Wilfred lay on his front in the dark. He imagined himself as still as a Gila monster on a rock, baking beneath a searing sun.
His bed was of course more comfortable than a rock, and his bedroom more accommodating than mid-summer in Death Valley, but he would trade places with that reptile instantly for its inherent stillness.
Parkinson’s Disease was like an evil twin brother he never knew he had until fifteen years ago; the symptoms that accompanied this errant sibling played the parts of its offspring. The ‘nephews’ thrust in Wilfred’s care for tonight, were insomnia and trembling.
Most nights he would pass the time allowing Beethoven to caress his good ear, or some large print Beckett or Proust to stoke his creative fire. On that night though, he couldn’t be bothered with any of the normal distractions. He just lay there doing what he did best: quivering like a cockerel’s comb; leaking saliva; and enduring the involuntary flexing of his right foot.
It grasped at the air in acknowledgment, as if a mischievous sprite tickled him just then.
He peered across the dark space and 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 reflection in the new corridor mirror, an attack on her ersatz self.
No, he pondered. Wrong choice of word. An attack on her…doppelgänger. That’s the one. Ersatz is a good word too, but for another context maybe.
In all his years of writing he couldn’t remember ever using those two words. He should have got his carer, Ludmilla, to insert them in his last novel before she left on holiday.
It was because of that holiday that Wilfred’s younger sister, Stella, was arriving tomorrow to stay over for a while. He smiled, “If ever there was an example of the blind leading the blind…”
Stella was meant to be there already, but her flight had been delayed...apparently. He promised her he would get an agency carer, but in the end he decided to opt for independence, just for the one night. He hated to think that he bothered people, even paid strangers.
The full-length mirror that Gerdi occupied herself with was a present from Stella―Wilfred’s seventieth birthday present. Seventieth. She corrected 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’d said at the ‘party’, in one of the fleeting moments between sausage rolls.
Ludmilla chortled at that, celebratory sherry in one hand, a fairy cake in the other. She was unaware that rather than attempted levity, Stella’s comment was the result of mild insanity, inherited from their mother. His sister was simply making it known that she still had the mental capacity to perform simple arithmetic, albeit in such a roundabout manner that only her brother would notice. Bless her.
Wilfred asked his handyman to come and mount the mirror as soon as Stella told him she was coming; he would get the young man to come back and remove it when she left too. He didn’t know why she thought a seventy-year-old misanthrope needed a full-length mirror. Perhaps to see how his out of control body preceded his soul’s imminent descent to Hell? None of her presents could match up to the one she gave him last year though: that little white ball of energy Wilfred was now peering at through the dark.
Earlier today―and today only, mind―Wilfred stood naked in front of the mirror. He found his features so complicated to take in, that he couldn’t help fluctuating between the extremes of…not bad for your age, all diseases considered…to…as hideously deformed as if you’ve been swiftly dipped in and out of molten lava.
All the mirror did was make him consider raising the topic of euthanasia with her again. That one time he brought the subject up with her, he did so because he thought she of all people would understand…considering the remnants the disease had left of their father before he died. Instead, she lambasted him for even thinking about it, an occurrence he doubted she remembered now. He still recalled her already out-sized eyes distending even further in shock from her narrow face. She resembled a discus fish, a tiny mouth and bulging eyes, with the Queen of England’s hair thrown on top. Worryingly, he’d been told all his life that they resembled each other too.
Before Wilfred had the chance to explain that he didn’t intend to kill himself―and therefore had 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 bizarre relationship, one couldn’t rule out that the topic wouldn’t come up again; 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 experienced yet another misunderstanding.
The mirror did serve one 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.
If only my life could be so simple. If only I had such control over my body. Such expressiveness…
Right then, the tickling sprite substituted the feather for a live length of cable, the end of which he touched to a bundle of nerves on the sole of Wilfred’s foot. If the sprite really did exist, Wilfred would have stomped it in the face―his leg spasmed that violently.
He did have complete control over his body once, more so than most. In high school he was twice singled out as being ‘most likely to excel in a stage career’. Excel. Not just succeed. They were almost right. Instead of bringing characters to life on the stage though, he chose to bring them to life on the page. His uncanny expressivity and visualisation didn’t go to waste.
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, when through his mind he knew he could perform more physical feats than any fit man could? Why just last Tuesday he 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, hoping for more of the same. Aided as always by darkness, his mind slipped easily into the right mode, but instead of Soph he ended up thinking of Gerdi, being as she was in his view.
"Oh well,” he added a voluntary shrug to his various other movements, “better than nothing.”
There was another reason why she was at the forefront of his creative mind: that afternoon, he’d completed a short story about her.
"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’. Thank God for pen names.”
He 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’d made sure of it.
"Damn straight.”
All he needed to do now…was hurry up and die.
*
They faced each other in the narrow, dark corridor…but not lengthways. Dark it may have been, but that didn’t stop Mao from seeing her soon-to-be victim clearly…no darkness could.
Mao kept her body pressed flat to the wooden floor. Her forepaws lay straight out in front of her, and her claws dug into the timber, gaining solid purchase for the imminent pounce. It was in the same position. Mao’s gaze zoned in on the neck. It did the same. In fact, it didn’t only move like Mao, it looked like her as well.
Bristling white fur covered it, from just after the pink of the nose all the way to the tip of the downy tail. Mischief and curiosity charged every tuft of its pelt, but in the eyes, claws and teeth, Mao clearly saw a killer instinct she knew too well. It was undoubtedly a Mao-Thing, just like her.
The thump inside her moved like she had swallowed a hummingbird whole, and she breathed like her larger cousins now too, probing the air for a telltale scent. She flexed her ears rigid, exposing their full pink triangularity, ready to snatch any sound out of the air.
It had appeared on that new part of the corridor wall that was something between a TV, a door, a window and water. Mao had almost walked right past, minding her own business. She 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 two-legged Being and the other Mao-Thing...her home-mate, Raau. Raau was asleep on the heated bathroom floor, of course, not even aware that there was another of their kind in the apartment. So it was up to her.
The new Mao-Thing was still frozen there like a crystal clear picture…just as Mao was. 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 his favourite; until Mao found a seed on the kitchen floor once and nearly choked to death on it. She remembered that he 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’d been fixed by another Being, the one he took her to.
The Mao-Thing in front of her seemed to have drifted, and was now back paying Mao the attention she was due.
Mao dared to glance slightly to one side of it, and noticed that a door stood a little open in its background. It looked the same as the one that led to her Being’s room, but Mao didn’t dare turn around to check.
She waited to see what the Mao-Thing would do next, still unsure whether she should attack it, or run off behind the piano in the lounge.
Mao’s right ear twitched and repositioned, as a sharp repeated electronic beep pulsed into the space, through the crack beneath the front door.
Beep.
Beep.
(Did the Mao-Thing’s ear just twitch?)
Beepbeep.
Beep.
Mao knew the sound well: it was the Beep-Thing all those floors below, touched repeatedly by someone using a part of their Being-Paw many times.
Someone was entering the building.
*
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 little 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.
Seconds of dryness passed―tik―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.
Tik
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 forever to swivel himself on his good hip. Finally, he shuffled around so he sat facing the bedroom door.
Tik
He knew and felt everything. Perverse…reverse…nirvana. Someone was pushing a key into the lock of the front door. Carefully. The sound was of the small spring-loaded pins in his front door lock. Their bottoms hitting the depths of each notch, while their tops lined up evenly for three tandem barrels to slide across unhindered when the key was turned.
He purposely engrossed himself in the details. He could see them even.
Tik.
Ludmilla was supposed to have a key, but he knew it wasn’t her because he had convinced her to leave it with him earlier that morning. Stella had one too, but she wasn’t even in the country yet…or maybe she was?
He was being ridiculous though; he knew exactly who it was.
Tik.
It was Death. It was time. It was the end.
An atmosphere of sweeping oppression always 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.
Tik.
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.
Tik.
If Wilfred’s tongue didn’t feel like a saturated sponge he would shout: “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 by 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 noise: the living room. He imagined Gerdi ensconced behind the piano, Rodger’s eyes glinting from the dark rear of the Chesterfield.
Then…a void of seemingly eternal silence and time.
The sound of Wilfred’s breathing filled the air around him. 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 exerted, but it still didn’t stop his death grip.
Then the strangest thing happened: he stopped shaking and twitching. After fifteen years of constant suffering, outward calm washed over him in his last minutes.
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 didn’t believe it was happening until this 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 he 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 crawled along the left side of his body―shoulder, arm, neck, jaw even―while intensifying.
He realised what it was: a heart attack.
The black smudge extended fully formed to the floor, then grew as it moved closer. The attacker lingered in front of him. Two hands aimed for Wilfred’s sweat-drenched neck out of the blackness, increasing the heart attack’s intensity. At the last moment, the interloper dropped his hands without touching him, 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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