Scuttle

“Goddammit! Not again!” shrieked Rachel, shoving the dead mouse off of the bed. It made a thump when it hit the floor. “Gross. Leo! Leo!”

A cat mewled from another room. It sounded unsure of itself.

“Goddammit,” Rachel said, more quietly now, and sighed. She looked up at the ceiling. “I know you’re just doing your job. I just wish you’d get a cleaner job, that’s all. Like a businessman or something. A seeing-eye cat. I don’t know.” She climbed out on the other side of the bed and padded off to the bathroom. Rachel refused to think about the furry little corpse with its gross tail and weird little hands until she had her first cup of coffee. At least this bastard still had its head. “I’m sleeping with the door closed from now on, by the way,” she exclaimed.

But she didn’t.

Thankfully, Rachel did not awaken to another trophy on her chest the following morning, or the morning after. But what happened two days ago was not the first time that Leo had alerted his mistress to the presence of mice in their home, no sir. The little bastards didn’t infest the place—that’s a disgusting word, anyway—but there were plenty of signs. Besides the random proofs proudly displayed by Leo for Rachel’s inspection, of course. Jagged little holes chewed into the cereal boxes and oatmeal; droppings on the floor of the pantry; and brand new mouse traps loaded up with tasty bits of bait and cheese scattered throughout the apartment, spring-loaded, cocked and ready. Of course, the mice never fell for the traps; they must’ve seen too many Tom & Jerry cartoons.

Rachel’s apartment wasn’t filthy, heavens no, and that was what made her mouse problem even more embarrassing. You wouldn’t take a walk through her place and think to yourself, Disgusting. I’ll bet she has mice. On the contrary, Rachel kept it very clean and very tidy, and you would think, Ooh, maybe I’l stay for a cup of tea and biscuits. Maybe the mice appreciated that. Maybe they were clean mice. Maybe they wiped their paws on little mats outside of whatever cracks in the walls they were coming in from. Regardless, the sight of mouse droppings in the corner of a newly-mopped floor was upsetting.

That, and the unsprung traps with missing bait. She didn’t know how on Earth they were accomplishing such feats of legerdemain, but it was infuriating. And impressive.

A week or so after Leo’s last kill, Rachel noticed something: there hadn’t been been a sighting or any sign of the presence of mice in the apartment since…since that last time! True, she had moved her cereal and oatmeal into glass jars, and it was also true that none of the traps had ever been sprung, but there were no droppings. No droppings and, most importantly, no headless or otherwise mutilated little bodies in her bed.

“Hey Leo, did you get the last mouse?” Rachel asked the marmalade cat circling her feet and purring. “Or are you just shirking your duties? Am I not paying you enough?” Leo meowed.

Days passed. Then weeks. Rachel was getting used to the possibility that her mouse problem might actually be solved. It was now fall, so the mice would be coming indoors where it’s warmer. “We’ll see what happens,” Rachel said. She still didn’t take away the traps (not that they did anything, but just in case), but she was feeling more relaxed. Finally.

One night in early October, Rachel was awakened by a scuffling sound from out in the kitchen down the hall. Well, not exactly awakened. It was just enough to stir her. But Rachel dismissed the disturbance as guhhh, cat, goddammit… before drifting off again into a peaceful and dreamless slumber.

The next morning, Rachel’s eyes fluttered open to the sound of trash cans banging together outside. The sun shone through her bedroom window. She listened to a garbage truck rumbling slowly through the neighborhood. Rachel started to lift herself out of bed when she noticed an object down by her feet that was definitely not a sleeping cat. Her heart sank. A mouse. Another goddamn mouse. “Thank you, L—” she started to say.

But no. It wasn’t a mouse this time. Not at all. You would think that this discovery should have made Rachel happy. Instead, she let out a bloodcurdling scream, half-rolled and half-fell out of bed onto the floor, knocking a water glass over, where it shattered. She leapt up, lunged from the bedroom, and slammed the door shut behind her. Leo sat and watched from the kitchen entryway.

After she had recovered, Rachel stood at the closed bedroom door holding a broom like a wizard’s staff. She looked at the doorknob and realized she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t open the door and see whatever in the hell it was that Leo had caught last night and (presumably) killed. Whatever was existing in the spaces behind her walls.

“Rachel, you’re being an idiot,” she said to herself. “Maybe it is just a mouse. Maybe Leo just ripped it all up and made it look like…like whatever is in there on my bed. Where I sleep. Jesus Christ. …But it’s so big.” Leo came up behind her and started rubbing up against her leg. Rachel screamed. Leo ran away.

“Leo! Come back! Honey, you just startled me. Oh, whatever.” She swallowed, opened the bedroom door, and poked her head cautiously inside.

Nope. No mouse here. First of all, mice didn’t get as big as this…thing…sprawled at the foot of the bed. It wasn’t a rat. A rat would have been repulsive and nauseating; but this was much, much worse. Rachel would have preferred a rat. Welcomed one, even. It wasn’t a rat, but it also didn’t look like any rodent or mammal or any living thing that Rachel had ever seen before in her life. She stepped into the room, her face twisted in a grotesque sneer, holding the broom defensively out in front of her. Leo peered around the corner of the kitchen entryway.

From what Rachel could see, it was fourteen to sixteen inches long, and looked to be more insectile than animal, though it was covered with a coat of short, coarse-looking, oily fur. It looked like something between a centipede and a mole. The body didn’t appear to be segmented, but had pairs of legs running down the length of it; thick, spindly legs with curved, hooked feet. Ten pair? Twelve? Rachel stepped further into the room, brandishing the broom.

She moved alongside the far wall, her eyes never leaving the motionless creature. She was aware of some slight movement back at the door, and Rachel jerked her head around. Leo stood there in the open doorway, looking at her. “What the hell did you do, Leo,” she muttered through gritted teeth. Leo didn’t answer her.

Because of the angle at which the…thing…was sprawled, Rachel couldn’t see its head, or whatever passed for a head. She poked it with the broom, and when it didn’t do anything, she ventured further into the room, skirting the edge of the bed. The garbage truck was on the other side of the street now. The crashing of the barrels sounded miles away as Rachel nudged the dead thing’s head into view with the end of the broom.

Seconds later, she was running down the bedroom hall, screaming, the balled up comforter held out at arms’ length. She burst into the kitchen, stomped the pedal to the trash can, and stuffed the comforter into the trash, screaming throughout. Next, she picked up the trash can, bolted out the back door, down the stairs and outside, where she heaved the entire thing into the building dumpster out back.

If there was one, there could be hundreds, she mused.

I wonder if that was what got the mice, Rachel pondered.

Rachel moved out of her apartment two days later. She tossed Leo in his carrier, threw some clothes in bags, and took off to parts unknown. Well, across town, anyway, but she flat-out refused to go back for any of her belongings, at all, ever. She coaxed friends, family, and acquaintances into volunteering to move the contents of her apartment—which was small, yes, and one person with one cat, true—but was a huge pain in the ass for everyone involved, nevertheless. She just couldn’t bear the thought of lifting a table or one end of the couch and seeing one of them. Alive. Looking at her. Or sifting through a closet just to see its eyes glinting at her in the darkness at the back where it crouched. Its nearly human eyes in its very human looking face on a very human looking head. She recalled its thin, scraggly beard—

—Dear God. Rachel shook her head vigorously to drive away the recollection, the few seconds of unveiled horror as she beheld uncannily human features belonging to the unidentified demon lying dead on her comforter. The thing that could have relatives scuttling around just under the floor or behind the walls or in the ceiling above her bed…

Weeks turned into months. Rachel settled in to her new place, and so did Leo. Granted she hadn’t seen much of her cat for the last couple of days, but he was probably scoping the place out. The apartment was a little smaller than her last one, but that was fine with her—the smaller the place, the fewer hiding places there were. This apartment had less furniture, too—less furniture meant less hiding places. And Rachel’s electric bill was a bit higher now because she started keeping all the lights on twenty-four hours a day. She didn’t sleep very well at first. Actually, she didn’t sleep at all at first. Quick snatches throughout the day and night—twenty minutes here, an hour or two there—but it was always very light sleep. ‘Sleeping with one eye open,’ as the saying goes. She had begun to relax, though, little by little, hour by hour, through the dark, dark night.Why she had decided that these things were nocturnal was not a consideration. Regardless, whenever she closed her eyes, Rachel founded herself waiting. Waiting for scratching sounds coming from the closet, scuttling sounds from under the bed. Waiting for Leo to bring her the corpse of something that should not exist. Unless it gets Leo first…

But nothing ever got Leo. Leo was a good cat. Loyal. A great hunter. Strong. Smart. He had more than demonstrated his feline capabilities. But in early spring, after the snow had melted and left behind a cold mess of last year’s waterlogged vegetation and mud, Leo proved himself again.

The marmalade cat had, indeed, been laying low since he was abruptly relocated; and, indeed, he had been scoping the place out. Looking for cracks in the walls. Sniffing the faintest trace of…cinnamon?…that was much stronger at their first apartment, but a very definite cause for alarm. Listening in the quiet of the night, to her master’s breathing, slower, slower, and the far wall in the laundry room.

It wasn’t mice. Leo knew mice. He knew the way they sounded and he knew the way they smelled, the fearful and frantic little buzz that mice emitted. There was something behind the wall in the laundry room, and it smelled like cinnamon, and the bad thing at the other apartment smelled like cinnamon, too. It wasn’t mice. Whatever it was, Leo knew it was there, and he was on full alert because Leo also sensed that the thing behind the wall knew that he was there, too. And waiting. Leo crouched on his haunches while his master dozed, sniffed the air, listened. Watched the wall in the small hours and smelled the poison on the other side.

One night in late March, when New England was its ugliest and most unpleasant, Leo crouched on his haunches in the open doorway of the laundry room, watching the wall, listening. Keeping vigil. Waiting. Sniffing the air. The cinnamony smell was much stronger now than it had been. It was closer now. Leo could feel it in his whiskers, and it made him sneeze. His fur stood on end. His ears went back. There was a sound now, a sound that Leo recalled from the last time this happened. His pupils were so dilated his eyes looked black. He was set to spring.

The sound, something between slicing and chewing, increased in both volume and urgency. A crack appeared near the floor, spreading out like blood. A dull crunch, and a small, circular section of the wall was suddenly sucked into itself, disappeared, as if consumed; leaving behind a small black hole in the wall just under twelve inches in diameter. Leo made a guttural growling sound that neither Rachel nor anyone who had ever met the marmalade heard him make before. Now a face appeared in the hole, with eyes that locked onto Leo’s own. A small, menacing face with a mouth upturned into the hideous caricature of a grin.

“Leeeeeooooo,” it vocalized in a shrill chirp. It sounded vaguely like a mockery of Rachel’s own voice, a blasphemous imitation. The thing issued from the hole on spindly pairs of hooked legs as thick as a rat’s tail. Leo sprung.

“And what was the difference between the first and the second creature, again?” Dr. Landau asked.

“The faces,” Rachel sighed, her legs propped up on the big, soft wingback chair on one side of the ornate, mahogany desk. Her chin rested on her knees. “The second one had two.”

“Two faces?”

“Yes. One on either end.”

“And…you weren’t able to save it? Take a photograph of it?”

Rachel glared at Dr. Landau. “No, doctor,” she spat, “I burned the house down. Remember? That’s why I’m here.”

Dr. Landau pressed his fingers together into a steeple at his mouth and studied his patient over his glasses. She was getting agitated.

“Yes, I remember,” he replied. “And when you found it, it was on your bed? Like the first time?”

Rachel glared.

Afterwards, after she had been led back to her nice, bright, small padded cell—with nowhere for scuttling demons to crawl and hide—Rachel sat down on the floor in the corner, took a deep breath, and let it out. It really wasn’t so bad. She was reassured that it would only be until the doctors thought that Rachel would no longer be a threat to herself or others. Leo was fine—he was staying with grandma in the interim. And in the meantime, Rachel was instructed to get well, to take care of herself, and we’ll see you really soon.

Maybe she was just crazy. No, not crazy—that’s a bad word, like infested. Rachel’s only regret was not taking a quick photo of the loathsome monstrosity that she discovered the morning after Leo mercifully left it on the floor at the entryway to the laundry room. Granted, she had almost stepped on the goddamn abomination before seeing it; but even that would have been a thousand times better than if Leo had decided to drag it into the bedroom and show her what he had accomplished. If he had left it on her bed. Or on her face.

But no. Leo was a good cat. Loyal. Smart. He must’ve seen his mamma’s consternation and overwhelmingly negative reaction the first time and tried to spare her this time. This time.

Rachel chuckled to herself in her small, safe, padded space. This time indicates a future time, she thought, and chuckled again. She might not want to leave the safety of her room here at Danvers Psychiatric Hospital. It was lonely, true, and the food wasn’t very good, but Rachel felt safe. She could sleep. And she was relatively comfortable. She had noticed a weird cinnamony smell a couple of days ago, but it was very faint. Rachel reminded herself to mention it to the cleaning woman the next time she stopped by on her rounds.