Nancy and the Dancing Cat

By William M. O’Brien, Jr.

Nancy Milstead pulled herself erect, spilling a full cup of steaming coffee into her lap. The burning liquid quickly penetrated her skirt, flowed down her thighs, soaked her panty-hose and burned her crotch and privates. She wanted to scream, not from pain but fear.

Nearby, a small black cat sat in the open doorway of Nita’s Diner and licked its fur. Its eyes, two green and black marbles, glanced up intermittently at Nancy, who sat stiffly nearby.

She did not feel the scalding coffee near as much as the horror and revulsion at the sight of the cat. The burning sensation between legs she could control, but the sight of the little beast in the doorway she could not.

The cat crouched on its haunches, swished its tail and stared at Nancy. Its mouth opened slightly to emit a low, prolonged whine. Then, after momentarily studying the frightened woman, it turned its attention to something in the street.

Nancy fought to control herself, glancing around the room and then back at the cat. Although it was only a kitten, she felt trapped by this monster, which was now ignoring her. Only with effort could she take her eyes from it.

She closed her eyes and once again relived a life-long nightmare. In an alley back home in Bloomfield, Oklahoma, ten-year-old Nancy confronted the gigantic old battle-scarred tom the neighbors called Old Solomon , crouched against a closed garage door amid over-turned trash barrels. Holding her breath, she approached the hideous creature slowly. Terrified, but fascinated, she hadn’t expected the thing to be this large, larger than most dogs she knew.

The creature immediately raised its back, menacingly, and snarled in her direction. Slowly, Nancy walked toward it, hands out, hypnotized by a strange combination of dread, fascination and revulsion.
In one movement, the animal turned its entire body toward her and lowered its head, its one good eye glaring through her. Then, the feline horror arched its back even higher and bared its teeth, its whine becoming louder.

Five feet from the animal, Nancy stopped. She could smell the creature and felt nausea welling up within her. The animal’s hideous appearance and unnatural sound aroused in her a disgust and hatred she had never felt before.

Moving slowly, her eyes never leaving the cat, she bent down and picked up a brick. When she straightened up, she hid the brick in one hand behind her. The animal moved toward her, slowly and deliberately, its eye glaring upward, searching for hers. Thousands of gray, white and black spears glistened on its back.

In a heartbeat, she stepped forward, raised the brick in both hands over her head and brought it down squarely on the animal’s head.

The cat twisted over on one side, a huge gash above its one good eye. Quickly, Old Solomon recovered from the blow and, leaping at the frightened girl, sank teeth and front claws into her bare calf.

Nancy screamed, reaching for the animal’s bloody head. But when she bent over, it released her, jumped upward and knocked her to the ground on her back. Bolting through her upraised knees the cat, claws spread, landed full on her chest. In an instant, its mouth closed on Nancy’s cheek.

“Here, let me wipe that up for you. Did you get much on you?” A young waitress, “Nita’s Diner” stenciled on her blouse, hovered over Nancy, a worried look in her eyes.

But Nancy didn’t hear her. Her consciousness, still in Bloomfield, Oklahoma, could hear nothing. Slowly, she came back to the present and focused her eyes again on the animal at the door. It moved its head from right to left and then lifted itself from it crouching position. Fear and nausea cut through Nancy like a knife. With effort, she glanced away while the cat crept out the door.

“Ma’am, can I—“ the young waitress started again.

“No—No—Where is your restroom, please?” Nancy glanced up at the young woman and tried to smile. Then, she slowly stood up and looked about the room.

“It’s in the back by the serving counter. Ma’am, are you sure you’re all right?” The girl placed her hand on Nancy’s shoulder.

“Yes—Yes, just a problem with my clumsiness. I’ll—I’ll be all right thank you.” Crumpling her napkin on the table, she rose, one hand pressed against her stomach, and hurried to the women’s room at the back.

Later, in her car, Nancy, in helpless tears, briefly remembered an exhausted nap in a hotel room just five days before. In a dream, a black cat, exactly like the one in the door of the diner, crouched on her chest and kneaded her with its forepaws, its glaring, blank face emitting Old Solomon’s snarl. When she threw it off, it landed on the floor and rose on its hind legs, its front claws pawing frantically at the air. It stayed on its hind legs balancing itself while its fur changed from black to smoke gray. Nancy, frightened beyond words, stared at the animal and then focused her attention on its head. It had only one eye, with a patch of fur where the other should be. She awakened in a sweat, panting in terror.

When she stood up, she discovered, to her disgust, that she’d wet herself, peeing profusely all over her clothes and the bed.

Now, in the car, she shook her head violently, attempting to drive the loathsome memory from her mind. She twisted the ignition key violently and ground her teeth in disgust and helplessness at this fear, the only fear that made her vulnerable. And fear, to her, was a weakness to be exploited in someone else. She feared no one, not one person. But cats? Momentarily, she remembered Old Solomon and the thought made her shiver all over again.

Fiercely competitive at thirty-five, she had not climbed but scrambled up the corporate ladder to second Vice-President of the local Chalmer’s Savings and Loan, a large member of a nation-wide chain. High intelligence, iron will and good looks had endeared her to supervisors and customers alike. And her basically predatory nature in business had kept the competition at a minimum. Now, near the top, she could look back on a successful career at a young age. She felt herself invulnerable and so did all around her. Completely confident in everything she did, she prided herself on her fearlessness, a virtual freedom from all fears—all but one.

Possible promotion to an even higher position required a transfer to this city where she had rented a townhouse from a Dr. Ralph Drexler, an ear, eye and nose and throat specialist dabbling in real estate. He had given her a key and informed her that the house was ready except for minor repairs that his handyman, Arthur, would take care of. Oddly, the rent was low.

Although the man was friendly enough when she met him that morning, Nancy noticed that there was something about Dr. Drexler that she did not like; nothing tangible, but something that made him seem like he was trapping her, or lying in wait for her. While he spoke, his eyes had taken her whole body in, slowly. Then, they had stared straight into hers but seemed not to be looking at her at all. She handled him in her usual polite, business-like manner but when she left his office, she felt beads of sweat rolling down her legs. And she shivered. But she shrugged off her misgivings in her usual manner. And then came the diner.

133 Howard Lane, her new home, turned out to be an interesting three-story townhouse on the edge of downtown. Some ninety years old, it brooded over a single, squat oak tree spreading its shade over the entire front yard. Two doors from the corner, it was the only townhouse on the block, Nancy thought, that had any character. Just right for her.

Feeling a twinge of excitement, she hurried up a short flight of steps to a large old-fashioned door and quickly inserted her key. Then, she shoved the door open into total darkness.

Immediately, a gust of cold, foul-smelling air wafted out of the house against her. Staggering back a step, she clasped a hand over her mouth and bent away from the open door. The heavy smell made her choke. But something more than just mustiness in the air made her want to get back in her car and leave.

“Phew! Than son-of-a-bitch could have at least aired this place out,” she said aloud to herself, trying to hold her breath. Although the smell vanished rapidly, the mustiness still hung in the air, even on the porch. And dust seemed everywhere.

She walked inside to the base of the stairs, lighted from the open door. Coughing, she lowered herself to the bottom step and pressed her hands to her stomach and mouth. There, in the darkness, she began to speculate where a light switch could be. And she wondered why the house was so dark in the middle of the day.

When she caught her breath, Nancy looked around her. Sitting alone in the dark, she suddenly became acutely aware of a formless fear, the source of which she could not determine. She was abruptly afraid of something that seemed very near, something inexplicable and horrible, in the house. And the smell was worse than before.

Frightened and sick, she staggered through the front door to the fresh air on the porch. Outside, she noted a distinct difference between the atmosphere there and that just inside the door. She stepped down three steps from the front porch and tried to control the terror balling itself up at the very bottom of her.
Nancy paused on the steps, her back still to the open front door. In momentary self-defense, she thought about her iron will which had always kept her one notch above everything around her. After all, in business, instead of her being afraid, she was the one to be feared. Nothing could get to her, least of all a filthy house. Nothing was different here, she thought. No wonder the place was cheap. The dirt and dust were inches deep!

Still a bit shaky, though, she entered and located a light by the bottom of the staircase. Walking toward a kitchen at the back, she attempted to drive the darkness out as quickly as possible by switching on every light she came to and throwing open each window curtain. When she turned to retrace her steps to the front door, she noticed, disappearing into a room off the main hall, the tail and hindquarters of a cat.

“What the hell!” she screamed, storming to the door after the creature. Quickly she groped for the light and flicked it on. Her immediate impulse was to slam the door to this room and keep it locked, but the idea, the indignity, that this hateful little animal was in her house was too much to bear. She was determined to search the room; to tear it apart if need be.

In the room, though, nothing moved. Nancy looked everywhere, even on the windowsills, which were layered with dust, but the animal had simply disappeared. She gritted her teeth and breathed deeply, wondering if maybe the cat had gotten behind her and fled to another part of the house. Scanning the room she had just searched, she puzzled over the stillness, the vacantness of everything. Except for her, nobody, or nothing, had been in this room for years, or at least months. There were no tracks in the thick dust or any other indication that an animal had entered the room.

Bewildered and angry, Nancy walked to the living room and lay down on a couch—dustless from being covered—and thought about the serious of “seeing things.” She was sure now that the cat had not gotten around her. It had simply vanished. Or had never been there at all. Or was it left over from the incident earlier in the day?

She thought of Dr. Drexler but, no in a mood to chew anyone out, decided against calling him. She studied his face in her mind and the effort put her into a troubled sleep. Immediately, a frightening dream produced an animal, which she could not identify, clinging to her and biting her around her upper body. An effort to slap the creature away woke her up to sharp pains in her upper torso. She could feel several needle pricks in her shoulders and right breast.

Cursing softly, she began to feel about her upper body for wounds. She could feel small tears in her blouse. When she drew her hands away from her body, she noticed blood on her fingertips.

“What is this shit?” she said aloud, breathing faster and faster. Beginning to panic, she began to search the room for a mirror. Her mouth opened for a scream but she heard nothing. Again she began to grope about herself for wounds. Staggering in her high heels, she started for the hall to find a downstairs bathroom. When she reached the base of the stairs, she was unnerved by the thud of a door knocker she hadn’t noticed on the front door.

“Who is it?’ Nancy shouted, terror rising in her like water filling a jar.

“Arthur, Ma’am. You have a few repairs need to be done?”

She wiped her hands, thoughtlessly, on her clothes and examined her fingertips. “Just a minute,” she yelled, regaining her composure as rapidly as she could.

After a minute, she opened the front door to Arthur Kessler, a young man satisfied with everything he did in life. His agreeable smile and loose, swinging arms contrasted sharply with Nancy’s staid, frightened appearance in the front door.

“The Doctor sent me over to do a couple of things. Only be a little while.” Arthur’s eyes fell on Nancy’s chest. “You hurt, Ma’am?” He pointed to spot just above her right breast.

“I—Never mind that! I want to talk to you about this.” Nancy put her hands on her hips and cocked her head, a prosecutor presenting an unexpected accusation.”

“About the house, Ma’am?” Arthur’s cheerful voice fell, puzzled momentarily.

“Yes, the house. For starters, it’s filthy! It needs dusting and scrubbing. And secondly, there is an animal in this house!” The combination of Nancy’s voice and eyes beat on Arthur’s head.

“An animal, Ma’am?” Arthur’s mouth screwed up into a confused grimace.

“A cat!”

“A cat?”

“Yes, damn it, a cat! In this house!” Nancy’s voice, buoyed up by the horror of her dream, rose.

“Ma’am, I don’t see how.” The young man, bewildered, scratched his head. “ This house has been completely shut. Nobody’s ever had a cat in this house. Not that I know of.”

“I don’t care about that. There’s a cat in this house; I saw it. Now you find it and get it out. And I want this house dusted. Tomorrow, while I’m at work, I want it scrubbed!” Her chest heaved with every word.
“Hell, Ma’am. I don’t know how the damn thing got in.” Arthur stared blankly past Nancy, up the hall. “Never been any animal around here as far as…”

Nancy’d had enough. You just make sure you get that animal out, today!” She screamed, her face flushing a bright red.

Arthur vanished down the hall toward the kitchen while Nancy retreated to the living room. Heavily she plopped down on the couch again and wondered why she felt so tired having done hardly anything that day.

She lay there still, breathing softly. Hearing Arthur rummaging around a t the back of the house, she worked her hand up under her skirt and began to feel around in her crotch. Her underwear was still damp from the spilled coffee. And she began to feel like she had to go to the bathroom.

Straightening her skirt, she began to rise, but before she could swing her legs over the edge of the couch, she heard it—the unmistakable, snarling whine of a cat, echoing seemingly, into the living room from the hall.

Exploding in terror, she let go, peeing heartily into her already damp undergarments soaking her bottom and creating a wet spot on the couch. “Arthur,” she screamed. “Get the hell in here! Now!” jumping to her feet, unmindful of her situation down below, she screamed, a loud, piercing female shriek that, given her right mind, she would be totally ashamed of.

Arthur’s face, a red balloon floating above overalls, appeared at the livingroom door. “What, Ma’am?”

“Did you hear that?”

“hear what, Ma’am?”

“Hear what? Are you deaf or something? That..that sound, you…that screech! O god, I’ve had enough of this shit! You search this house, now. I just heard a cat, plain as day. A cat, mind you. A cat! A C-A-T in this house!” She began to cry, something else she would be ashamed of, although now, it seemed, she did it often. “That doctor, I’m going to call that bastard.” She choked, jerking her head back and forth. Even though she did not know what she would encounter, she ran upstairs, trying to flee something totally frightening that she had impulsively pinpointed in the living room.

She found a large bedroom near the top of the stairs at the front of the house and fell on the bed. She took deep breaths and pressed both hands to her chest to quell her rapidly beating heart.

It was then that she finally noticed how wet she was. Grimacing, she reached down and found that her skirt was soaked. She rose from the bed and found a bathroom nearby where she took off her wet panties and laid them nearby. Then, taking a handful of toilet paper, she dried herself off. She needed a shower and wanted to dispense with her underwear altogether, but with Arthur in the house, neither activity would be feasible. She washed and dried herself again and then pulled her damp undies back into place.
Momentarily she thought about returning downstairs but decided against it. Instead she returned to the bedroom where she had been before. Distraught as she was, she noticed that the room was clean and free of dust.

“I wonder how this room is so clean when the downstairs if so dusty,” she said softly, to herself. She wondered about the pettiness of her thoughts and the strangeness of talking to herself. Also, she was amazed at how calm she was now when just a few minutes she had become completely unnerved.
For the first time all day she began to get comfortable. But her comfort was watchful and uneasy. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling; than at the walls.

A multitude of cracks in the wall near one corner of the room seemed to move when she watched them. Nancy blinked and shook her head. She reached for her handbag containing her glasses but remembered she had left if downstairs in the living room. Glancing again at the corner, she noticed that the cracks had begun to form shapes that suggested small animals, curious rat-like creatures that posed in contorted positions and opened ferocious mouths. For a moment Nancy held her breath; then rose from the bed and walked to the corner to examine the wall. There was nothing but a few spots on the walls formed by moisture from the outside. Puzzled, she ran her hand over the wall, then turned to go downstairs.

She was retrieving her handbag from the living room when Arthur appeared at the door.

“Ma’am…Ms. Milstead. I can’t find anything. My only idea is that the cat came in earlier and got out while I was looking for it. I didn’t find any trace of the cat but I did find an open window in the basement. That’s probably where it got in. I closed that up.” Arthur stood, a baseball cap in hand, a kid reporting to a teacher. “And Dr. Drexler has a woman that can do the cleaning.”

“I want that window nailed up.” Nancy stared at him, sternly through owl-like glasses just put on.
“Yes, Ma’am. As I was saying the Doctor’s got a woman that can do the cleaning and I’ll finish up the other repairs tomorrow while she’s here.” Without receiving an answer, Arthur slipped out the front door and left.

Choosing another upstairs bedroom down the hall from the one she had been in before, Nancy set up housekeeping for the night. She’d brought her suitcase upstairs and plopped it down on a small table by a window. She still puzzled over the cleanliness of the upstairs—this room, like the other, was curiously clean as opposed to the downstairs—but dismissed it to herself saying that someone, perhaps Arthur, had stayed there overnight and wanted it clean. Who knows—maybe the previous tenants, for some reason, kept the upstairs clean and let the downstairs go. However, she was determined that the entire house would be kept spotless, beginning tomorrow.

After changing her clothes, Nancy busied herself with work she had brought with her. Every fifteen minutes or so she would stop what she was doing and listen, trying to hear someone, or something, in the house. But she heard nothing. Night was falling. She thought about staying up all night but decided she was much too tired.

Later, she ate a bowel of cold cereal and retired early. Uneasy but in a comfortable bed, she lay still and contemplated the day’s events. She wondered about the house. Such queer circumstances all day long. I couldn’t be losing my mind, could I? She thought to herself.

Alone in the dark, Nancy lay under the covers and thought about the darkness around her. Everything was quiet; nothing, not even street noises, disturbed the unnatural quiet of the room. Although very tired and sleepy, something warned Nancy about going to sleep, although she was too tired to acknowledge it. She thought about a foreboding dream she had had before she had left her previous job.

She had dreamed that she was standing in her office when a shadow had approached her from out of nowhere and stabbed her through the stomach with a large knife. Her reaction was to flail away at her assailant but there was nothing there. But she clearly felt the knife which had passed all the way through her body. Feeling a situation that should have been painful but had just felt odd, she had wondered why she hadn’t fallen; why she wasn’t dead. Her only sensation was the odd feeling of this intruding thing in her body. And she was alive!

She had shrugged the dream off as an oddity, a weird experience that occurred once in a life-time. Besides, if a dreamer died in a dream, was he not supposed to die in reality? But then had come the dreams about the cats. She wondered if these dreams were somehow connected.

Quickly fast asleep, however, she began to dream again. Her second dream in the new house proved worse than the first.

In it, a large gray cat crouched on her chest, kneading her neck and breasts with sharpened fore claws. Something about the animal’s face, less than three inches from hers, was terrifyingly familiar. Its head moved even closer and she caught the foul odor of its breath. There was no mistake now. The hideous presence on top of her was Old Solomon.

She tried to move her arms but some unseen force pinned them to her sides. When she jerked to the left, the force flung the animal off of her to the floor.

The whining creature hit the floor with a mild thump and immediately reared up on its hind legs, its rear paws gyrating to and from while its forefeet pawed the air. Nancy stared at the wildly moving animal in horror. Her eyes fixed on its head, she heard, from a mouth that did not move, a gravelly voice. “You tried to kill me years ago, bitch. Now, I’m going to kill you.” A scream welling up within her, Nancy awoke.

Nothing moved in the room. Some light from a distant street lamp slightly illuminated her bed and part of a dresser on the opposite wall. She examined the bed in the dimness and then looked down at her nightgown, which was shredded, as if cut by a razor. She placed both hands to her breast and breathed heavily.

Shivering in horror, Nancy switched on the light and peered under the bed, all the while clasping her chest tightly with one hand. She tried to control her trembling by hugging herself but couldn’t. With her hands still tight around her, she raised up and tried to listen for a sound, any sound. All she could hear was her own sobbing and heavy breathing. Tearfully, she tried to explain to herself that her sliced nightgown was the work of her own fingernails. But her fingernails were always clipped painfully short for work on computers. So her terror and her helplessness remained.

She did not go back to sleep. She lay in bed and wondered if there was anyplace in the house that would be a sanctuary for her if something were there with her. Fidgeting with her bedclothes, she cursed her inability to explain her nightgown. There had to be a rational explanation, she thought. But what? How could a horrid dream produce this physical evidence? The whole situation mocked her superb innate ability to reason things out. Even though she was still tired, she remained awake, afraid of dozing off.

For the sake of her own sanity as well as a hundred unknown noises which multiplied in her mind, she phoned Dr. Drexler’s service to leave her number. In twenty minutes he called, obviously wondering why Nancy, not a patient, had disturbed him in the middle of the night. Somewhat aggravated, he denied any knowledge of a cat or any other animal on the premises. He did offer her a prescription, the address of an all night drugstore and the advice to go back to sleep. Thanking the doctor through clenched teeth, she hung up the phone. She did not go back to sleep.

Out of pure resilience, Nancy reported for work the next day. Since work for her had always been a panacea, her new responsibilities cheered her up somewhat and took her mind off of 133 Howard Lane. However, at five o’clock, she knew she must return to her fear and her vulnerability. Off and on during the day she thought about going to a bar but pooh-poohed the idea as a sign of weakness.

On her way home she thought about renting a motel room for the night. This idea very quickly became revolting to her. The whole idea that she could be chased from her home by an illusion, or by bad dreams, angered her and made her even more determined to get home and confront these disturbances to her peace again; this time to grab them and throw them out of existence. She cheered herself on the way home by thinking of possible strategies she could use to turn this affair around. After all, wasn’t this just another business-world shark, to be grasped by the tail and hurled into oblivion. More and more, she began to feel better. The idea of a challenge had always been an elixir. She even began to smile for the first time in a couple of days.

When she drove up under the carport in the back, Arthur was waiting.

“Ma’am, I replaced the window and it’s locked tight,” he said, grinning. “And Mrs. Arbuckle cleaned up., too. You outha see it. Clean as a whistle.”

Nancy looked at him through the open window. Then, she rolled the window up. Opened the car door and hurriedly got out, her legs spread apart. Not minding that Arthur could probably glimpse a good portion of her bottom up her skirt, she slowly straightened and stood up, very close to his face.

“Arthur,” she said, hands on her hips and authority in her voice, “Did you or Mrs. Arbuckle put all of the stuff in the kitchen for cooking and all of the things in the living room that were not there before?”

“Yes…Yes, Ma’am.” Arthur’s face was beet red.

“Good, I’ll let you or the good doctor know if I need anything else.” She turned her back on him and walked up the steps to her back door. She entered the house slowly and went up to her room and shut the door. When she lay down on the bed, she noticed that the exuberance she had felt earlier had left her.

The house seemed harmless enough, silent and pleasantly clean. Mrs. Arbuckle had even put fresh flowers in the dining room. And the mustiness and the dust were gone.

But was it all gone? Nancy thought as she stretched out, fully clothed, on the bed upstairs. She began a study of the ceiling and walls in this bedroom and thought about eating something but before she could rise and go to the kitchen, she fell asleep.

At ten o’clock, she awakened and raised herself on her bed. Her momentary joy over having not dreamed this time was replaced by sudden apprehension that she was alone in the dark.

It occurred to her that Arthur may still be around the premises. “Arthur,” she called, wondering if she had locked the back door when she came in. “Arthur, are you still here?” There was no sound in the house. She looked at her watch and realized that she had slept over four hours.

Perturbed, she moved to the edge of the bed and swung her legs over the side. When she put her feet flat on the floor, she noticed an object immediately between her ankles. Puzzled for a moment, she kicked at it, thinking it was some piece of clothing left by the bed the previous night. But before her foot could strike the object in the darkness, it vanished. Nancy kicked about by the bed for the object but it was no longer there.

“What the hell?” she said softly.

She turned on the light and looked about the room but found nothing. Her examination of the bed, underneath and behind, yielded nothing as well. Frustrated as she was , she dismissed the phenomenon as the bedspread rubbing against her bare ankles. What else could it be?

Nancy changed into her nightgown and went downstairs for something to eat. She ate grapes from a bowl, drank milk and thought about what had happened up in her room. Every now and then she would again stop and listen, trying to hear anything, any sound in the house. There was nothing. Even for an old house, there was absolutely no sound anywhere.

She returned to bed, turned off her lamp and slipped into an uneasy sleep. Although again she did not dream, she was awakened shortly by a sound by her bedside.

Quickly, she put on the light and swung her legs over the side. When she put her feet flat on the floor this time, there was no mistaking the object immediately between her ankles. Puzzled for a moment but remembering the same sensation from before, she kicked at it. But before her foot could strike the object, the animal moved instantly onto the bed and into her lap.

When the cat rose on its haunches and put its forepaws on her chest, Nancy realized, with utter horror, that this time she was not dreaming. She was wide awake.

The animal’s face, staring with one vacant eye socket, filled her with an all-too-familiar terror and revulsion. The rough fur, the filthy breath and huge sharp claws told her she was face to face with a life-long nightmare. To her it was, as she knew it must be, Old Solomon.

Was this just a vision, a ghost returned from her childhood? Or was the animal really here? And if so, how?

“God…God,” she choked, nausea welling up within her. She tried to knock the monster off her lap. When that failed, she threw herself backwards on the bed and flipped over. Instantly, the animal was on top of her back, its forepaws dragging ten tiny razors through clothes and flesh from her shoulders to her hips. She began to crawl, painfully, to the head of the bed.

“Oh God, You bastard, you..leave me alone! Get out! You…” In pain and bleeding from her back, Nancy flipped to her right to grab the animal. Rolling off the bed, she landed on her stomach and lay still, holding her breath.

She gritted her teeth and waited for the animal to attack her in the darkness. When it didn’t, she jumped up and ran into the hall, only to be hated by her choking. The air in the hall was foul with the filthy smell of long dead animals…a smell she recognized from her first few minutes in the house.

Sobbing, she pressed both hands against her midsection and bent over at the waist. Then she straightened up again and screamed as loud as she could. “I’m going to kill you, you hear me!”

She ran to the stairwell to see the monster, huge and menacing, sitting on its haunches before the open front door. Its twisted, empty face snarled up at her. The same terror and revulsion she had felt as a child once again overcame her and she doubled over, sobbing convulsively.

But her anger quickly replaced these sensations and Nancy, screaming, charged the animal. Before she reached the bottom of the stairs, however, the cat vanished, silently through the front door.

Enraged, she turned around the staircase and raced to the kitchen where she drew a long, wide butcher knife out of a drawer. Leaving the drawer wide open, she ran to the porch and there, on the sidewalk, sat the animal, waiting for her.

In the dim street lamp, the animal was little more than a shadow, but Nancy could still see that its head turned in her direction. She screamed at the animal and ran toward it.

The cat opened its mouth but made no sound. Then, it turned its head and ran toward the street corner.

Bereft of every bit of composure and good sense, Nancy was determined to catch this “vision” and dispose of it once and for all. In desperation, she followed the creature toward the end of the block, the knife raised high in her hand.

About ten feet from the corner of Howard Lane, the animal stopped, suddenly, and Nancy, following close behind, quickly closed on it. She raised the knife high over her head and, when almost on top of the monster, brought it down in a large arc away from her body. But the cat moved, swiftly, two feet forward and Nancy, losing her balance, stumbled, falling forward, the knife immediately under her. With nothing to hinder it, the blade sliced into her body as she fell solidly on top of it.

She felt it pass through her stomach and large intestine as the point made its way through her body and out her back. Nancy lay prostrate, twitching, a full four inches of the blade protruding from her back.

“What…Wha….” Nancy, glancing down underneath her at the knife handle, both hands still wrapped around it, gaped in disbelief. She could feel her gravely wounded innards and a pain building rapidly in her lower body. And, is if her lower parts were divorced from her upper parts, she peed profusely into her nightgown.

But the cat sat silently, and looked at her, its death’s head grin empty as its one eye socket.

“You…You filthy bastard, you…,” she sputtered at the monster. Nancy tried to turn herself on her side but couldn’t. “I’m…I’m…, you…”

Then her mouth barely moved. “You’re just an animal,” she whispered. “You can’t…” When she closed her eyes, her body blended with the sidewalk and she said no more.

READER COMMENTS

back to top