studios. He had guts to show up under such circumstances, and she fervently hoped that he’d bring home a win for his efforts. As for Grace, Darla hoped with equal fervency that she’d had the good sense to stay away.

  Chris glanced up, and Darla gave him a friendly nod. He seemed to hesitate, and then he hurried over to her. “Hey, I saw your cat,” he told her with a fleeting smile. “He was pretty good.”

  “He was pretty good,” she agreed. “Too bad he decided to compete in the wrong age category. He got disqualified, just like me.”

  “Yeah, kinda stinks,” he said, the smile returning. Then, glancing around he said, “I don’t suppose you’ve seen my mom anywhere, have you?”

  “No, I don’t think I have.” Hoping he hadn’t heard the surprise in her tone, she added, “But I’ll let her know you’re looking for her if I see her.”

  “Guess she’s out for a smoke or something.” He nodded and wandered off again, and she felt a little outrage on his behalf. Couldn’t the woman have stayed home just once, and spared her son some embarrassment?

  But she forgot about Grace as soon as she reached her seat. Her duffel, now gaping open, still lay where she’d left it. Sitting down beside the ersatz cat carrier, she gave Hamlet a scratch behind the ears.

  “You might be smarter than the average cat, Hamlet, but it’s not safe to let you run loose,” she told him as she lowered him back into the bag. “I hate to do this to you, but you have to snuggle in there until we’re ready to go home again.”

  For a moment, Hamlet appeared willing to cooperate . . . that was, until the duffel’s zipper stuck. Then, as Darla struggled to free it, the cat bounded out of the bag and headed down toward the main floor again.

  “Hamlet, no!” she cried, leaping up to rush after him.

  The feline, however, was faster. Before Darla could catch up, he gave a quick zigzag, which took him to one of the smaller exits. But rather than running through it, he turned again. Then, with a flick of his black tail, he disappeared beneath a section of bleachers.

  Darla gave a cry of dismay and dropped to her knees, peering into the gap behind that section of seating. “Hamlet!” she cried. “Come here, kitty!”

  No green eyes stared back at her. Frantic now, she tried to squeeze into the gap, but she didn’t have Hamlet’s size advantage. Still, she could see that, slightly farther down behind the bleachers, there was an open area. Maybe he was hiding back there and laughing into his cat paws at her.

  “What are you looking for, Darla?” a familiar nasal voice behind her suddenly asked.

  Darla jumped at the unexpected sound, bumping her head on the bleacher’s edge.

  “Ouch!” Rubbing the back of her head, she scuttled out from the gap again and glared at Mark Poole, who was dressed in his white gi, the familiar headband with the rising sun tied around his forehead.

  “I’m kind of busy now, Mark,” she told him, rubbing her tender head again and wondering if this was going to become a habit, experiencing pain every time she saw the man. “So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll—”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t tell me what you were looking for.”

  Darla gave an exasperated sigh and sat back on her heels. “Fine. If you must know, I’m looking for my cat. He got loose out of my duffel bag and ran back there. I really need to find him, so I’ll have to talk to you later.”

  “Your cat?” Mark’s eyes behind his glasses blinked rapidly. “That’s a good one, Darla. What are you really looking for?”

  She gave him a doubtful look. He was blocking her way, and crouched as she was at an awkward angle, she wasn’t easily getting past him. “I already told you. You remember Hamlet, the black cat from my store. He’s hiding somewhere back here.”

  His expression cleared. “Oh, yeah,
Hamlet. I think maybe I just saw him.”

  “You did?”

  He nodded. “I’ve been here before, for other tournaments. There’s all these little rooms and crawlspaces all through the building. It’s kind of fun to go walking around them when it gets boring out on the floor.”

  “I get it,” she told him, cutting him short lest he launch into a thirty-minute discourse on college gyms. “So, what about Hamlet?”

  “He’s all black, right? Now that I know it’s your cat, I’m pretty sure he’s the one I saw go into one of those. The crawlspaces, I mean.”

  He paused and snickered. “I call them creepy crawly spaces . . . you know, because there’s always creepy crawlers in them. But, anyhow, you can get to the one he ran into from the back hall, if you want me to show you.”

  Darla allowed herself a small glimmer of hope. She was certain that Hamlet wouldn’t take up residence in the gymnasium for good—he liked his routine far too much to rough it for long—but she wouldn’t put it past him to take his sweet time about showing himself again. If she didn’t find him right away, she’d have to notify someone that he was hiding there somewhere . . . a fuzzy black needle in a very large concrete and steel-girdered haystack.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “I said I’d do it,” Mark replied, sounding irritated now. “You better hurry and make up your mind. I’ve got to go spar in a little while, and it will probably be too late to find him when I’m done.”

  “Come on, then,” she decided with a nod. “Let’s go, before he runs off again.”

  Mark smiled now and stuck out his hand. Seeing no choice for it, she took his sweaty palm and let him help her up. All the martial arts classes had clearly worked for him, since he had no trouble lifting her to her feet.

  “This way,” he said, still holding her hand as he made his way to the exit.

  TWENTY-TWO

  UNLIKE THE OTHER DOORWAYS, WHICH LED BACK TO THE main halls or the restrooms, this exit went in a separate direction toward what Darla assumed was the utilities portion of the building. Quickly the sounds from the ongoing competition grew faint, reminding her that she was missing out on Robert’s match. And as they moved at something closer to a trot than a walk down the hallway, she wondered why Mark was still hanging on to her like she was a naughty child prone to running away.

  “Uh, my hand,” she prompted him, trying to tug her fingers from his grasp.

  Mark stopped so swiftly that she almost smacked into him. He all but flung her hand away and then shot her a peeved look.

  “There, I’m not touching you anymore. Happy?” Not waiting for her answer, he continued, “I was just trying to make sure you didn’t get lost. You women are always complaining about something. Don’t touch me. Don’t look at me.”

  He said those last words in a mocking falsetto. Talk about creepy crawlers! Surreptitiously, she rubbed her palm against her gi trousers and wished she had her bottle of hand sanitizer. Then, abruptly, Mark’s expression crumpled a little, and he shoved his slipping glasses higher on his nose.

  “Sorry, Darla. I know I was being a real jackass to you, but I didn’t mean it. I’m just nervous about my sparring competition. We need to hurry and find your cat so we can get back out on the floor. Maybe you’ll even watch me when it’s my turn,” he added with a hopeful look.

  Darla suppressed a snort. Mark had no idea how much she wanted to see him get his “jackass” kicked a little. In fact, she’d pay extra to see it.

  “Of course,” she assured him as they started walking again. “But let’s worry about Hamlet first. Are you sure we’re going in the right direction?”

  He didn’t answer but halted once more, this time in front of a door with the stenciled words Campus Facilities Personnel Only emblazoned in chipped black paint. She was about to point out that they weren’t said personnel, when he twisted the knob.

  The door opened inward with a rusty squeal into a low-ceilinged, concrete brick corridor that was almost totally devoid of light. Not a problem for Hamlet with his super cat vision, she wryly told herself, but probably not the safest place for a blind-in-the-dark human to go traipsing through. No way was she setting foot in there. But then Mark reached in beside the doorframe and apparently found a light switch, for a moment later a series of single-tube fluorescent fixtures feebly flickered to life.

  Looking more than a little pleased with himself, he told her, “This way is a shortcut.”

  But was it?

  Darla hesitated, staring down the length of the utilitarian passageway which, even when lit, looked distinctly uninviting. Mark had said they could reach the storage crawlspace from the back hall, but surely that would have been right around the corner from the exit they’d taken. And already they had walked past several closed service doors that might also have led to the area under the bleachers. Right?

  Assuming that her mental map of the gym’s layout was correct, they were a good distance now from the spot where Hamlet had vanished. And that realization was beginning to make her feel uneasy. “Hang on, Mark,” she spoke up. “I know you’re trying to help, but I don’t think Hamlet would have gone this far. Why don’t we head back to the bleachers, and I’ll look there again.”

  “But we’re almost back there, anyhow,” he protested. “I told you, I’ve been all through this building a bunch of times before. It’s like a maze. The halls go like this”—he raised a finger and traced a long, narrow U in the air—“so even though it feels like we’ve walked a long way, we’re pretty much back where we started. We’re just on a different side of the wall.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Mark nodded vigorously. “Here, I’ll show you.” He gestured her to follow and started down the passage. Darla strode impatiently after him. If they didn’t get to the bleachers in the next minute, she told herself, she was going to abandon him and find her own way back to the gymnasium court.

  They’d gone maybe halfway down the corridor when she saw a metal door painted the same utilitarian gray as the walls. An electric light switch in the identical drab color was mounted nearby. This time, the black stenciled letters on the door read Electrical Room Authorized Personnel Only.

  “This is it,” Mark said in satisfaction as he pulled opened the door and simultaneously flipped on the light switch in the corridor.

  A series of bare bulbs came to life, their pallid glow bouncing off the metal electrical boxes mounted on both main walls of the room. Metal conduits snaked from them and ran like kudzu along the ceiling. In the room’s center, what she guessed was a generator of some sort stretched to the low ceiling and took up a good quarter of the floor space. She could hear it humming, the sound reminding her of a bee swarm in summer. Not a bad comparison, she thought, wondering what it would feel like to get zapped with that much electricity.

  Stepping back into the corridor so she could get a better look, Mark pointed directly ahead. “You cut through right here. Just keep walking straight until you run into another door like this one. Open it, and you’ll be under the bleachers right about where your cat should be.”

  “Wonderful,” Darla exclaimed with a smile, deciding that perhaps Mark wasn’t such a creepoid, after all. “Hopefully Hamlet will be waiting right there for me.”

  Relieved that she’d gotten all angsty over the situation for nothing, she stepped past him and headed into the room. Turning back for a moment, she added, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to stick around. I know you’ve got your sparring match in a bit. But let me make sure I have my bearings before you go. Once I find Hamlet, I think all I need to do is—”

  She hadn’t even finished her sentence when Mark smiled broadly. In a heartbeat, she realized what he intended to do just before he slammed the door on her. And before she could draw breath to protest that, the light flashed off, as well, leaving her in cave-like darkness.

  “
Mark! You jerk! Turn the light back on this instant,” she shrieked in the direction of the door.

  Or rather, where she guessed the door might be. For the sudden blackness around her was impenetrable, the door he’d closed upon her fitting so tightly that not even a sliver of light seeped beneath it. Heart pounding faster, Darla could feel herself swaying . . . or maybe she just imagined that she was. Something about the total darkness left her gripped by sudden vertigo, as if she were balancing on the edge of an unlit precipice.

  Trying not to panic, she shouted again, “Okay, you’ve had your joke. Now turn the light back on right now. I mean it, Mark!”

  “I mean it, Mark!” came the man’s faint mocking falsetto from the other side of the door. Then, resuming his usual nasal tones, he went on, “I don’t know, maybe if you ask me reeeeal nice, I’ll think about it.”

  “Open. The. Door,” she clipped out. “Now!”

  She heard a snigger from him.

  “Not going to happen, Darla,” he called back in a singsong voice. “I’ve got to keep you in there until I figure out what to do with you. Don’t you think I saw you spying on me? And then you pretended to have a cat with you so you had an excuse to stick your nose into everything. How stupid do you think I am?”

  “Do you really want me to answer that?” she shouted back at him, even as she frowned in confusion. Spying? What the heck was he talking about?

  But by now she was regaining her equilibrium a bit, as well as a bit of night vision. The various panels had small indicator lights on them . . . not enough to light her way, but sufficient to orient her. Gingerly, she slid one foot forward, and then the other, arms out in a parody of an old mummy movie.

  “Mark!” she called again, needing the sound of his voice to guide her, “I don’t know what you think I was doing, but you’re wrong. I was just trying to find Hamlet.”

  “No, you weren’t,” he yelled back, and she found she was nearer to the door than she’d realized. “I thought you were nice. We were friends and everything when we were playing word games on the computer, but you’re just like the rest of them.”