Chapter 2: Distant Voices

A few days passed before Violet saw the cat next. She was not in the ash-pit this time but rather lying on her stomach, peering into a drainpipe. This was another thing her mother did not like her to do, but Violet was curious and, as ever, not particularly inclined to listen to reasonable advice.

The drainpipe was set close to the little gravel alleyway that ran between the side of her house and that of the neighbor’s. It was small and wet with the previous night’s rain, blocked off by an iron grate half consumed by rust. Beyond the grate was a lightless dark so absolute that staring into it made Violet’s eyes feel strange and numb.

Yet she thought there was something in there, the barest hint of a noise tickling the innermost parts of her ears. To Violet it sounded almost like words, fragments of a conversation being carried from a long ways off. It had the same sort of cadence but there was something off about the tone, a strange quality to its half heard essence that felt almost like nettles. Wherever the sounds landed there were little portions of her mind going fuzzy and vague, sensation muted.

As she lingered in front of the drainpipe the darkness contained within seemed to shift and swirl, as though a plug had been pulled at the bottom of a basin full of ink. Immediately there were depthless vortexes gaining cohesion, texture riming the edges of a material that Violet couldn’t quite make sense of. It wasn’t liquid, for she could see its edges evaporating when it found spaces where the daylight was too intense, and it wasn’t shadow for its presence was much too real.

Violet suddenly had an intense, frightening urge to push her hand through the gaps in the grate and try to touch the entity within, but even as a dreadful, sick curiosity ballooned within her she stayed stock still, transfixed.

There were splashes of a distant color forming at the bottom of the inky swirls, an inch and a thousand miles away simultaneously. Violet thought she could see blue, a hard, icy cobalt that seemed to drive every splash of warmth from her mind and body. The blood fell from her face like liquid poured down a well shaft and immediately anxious prickles danced all along her body, sharp as needles.

The color held no light within it, no glow or illumination, yet somehow it was still able to be perceived. There was a flatness and at the same time a sense that if she were to look through she’d see that each cobalt pinprick was merely an aperture into something greater and more terrible than a person could comprehend.

From the tunnel came noise, or some sensation that her mind chose to interpret as noise, sound issuing from the thing in the drainpipe.

Words drifted free.

h e l p i t h u r t s

m e

w h e r e . a m . . - -

t i r e d p l e a s e

p l e a s e h e l p u s

s o s o r r y

p l e a s e

c o m e

c l o s e r

Violet froze, unsure how to react. A distant fear squeezed the bottom of her stomach like an iron band, cold and heavy, but there didn’t seem to be any real immediacy to it. Her mind spun in place like a broken gear, unable to connect to its surrounding parts.

All that remained were the words, the intent boiling from beyond them, and the darkness yawning open past the grate, which suddenly seemed as big as a cathedral door. All she had to do was move forward just a little further…

“You shouldn’t be doing that.” A very different voice suddenly said. It was the cat.

Violet jumped in place, the surprise snapping her away from the drainpipe. She scrambled back and onto her knees, skirt rumpled and dotted with grass stains, heart doing an uncomfortable flip in her chest. Immediately all of the instinctive worry and fear her body had generated seemed huge and overwhelming, crashing down upon her in an icy wave.

The cat had tucked itself away into the shadows at the corner of Violet’s house, only its eyes easily visible. As she stared, trying to calm herself, the cat unspooled from the darkness and padded silently along the little gravel alleyway, towards Violet.

Violet tried to say something but found that her words were entirely gone, her mind still slow and woozy. She glanced back into the sliver of drainpipe she could still see from her new, kneeling position. The darkness within spasmed and she cringed back.

“Take a moment.” The cat instructed, stopping a few feet from her left side.

Violet blinked helplessly but couldn’t bear to stay silent. To simply sit on top of what had just happened felt impossible, but to try and embrace the horrible enormity, it…it…

Again she thought of the color, the horrible swirling nonsense of the monster in the drainpipe. Its toneless, fractured words dripping with horrible desperate loneliness and greed and anger, hatred and a thousand other emotions all only becoming clear as her mind got back up to speed. But whereas before she’d been numb, now Violet felt all too sensitive. Overexposed.

She fell slowly to one side and curled into a ball, trembling on the grass. The cat watched dispassionately for a moment, then approached the drainpipe.

“Wait….” Violet reached one trembling hand out but was too frightened by the thought of going any closer to the drainpipe to put any real effort into halting the cat. Even now she could hear the edges of the creature’s words, jumbled and falling on top of each other as it tried to lure her back.

Then, abruptly, it froze. The silence only held for a moment, but the shock of it was enough to make Violet blink. She could feel a trembling, disquieted fear in the space beyond air now, where the creature truly lived.

s t o p

The creature whined, its voice-noise gone shivery and unstable.

Violet managed to sit up, staring at the cat. It had stopped about where she had been, resting casually in front of the drain, looking through the holes in the rusty grate.

“Why is it…?” Again Violet trailed off, terribly confused.

“It knows what I am, therefore it is afraid of me.” The cat said, as though that should have been self evident, then stroked a paw across the grate, rattling the metal.

The creature recoiled, the pits of color guttering like candle flames. Its noise dissolved into a discordant, frightened buzz.

“But you’re a cat.” Violet said, uncomprehending.

The cat didn’t seem to hear her.

“You shouldn’t play with dead things.” It chided, then trotted across Violet’s back garden and slipped beneath the bottom rail of the fence, gone in an instant.

Violet took a small step away from the drainpipe, eyes locked on the blackness beyond the grate, but there were no words or colors leaking from that negative space. She could still feel the demon’s noise collecting in the front of her mind, but it was unordered now, fragments of sound and feeling falling in an aimless cascade, splintering off in every direction.

And from the very center of the demon’s noise, so faint that Violet wondered if she’d actually heard it; a sob.