Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. The Summoning Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

THE SUMMONING

Wallace Hamlin peeked out from behind the drapes at the sound of Rusty Penrose and his stupid ass cat, Leroy. Rusty walked slowly, giving the leashed Leroy plenty of time to choose to cooperate. Wallace had watched them every morning and most evenings; he’d never caught that damned cat shitting in his flowerbeds, but there was more shit, day after day.

“Goddamned nutcase,” he said, his voice grumbly, just above a whisper.

Rusty Penrose owned a card and game shop that was about a three-minute walk from his home. Leroy was House of Horus’ mascot.

Wallace had met Rusty just once. It was more than a year ago, the man had been going around handing out discount cards. Wallace had snorted derisively the moment after closing the door on the hapless loser—of course his stupid business was so hard up the owner was going door-to-door with discounts.

It was to Wallace’s great surprise and disbelief when he’d learned the nerd store was thriving. Leroy hadn’t become a fixture at the store until last May, the same damned time hard little shit balls started showing up in the flowerbeds.

—

Rusty had his back pressed to the door as he bent to scoop Leroy into his hands. “Come on, now,” he said, eyeballing the same robin Leroy was eyeballing.

The door made the original Star Trek phaser sound; the security box on the extended doorway chirped. Rusty set down Leroy, then quickly punched 1-0-7-7—the price of a cheese pizza and a large soda, as well as Fry’s pin code, from the TV show Futurama. The box beeped.

Cat off the leash, lights on, coffeemaker bubbling, Rusty settled at the desk behind a laptop. The screen came alive, presenting the store logo in gold on black: the Eye of Horus with a table of mini people playing cards on the line trailing to the left, below that, the words HOUSE OF HORUS.

He’d never been into Egyptology or the myths or the art or the people, but when he met Franklyn Rice, he got into it in a hurry. Franklyn talked and Rusty listened. It wasn’t always about Egypt, but often it was.

Rusty worked as a manager at a nearby Lowe’s; Franklyn was at a crossroads, finally accepting that his love of knowledge was not enough when it came to molding the hormone-crazed minds of teenagers. The only benefit of teaching public high school, according to Franklyn Rice, was that the well of workout inspiration was endless. In his head, he’d murdered half those kids just to see their expressions when he squeezed the life out of them, his arms and legs pumping madly on an elliptical machine.

So, he’d quit.

When Rusty met Franklyn six years ago, the man had been bumming—Franklyn’s word—for eleven months, unmoored, unanchored, unwilling. But that uselessness was boring, and Franklyn agreed to be a date for an old friend and a round of D&D in someone else’s basement. Rusty’s basement.

“You know,” Franklyn said, toying a silver infinity necklace dangling above a thatch of auburn chest hair, “I’m only here as a favour.” He’d waited outside the home’s only bathroom, trailing after Rusty said he had to go.

“Um, I never…I’m not gay,” Rusty said, and he was pretty much telling the truth.

Franklyn straightened his back. “Oh. Ugh. Need my gaydar adjusted. Sorry.”

Rusty blinked rapidly as Franklyn passed by him to enter the washroom. “Uh, I…sometimes I’m gay,” he said through the door.

The store came first, named after Franklyn’s favourite subject, while being populated with Rusty’s favorite subject; the wedding wasn’t long after. They kept their names for simplicity. They’d been together just shy of three years when Franklyn agreed to shave his head to raise money for the Cancer Society, revealing the ugly brown splotch behind his left ear. Melanoma.

Franklyn died on a Tuesday in May. The doors of House of Horus remained closed for seven months while Rusty wandered aimlessly around Franklyn’s house. When they’d first opened the store, the Penrose home was their safety net if nobody showed up. When House of Horus was an instant success, Rusty kept the place, mostly because his parents had only gifted it to him eight years ago—he’d always imagined selling it, but not until they passed. He moved back into the home where he’d grown up because Franklyn’s place was too full of triggers.

What finally dragged him from a grief-induced depression was a strange request. A Magic the Gathering fan had appeared at his door one day a year ago, grimacing, holding a box. She’d begged him please, please, please would he take the kitten in the box for a week until after her apartment was fumigated and aired out. He tried to say no, but she pushed the box into his arms.

It wasn’t until he was back inside with the boxed kitten in his grip that he realized he didn’t even know the woman’s name. It took two weeks for him to realize that the nameless woman who sometimes used to play Magic the Gathering at the store had brought the cat to his home with intent. She was never going to pick him up.

Rusty got Leroy neutered and chipped, made officially his.

Three months later, it was time to re-open the store, and as an apology for his absence, he walked door-to-door in his neighborhood, handing out coupons and saying hello.

—

“What do you have going on here?” Victoria Whitelaw said.

She always left visits to miserable old Wallace’s sour-smelling home to the end of the day. He was stumbling through an early stage of Alzheimer’s Disease. The family couldn’t cover full-time care and he was on the waiting list of three different retirement homes; until a doctor visit downgraded his condition and need, he was stuck at home, a care nurse coming twice a week for two hours.

“Squirrel problem,” he said.

On the table before him was a can of flaked tuna and an ancient cardboard carton of Coon Doom varmint poison. He’d taken some of each and mixed it in a little glass dish. He put a plastic lid on the dish.

“Squirrels eat fish?”

Wallace grunted. “I that nurses had to have half a brain?”

“You ‘that’ nurses?” Victoria said, immediately wishing she hadn’t.

“I said I thought nurses had to have half a barn!” Wallace jerked to stand, pausing a moment at the rush of blood from his brain.

Victoria turned away. The man was an asshole, but almost everybody deserved some dignity, and she knew so much better. Her regret was assuaged by the time she reached the bathroom and heard Wallace grumbling about her being a lazy Indian.

She wanted to ask how a single mother with three teenagers and a full-time job could be considered lazy, but he’d just say something about the men she must’ve been sleeping with and yadda, yadda, yadda: no thanks. The truth was, if the mind she had in her late teens was what it was in her early thirties, she probably would’ve made her ex sport a rubber.

Victoria filled a bucket with the tub tap, eying a greasy film around the toilet as the water pounded plastic. She’d never been in an old man’s house that didn’t come with an aura of piss orbiting the toilet.

—

“Come on,” Rusty said, giving Leroy’s leash a little tug.

The cat followed, eventually, licking his tuna-tasting chops. They made it to the store where Rusty had time to straighten up, fill a mug of coffee, and turn the sign before Leroy let loose with his first barf of the day.

“Love how you pick the perfect time to yak,” Rusty said, heading over to the puddle with a spray bottle of green stuff and a roll of paper towels.

A little more than an hour later, the cat vomited again. Rusty thought nothing of it, laughing when a young customer pointed a chubby little digit and said, “Eeewww, puuuke.” When the cat vomited a third time, Rusty took pause at Leroy’s attitude—he was snuggly, but typically he didn’t stick as close to Rusty as he had since mid-morning. After the fourth vomit, he called the vet for an emergency visit after work.

“Did you eat something funny?” Rusty said.

Leroy lay on Rusty’s desk, one paw in constant contact with his minder. As the minutes mounted and Leroy became more and more dejected; Rusty grew worried and morose.

—

Wallace watched out his window, waiting for the nutcase and his shitting cat. He saw the cat pause at the flowerbed yesterday, but there was no way to know for sure whether it had ingested the poisoned tuna.

8:30 rolled to 9:00 to 9:20 and Wallace decided it had worked. The cat was ill, at a minimum, and perhaps dead. And what a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

Wallace pushed to stand, took up his aluminum walker with tennis balls on the front feet, and shuffled to the door. He bypassed the mailbox, currently brimming with flyers, and headed out to the flowerbed that ran along the sidewalk. There were a couple hard shit nuggets, but nothing from that morning, and the poisoned tuna was gone.

“That’s what you get,” he mumbled as he worked himself around to head back to the house.

—

Leroy had died three hours after taking a treatment of activated charcoal. Perhaps had a barf or two not been a relatively normal morning for Leroy, Rusty might’ve gotten him to the vet in time to save his life.

He didn’t dare tell a soul. The grief for Franklyn had swallowed him up and shat out a self-absorbed loner; he could not put the people who loved him through that again. But this hurt in all the familiar ways.

Rusty sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of Caribou Trail maple flavored whisky that someone had given him for Christmas and a six-pack of cans of Canada Dry diet ginger ale. Also on the table was the box with the towel in it and Leroy’s fuzzy corpse.

The first drink went down like Buckley’s Mixture. The second went down only a modicum better. He then thought of the bag of weed Franklyn had kept around and the palm-sized wooden pipe.

“Want to go…for one last…walk?” he said, fighting off a fresh bout of sobs between words.

Leroy went into Rusty’s hiking backpack. Outside, Rusty lit the bowl, only realizing then that he could’ve smoked inside—it wasn’t like his mom was going to catch him, as she had when he briefly experimented with the stuff in the eleventh grade.

“Boy…you were a very good thing…at a very dark time,” Rusty said, his vision hazy on the seemingly endless supply of tears. “I wish…” he inhaled deeply through his nose, “I wish I’d noticed it was a different sick.”

Without thinking, he followed the usual route to work, the route he didn’t take this morning. He paused by the weedy, overgrown flowerbed that clearly nobody had tended to in years. A local litterbox, Leroy made the odd deposit, but typically simply liked to smell.

“Where’s your cat?”

Rusty looked up, frowning. The old man who lived at the home was smiling at him from his porch.

“Huh?” Rusty said. The weed had begun to soften the edges of his grief.

“Your shitting cat, where is it?” The man’s tone was jovial and light.

Rusty’s chin quivered. “He’s in my bag…he…he…passed.”

The man nodded slowly. “I bet. Cats are stupid. Almost as stupid as owners who let cats shit in flowerbeds.”

The information floated to Rusty upon a foggy zephyr. He latched onto what seemed like the most pertinent point. “You don’t own a pet. You mind them and love them; maybe if you tried that, you wouldn’t be such a miserable hermit.”

The smile slipped from the man’s face. “Cats goats Hell; did you know that?”

Rusty scrunched up his expression, then began to sneer. “Goats…? Go to? Like real Hell? How damned old are you?”

A boxy Ford pulled into the old man’s driveway and a short, stocky woman climbed out. Rusty recognized her vaguely, from around town or at the store, he couldn’t say. She nodded to Rusty as she made her way around the front of the car, heading for the shotgun door.

“Where’s the kitty?” she asked, smiling—Leroy was just about famous in the neighbourhood.

“He ate something…and passed,” Rusty said, snapping into another round of racking sobs.

The woman looked at the old man. “Was it tuna?” she said.

The old man couldn’t quite scurry, but he came close, the door rattling shut behind him. Rusty was already heading away, relighting the pipe as he went.

—

He was filling his water glass for the third time since arriving home. The walk had been okay, then the weed crept a little deeper into his system and he couldn’t get enough liquids. He’d gone into a Hi-Yah Convenience and stood for what seemed an eternity of indecision while considering whether he wanted regular iced tea or iced green tea. He then began to feel the clerk’s eyes on him. He’d grabbed the green and hurried to the till and tried to act normal.

As if blown, he was suddenly at the house with an empty bottle in hand, Leroy in a bag, forgotten on his back. The bottle went into the bin in the garage as he headed inside. Seeing the box on the table reminded Rusty of his backpack.

“Gonna put you down, buddy,” he said, unshouldering one strap, then the other.

Third glass downed, he bent to fill another, his mind washing items against the shores of his mind beneath a curtain of tap water. The nurse and the old man and the question about tuna swirled into an eddy, no longer washing away, instead starting to fit together like puzzle pieces.

Halfway through drinking a fourth fill, the glass slipped from his grip upon the shock of the truth: that piece of shit murdered Leroy! The heavy-bottomed glass rattled into the sink, sending a tiny, perfect tremor through the counter, to the wall, and into the third shelf of a bookshelf he’d haphazardly filled with his and Franklyn’s small collection of specialty books. Leather, ornate covers, interesting plastic conglomerations.

One book dropped and flopped open to a dozen pages past halfway. Rusty’s mind was on fire with anger, wondering what legal steps he should take, and maybe he should take some physical steps, go knock on that sonofabitch’s door…he scooped up the book. There, in hieroglyphics and translated beneath, a ritual to summon the dead. He glanced over his shoulder to the table where the backpack sat.

—

The moon was down and the sun was but a budding promise to the east when a mound of dirt in Rusty’s backyard bulged up, then crumbled away from its peak in a mini-avalanche. A little padded paw stretched its claws through the layers of Charmin toilet paper.

Rusty had long before gone to bed.

—

Wallace awoke feeling something move on his chest. His eyes shot open to the darkness all around him.

“Hello?” he said, his nose taking a few seconds to register a scent.

He shuffled up and reached for the lamp. On his chest was a massive log of bloody shit. Within were hundreds of tiny white shards that he recognized as bones when he saw the chunk of intact rodent skull. A squirrel or a mouse, something of that size.

He flung the blanket away, sending the log flying across the room to paint a slash of blood on the off-white wall. Wallace jerked his legs around and pushed to stand. The blood rushed from his head; his vision went brown and his ears rang tinny. Wallace had to sit a moment to regain himself. He felt something padded thump his shin a heartbeat before he felt the bite.

The pain cleared away the fog and he jerked himself forward to look at his legs. There, in a strange dirty pink wrapping, was a cat. The wrapping had come away from its mouth, letting elongated eyeteeth shine beneath the lamplight, blood dripping from the tip of the upper row.

“Git!” Wallace shouted, reaching down to push the cat away.

The cat charged up his arm. Wallace flopped back, swinging wildly as the cat clung, rising, rising, rising until it was at his neck.

“Honk!” Wallace shouted. “Somebody honk!”

The cat bit either side of Wallace’s windpipe, then leapt once, twice, thrice, on and on, whipping itself around like a helicopter blade as the flesh of the old man’s throat burst into a chunky mist of viscera. Within seconds, Wallace lay flat, his feet on the floor. A brightness flooded his mind and he thought of his long-deceased wife, he thought of his mother, father, the girl he’d lost his virginity to one night after church group back in the ninth grade. He sucked in a gargling breath that was as much hot, hot blood as it was oxygen.

Splashing as it bounced, the mummified Leroy continued to soak its makeshift linen in fresh blood as it swallowed down all that Wallace had to offer.

—

All day, Rusty received words of condolence that he could only vaguely accept. He was fairly certain between grief and liquor and pot, he’d mummified his cat and buried him. Now that spot was an empty hole, one which something must’ve dug up. What was hard to imagine was that he’d buried Leroy that way and expected anything more than nothing. The world was unfair and wholly without miracles. Part of growing up was accepting that.

“I’m so sorry that happened,” said a woman named Trina who’d come in the store almost weekly to look at the new games on offer. “I had to put down my Lynnie back in February. One of the worst days of my life. All I could think about was, ‘why didn’t I see she was sick sooner?’”

Rusty nodded. She wasn’t exactly describing how he felt, but close.

All day was much of the same until near the end, Trina returned with a little gift basket. “It’s what I needed, after Lynnie.”

It was a repurposed Easter basket, purple with pink straw made of shredded plastic. There were three pre-roll joints in a tube, a bar of sea salt and caramel Tony’s Chocolonely, a bag of Yupik gummy worms, and a single serving of Epsom salts.

“My number’s also in there,” she said, smiling nervously.

Rusty looked up. He hadn’t much thought about companionship after Franklyn, but this was landing at the exactly right time. “Thank you,” he said, then found the slip of paper. “Maybe we could go for a walk?”

“When you…do you mean…yes, sure. When?”

Rusty imagined himself sitting on the recliner, no warm body on his lap. He’d probably cry and cry and cry until he was so dehydrated he felt but a husk of his usual self.

“How about seven?”

“Here?” she said, her eyes seeming to shine as a blush subsided from her cheeks.

—

“Behave,” Victoria said to her three kids and the three neighbourhood kids parked in her living room, all absently staring at their phones, seemingly indifferent to one another’s presence.

She’d come home to use the can between client visits and now had to head over to the curmudgeon’s place. “Wallace, you prick,” she said through a sigh as she backed out of the apartment complex driveway.

Town was never difficult to navigate, and after 4:00 PM, was never busy enough to congest. As she parked in Wallace’s stubby laneway, a green maple leaf drifted down from the lush tree the old man had in his front yard, what there was of a front yard. Kit in hand, she headed for the garage door.

She rang the doorbell once and waited. There was always a touch of dread with the especially sick and especially old; she’d called in six bodies in her eleven years as a nurse. Two of those had come in the nursing home where she’d started her career.

Nobody answered, so she knocked. The door clicked open beneath the weight of her knuckles. “Hello, Mr. Hamlin?” she said through the open door, suddenly feeling the need to treat the asshole with a little extra distance.

She stepped inside, pulling the door closed behind her with her free hand. There was a scent on the air, something like dirt and pennies. A steady buzzing rumbled in a way she could feel in her teeth.

“Hello?” she said again, moving slowly through the tidy home, following her nose, playing cartoon toucan. She set her kit on the dining table and headed into the narrow hallway that led to two smallish rooms, the bathroom, and the master bedroom. The buzzing grew deeper as she drew closer to the door at the end of the hall.

“Jesus Christ,” she hissed, seeing the spread of bloodstain that had seeped into the comforter. On it like a threadbare blanket were hundreds of houseflies. “Fuck that,” she said, backing away.

She already had her cellphone out as she grabbed her kit and hurried to the door. Whatever happened to Wallace Hamblin, she did not want happening to her. The line clicked as she entered the garage. She gave her address and the situation in a harried, stuttering breath. At her car, she hucked the kit into the backseat and leaned against the shotgun door, gathering herself as the woman on the far end of the line said calming reassurances.

“Yeah, I’ll wait here,” she said, suddenly wishing she hadn’t quit smoking nine years ago. It was enough that she nearly leaned in through the open rear door of her car to begin a search—despite that she’d only had her car a few years now.

—

A walking date had seemed a perfect distraction—and he had to admit, Trina had the kind of charm that got the butterflies in his tummy into motion—but as the day played into evening, he dreaded it. Still, the logical part of his mind told him to go, to expand his seemingly ever-shrinking world.

Once back to his empty house, he understood that he had no choice. He had to meet Trina. He looked at the gift basket and decided he’d bring along the joints; shit, he hadn’t been this kind of alone with a woman in…forever…so it felt.

“Maybe your brain is broken and—do women ask men out on platonic dates?” he said, realizing then that he was asking Leroy. “Fuck. Probably they do if they assume the man is all-the-way-gay.” His tone had instantly become grumpy, the underlying vibe self-deprecating.

He stomped to the bathroom to take a shower. He hadn’t showered in the morning and hadn’t showered yesterday; getting up for work had been a tremendous struggle on its own.

By the time he’d emerged, clean, deodorized, and dressed, he had twenty minutes to get to the store. A peculiar, numbed excitement danced his veins. When he’d been in the shower, he suddenly thought of sex, and having it again. It was enough to forget Leroy, if only momentarily—certainly not long enough to act on the fleeting fantasy of him and Trina finding a quiet place in the park.

—

“I have another client to see,” she said, awakening her cellphone to read the clock for the umpteenth times since the cops arrived at Wallace’s place. Three different cops asked the same questions and finally, she’d had enough. “Meaning, I’m leaving now.”

“But, uh,” a cross-eyed cop began, looking around for someone in charge—all of the emergency people looked a bit out of sorts, like they’d all skipped a step during training.

“You have my cell number,” she said, swinging closed the backdoor she hadn’t shut after stowing her kit some forty minutes prior. She then went around the rear, avoiding a trio of paramedics passing by, and to the driver’s door. She backed out, weaving her Nissan Micra through a short-lived maze of emergency vehicles.

Her last client of the day was Marian Shaw. He was seventy-one, and after a hip replacement led to a bone infection, he’d had to give up autonomy and had moved his black sheep nephew into the home. The nephew, Clarence, worked at a cooperative bookstore, where he had six different bosses, something he’d explained at depth one day while folding laundry as Victoria muscled Marian out of bed and onto his chair—the bone infection had gone untreated long enough that the issue located the man’s spine and all but destroyed his lumbar vertebrae.

Clarence’s electric bicycle was not in the carport as usual, so after knocking once, Victoria grabbed her key. A heavy door, she used her butt to hold it open while she twisted inside with the bulky kit in her left hand. It was getting dim, so before she forgot, she switched on the porch light for later.

As she bumped the door to close it behind her, something blocked it, bouncing it back. She looked down, expecting to see a shoe in the way, but saw nothing and bumped it again. The door closed without argument.

“Marian,” she called up from the landing by the door. She shuffled into the kitchen, set down her kit and made her way to the TV sounds coming from the master bedroom. She peeked inside; he was asleep. That was fine, it took a few minutes to ready everything anyway.

The door opened and closed. “Hey.”

Victoria didn’t look, calling over her shoulder, “Clarence?”

“Yeah,” he said, coming into the kitchen smelling like popcorn. “How’s it going?”

Victoria did a double take, surprised at first, but then shrugging internally. Clarence absolutely seemed like the kind of guy to wear a dress. “Good. Just got here.”

“Do you like my dress?” Clarence said, spinning, fanning out the panels of a pale blue poodle dress with a black cosmetic belt. Though the act was playful, there was definite challenge in his voice.

“Sure,” Victoria said, eyes and hands busy.

“Yeah?” Clarence said, sounding almost angry now.

Victoria frowned, turning then and taking in the ugly damp patch running down from his right shoulder. “Oh, what happened?”

Clarence huffed. “Some fucking neanderthals in a big truck threw a milkshake at me.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Victoria said, already disinterested. “Well, better get to—”

“Ooohaagh!”

The sound was gasping, gravelly, and final. It had come from the master bedroom. Victoria raced after it.

Marian was skinny, weakened by his age and health. He wore black pajama pants and no top, blankets tossed aside. His eyes were wide and his mouth gritting in a permanent rictus. The greyed and thin flesh of his abdomen was alive with action, bulging in the shape of something horrid, wriggling beneath like an eel in a bucket of mud.

Victoria stopped two steps inside the door. What she was seeing made no sense in a modern world; she suddenly wished she’d paid any mind whatsoever to what she’d always considered hokey Indian factoids.

Clarence followed her in and pinned himself against the wall, screaming in a pitch high enough to explode dog brains. The thing beneath Marian’s dead flesh became frantic at the sound, swimming the muck of the man with the lithe motions of a water snake. The old man’s inny bellybutton popped outward, standing but a heartbeat like the nipple of a baby bottle before a scummy red form burst free, the flesh peeling like a banana.

A cat.

It leapt at Clarence, intestine acting as a kite string, clinging to a nail of the cat’s rear left paw. Victoria ducked away. The cat landed on Clarence’s chest and scrambled up the man’s neck and to his mouth. It squeezed inside, instantly silencing the man as he jerked and pulled, trying to free his airway as the cat dug deeper and deeper and deeper—Clarence dropped in a heap.

“Nope,” Victoria said, letting go of the bucket and sponge she’d prepared in the kitchen, and sprinting down the hall. By the door, she stumbled over Clarence’s Dr. Martens’ knockoffs, slamming her face into the old wood. She glanced back.

The cat was coming, eating as it ran, bits of slimy viscera trailing from the sides of its mouth like fleshy whiskers. Victoria backed far enough to jerk open the heavy door. She stumbled down into the carport, knowing if she got to the car, knowing if she got the car door closed, knowing if she did those two little things that she’d be safe. It fuelled her and she charged, lightning in her legs. Car door open, she tumbled inside, yanking her legs up behind her and crunching her middle to pull the door closed, but she couldn’t get her knees high enough thanks to the wheel. She shifted onto her back, stretching painfully across the front seats, belt couplers digging into her spine.

She crunched again, feeling a muscle spasm she was able to ignore just long enough to close the door. When she looked up, the cat was on the hood. It appeared to be wearing some kind of coat, a matted, chunky, downright grotesque bit of material.

“Eat shit, pussy,” she said around panted breaths.

The cat licked its chops, then hopped down.

Victoria lit the engine and yanked the shifter into reverse. Her mind reeled, trying to put the sum of her afternoon together. Had a fucking cat killed Wallace, too? Did it ride in the car from A to B?

“You’re nuts,” she said, rooting around the center console for her cellphone. “That was no cat.”

She dialled 9-1-1 a second time. As she held the phone to her face, she heard a strange squeaking, like plastic on plastic. One of her dash vents flapped—open, closed, open, closed. The motion grew frantic, almost blurring with speed, then it popped and instead of AC, a gore smattered cat’s head appeared.

Victoria let out a cartoonish yowl, her hands pulling the steering wheel as she leaned away from danger. The cat spilled itself free like a healthy BM, coiling momentarily around the shifter. It hissed at Victoria no more than a second before she nailed a fire hydrant on the opposite side of the street, sending her through the windshield. Her thighs caught on the airbag and steering wheel beneath while the rest of her flopped out onto the hood like sludge from a clogged culvert.

—

“For months after I put down Lynnie, I saw her walking in the corners of my eyes. Like she was still there, just out of reach. I thought I was going crazy,” Trina said.

They’d been walking more than an hour already, circling back toward the store where they’d begun.

“You want to hear crazy,” Rusty said. The more he thought about burying Leroy, the more he thought about the book, the recipe, and how he’d added a little something extra to the ritual. “Franklyn was really into Egypt; I have a bunch of books on their—anyway, there was this raising the dead ritual, so I cut open Leroy and stuffed him full of roots and spices; I was totally meticulous, I think, you know, following the ritual exactly. Then my brain farted or something and I dumped a bunch of Franklyn’s ashes into the cavity.”

“Oh,” Trina said. “That’s very sad.”

“Worst part, I buried Leroy, but something came along and dug him up.”

“God.”

“Yeah.”

They reached the store. “I don’t mean to…do you want to smoke one of these joints and hang out a while longer?”

Trina smiled sadly. “I thought you’d never ask.”

—

They sat in a swinging, two-seater chair in the slim backyard, only feet from the hole where he’d buried Leroy with a touch of Franklyn. At their feet were juice glasses and a pitcher of homemade lemonade. Their bare thighs below the hem of their shorts pressed together as they rocked gently. The sun had gone down, the grass around them alive with cricket chirps; up the block, Classified pounded from someone’s garage; the breeze was pleasant, warm with the scents of ocean and fresh cut grass. The yard light from next-door cast enough glow to further soften the ambiance.

Trina snuggled into Rusty, and he let her. The feeling of a body against him was one of those things he hadn’t realized he’d been missing. Now and then, he’d feel a pang of guilt, sometimes for being unfaithful to a dead man, other times for not mucking about in the grief and sadness of losing Leroy. But he knew he’d cry for both again in the future. In the case of Franklyn, he’d probably cry now and then for years, perhaps never getting over the loss. With Leroy, he guessed the grief would slip into getting another cat and his telling the new cat all about Leroy—essentially talking himself through agonizing emotion.

“One thing, I’ll get more work done without Leroy parked on my forearm,” Rusty said, gaze loosely fixed on the North Star.

“Lynnie used to put her paw on my shoulder. She was a couch-percher.” Trina took in a deep breath through her nose. “After…I cleaned up her cat tree. There was enough fur left behind to fill a sandwich bag. I’ve been thinking about getting it made into a keychain or something. I saw posts about stuff like that; fuzzy little cat silhouettes or faces made out of cat fur.”

“Huh. That might be cool.”

Trina sighed. “Or creepy. It’s a toss up.” Seconds became a minute, and Trina finally said, “You know, I finally drove up the nerve to ask you out once. But the next time I was in the store, you had Franklyn. I didn’t know you were gay; I couldn’t tell at all.”

“I’m not always gay,” he whispered, feeling the warmth of her breath on his neck as she leaned in close—her shampoo was peach scented.

She put a hand on his thigh and began tracing circles amid the dusting of brown hair. He put an arm around her, pressing his nose to her scalp—probably the weed, but that peach scent was driving him mad. Trina’s swirling finger departed his thigh, then snaked under the tail of his shirt and played beneath the waistband of his shorts, then boxers. Rusty used his free hand to lift her chin.

Their tongues were cool from the lemonade, tasting free and inviting. He slipped a hand down the loose U of her collar, then beneath her silky bra. She began to piston her hand.

“Wait,” he said, panting. “It’s been—oh god,” he said, soaking the front of his shorts after about forty seconds of contact.

“Been a while?” Trina said and the smile was blatant in her words.

Rusty cleared his throat. “That’s embarrassing. I’m usually…it has been a while.”

They rocked gently then, the jizz in Rusty’s shorts cooling uncomfortably. He was about to suggest they go inside—he had to piss now anyway—but instead he said, “The crickets have gone quiet.”

“Huh,” Trina said, sitting up from his lap. “Maybe there’s a raccoon.”

She pulled her cellphone from her back pocket. With a flashlight app, she shined the beam about the yard. At the left corner of the house, the light was reflected back by two glowing yellow rings.

“That a cat?” Rusty whispered.

The eyes winked out. Trina moved the light around but saw nothing.

From behind them came a rustling. Rusty and Tina jerked around, the beam finding those same eyes again, only closer.

“A cat,” Rusty said.

“It’s creep—oh, gone again.”

Rusty stood. “Would you care to take this inside?”

Tina rose then, pocketing her cellphone. “Good idea; I need to wash my hand.”

Rusty could only giggle—his thoughts were all over the place since standing, as if his blood had pumped a fresh serving of THC to his grey matter. They started across the lawn, stepping into a swath of light that ran up to about a foot from the back porch.

“I really like you…so far,” Trina said. “So, I think, maybe we should just hang out for the rest of the night and not, you know.”

Rusty nodded. “You calmed my urge a bit anyway.”

She bumped him with her thigh as he stopped to pull open the screen door. “After you,” he said.

He stood in near-total darkness; Trina stepped past him to enter, getting only as far as the doorway before the gooey, scummy mass of cat launched itself from the porch railing, latching onto Trina’s face. She screamed. Her hands came up in a flash. She squeezed the thing, putrid fluids oozing as if from a leaky valve on a rendering plant truck. Trina stumbled back against Rusty. He tripped over his feet, dragging them both down, into the light from next-door.

“No,” he said, the word akin to a witch’s curse.

It couldn’t be Leroy, but what other cat could it be? The wrappings were there, but they were soiled and lumpy. Chunks of clotted blood dotted the pink surface like 3D Dalmatian spots.

Trina rolled off Rusty as the cat slashed at her scalp. Hair flew and blood scattered as the thick flesh took score after score. Rusty pounced, grabbing Leroy by the scruff of the neck, which was akin to grabbing a filthy sponge. The cat went limp. Trina scurried backward on her fours, eyes affixed to the cat, her face painted in glistening gore.

“Leroy! Stop!” He said this as if he was speaking to a regular cat, each word shaking the animal closer to freedom from the cheat code grip. “You’re being a—”

Leroy, suddenly regaining his faculties, launched himself off Rusty’s forearm. As Rusty’s mouth stretched for the word total, the cat located its target. Rusty yowled like a tom as Leroy planted his rear legs against Rusty’s chin and began pulling his tongue from his face.

Trina watched in helpless shock. Rusty punched and shook, a sound steadily whining up his throat as Leroy stretched the pink flesh like taffy. Finally, the base gave and the cat barrel-rolled backward, nine centimetres of gushy meat in its maw. Rusty’s hands went to his mouth, the pain causing him to roll back and forth, mildly resembling a flipped turtle as blood oozed out around his fingers.

Looking to the cat, then to the man, and back to the cat, Trina scrambled in reverse, her hand landing on something stuffed and jingly. She snatched it up, bringing it into the light. It was a stuffed butterfly with two bells around its neck.

Leroy reacted to the jingling of the little bells. His eyes went wide and his head moved in tight strokes, following the action. Trina reared back to throw the toy, feeling the crunch of a nip-filled abdomen. She launched it maybe eight feet, the cotton too light for much distance.

Leroy chased the toy.

Trina pushed upright, then ran to Rusty. He was on his hands and knees, attempting to rise even as a shower of hot, hot blood ran from his mouth, dripping from his teeth like dew from stalactites.

“Come on,” she said, hissing the word, taking some of Rusty’s weight.

They got two steps back toward the door when Leroy skittered up Trina’s short leg. She let go of Rusty, grabbing at the lump scrabbling its way into her, unbirthing itself into her pelvic cavity, slashing and biting and swallowing as its rear legs powered it on and on. Trina’s screams had neighbourhood dogs barking and howling.

Rusty made a groaning sound as he grabbed Trina, unaware she was harboring a stowaway. He pulled her by the arms, trying to help her beyond her knees. Distantly, he heard police sirens.

A series of cracks rang out, one on top of the last, as her ribs snapped, each suddenly a jagged nub poking through her flesh, her shirt sodden. Leroy clawed as if at a closed bathroom door, turning Trina’s guts into meat ribbons. His head popped beneath Trina’s sodden shirt, his head clearly outlined.

“Leroy?” Rusty tried to say, but without a tongue, could only make choking and mumbling sounds that gargled on the steady flow of blood.

The cat used the sound to zero in on his target, charging up Trina’s loose collar and onto Rusty. Battered, exhausted, and high, Rusty was easily overwhelmed.

—

The holes took almost until morning to dig. Wrapping the bodies and locating the correct ingredients through a fog of cat brain took well into the afternoon. Franklyn managed though, waiting until night to drag the mummies out from beneath the porch where he’d stowed them. He buried the bodies, the last of the ashes from his human form tipped into the open cavity of Trina’s abdomen.

Once it was through, he went and nestled up to the catnip-stuffed butterfly, watching the soil, knowing if it worked once, it would likely work again.

XX