The Last House on Needless Street(59)

Yes, I tell her. I hope I’m right. I shake my head and rub my ears.

She says, ‘You see where the freezer sits close up against the kitchen counter?’

Yes.

‘Knock the top weight off the pile. It’ll make some noise, but not too much. Don’t let it fall on the floor. Then push it off the freezer, onto the counter. Got it?’

I nod, forgetting she can’t see me. Got it, I say.

The first weight comes off the pile with a clang. It’s small and wants to roll. I bat it back with my paws and push it onto the counter. Then the next. The one after that is heavy. I push it too hard and it slides off the freezer onto the floor, with a leaden thunk that seems to shake the world. We are both as still as death. I listen. It’s difficult through the shrieking drone in my ears. Lauren’s breath shudders in and out. In the next room, Ted snores. He’s still sleeping, I say, weak with relief.

After a moment Lauren says. ‘Don’t drop them, OK, Olivia?’

No, I whisper. I won’t. I’m very, very careful after that. The last weight, the one at the bottom of the pile, is so heavy that it hurts my paws to push it. Each inch is a miserable struggle. But at last it slides onto the countertop, clunking against the others.

They’re all off, I say.

‘All right,’ she says. ‘I’m coming.’

I close my eyes tight and make a sad little row. For some reason I am afraid. What will she be like?

You know, Lauren, I say, eyes still tightly closed, I don’t think I have ever even seen you in real life. Isn’t that weird? We have kind of always taken it in turns being out here, I guess!

There is no answer.

I hear the freezer begin to open, slowly, effortful, as if the hand that lifts the lid is shaking and fragile. I hear the lid thud against the wall. There is wet stirring, a sigh. The stench of misery and terror comes in waves. I think of white thin hands like claws and flesh shiny with scars. It makes me want to row and curl up in a ball.

Come on, cat, I tell myself sternly. Don’t make things worse for the poor girl.

I open my eyes. The freezer lies open, a dark grave. I stand on two hind legs and peer into the depths.

It is empty.

Oooooooeeeee, goes the whine.

Where are you? I whisper. Something is very badly wrong. The whining in my head rises to a scream, and I row and claw my head. I want to run headfirst into a wall, just to make it stop.

‘Hey, cat,’ Lauren says, next to my ear. The screaming rises. Through it I can hear my breath, my heart chopping like an axe on a block.

‘Olivia,’ she says, ‘try not to freak out.’

What in heavens, I say. I’m going insane … Why aren’t you in the freezer?

‘I was never in there,’ she says.

I can feel her, somehow, the warm outline of her, or smell her maybe. Or maybe there’s no word yet invented for the sense I am using. I’m on the very knife-edge of losing my mind.

Lauren? I say. Where are you? What the eff is going on? Why can’t I see you? It feels – and I know this can’t be true, but it’s what it feels like, nevertheless – it feels like you’re inside me.

‘It’s the other way around, Olivia,’ she says. ‘You’re inside me.’ And now a horrible thing happens. My body seems to stutter and shift. Instead of my lovely tail and paws I feel for a moment that there are hungry pink starfish at the end of my limbs. My silky coat is gone, my eyes are small and weak …

What, I say, what … Let me go. None of this is happening. Let me go back into my nice crate …

‘Look at it,’ she says. ‘The thing you call a crate. The truth is right there. But you have to choose to see it.’

I look at the chest freezer, the open lid resting against the wall, the holes punched in the lid for air.

‘I left you a note,’ Lauren says. ‘But what kind of cat can read? What kind of cat can talk?’ The screeching rises again. OOooooeeeeoo.

I’m imagining this, I row. If only that gd noise would stop I could think …

‘One of us is imaginary,’ she says. ‘It’s not me.’

Go away! Stop it! Stop that noise!

‘Olivia,’ she says, ‘look at what you’re doing.’

My paw is outstretched, claws extended. It rakes across the side of the metal freezer, making a scream like terrible suffering. Eeeeeeeoooooeeeee, go my claws, screeching across the metal. The noise was me, all the time. But how can that be?

‘I’ve been trying to get your attention for such a long time,’ Lauren says.

The screeching of claws on steel rises. The world seems to flicker. Instead of my paw there is a hand with long dirty nails, dragging, dragging … eeeeeeeeeeeoooeeee. Claws on metal. Fingernails on metal, a voice whispers and I yow and scream but even that can’t rise above the screeching; it builds until it becomes a physical thing, a wall inside me that breaks with a terrible crack.

I come to with Lauren stroking my back. But somehow, once again, she’s doing it from the inside. I start to cry, little piteous mewlings like a kit.

‘Shhh,’ she says. ‘Let it out quietly, if you can.’

Leave me alone, I say. I curl up tightly. But it feels like she’s wrapped around me.

‘I can’t do that,’ she says. ‘You really don’t get it, do you?’ She strokes me again. ‘The first time I tried to run,’ she says, ‘he took my feet. He broke them between two boards with a mallet. The second time I tried, you came out of my mind.