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“Oh my God Jon, don’t be so dramatic! I told you, putting in between Hopworth and me was more than enough to get back most of my trust. And I feel bad enough, alright? I should not have…I shouldn’t have mistrusted you so much before that, ok? So, yes, I know you were just looking for nice rings and I won’t say a word to anyone, especially Melanie. Jeez, when are you two let that go?” on the other side of the line, Jon starting a speech that, in an all public show would have been far too bleeped to be considerable audible. Tim laughed and toyed with some of his white hair; letting it grow longer had likely been the best decision of his life. “Fine, er…I called you later.”
One good thing after his experience almost getting assimilated by The Lonely was his new-found capacity to feel automatically annoyed when someone he hadn’t invited in came into a room he was in at the moment.
He called it, the reverse-vamp-power (for everyone’s annoyance).
He turned, to find a woman with naturally tanned skin and so many freckles Martin’s skin would look plain in comparison. She was smiling at him.
There was also some kind of fog around her, but it wasn’t like his fog.
No, there was something… wrong with hers…
“Hello there!” she said in which, he had to admit, was a pretty good imitation of the famous Obi-Wan Kenobi moment.
Actually, now that he came to think about it, she had literally used Ewan McGregor’s voice.
“What the actual fuck?! Lad…Pal, let’s cut this short, what Fear do you serve or are more in the Keay ‘pick-up’ style? And what are you doing here?”
“Kind-of Beholding. I am here to say hello to the new grey-area players! Honestly, to speak in terms you Brits understand (and, by that, I mean people of your our country), between all the Jonahs and Gertrudes, it is great to find more people that don’t necessarily want to end the world as we know it, but understand that cannot keep pretending to be some kind of John Wick against the other avatars. Soooo self-righteous” she laughed. “I’m from the Greek Institute: The Daedalus Institute. We kind of serve other powers, too. More of a family matter, if you may.”
Tim raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve read Percy Jackson and Co.; please, tell me you are joking.”
“Then you get it (thanks Rick!) and no, I am not. But it is not something you have to be worried about, enough you have with Smirke’s 14. Gods, the ego of that guy. The moment Jonah Magnus call you out on your hubris you know you have a problem” she lowered her head and, when she raised it again, her eyes glowed just like Sasha’s did when she went, as he liked to call it, Full Archivist-OP. “Something is coming to you, it might not be much, but it want revenge for what you once did to one Jane Prentiss (or what had become of the best of her) and better if you get a bit of context beforehand, isn’t it?”
Before Tim could say anything, the Greek woman had disappear, leaving behind a phone number under the text “Julia, of The Watcher and Hecate”.
He almost wished he had to listen to more of Jon-trying-to-propose drama instead of having to deal with more ominous random people that came out of nowhere.
It was starting to get old. He sighed and started reading the statement.
Statement of Jay Sanders, regarding their strange relationship with a litter of extremely tiny kittens.
Me and my friends graduated from Mathematics last summer and, since then, most of us had got it…quite harsh, to say the least, when it comes to make a living.
There had been a decrease of “shitty jobs” offers (to say something) and, as a mathematician…ha, that had been a funny experience.
However, of the five of us, three were…well, well-off enough to not have to actually worry about money if they didn’t want to. And so they didn’t.
I don’t blame them; they tried to make it in their own, they failed, and then they just moved on, back to rich-people town.
Fun to play the regular kid for four years. Now, it was only Sarah and me.
And we couldn’t afford our shared flat, nor go back home. In my case, it’s about having your standard ultra-conservative family and, in her case…her family is just very poor and she is too concerned about their well-being to go back and having to live under their roof again. She has always had this compulsory need to be the one protecting the rest of the World, never the other way round.
God, she is so stubborn and proud…Well, maybe was. I…we will get to that.
The thing is; we were seeing ourselves out in the street, our everyday anxiety increased and, basically, fed from one to the other….when our landlord came in one evening.
We had barely seen in him in the almost half a decade we had been living in the building. He was your regular cliché scary Nosferatu-like landlord: tall, rail thin man with pale gray-ish skin and thinning hair. However, that day he looked slightly better than usual, a bit of light in his dark sunken eyes.
“You two cannot pay rent” he stated, with such a flat voice for a second I thought he was going to discover himself at some kind of droid that murdered defaulters in his property.
“No, we can’t. But…maybe we can rent a smaller flat, right? Or share with more people, Jay is good at socialising, right?”
The only socialising I ever do is when someone does a terrible misused of mathematical concepts and, here I go, your best pedantic pal!
Anyways, I knew it was important to keep the place (or the closest we could to it), so I nodded.
“Yeah! My friends used to say: ‘They are the live of the party, that Jay!’” I composed a barely believable smile and, as such, it made our landlord laughed.
His laugh sounded so normal…too normal; no laugh sounds like that in real life.
“Don’t worry kids, I know you two are broke and kind of lone wolfs that cannot go home for whatever reasons. I am really good at peaking up signs…” then, he opened a box he had been carrying this whole time and, if it hadn’t been for extremely bizarre event that was having him here with us, I would have noticed before.
There was a muffled sound coming from it.
Meowing.
Inside the box, there was a litter of tiny kittens, barely a few hours old, if you ask me.
Even there, so small, fragile, bald and slightly bloody; they were adorable.
Sarah and I composed a collective involuntary “Awww” to which our landlord responded with a smile that just…didn’t feel like a smile at all.
I know that might not make much sense but…it was what happened: he composed a mouth curvature that can only be described as unsettling.
“You can stay, on one condition: take care of the kittens.”
Yes; I know: this is likely the shadiest scenario possible, how come we both agreed to it without a second of hesitation?
First of all, if you have ever seen yourself at the verge of losing your home and still question desperate measures…what the hell is wrong with you?!
Second of all, sleep deprivation. Sorry, might sound stupid but we hadn’t had a good night sleep in what already felt like months (though they had just been a couple weeks) and it showed in everything we did (or, better said, tried to do).
And third: the kittens themselves. They needed someone. They needed us.
Especially one of us.
At first, having the kittens was the best thing that had ever happened to us.
They were extremely small rays of sunshine in our everyday otherwise bleak existence. They required to be taken care of but, if it hadn’t been for a pretty nasty habit of having a taste for cut fingernails and hair (and even that was kind of adorable from time to time), they would have been the best pets ever.
Plus, we couldn’t exactly prove it but…the moment they appeared, we got jobs. In our field, nonetheless!
It is true that the kittens didn’t seem to grow and, after three weeks under our care, that was starting to worry us.
What if there was something wrong with our kids?
Or maybe there were just some of those races that barely grow; we thought. It was comforting, since there was still a selfish part of us that was quite worried that, if our landlord saw us taking the kittens to the vet, he might think we weren’t taking proper care of them…and lose our flat.
And so weeks kept passing, winter cold arriving and our teeny tiny cats still capable of fitting into their box, where they were nothing but peaceful.
We could just sit next to them and stared at their bald, wrinkly skulls and pet their pointy ears while they playfully used their sharp claws against our fingers.
It was all just fine.
Until one day, when Sarah decided that, since we were just friends, the kittens could only be the children of one of us and, obviously, since her work as online, she spent more time with them, therefore, her offsprings.
Not only that, but SHE CHANGED THEIR DIET without asking me first.
She started giving them well cooked meat and soy milk, as if that was the two most adequate things for baby cats.
I confronted her, clearly upset. Perhaps, more upset than ever before in my entire life.
“That is not cat food, Sarah” I told her, annoyed and, I must admit, jealous of how popular that had made her with our kittens.
“Of course not” she answered, as if it was obvious that she knew perfectly well this fact. “But they are not cats, look at them! They look like us!”
Yes; it was true, they looked like us, like a feline version of us combined in different shapes.
I grunted.
“Cats can look like their owners, it’s a thing” I, obviously, didn’t know whether that was true or not; but, since it was the only logical explanation, is what I decided to believe.
And then…she hit me.
Actually, no. She didn’t hit me; she threw me across the room, a ball of pure rage and fury.
“WE ARE NOT THEIR OWNERS. HOW DARE YOU DISRESPECT THEM THAT WAY?!”
As I tried to stand up, I realised…she was right. I was being unfair to our kids; we didn’t own them. Hell, not even the landlord did. They were our buddies; we couldn’t keep letting them in that box. So, instead of apologising to Sarah, I did what needed to be done: I let the kittens free of the box, making both the little ones and my best friend the happiest people on Earth. I have never been prouder of myself in my entire existence.
The kittens still didn’t grow, but they became completely independent and even cooperated on house tasks, under one condition: we had to feed them all the waste our own body produced, even the thick liquid coming out of Sarah’s almost juvenile pimples.
Some days, we just went to work and then be with them. There was no need for anything else, not even eating. As long as they were well fed, we didn’t seem to need anything for our own body.
They even learnt how to use their tiny teeth! Isn’t that great? Now, we will never mistake their favourite soy milk label ever again.
Sorry, now I am reading all this and it is…crazy. Even as I wrote it down, I BELIEVED AGAIN it was normal, actually, it is not that bad, is it?
Never mind, I shall continue.
Even though I couldn’t notice what this ordeal was doing to me, Sarah was a completely different story: Sarah, whose raven hair was turning a dirty grey and her marathon kind-of-skinny figure was turning into a starving kind-of-skinny one.
Her eyes were now as sunken as the landlord’s had been when he left the kittens, and she was allowing them so much as once saw her carrying one of them entirely on her mouth.
I want to believe I didn’t get to that extreme.
I tried to speak to her about it, worried at the time not only for the well-being of the first person who had called my Jay without a moment hesitation, but of the kittens’. As I have already stated, I didn’t spend that much time at home and, if Sarah couldn’t do it…I shivered at the mere thought of what could happen to them.
But, the moment I started talking about her maybe needing more time for herself…the kittens did something they hadn’t done since we adopted them: they started meowing.
Firstly, very low; then louder. And louder.
And louder.
And louder.
So loud that, by the end, I could feel my ears bleeding.
It was a clear protest of my words and, while this just made Sarah cry and point at me as if I was responsible of the cats’ suffering; it made me snap out of whatever trance we had been in for the last few months.
I flew the flat without even taking my phone with me.
From there, I went straight up to her parents’ house. Yes, being independent was nice and all but…we, SHE needed their help and, as much as it might be an economical tall on them…Sarah’s life was at risk.
Maybe mine too, as I collapsed the moment I entered their house and had to be committed to hospital for, between other things, malnutrition and plenty of infected animal bites.
I haven’t heard from Sarah since; her parents went to our flat, finding nothing but an empty box filled with a hulking mass with such a strong reek to it that their clothes still kept the smell when they came by to visit me to the hospital that day.
They kept looking, no results.
I went myself to the building after recovering and, luckily enough, confirming I still got my new job (maybe, after all, the kittens had had nothing to do with that particular fact). I asked for the landlord and, the moment I said that he had given us a box full of kittens, one of my former neighbours laughed.
“Our landlord is a she, dearie. Ursula, she lives with her kids, very nice boys, they are the only children that can awake my maternal instincts...Are you sure you weren’t fooled somehow, youngster?”
Yes, ma’am, I am almost certain.
And…that is all. Sorry I cannot give a conclusion. I can’t stay much longer, either way. I have to get home. They came back yesterday and they could get very upset if I don’t feed them...
…I hope my broken toenail will be of their taste.
Yes, I think so. What do you think?
Statement ends.
-----
It had been a month since Julia had randomly popped-up inside The Institute and the menace she had preconized had just been eradicated.
Murderous kittens were tougher than you could ever imagine.
As his boss (both out and inside the work space), Tim had given Sasha the card to call their mysterious friend.
“Ok, what do you want in exchange?” she asked.
“Ah! Director-Archivist! A pleasure! Nothing special just…You can take it as a warm welcome…
Welcome to the monster world, good to have new players.”