Cat-astrophic Spells (8 page)

T
wo days had passed
since Brit had returned Treacle.

The black cat seemed to be happy inside for the first time since he was a kitten. As soon as he settled in, and I knew he was home and safe, I asked Treacle what had happened.

He climbed onto my lap and stretched his arms to either side of my neck as I stroked his short black fur. He looked at me intently.
“I was across town. Something was buzzing around there,”
he told me in his mind.

“What do you mean?”

Treacle licked his nose.
“My usual felines would tell me what was going on, but I couldn’t find anyone. They were all hiding. They wouldn’t come out, but they peeked out from corners and shadows.”

“You didn’t think maybe you should get out of there?”

“I saw the gray cat with the scar. I don’t like him. We usually fight. He seemed to know something, but he wouldn’t tell me. He growled low at me as I approached him. Not his usual fighting growl but more like he was mad I was giving away his hiding place.”
Treacle’s claws poked from soft paws as he continued his tale.
“I should have run. I should have hid like the other cats, but I didn’t.”

“Oh, my poor boy,”
I soothed, rubbing his head behind his ears and stroking his back.

He continued his story.
“The next thing I knew, I couldn’t see. Someone had covered me completely. I scratched and bit and tried to move. I screamed. I cried. But I was pulled off the ground. I was in something... a sack. I didn’t have a lot of room, and I couldn’t see anything. Nothing I did seemed to help. I was being carried away.”

The thought of Treacle being taken away against his will, violently, cruelly, and brought to a strange place, tore at my heart. My eyes filled with tears.

“When I was finally free of the confines, I was in a place like this,”
Treacle said, looking around our home.

“You were in her trailer.”

“Her trailer, yes. She’d never had a cat there. She fed me and tried to pet me.”
Treacle scooted closer to me, so close his whiskers rubbed against my cheek as he nuzzled his head along my jaw.
“But she wasn’t you.”

I scratched the back of his head and neck.

“I missed you, Cath.”

“You have no idea how much I missed you, big kitty.”
I hugged him, letting my tears fall into his shiny black fur and disappear.
“You’re home now and safe. And tomorrow, we’ll go visit your friends Marshmallow and Peanut Butter. They’ve been so worried about you.”

“I’ve missed them,”
he purred.

Treacle fell asleep next to me on the couch. I stretched out, putting my feet up and stuffing my favorite throw pillow behind my head. Every time I moved even slightly, it set off Treacle’s purring mechanism, and he’d start buzzing happily, his eyes still closed.

I must have been more tired than I thought because I fell asleep within just a few minutes. I was so grateful Treacle was safe and sound. Brit may have been weird and scared, but she didn’t hurt him. What had she wanted with him? She’d gone through a lot of trouble if all she wanted was a cat.

And I couldn’t help but wonder what she meant when she said not to let that cat out because next time it might not be her who got a hold of him.

That thought rolled around in my head as I fell asleep, leading me to a terrible dream. Treacle was gone again because I’d simply left the door open, something I’d never do in the waking world. I intentionally left my home vulnerable and Aunt Astrid’s, too. Marshmallow was also gone because I’d left a door open. In the dream, I didn’t tell anyone it was my own negligence that led to the animals’ disappearance. I held the guilt inside and pretended nothing was wrong until something made its way into my home.

The strange creature in the dream was human-like. It had two arms, two legs, and a head, but it was shrouded in a black robe that was dirty and worn and appeared to have been buried or left in the elements for several seasons.

I couldn’t be sure, but I think there were living things on it… small, ugly, writhing living things that fell onto my beige carpet along with bits of dirt and twigs. Bony, white hands were all I could see. On the right hand was a gaudy, obscene ring with a black gemstone and a rhinestone pentagram. Had the horrific creature decided it needed a little bling to be truly terrifying so it bedazzled a cheap, imitation gemstone ring?

I stared at the ring on the monster’s hand as it proceeded to crawl through my open bedroom window. It was pulling itself through in a grotesque manner that made me think of someone having a convulsion. I didn’t try to stop it. I was paralyzed and could only watch as it pulled itself farther and farther into my home. Finally, it stopped its horrible jerking movements and looked at me.

Underneath its shroud was a ghostly pale face with empty, black sockets where the eyes should be. As I stared at its face, the thing laughed. It sounded like the voice of a classroom bully, a heartless child mocking another. And the voice was even more terrifying than the face because it was unnatural. The whole thing was unnatural. When I opened my mouth to scream, all I could hear was the hiss of a cat.

My eyes snapped open, and I felt my heart pounding. My skin was wet, and as I blinked, my familiar room came into focus. But the hissing sent my body into a spasm that jerked me clear off the couch and to my feet.

It was Treacle. He was in my bedroom. He stood stone still on the floor about two feet away from the bedroom window. Then I heard it. Scratching. In my head, I tried to remember if I had left the window open or closed the night before. I was pretty sure it was closed as listened again.

I tiptoed to the bedroom door entrance and placed my hands on either side of the frame to steady myself. Luckily, the window was closed.

Treacle slowly arched his back. Every single strand of his jet black fur stood on edge, making him look as though he were at least ten pounds more cat than he actually was. Whatever was making those scratching noises was not supposed to be there.

The scratching was slow and long as if whoever or whatever was doing it was scraping its claw, fingers, talons, or something from the top of the window diagonally across to the opposite bottom corner. Treacle’s whiskers twitched, his eyes unblinking as a serious, mean growl came from deep inside his gut. The creature at the window was more than just a squirrel or chipmunk getting too close to Treacle’s personal space. Whatever was outside was something dangerous.

“What is it, Trea?”
I asked, carefully whispering with my thoughts.

“I don’t know,”
he said, still growling.
“But it’s out there, and it wants to be in here.”

We both stood perfectly still. I don’t know about Treacle, but I held my breath, focusing intently on whether I could hear any other noise besides the scratching. I remembered the image from my nightmare that had snapped me awake, and I began to sweat.

It couldn’t have been a premonition. I didn’t have that gift. Aunt Astrid was the one who could see future possibilities, not me. My dream was probably just a collection of all the things that had been going on, right? There wasn’t going to be some disgusting, eyeless form with maggots and worms on its clothes pushing through my bedroom window, right? And if there were, Aunt Astrid would have seen it already, right?

Well, she would if she were looking, but if she were distracted and looking in another direction, then who knows?

I let out my breath and felt winded. Just as I was about to take a step inside the room, Treacle bolted to the window. He was up and underneath the curtain within a split second, hissing, clawing, and scratching at the glass. Not wanting my precious pet to get hurt, I forced myself to move.

Throwing back the curtain, I watched as Treacle continued to scratch at the glass, growling and hissing. Then I looked up to where his eyes were focused and saw nothing.

Growing up in a witch’s family instilled a few rules in my head that most kids probably wouldn’t think twice about. One rule was that seeing wasn’t always believing. Sometimes, we believed in things greater than ourselves, even though we may not have been able to see those things.

But as puny humans, we were terrified of things we couldn’t see. All I could see was the little patch of green grass outside my bedroom window along with the nearby tree line. I squinted into the foliage and saw nothing… no cluster of moving shadows outlining a human form, no eyes peering back at me, nothing. But Treacle was still going mad.

Leaning closer to the window, I pulled the curtains back to see if I was missing something.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
Someone was pounding on my front door. The blows were so loud and hard that Treacle and I jumped a good foot into the air.

“Why is someone knocking like that? I have a doorbell,” I said more to calm myself than to actually get an answer.

I looked at Treacle, who seemed to have calmed a little. He sniffed around the edges of the window, his eyes scanning the yard. Whatever had been out there was either gone or suddenly not so menacing. Treacle perched himself on the small ledge and stood as my sturdy and true lookout.

Tiptoeing to the front door, I had already made the decision not to answer it. No way was I was just going to pull the door open. I squatted down to see if I could make out the shadow of feet across the bottom threshold, then I stood and stretched my neck to see if a shadow could be seen pulling away from the peephole. I saw nothing. I turned my head and listened. Then I heard a swish sound coming from beneath the door.

Treacle was at my side in an instant, hissing madly. Both of us stood there, stepping closer to see what was inching its way underneath the door.

“Should I rush the door and yank it open?” I asked out loud.

“No,”
Treacle said then made a dash for the bedroom again.

I swallowed hard and watched. It was paper. Just paper. A note was worming its way through the narrow slash of space between the door and my foyer floor. I’d never been so terrified as I was watching the scene unfold in front of me. It felt as if I were watching a film being run in reverse, in which rain fell upward, and people backed out of doors. Our brains were conditioned to recognize when something felt wrong.

I listened for Treacle and heard the
thump-thump
of his tail whipping on the floor as he sat studying something. I looked at the front door, half expecting it to explode inward or pulse as though it were alive. But it didn’t. It remained a normal door.

“Stop being silly,” I said to myself. “Whoever is dropping off notes is obviously more scared of you than you are of them.”

That line of complete bologna made me feel a lot better. Sometimes, I impressed myself with my own words and how I could encourage myself. I walked up to the door, bent down, swiped up the note, and took several careful steps back, just in case.

My hands trembled. What I saw was shocking and obscene. Letters cut out of magazines formed a jagged message that looked as dangerous as the threat:

The message was bad enough, but the handwritten scribbles at the bottom froze me to my core. Next to a cutout magazine picture of a black cat on a silver platter with its head separated from the body, someone had scrawled,

T
error and anger filled me
. I wasn’t sure what emotion won out. I was terrified that someone knew we were looking into Marvin Clegg’s death, and that the person was most likely the killer and a witch. The fact that the hag would threaten my cat made my blood boil.

Treacle snapped me out of my conflict. He was in the bedroom again, growling and scratching the glass.

“What? What is it?” I called to him.

“Outside! It’s out there!”

Darting into the bedroom, I threw aside the curtains with more anger than I expected then stopped. It was a cat. I had never seen him around before. He was just sitting there, staring at us. Normally, a cat would blink, a muscle would twitch, or its nostrils would flare as it picked up a scent. But I wasn’t looking at a normal cat. The black-and-white tuxedo cat with intense green eyes
looked
like an average cat, but there was a hollowness in its eyes. Something else was there… something sinister.

I heard Treacle calling to it. He said he’d seen it before around the trailer park. The tuxedo cat would slink underneath trailers, around cars and garbage cans, and climb on top of mailboxes and makeshift fences so it could stare at Treacle when he was at Brit’s. The cat never spoke to him, and it wasn’t speaking to me either. It just sat there as if it were studying us.

“Treacle?”

“Yes?”

“Why did you say
it
’s out there?”

“Because that’s what it is. It’s not a feline. It’s an
it
.”

My body shook. I had the sneaking suspicion this creature could hear our thoughts and just chose not to speak. I don’t know how long Treacle and I stood there trying to stare down the creature in front of us, but the tuxedo cat seemed to become more and more menacing with each passing second.

The
ping, ping, ping
of my phone made the two of us jump. I ran into the front room, grabbed the phone quickly, and ran back to the bedroom to look out the window. It was gone.

“Where is it?”
I asked Treacle, who had stayed in the bedroom.

“I don’t know. I looked at you leaving the room, and when I looked back, it was gone.”

I pulled the cord on the slatted blinds, letting them fall all the way to the floor then made sure the curtains were in place before answering the phone.

Bea was beside herself on the end of the line. “She threatened Jake!”

“What? Who did?” I suddenly forgot about our furry, glass-eyed visitor and sat on the edge of my bed.

“The witch. She threatened Jake. Said what happened to Marvin could easily happen to him if we didn’t back off and leave Brit alone. She left a note under our front door.”

My heart flipped over in my chest. “When did you get this note?” I already knew the answer.

“Just… now. Just a few seconds ago. Jake went running outside to see if he could catch the person, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.”

“Was there a cat around?”

Bea sniffled on the other end then I heard her stop as though she were thinking. “A cat? I don’t know. Why?”

“I got a note, too. Just now. At this very moment. It said she was going to get Treacle.”

Bea gasped on the other end and shouted to Jake, repeating what I had just told her. “Jake said you and Treacle need to get over here quick. He’s going to go get my mom in the squad car.”

“Make sure she brings Marshmallow. I don’t think any of our companions are safe from this witch.”

Just then, Treacle made such a loud crying noise that Bea was able to hear it on the other end. “Cath, what’s going on over there?” Bea cried into the phone.

“Oh no.” I pressed the phone hard to my ear as the shade snapped all the way up to the ceiling, and the curtain fell to the floor. The black-and-white cat sat right in front of the glass staring inside at Treacle.

“What it sees, she knows!”
Treacle hissed then snapped. He would have flown through the window and fought with everything he had if he were able. But I wasn’t going to give him the job of defending the house. That was my job.

I turned and stomped to the foyer with the phone still in my hand, grabbed an umbrella from the stand, and was about to yank open the door when I froze. “Bea?”

“Cath, what is it? Oh, talk to me. All I can hear is Treacle hissing and meowing.”

“I was about to open the door and chase this other cat away when something in me told me not to. It wants us separated. It wants my cat. Whatever this thing is wants my cat, and I don’t think it will let anything stand in its way.”

“Then you guys pack a bag and get over here.”

“Yes. Yes. We’re on our way, Bea. We’re leaving right now.”

“Okay. We’ll see you in a few minutes. If it takes any longer, I’m sending all of Wonder Falls P.D. to get you.”

“We’re already out the door.” I scooped up my keys and Treacle before I even hung up the phone.