Mao didn’t understand what she was looking at, and anything she didn’t understand needed to be treated in one of two ways: if it was far off, it needed to be watched; if it was near, it needed to be attacked. It had always been that simple for her and her species. This…threat…though, was as near as it could get; it was in her home.
They faced each other in the darkness of the short corridor. Dark it may have been, but that didn’t stop Mao from being able to see her soon-to-be victim clearly…no darkness could. She crouched, attack-ready. It crouched too. In fact, it didn’t only move like Mao, it looked like her as well. This was what she didn’t understand the most.
Glaring white dense fur covered it, from just after the pink of the nose, all the way down the length of the fluffy, luxuriant tail. Mischief and curiosity bristled through every messy tuft, but in the eyes, claws and teeth, Mao saw the kind of killer instinct that she knew she had as well. There was no doubting it was a Mao-Being, just like her.
The thump inside her moved quicker than normal, and she breathed harder too, probing the air between the two of them for a telltale scent. She flexed her ears rigid, like catcher’s mitts ready to snatch anything out of the air.
It had appeared out of nowhere, on that new part of the corridor wall that was something between a TV, a door, a window and water, yet it wasn’t any of them. Mao had just been walking past, minding her own business. She had wanted to see what was going on in the bathroom, having spent the night so far in the kitchen, and then the lounge,watching the thing in the bowl of water as it swam around and around.
This was herhome, where she lived with her Being and the other Mao-Being...her home-mate, Raau. He was asleep on the heated floor of the bathroom, of course, not even aware that there was another Mao-Being there. So it was up to Mao.
This new Mao-Being seemed to be just as mesmerised by Mao, as Mao was of it. The thing’s eyes were huge, and not quite round, more like black olives. Olives. This was one of the few Being words that Mao knew well. Olives used to be her Being’s favourite, Mao’s too. He used to cut them into pieces and feed them to her, always amused that she enjoyed such an un-Mao-Being type thing. When Mao found a seed on the kitchen floor once―and nearly choked to death on it―he stopped feeding them to her.
She remembered that her Being had smelt strongly of a new scent t hen, one that came with the worried look on his face. He only returned to normal after she had been fixed by another Being, the one he had taken her to.
The Mao-Being in front of her still hadn’t moved.
Unlike her home-mate, Raau, this new Mao-Being made no Mao sounds and had no Mao smell. It couldn’t fool her though; she knew a Mao-Being when she saw one.
She dared to look slightly to one side of the Mao-Being. She noticed that a door stood slightly open behind it; it looked the same as the one that led to where her Being slept.
(Wait! Had it just moved? A flick of its eyes to the side?)
Mao’s own eyes grew huge, and not quite round, in fact…just like black olives (but how did she know what her own eyes looked like?). She waited to see what the Mao-Being would do next, unsure yet whether she should attack it, or run off behind the piano in the lounge.
Then, Mao heard a noise.
(Did the Mao-Being’s ear just twitch?)
She knew the sound well: it was of a Being touching the Beep-Thing all those floors below, using a part of its Being-Paw many times. She heard a different sound for each time the Being touched it.
Someone was entering the building.
*
Wilfred Gustafsson lay on his front in the dark. Parkinson’s Disease was to him like an evil twin brother he never knew existed until fifteen years ago. The various symptoms that came with this errant sibling acted the parts of the disease’s offspring, apples that hadn’t fallen far from the tree in their degrees of errancy. Wilfred’s current visiting nephew―and most frequent, after trembling―was insomnia.
Some nights he would listen to Beethoven, or read Beckett; on that night, he couldn’t be bothered. He just lay there doing what he did best: quivering like the tail feathers of a nervous cockerel; leaking saliva; and enduring the involuntary flexing of his right foot. There could easily have been a mischievous sprite at the end of the bed, tickling him intermittently.
He stared through the open crack of the bedroom door, ignoring the sodden patch of pillow beneath his cheek and jaw. He could just make out his youngest cat, Gerdi, as a vague blob of white against the dark, like something not erased properly from a blackboard. She was no doubt preparing a deadly attack on her own reflection, on her ersatz self.
"No, Wilf,” he whispered. “Wrong choice of word. A deadly attack on her…doppelgänger. That’s the one!”
In all his years of writing he couldn’t remember ever using that word.
"Doppelgänger. Ersatz is a good one too.”
He would get his carer-stroke-transcriber, Ludmilla, to insert them somewhere appropriate in his next work. But then he remembered the futures that both he and his doctors had foreseen.
"Hmmp! If I want to get it done…I’d better get up and do it now.”
Wilfred’s younger sister, Stella, was coming tomorrow to stay over for a while, as Ludmilla needed a week off for a holiday.
"If ever there was an example of the blind leading the blind…”
Stella was meant to be with him already, but her flight had been delayed. He had promised to call an agency to get someone for one night, but in the end he hadn’t bothered. It was nice remembering what it felt like to be independent again, even for one night.
Stella had given him the mirror last month as a seventieth birthday present. Seventieth. She had taken to correcting him each time he said that.
"It’s actually your sixtieth birthday present…as I didn’t start giving you anything for your birthday until you were ten,” she said in a brief space between sausage rolls.
Ludmilla had overheard Stella’s comment during the celebratory sherry and titbits of the ‘party’. She had mistaken it for some type of humour, unaware that it was actually the result of a mild dose of hereditary insanity from their mother’s side. In saying what she had said, Stella was simply attempting to show that she still had the mental capacity to carry out simple arithmetic, albeit in such a roundabout manner that nobody noticed anyway. Bless her.
Wilfred had asked Sigmund, his handyman, to come and fix the mirror to the wall as soon as Stella told him she was coming over; he would get the young man to come and remove it as soon as she left too. He didn’t know why she thought a seventy-year-old misanthrope would need a full-length mirror. What? Perhaps to see how his out of control body preceded his soul’s descent to Hell? All it really did was make him consider discussing euthanasia with her again.
That one time he had brought the subject up with his sister, he did so because he thought she of all people would understand, considering the remnants the disease had left of their father before he eventually died. Instead, she chastised him for even thinking about it, an occurrence he doubted she remembered now.
Before Wilfred had the chance to explain that he had no intention of killing himself, and therefore no expectation that she helped him to do so, Stella had already begun a complicated relationship with time, thanks to the matchmaking of insanity. However, due to that same relationship, one couldn’t rule out that the topic wouldn’t come up again, as she now had a habit of flawlessly resuming conversations they’d begun up to fifty years earlier. Wilfred was sure that her delayed plane wasn’t delayed at all; it was just that she and time had been through yet another misunderstanding.
The mirror did serve one worthwhile purpose though: to provide Gerdi with amusement. He envied that cat sometimes. Hers was perhaps the simplest of existences: eat, play, sleep. Period. Excretion didn’t even count, being mostly automatic...as it was with him, he thought with a weak smile. All Gerdi had to do was get herself in the right place at the right time. She had no predators either, except her fellow feline, Rodger, and his amorous attempts, as Wilfred hadn’t neutered him yet.
"If only my life could be so simple. If only I could have such control over my body! Such expressiveness!”
Right then, the tickling sprite substituted the feather for an electrically charged length of cable, the end of which he touched to a bundle of nerves on the sole of Wilbur’s foot. If the sprite really did exist, Wilfred would have involuntarily kicked it in the face, his leg spasmed that violently.
He did have complete control over his body once, more so than most. At high school he was twice singled out as being ‘most likely to excel in a stage career’. Excel. Not just succeed. What they didn’t foresee though, was that he would prefer to use his uncanny expressivity to submerge himself into the characters and situations he’d act out on paper, not on the stage.
Perhaps, he thought, this was why his mind was now resolutely healthy, while his body imitated rotting fruit. Maybe he should have been an actor, or a dancer. No. Of course not, what was the point in an Olympian physique lugging around the brain of a troll? Through his mind he knew he could perform more physical actions than any fit man ever could. Why just last Tuesday he had enjoyed a lengthy sojourn with Sophia Loren, neither of them a day over twenty-years-old!
Buoyed by the memory of himself with ‘Soph’, Wilfred plunged into his imagination again. Aided as always by darkness, his mind slipped easily into the right mode, but unfortunately he couldn’t help but think of Gerdi, being as she was right in front of him.
"Oh well,” he added a voluntary shrug to his various other movements, “better than nothing.”
It was also because the cat was fresh on the creative side of his mind, as just that previous afternoon he had completed a short story where she was the star.
"Now that is a piece of work I’m proud to put my name to…unlike the other drivel I’ve been churning out in this so-called ‘career’!”
He had never imagined that at his age he’d still be writing what editors thought he should be writing…certainly not after twelve published novels!
"A lifelong contract will do that to you,” he muttered wetly…and fifteen years too late.
When he was gone though, his magnum opus would be discovered. Those bastards would learn what he was truly capable of…and they would get not a piece of it. He had made sure of it.
"Damn straight.”
All he needed to do now was hurry up and die.
Wilfred thought he heard something then, a noise at the front door perhaps. He raised his head from the sodden patch of pillow and listened.
Nothing.
He squinted in Gerdi’s direction to see if his ‘early warning system’ had picked anything up. She was still by the mirror, but it was too dark to see if her ears had pricked up. He flipped the pillow over and lowered his head back onto it.
One second of dryness passed―klik―before he heard the noise again. He was now certain that Gerdi had straightened her back and was facing the main door to the apartment.
Wilfred threw the sheets off the bed, not meaning to do it with such vigour, so then―as if he’d spent himself in that one action―he took an age to swivel himself awkwardly on his good hip. Finally, he shuffled himself around so he sat facing the bedroom door.
Klik
He knew and felt everything. Perverse, reverse, nirvana. Someone was pushing a key into the lock of the front door. Carefully.
Ludmilla was supposed to have a key, but he knew it wasn’t her because he had forced her to leave hers with him earlier that morning. Stella had one too, but she wasn’t even in the country yet.
He was being ridiculous though; he knew exactly who it was.
Klik
It was Death. It was time.
An atmosphere of sweeping oppression rode side-saddle with him. Whenever Wilfred fell, he felt it. Each time he dared think of a future, he felt it. Lying in bed depressed in a pool of saliva, molested by a sprite, he felt it. The Fourth Horseman had been stalking him for over a decade now, so Wilfred knew the sensation well.
Klik
He felt as if the intruder was already in the room, sitting on top of him…and the bastard was weighty! Acute pain seeped from his inflamed knee joints under the imagined crushing pressure. Breathing stifled.
Klik
If his tongue didn’t feel so swollen up in his mouth he would have shouted: “I’m already awake! Just come in, damn you!”
How long is the blasted key anyway?
As if in response…the noise stopped…and was replaced with another.
Thwek!
A new, more solid sound, of the three tandem barrels shunting back into the door as the key was turned. It might as well have been a gunshot to Wilfred’s chest.
He heard the cats, scrambling out of control across the wooden floor, as they dashed for the furthest point from the origin of the noise: the living room. He imagined Gerdi behind the piano, Rodger behind the Chesterfield.
Then, a void of seemingly eternal silence and time.
His own breathing was all he could hear. Sweat trickled, tickled, over his ribs. His hands aimed to rip chunks out of the mattress’ edge. What seemed like radiation burns grew in his wrists from the force he was exerting, but it still didn’t deter his death grip. Then the strangest thing happened: he stopped shaking and twitching. Complete calm for the first time in fifteen years, during the last minutes of his life.
Wilfred spotted the silhouette via the mirror first, no outline, just a deeper black on black. Something rooted itself more firmly inside him on sight of this, as if he hadn’t believed it was happening until the visual confirmation.
Squinting at the door, he realised―with a spear of pain through the chest―that the intruder had been staring into the room for seconds longer than Wilfred had thought. A black smudge the size of a head, and at just the right height to be one, had long since breached the gap of the open door.
The pain of that shock wouldn’t dissipate. In fact, it grew, out to the left side of his body―shoulder, arm, neck, jaw even―while becoming more intense. He realised then what it was: a heart attack.
He sensed the room morphing under the command of his acute delirium. His mind was going after all.
The black smudge extended fully formed to the floor, then grew as it moved towards him. The attacker lingered in front of him. Two hands aimed for his sweat-drenched neck out of the blackness, increasing the heart attack’s intensity. The interloper dropped his hands though, without touching Wilfred, perhaps realising in shock that he had already begun the job remotely.
Wilfred fell back on the bed.
In-between spasms, before everything became nothing, he prayed that Gerdi and Rodger would be okay.
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