The Last House on Needless Street(74)

Ted





Dimly, above, someone is pressing their hands to the hole in my stomach. Someone’s breath is warm by my ear. He presses down harder and harder but the blood comes out all slippery anyway. He curses to himself. He is trying to draw me back up from the black, into the sunny morning.

We could have told him it was no good. We are dying, our flesh is cooling to clay. We feel it as it happens, each one of us. Our blood comes in slow pumps, spilling out all our colours and thoughts onto the forest floor; each breath is harder, slower, leaving us colder. The safe tattoo of our heartbeat is broken; now it beats like a kitten playing or a bad drum: growing fainter, more irregular.

There is no time for goodbye, there is only the cold stillness that creeps over our fingers and hands, our feet and ankles. Crawling up our legs, inch by inch. The little ones are crying, deep down in the pit. They never did anything to anyone, the little ones. They never had a chance. The bright burning world falls into darkness.

Sun lies in long stripes across the bloodied forest floor. Nearby, far away, a dog whines.

Now nothing.





Olivia





I’m back in the house, I don’t know how and it doesn’t matter. There is no time to feel relief at having my lovely ears and tail again. It’s anything but safe here.

The walls are giving in like lungs collapsing. Plaster falls in chunks from the ceiling. Windows explode inwards in a hail of icy splinters. I run to hide under the couch, but the couch is gone, instead there is a great wet mouth with broken teeth. Through the portholes there falls thunderlight. Black hands reach up from the floor. The cord is tight around my neck. It is transparent, now, the colour of death. There is no scent at all, and perhaps it is that which makes me understand that I am going to die.

I think about fish, and how I will never know its taste, and I think about my beautiful tabby, and how I will never see her again. Then I think about Ted and what I did to him and I am really crying, now. I know, in the way I know my own tail, that the others are already gone. For the first time I am all alone. And soon I will be gone too.

I can feel it all, now, the body. The heart, the bones, the delicate clouds of nerve endings, the fingernails. What a moving thing a fingernail is. I see that it doesn’t matter what shape the body is, that it doesn’t have fur or a tail. It still belongs to us.

Time to stop being a kitten, I say to myself. Come on, cat. Maybe if I help the body, the others can come back.

But when I look there is a seething mass of shining blades where the front door should be. They whir and snick through the air. There is no way out there.

I’ll try up, then. At the top of the stairs, the landing and the bedroom and roof are gone. The house is open to a raging sky, the storm which beats and whirls overhead. It is made of tar and lightning. There are brouhahas with great saggy jaws, baying. They tumble and race through the clouds, eyes like points of fire.

My fur is on end, my heart pounds. Every fibre of me wants to turn, to run and hide somewhere quiet, and wait to die. But if I do that it’s over.

Be brave, cat. I put my paws on the first step, and then the second. Maybe this will be OK!

The staircase caves in with a great sound. Rubble lands all around me, and there is choking dust and ropes of the sticky black tar that burn and blind me. When the dust clears, I can only see rubble, brick. The walls are caved in, closing off the stairs. Everything is quiet. I am sealed in.

No, I whisper, tail lashing. No, no, no! But I am trapped, the crumbling house my tomb. I am finished, we are all finished.

I call on the lord. He does not answer.

There is a deep stirring somewhere and I start, tail bristling. In the darkest corner of the living room Nighttime groans. He raises his head. His ears are ragged and there are deep slashes along his flanks, as if made by a knife. Dying, yes. But not dead. Not yet.

I think furiously. I can’t go up or out, but perhaps there is somewhere left to go, after all.

Hurt, he says, in a deep growl.

I know, I say. I am sorry. But I need your help. We all do. Can you take me down, to your place?

He hisses, a sound as deep as a geyser. I can’t blame him. He tried to warn me about Lauren.

Please, I say. Now, more than ever – now it is your time.

Nighttime comes forward, no longer graceful, but limping and painfully slow. He stands over me and I hear his breath sawing in and out. He opens his jaws wide and I think, This is it, he will finish me. Part of me is glad. But instead he closes his mouth about my scruff and picks me up, gentle as a mamacat.

My time, he says, and the house is gone. We hurtle down, down through the dark. Something hits me with a terrible blow and now we are somewhere else entirely.

Nighttime’s place is worse than I could have imagined. There is nothing but old, old dark. Great plains and expanses and canyons of black nothing. I understand that there is no such thing as distance here – it all goes on for ever. This world is not round and you never come back to yourself.

Here, he says, putting me down.

I gasp, my lungs almost crushed by loneliness. Or maybe it is the last life draining from us.

No, I say. We have to go further down.

He says nothing, but I feel his fear. There are deep places even Nighttime cannot go.

Do it, I say.

He snarls and bites me, deep in the throat. Blood gushes forth, freezes in a stony spray in the cold dead air. Bodies don’t work the same way down here.