The almost-a-growl was growing louder and more bothersome, as she had known it would, but it was not loud enough yet to drown out her voice. She called for the man to let her in, and waited for him to open the door. A few moments passed, and she called again, louder this time, but the door did not open. She started to call as loud as she could, but at this point the almost-a-growl was almost oppressive in its intensity, and she was not sure that the man would hear her. She started to think of simply running away, but she loved the man too much, and remained, calling out all the while.
Finally, one of the doors, the inside door, opened. But it was not the man. It was the girl.
The loud, grabby damned girl that wouldn't leave her alone no matter how much she warned her away, or how much the man told her to be nice. The girl who could've reached the latch for the outside door. She simply stood there and smiled. She did not move to open the door.
Peaches began to caterwaul for the man, screaming, begging, pleading for him to come and let her into the house, but the almost-a-roar prevented her from even hearing herself. The woman came then, the man's latest mate. Soundlessly, she grabbed the girl's wrist and, without ever bothering to look outside, closed the inside door. Peaches was trapped. She turned, and the sound which-was-indeed-a-roar was upon her. The terrible smell filled her lungs and stole her speed. She felt something cruelly red and wet.
*****
"Has anyone seen Peaches?"
Peaches opened her eyes at this sound, at the sound of the man's voice. And screamed.
"What is that awful noise you're making?"
Peaches turned and saw the woman, the very same woman that had just shut her out and fed her to the roar. And she was talking.
"I don't know, gas, I guess. Have you seen Peaches?"
Peaches stopped screaming. She was fascinated. The woman had never said a word worth understanding before in the few months that the man had been coupling with her, except to call her Peaches once or twice. Now every word she said was perfectly clear.
"No, not since I let her outside."
The woman had let her outside. Peaches had forgotten that. So little that the woman did was worth noticing. Where was the man? She couldn't see him, though she knew that he was there. She could certainly hear and smell him.
"You haven't let her back in?"
"No, I just said that I haven't seen her. What's bothering you?"
"The streets were just cleaned! If Peaches is outside, she might've been cleaned too!"
Peaches was certain that she had not been cleaned.
"I'm sure she's fine. She probably-- Why are you clenching your fists?"
Peaches looked down involuntarily, and saw the man's hands balled into fists. She felt her tail twitching menacingly, as the man's hands opened and closed.
"I'm a little worried. Peaches would've tried to get back in if the cleaners were out, but I was in the shower and couldn't hear her if she were crying."
"Oh no! Angie was by the door just before the street cleaner came by the house. I made her shut it."
Peaches turned to look for the girl, the Angie, but saw the door and walked purposefully towards it. Her footsteps were horrendously loud to her, and she stopped and looked down. She was greeted by the man's ungainly feet, bare and a little wet. Indeed, she could feel the water on the man's legs, and found it to her liking, if a trifle cool. She started walking again, taking care this time to walk with her usual silent decorum.
She looked over her shoulder at the woman, whose features were an all too human mix of guilt and confusion. The woman did not return her glance.
"Did you see her when you went to the door? Do you remember?" The man's voice was agitated, which was good, because that was exactly how Peaches felt.
"No, I'm sorry, I can't remember," The woman replied shaking her head. "I thought the new decontamination modules were programmed to avoid house pets."
"That's for in-house extermination. The big residential vermin cleaners still use the gases and the grinders. Then the regular cleaners get whatever mess is left behind."
Peaches reached out and pressed the button that slid open the inner door, and gazed through the transparency of the outer one. She saw the world as she usually saw it, as she had just seen it. The man wanted to look down to see Peaches, but that was too much. Peaches could not allow it, could not see what the roar had done to her. She could not look at herself as if she were prey. The man relented and she pressed the button that would shut the door again, but not before the woman gasped as she looked out the door.
"Oh God! I'm so sorry. Did you see her?" Peaches just shook the man's head, and together they walked away from the door and into the cool blue bathroom, trying hard to think of everything but the warm red bits left on the man's doorstep.
*****
Peaches awoke with a start, not because of her dreams, which were vivid and disturbing, but because the first thing she realized was that she could see nothing. She flailed about in blind panic, finally grasping at her hairless face.
"Whuzz mmfff..." The woman stirred next to her as she sat upright.
"Hhhhmmm?" This was the sleeping man's only reply.
Peaches uncovered her face, and found the room darker than before. She resisted the urge to cry out to the darkness, reflecting bitterly that her last cries had gone unheard. She shook her head and got up, albeit a little wobbly. She found it difficult to keep her eyes open. She staggered to the bathroom. By rote, she reached out to the wall next to her and slapped a button, flooding the room with painful light.
The man gasped and came awake, and Peaches fell as the man yelped in surprise. She fell hard and would have let out a cry herself were her silence not so resolute. The woman was awake and on her feet faster than either Peaches or the man could react.
"Are you all right, honey?"
"Yeah, I guess, but I don't know how I got over here. Sleepwalking, I guess."
"You've been dreaming all night. Making all sorts of funny noises."
"Hunh. Haven't walked or talked in my sleep since I was a kid. Guess I'm still a little out of sorts."
"Yeah. Just go back to sleep and tomorrow we'll talk about getting a new cat."
"Hunh."
The woman deftly helped the groggy man back into bed, turned out the light, and then climbed back in herself, and within moments, Peaches was left alone in the dark once more.
Long moments crept by before Peaches opened her eyes again, and the stabbing fear washed over her momentarily. She firmly reminded herself that she was not blind, that she simply could not see, and got up out of the bed. She moved as slowly and as quietly as she could, which to her mind was as slowly and as loudly as she had ever moved, and left the bedroom.
She didn't know what it was that made her go to the girl's room, but she had never been bothered by ignorance of her motives before, and decided not to start. As she made her way gingerly to the girl's room, mostly by feel, she was gratified to find that she was slowly able to discern certain shapes and obstructions.
The door to the girl's room was open, as it always was, and Peaches stepped in. She looked around slowly, taking in the atmosphere of a little girl that has just moved into new surroundings. The room was almost insufferably neat, unlike the study that it had been scant months before. It had very little to mark it as the girl's room yet, indeed, to Peaches it still smelled more of the man than of the girl, but everything seemed to smell of the man now. Her eyes narrowed.
There was little more light in this room than anywhere else in the house, but what light there was came from the small tank near the girl's bed. Inside of the tank was the girl's little turtle. The turtle had fascinated and perplexed Peaches for the first week that it had been there, but its apparent lack of movement soon grew boring, and Peaches had all but forgotten about it. Here it was again, and Peaches could feel her tail twist languidly in anticipation.
Without another thought, Peaches turned and made her way to the kitchen. Without a misstep, without even considering the possibility of one, she rapidly opened a drawer and produced a pair of scissors. Then, even more carefully than before, she returned to the girl's room, but this time did not restrict her intrusion to the doorway. Silent as she should have been, she opened the tank and picked up the turtle. With a hunter's infinite patience, she waited for the startled turtle to crane its neck out of its shell.
*****
"It's just lucky that we found it before she did."
"Yeah, I suppose. How did she take it?"
"How do you think? Lousy."
Peaches was uncontrollably bored. She loved the man's friend, who would always pick her up when she wanted and stroke her just the right way. That did not make listening to the two of them talk any more exciting.
"Well, I feel bad for the kid and all, but really, I just miss Peaches. She was pretty cool."
"Yeah. And the way it happened was just terrible, but the thing with the turtle bugs me more. We still don't know how it happened."
Peaches felt enormous satisfaction with the whole turn of events. She was certain that she could still hear the girl carrying on.
"Hunh. Did you say that the kid saw Peaches before she got cleaned?"
"Yeah, but she didn't know enough to let her in."
"Whatever, she's not that young."
"What do you mean?"
"She knew enough not to go outside didn't she? The whole thing sounds like a nasty case of bad karma to me."
Peaches loved the man's friend!
"Please, don't start."
"I'm serious. Cats have nine lives, you know. If I were Peaches, I wouldn't take getting left outside to die lying down..."
*****
"I don't want another turtle! I want a puppy!"
"Yeah, well, I think I want a lobotomy."
"Shut up, Marcus. Angie, Marcus is getting a new cat. Cats and dogs don't really like each other. How about some fish?"
"I want a puppy!"
Peaches was convinced that if the man didn't kill the girl, that she would. The girl was all red in the face, which by itself was kind of amusing, but she was louder than she had ever been, which was entirely too much to tolerate. Hoping the woman would smack the child, Peaches decided to walk around the pet store some more.
Peaches thought that the pet store was fascinating. There was more prey here than in any place that she had ever been, but none of it really fled. It was almost distasteful. Of course, to make matters worse, she could reach almost none of the them, since they were in all manner of tanks and cages. The tanks made her tongue ache for warm, red bits that she knew was only an arms length away, just like the turtle had been...
"Can I help you, sir?"
Peaches practically jumped out of her skin. The clerk was enormous, and now that she was paying attention, was breathing from his mouth louder than the man when he slept. How could she have not heard him walking up?
"Christ! You startled me."
"Sorry about that. Can I help you with something?"
The man sighed, as he always did when he was getting ready to give in to the woman and her beastly child.
"Yeah, I guess we need to look at your puppies," the man muttered, shaking his head. Peaches wanted to turn her back to him. "Kathy, Angie! Let's look at the puppies!"
*****
Peaches was almost insane. The dog had not been with them a week. It was loud, left hair everywhere, and had devoured more of the man's things than seemed possible. It was constantly leaping into the man's bed while Peaches was trying to sleep. This would not have been so bad, had the dog been close to the manageable size that Peaches had worn when she used to find a place in the bed. The dog, however, was more akin to a small piece of furniture itself, and thusly disturbed everyone trying to sleep. Peaches hated the dog.
The girl, however, was ecstatic. As loud as the dog got, she seemed to be louder, and often she led the assaults on the sleeping man. No matter how Peaches tried to escape the two of them, they always seemed to find her.
Worst of all, however was the man. The man hated the dog almost as much as Peaches, and since the woman would not control her child, the man was often left to care for the animal. The girl neither fed it, nor walked it, nor cleaned up after it, and these tasks were invariably left up to the man. The woman was often too busy to be bothered (or so she acted); the man did not have the time to train the dog himself. Matters did not improve.
*****
"Angie! Angie, come here!"
The man was furious, and rightly so. Peaches felt a sense of smug satisfaction.
"Aw, what is it?"
"Just come here!"
Peaches could feel her tail twitching in anticipation of what the man had to say to the girl. The man had discovered the dog in his new study, where neither girl nor dog was supposed to go. Next to the dog was a pile of the man's storage discs, most of his work. Predictably, the discs were destroyed, along with the work. The dog had just sit there, looking at the man with his insufferable innocence. That was not the most damning evidence. A small collection of the girl's dolls was piled on the desk, right where the discs had been.
"What were you doing in here?"
The girl had arrived, and her gaze was traveling sheepishly between the mangled discs and her own two feet. She shot one accusing look at the dog, but the beast just sat there, as happy as it had ever been.
"I dunno."
"You don't know? You don't know?!? It's fairly simple, isn't it? I thought that your mother and I had made it very clear that you and the dog were to STAY OUT OF HERE!!!"
"I guess."
"You guess. You guess."
The man was seething. The thought of the damned dog as well as weeks of having to redo his work unnecessarily, was too much to be tolerated. He grabbed the girl by her shoulders and shook her, bellowing at her almost incoherently. Peaches was rapt, but did not fail to notice the faintest beginnings-of-a-growl in the throat of the dog, nor the not-quite-silent-approach of the woman. The man was not quite so attentive and continued to scream at the girl, who had begun to cry.
The dog leapt with a bark, almost knocking the surprised man onto the floor. Peaches, however, had not been surprised, and grabbed the dog by its collar and flung it past her, where it bowled into the woman, knocking her over instead. The girl, with her momentary reprieve, scampered out of the study and into her room down the hall, slapping the buttons to whisk her door shut and locked.
The dog, confused, turned to look at the man and then ran down the hall and out into the living room. The woman, lying prone, raised herself onto her elbows and glared at the man who was squatting on his haunches, looking with bemusement at his hands.
"What was that all about?"
"Well, between your daughter and her animal, I've lost about six months of work, not to mention my temper."
"Looks like you've gained a pretty scar to balance that out." The woman got up and gestured towards the man's face.
Peaches got up and walked into the bathroom, the woman closely following. She gazed into the mirror, and sure enough, there was a nice long scratch down the side of the man's face. For the first time, Peaches noticed the burning feeling.
"Damn," the man breathed, shaking his head and turning on the faucet.
"It's your own damn fault," the woman spat with unheralded venom.
"The dog attacked me! Angie'll be lucky if I don't have it destroyed."
"You just leave my daughter and her dog alone. I don't care what happened. Do you understand me? Don't you ever lay a hand on her again." The woman turned on her heel and marched out of the room. Peaches heard her override the lock on the girl's bedroom door and go in.
Peaches slept on the couch in the man's new study that night.
*****
Carefully putting the lock on the door to the man's study, Peaches stalked down the hall and into the living room where the man's friend waited. All of the man's beloved fishing and camping gear was piled up here, along with that of his friend. The dog, of course, had nearly worried a hole into the man's sleeping bag.
Peaches was glad of the trip; the man had not gone away with his friend since before the woman and the girl had moved in. Peaches herself had gone on one of their camping trips, and been in heaven. There had been so much to see and do and catch. Best of all, the woman and the girl were nowhere to be seen.
"Dude, are you all right?"
"I'm just glad you could get the weekend off on such short notice. I think I'll end up shooting myself if I don't get away from everything else that lives in this house."
"Yeah, well, you're just lucky that none of the other guys at the office are using the timeshare."
Without any fanfare, the two men grabbed their gear and loaded it into the man's car. The dog whined and scratched at the door as they walked away from the house, and Peaches realized that she was as pleased as she'd been since they'd bought the beast. The man seemed happy as well, and grinned at his friend.
The two hour trip to the forest was blissfully uneventful for the man, although Peaches soon grew tired of the car, as she always had in the past. The two men laughed and joked, and the man even talked of the woman before the one with the child, the one who'd given Peaches to him. The woman and the girl and the dog seemed much farther away than they actually were. But Peaches could not forget.
*****
It was late. The men had fished for hours, until it had grown dark, and cooked up a few of the fish for dinner; Peaches had slept through just about the whole day, but her dreams were full of four shaggy legs and incessant barking. The men had talked together for hours by their fire, telling stories that Peaches had heard a dozen times before. The man was as happy as he ever was. By the time he and his friend had gotten into their sleeping bags and drifted off, however, Peaches was bitterly angry.
She, and the man, had been chased from her home by the woman, the child, and the canine interloper. They had destroyed things that both Peaches and the man valued, and Peaches had decided that she would allow it to go no further than their home. Taking the utmost care to awake neither the man nor his friend, Peaches got up, grabbed the man's keys from his pack, and padded, naked and barefoot, to the man's car.
Peaches had no idea how it was that she knew how to start the car, let alone drive it home, but she did. She moved almost invisibly from the car to the man's house, entered the necessary security codes to open the door, and entered soundlessly. Even the dog, which usually kicked up an awful racket at the slightest noise at this time of night, was oblivious to her passing.
She went first into the hallway. Both the man's and the girl's bedroom doors were open, and she could hear the woman and her child breathing ever so softly. The woman mumbled something in her sleep and turned over.
Despite whatever changes the woman and the girl had made to the house in the months since they'd moved in, Peaches would always know it intimately, and disturbed nothing as she retraced her steps and then turned into the kitchen, where the man kept his knives.
When Peaches left the house ten minutes later, she was much happier with the entire situation. She got back into the car and drove casually back to the forest.
*****
"I just don't know. I feel like I should move after what happened, you know? But part of me just feels like it's my home. It was before they came and it still is now, I guess."
"Dude, you need to move. That house has a lot of badness floating around in it. I think it's cursed."
"Whatever. I love that house, but I don't know."
There was a long pause as the man and his friend looked at their menus. Peaches found it hard to stay awake, especially with the man going on about "what happened," and the police being "no help at all." Peaches almost fell asleep before the man started speaking again.
"What are you ordering?"
"Dude, the steak. Nice and well done with mushrooms. You?"
"Same. Except I think I'd like mine good and bloody."
"Ugh. I thought you hated rare meat."
"I don't know. I'm just in the mood for something warm and red."
Bio:"I am a 29-year old waiter at the Hard Rock Cafe in Hollywood. I do the waiting tables thing to pay the bills while pursuing a career as a writer. While my fondest hopes are to score a gig writing comics and to publish a novel some day, I am also attempting the screenwriting thing. In all media, my work almost always reverts back to fantasy or horror."
E-mail: Moose0225@aol.com
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