______________________
So…
This is the final part.
Part 2.
It’s night and I’m about to go to bed.
I thought I was done for the day.
I was crying by the end of my last entry, but with this entry, I worry that I won’t ever be able to sleep again if I don’t finish it before the clock strikes midnight.
Just remembering makes me shudder.
I was so close to her and did nothing.
This is all I thought about during the whole process.
The interviews.
The interrogation.
The eulogy.
All I could think about was how I hadn’t done shit to help my love.
And whenever I tried to remember her, all I could project in my mind’s eye were her injuries from the autopsy photos the cops had shown me.
Death by manual strangulation.
Deep scars throughout the body, suggesting defense from a bladed weapon.
No signs of sexual assault.
Night after night they danced inside my head.
One night, a particularly bad night, I slept on her side of the bed.
I didn’t let Jasper in my room anymore.
The loneliness was unbearable though.
I felt as though I was tainting that cat more than he’d already been by letting him near me.
I couldn’t sleep.
My hand slipped under her cold pillow and that’s when I found her butterfly knife tucked under it.
I wonder how long I gazed at that thing.
I just remember waking up the next day, still clutching it in my hand.
I had to take Jasper to the Vet, and when I came home, I remembered her dream diary.
It was still under the bed, and I flipped to the very last page, the one on the day she died.
“Today I will finally kill the monster,” it read, “I can’t believe I thought it wasn’t real. Stephanie came home early, while It was still caressing my thigh. The sudden entrance startled It, and its long claw sliced my skin. I hid it from her, and when I woke up the next day, those scars from the claws was still there. I haven’t been dreaming. I was never dreaming.
It was right under our nose this whole time.
I’ll strike when It least expects it.
I will have my revenge.
I know what it is now.
I know where it is.
I shudder to think I’ve walked over that fucking crawlspace every time I went into that damn laundry room.”
Oh, how things click into place when they’re shown to you.
The invisible suddenly exposing itself to flash you, akin to a perfectly executed “fuck you” for not paying attention before.
In the days leading up to her death, Angie had always been hesitant to go into the laundry room, and now I was sure I knew why.
I searched for it after I picked Jasper up from the Vet.
The crack in question was nearly imperceptible unless you were down on your knees and aiming your gaze right at it.
After using Angie’s knife to crack it open, I was hit by the air that board kept down on a daily basis.
A rotten scent which smelled like a mixture of animal food and the breath of someone who never brushed.
An oversized blanket lay there, coiled like a bird’s nest as though it had been stirred with a spoon. Empty food wrappers lay as far as the eye could see, but what caught my attention the most was the small, black notebook in the central eye of the blanket.
I haphazardly picked it up, almost falling down in the process.
I flipped this notebook to a random entry and started to read.
“I wonder why she doesn’t notice me…
She should’ve realized I’m here by now.
I guess I’ve given her brains too much credit.
Still, it’s nice watching them shower.
It does get boring rather quickly when they don’t notice you.
I wonder what they’re reactions would be like if they knew.
Especially that one. But I think the other is catching on quickly. Oh how I can’t wait to play with her.”
The rest of the pages all contained the same ramblings you read above, but phrased differently just enough to make you think they were all different.
But they were all the same.
The plain never-ending words of a lunatic.
Where the person who’d written them was at that point was anyone’s guess.
But I didn’t feel safe anymore.
With no warning, I heard a noise from behind me and jumped, nearly spitting my heart out. But then I saw Jasper standing stoically by the doorway.
I sighed in relief and walked past him.
I was determined to get that wretched notebook to the police, and I was about to leave, but the front door wouldn’t open.
I jiggled the knob but to no avail.
I wonder why my mind didn’t register the red flag waving right in front of my eyes.
All I’m sure of is that I only stopped when a voice talked to me from behind.
“It’s quite futile, I assure you,” they said.
I froze in place.
I froze not because I was startled by the voice, but because I recognized it.
Arthur.
My feet were the only thing of mine which could move, and I turned around, expecting to see him.
But Arthur was nowhere to be found.
I only saw Jasper.
I looked around frantically, trying to find him, when his voice rang out again.
“Really,” Arthur said,” is it really that hard to look down?”
Jasper swung his tail slowly, like the pendulum of a clock, and had I not seen the next words come out of his mouth, I never would have believed what my mind was screaming at me in that very moment.
“Ah,” my cat said,” there we go.”
Jasper was talking in Arthur’s voice, and I felt my bones melt.
At the drop of a hat, I went from a rigid statue to a gelatinous sculpture struggling to keep its shape on the floor.
Jasper’s…or rather Arthur’s slit pupils were dilated, like two gashes stretched open by forceps. Predatory bloodlust oozed out uncontrollably from them.
I thought of all the times I’d held him in my arms, cuddled him, and changed in front of him, but the wave of disgust that I felt in me was unceremoniously eclipsed by the pain of the glass rod I hadn’t been aware of exploding, its shattered fragments penetrating every single part of me that my skin would hold at bay at any given time.
The pain my mind and body were feeling at that moment is indescribable.
My muscles felt constricted by needles while my brain felt like it would be shredded by the shards it was eating from my bloodstream.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had a stroke or an aneurism.
But I didn’t.
Arthur just purred at the sight.
“You know my love, it really could have been just us. Every decade or so I would come back as a different cat, and I would give you all the hugs and cuddles and kisses you could possibly imagine, but that bitch just HAD to interfere. It really is quite sad. Her skin was so smooth, so easy to cut and bruise at the slightest of touch. I daresay she’s better than you in that aspect, but oh how much you have that she never could. A venerable forbidden fruit you are, out of the reach of man. I find that to be very unfair.”
“T-The FUCK ARE YOU?!”
We’ve all seen them, haven’t we?
Those horror movies where we laugh at the sight of a character asking the obvious or making a stupid decision.
Well, you have to be there to feel it.
It’s not the fear that gets to you.
It’s the confusion.
That’s what you feel.
What you see in those movies, and what I was experiencing at that moment, was a delicate combination of the two that prevented me from going into full fight or flight.
I was just frozen in place, my mind struggling to wrap itself around this absurd situation.
And Arthur knew this full well.
“Come on love,” he told me, his whiskers twitching like the legs of a cricket,” you know oh so well what I am. I’m your one and only love. The only one who will be there for you, you’ll allow into your bed, you’ll cook for, and so on. What’s so hard to understand about that?”
“B-but you’re a fucking CAT!”
My words were like the sputters of an engine, and the whole while I was talking, I kept thinking about a way out. I knew that he’d most likely locked all the other doors somehow, and I couldn’t risk jumping out of a window. I had my car keys with me, but now the only problem was getting out.
“A small price to pay,” he replied with a purr that made my skin crawl.
At that moment, I didn’t have the slightest idea why I was afraid of such a small cat. But I guess at some level I probably understood that he’d been the one who’d killed Vic and Angie, so I really couldn’t take any chances.
The words that Angie had written in her dream journal also wrecked chaos in my mind.
“Come on,” Arthur said while coming near me, “We can make it work. True love always finds a way after all.”
“THIS ISN’T TRUE LOVE YOU SON OF A BITCH! YOU KILLED MY TRUE LOVE LIKE THE JEALOUS FUCKING PRICK YOU ARE AND THAT YOU’LL ALWAYS BEEN! A PATHETIC SWINE DRESSED LIKE A CAT YOU ARE! JUST LIKE ALL THE FUCKING REST!”
At that, he stopped, and I’ll never forget how those sharp pupils seemed to slice me into pieces with their gaze.
It hit me that if I didn’t move in a bit, now that he was distracted, I’d never have a better chance of making it out alive.
But the cascade of cracks that began to ring out made me hesitate. I saw the cat writhe on the floor as it seemed to gurgle and its skin boil, as his tail got longer and his claws got sharper.
I ran up the stairs, hoping that I could find an opened window and make my way to the car. The keys were still in my pocket, but I feared my wits were on the verge of abandoning me.
I went to the bedroom and slammed the door behind me before locking it. I then tried to desperately open that damn window, but to my absolute dismay, I saw that it had been glued shut, and my wits really did leave me when I saw a caulk tube of silicone on the floor.
But then I remembered the knife.
After nearly slicing my fingers off, I positioned the tip of the blade at the center of the window, but just as I prepared my hand for a grand push that was more like a blow, I heard something which made me stop dead in my tracks.
A knock.
It felt like my circulatory system had solidified, my blood frozen like ice.
The knock had been rather quiet, but I heard it nonetheless.
It came twice more before an emulsifying silence followed.
And that’s when it came.
A hand.
A hand much like a tarantula – with long and sharp claws instead of long and hairy legs – crawled from under the crevice of the door before it crept up and up and up towards the handle like a true spider taking its time.
A click echoed, and I found myself faced with what Angie had to bear seeing every day before it finally killed her.
The door opened to reveal a gaunt figure covered in patches of fur resembling a fir tree, with a tail more like a spine dragging behind it. Its limbs were so long they almost reached the ground, capped by feet and hands with long daggers for claws.
But the face is the one I’ll never forget.
Don’t imagine a cat.
Imagine a rabbit instead.
Don’t imagine a cute rabbit.
Imagine one that is feral and angry, one injected with bile of absolute loathing, diseased to the point where having rabies is considered a healthy state of being.
Beady eyes like bullets which are like caterpillars trying to wiggle through a crevice, with teeth so small and so numerous so as to appear like a saw.
Ears small enough to be on the head of a normal cat and a… a-a penis which looked like the skinned tail of an elephant.
There are few moments in modern life where you feel danger as primal as that, and I can say with certainty that I will never again in my life be able to turn faster than I did at that very moment.
But even so, those spindly daggers still managed to wrap themselves around my leg before anything shattered.
I dropped the knife, and felt myself get dragged away from what I saw as my only escape.
Further and further away I was pulled along the floor like a pathetic mop.
I was being dragged into the mist, everything becoming hazy.
It wasn’t long before I smelled the crawlspace again.
This disgusting smell, even worse than before, like a urine-soaked sponge that had fermented in the sun for weeks.
I felt myself pinned down against the blanket, my wrists scored like you do with a large chunk of meat.
I was trapped.
I felt lost.
The breath that hit my face made me want to puke.
It made my skin shrivel like burned hair and my eyes tear.
I do remember being glad.
Strange, right?
I was glad, in a sense, that it had been me and not Angie, who would suffer the worst.
I was damn close to resigning myself to the fate I knew awaited me.
I was blind and helpless after all, made to feel even more so by the deranged and twisted smile – just like a lipless gash – that I could barely look at.
But then there was a light.
A blinding light of hope.
Arthur had momentarily released his grip on my left arm to reposition his penis, and in that moment, as my arm went limp, I felt something, and a reflex of sorts – at least something faster than thought – took over and it all happened in a flash.
Before he could process what had happened, I’d already stabbed him with Angie’s butterfly knife.
I’d had it this whole time, but we’d been too focused on each other’s faces for either of us to notice.
Arthur let out an odd sort of sound as I felt the skin of my hand become doused in hot, pulsating red blood.
It felt like putting your hand in a used latrine.
The sensation of his coarse fur rubbing against my sensitive skin was akin to an artist violating his canvas.
I half expected his claws to stab into me, or at the very least him trying to choke me, or even look at me.
But my monster did none of those.
Instead, he started to whimper like a sad puppy and whither like a flag guided by a gentle breeze.
It wasn’t long before I started to feel his weight as the strings of his soul loosened their hold on him one by one.
And one by one I also heard crack after crack, though from where I had no idea.
He didn’t stop moving until the end, getting smaller and smaller.
The light of the washroom fell on me as I found myself cradling my dead cat in its nest, soaked in gallons of blood that hadn’t been its own.
Arthur really was gone.
And so too was the glass rod I had been carrying in me since that dinner.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Fool me thrice…shame on both of us.
Don’t you agree, Arthur?
…
I just laid there.
The sheets around me had soaked every ounce of blood, and made me feel like I was swimming in a pool of it.
I was held afloat by the hollowness I felt at that moment, not even registering the pain.
I’m not sure how long I lay there.
I waited for my cat to twitch or move, but it never did.
Jasper was still, and I found myself thinking if I’d ever pet him.
Had I always been caressing Arthur, or had there been moments when Jasper had felt my touch? Had Arthur come to me that night, or had it been Jasper?
I thought and I thought, and I thought for so long that, by the time I stopped thinking, the blood around me had completely dried up.
I got up and left the washroom, my skin cracking as I moved about, like I was a snake about to shed it.
I showered for as long as I could, until the hot water went cold, and even then, I didn’t stop showering. I sat and stood in the tub until my hand moved on its own and turned the water off.
I put on some fresh clothes, and I left, not even bothering to get my car keys.
I only left that house with the clothes I had, my wallet, and Angie’s butterfly knife.
I’d also made sure to pour a can of gasoline on top of Jasper in the washroom.
A single lit match was all it took to kickstart my former cat’s christening, and I never looked back as a countless cascade of flames burst forth like hands from a mass grave.
I found myself wandering through the empty streets of the nearby town, having not looked back once.
Before I knew it, I found myself clutching a bottle of wine.
There came a point where there really was no one but myself, and the only thing left for me to do was to sit down on the curb and stare up at the sky.
I did think about ending it with Angie’s knife.
I’d join her, and the storm drain between my legs would make sure no blood would be left.
My resolve regarding this was quite powerful, I’ll admit, but for a reason I’ll never know, I decided to do this only after finishing my bottle of wine.
Maybe I was scared to cut myself and wanted to go by alcohol poisoning.
Maybe I wanted to numb the pain I knew I was going to experience.
Maybe it was divine intervention.
Maybe I’ll never know, and I’m fine with that.
All I know is that the moment the last drop of that wine entered through my lips and slid down my throat, a voice I hadn’t been expecting called out to me.
“H-hey there,” they said, and I knew they were drunk before I even turned around.
A tall man with disheveled and sandy blonde hair, wearing a formal but unbuttoned suit, stood before me, himself tightly clutching a bottle of alcohol (vodka, in case you were wondering).
He was nowhere near done with it, but to say he was hammered was a definite understatement.
The man – who introduced himself as Max – sat down next to me, and I didn’t have the state of mind to protest.
After some small talk, he asked me how I ended up like him.
“Did your dog also find your boyfriend’s lover in the fucking closet?”
“No…,” I replied, “Let’s just say my cat made my girlfriend’s life a living hell. Mine too.”
Max eyed the scars on my legs as our bottles stood side by side.
“You gotta tell me the breed,” he said, “I want to send my ex one of those SO fucking badly.”
I laughed for the first time in a long time.
We had a nice conversation after that.
A kind of conversation I hadn’t had in a long time.
One which left me relieved by the end.
Max told some funny stories about how close he’d come to finding his ex-cheating before, some awkward mishaps during his middle school band performance, and so on.
I made up a story about how I’d been kicked out of my home by my ex and how she’d given up the cat, to which Max was sympathetic too, and even said that it was probably for the best.
I didn’t agree, but in a way, I was glad that…this was all past me.
There came the time where we had to depart, but just as I was about to leave, Max asked me if I’d like to crash at his place.
I stared at him, and then I looked behind me, and for the briefest of moments, I saw a plume of smoke in the distance billowing up towards the sky.
I told Max that sounded swell, and when he turned around for me to follow, I dropped Angie’s butterfly knife down the storm drain.
Something told me it had done its purpose in protecting me, just like she would’ve wanted, and I caught up with Max.
I like to think that the bottles we left behind on the curb were the grave for our respective pasts.
And not just us being too lazy to recycle.
…
It’s been a month now.
Me and Max have become wonderful friends, and for the first time in a while, I feel I’m somewhere I belong.
Max should be coming from work right around now.
His Labrador Retriever, Queenie, is by my side. He really is a wonderful dog, with his soft fur and child-like eyes.
I have thought about the rod.
Sometimes at night.
Sometimes in the morning.
Sometimes at work.
And even now.
But as far as I know, there’s nothing down in there.
Max just came from his late shift.
The clock has struck midnight
And nothing feels out of place.
But, alas, I know better than to assume that everything will stay in place.