He found her on the back porch again, watching the yard through the sliding glass door. He didn’t want to spook her, so he made some noise as he left the kitchen, bumped a chair, and made a light tap with one shoe on the metal threshold that separated the porch from the rest of the house. Then he stopped a few feet behind her and said, “What are you looking at, honey?”

“The rabbit. Matt, have you seen that rabbit?

“That was yesterday, Clara. Remember? I went down there, and I scooped it up with a shovel, and I dropped it into a trash bag. Some wild animal got to it. Rabbits can’t protect themselves very well. That was yesterday.”

“But it’s back.” Her voice shook. “Can’t you see it?”

He followed her gaze to the lower part of the lawn, where it dipped downhill to the fence. Shadows tended to pool there, making the area look damp even though it hadn’t rained in almost two months. Beyond were a field of weeds and wild­flowers, and the line of trees bordering the old canal. Beyond that was the interstate. You couldn’t see it, but you could certainly hear the traffic​—a vacillating roar that you could pretend was a river if you really tried.

The skinned and bloody rabbit had appeared there yesterday at the bottom of the yard, eased out of the shadows as if from a pool. And here was another one, its front legs stretched out toward the house, its body gleaming with fresh blood. This must have just happened. They must have had some sort of predator in the yard.

“I see it,” he said. “Something got another one.”

“Something terrible is happening,” she said. “I’ve been feeling it for weeks. And now this rabbit​—I see it every day. Sometimes just after sunrise, sometimes just before sunrise. I thought I was going crazy, but now you see it too. What do you think it wants? Can you tell me what it wants?”

Matt looked at her: her eyes red and unfocused, lips trembling. She was somewhere else inside her head. She was wearing this old green tube-​top thing. She’d never looked good in it. Her back was knotted, her shoulders pushed up, her arms waving around as she spoke. He figured she must be crazy tense if he noticed it​—he never noticed things like that.

He felt sorry for her, but he also felt scared for himself. The woman he had loved had been gone for years, and now he was left with this. He wasn’t a good enough person to handle something he hadn’t signed up for.

“It’s not the same rabbit, Clara. There must be a predator loose in the neighborhood. Probably just a big cat or maybe a dog. It’s just a dead rabbit. I’ll go get the shovel and take care of it. There’s nothing to get upset about.”

He didn’t really understand how her mind worked anymore. But maybe his being logical helped her. No one could say he hadn’t tried.

“There’s blood all over him,” she said. “He’s all torn up. Can’t you see that something terrible is going to happen, that something terrible is happening? Can’t you see it?”

She continued to stare at the rabbit in the yard. She wouldn’t turn around and look at him. It felt creepy, talking to her back all the time. He didn’t dare touch her when she was like this, like a fistful of nerves. He didn’t think she’d looked at him full in the face in days.

“It was a wild animal. It had a savage life. And something got to it. It’s not like a cartoon, Clara. Rabbits can’t protect themselves very well. Real rabbits in the wild, their lives are short and cruel.”

They hadn’t had sex in a long time. He’d been afraid to touch her. You can learn to live with crazy, but you can’t touch it. He couldn’t let her drive, and when he left her alone she called him at work every hour to complain about some new thing she’d suddenly realized was wrong. Their GP kept prescribing new pills for her, but he was just a kid, really. Matt was sure the fellow had no idea what was wrong with her.

“I haven’t been feeling right, Matt. Not for a very long time. Something terrible is going to happen​—can’t you sense that?”

“I know that’s what you feel, but just go lie down. Let me take care of this, and then I’ll come join you.” But he knew she wasn’t hearing, the way she stared, glassy-​eyed and the edge of her upper teeth showing. He stood in front of her and whispered, “Go inside now. Please.” When she didn’t respond he stepped closer to block her view of the yard and put one arm around her, gave her a bit of squeeze.

“Honey, just go inside and lie down. I’ll join you in a few minutes. Maybe I can even figure out what’s killing these rabbits, and I’ll deal with the thing. You just go inside.” Hopefully she’d be asleep when he was done. When she was asleep he could grab a drink, watch some TV, relax and unwind for once.

He grabbed a shovel and a trash bag and some gloves and started down the slope of the lawn. He’d generally neglected that part of the back yard. The ground there had always been mushy, unstable. He didn’t know much about ground water, septic systems, any of that stuff. But he figured it must be some sort of drainage issue, maybe because of the old canal, or maybe because of an old broken septic system, something like that. It didn’t smell too bad, just a little stagnant most of the time, a little sour. Only sometimes it stank like rotting meat. But they couldn’t afford to fix it whatever it was, so he’d just tried to ignore it.

The carcass wasn’t where he had seen it. In fact he couldn’t find the rabbit anywhere. He thought about that mysterious predator, and went back to the house and grabbed the rake that was leaning against the wall by the sliding glass doors.

He stood still, the rake held in both hands in front of him, raised like a club. He still didn’t see the rabbit. He felt unsteady, and shortened his grip on the handle. He imagined that the predator, whatever it was, had dragged the body off somewhere. Some of the more dangerous animals in the region—coyotes, a wildcat or two, once even a small bear​—had been known to wander out of the foothills and follow the canal into the more populous suburbs. He crept down the lawn toward the fence, afraid he might lose his footing. The grass looked shiny, slippery, as if the earth beneath were liquefying.

He detected a subtle reddish shadow as he got closer to the fence, and then saw that it was a spray of blood. The body had been pushed up against one of the fence posts, eviscerated, but still clearly some version of rabbit. He was glad Clara couldn’t see this. It must have suffered terribly, ripped and skinned alive, all gleaming, bright-​red muscle, damp white bone, strings of pale fat. But the muscle had no business being bright red like that, like some kind of rich dyed leather. He’d skinned squirrels with his dad​—he knew what a dead, skinned animal looked like, so dark and bruised. But this? This looked unreal.

He bagged it and trashed it, then brought out the hose to wash away the blood and any loose pieces of meat. That’s what you did with this sort of thing. That’s how you handled it. You cleaned up the mess and then you went on with your life. Later he grabbed his binoculars and studied the field and the trees beyond, checking for any signs of movement. He saw nothing. If he had been ambitious he would have climbed over the fence and walked through the field to the row of trees that bordered the canal. He could have followed that canal into some other place. The water might not be running through the canal anymore, but it was still a passage to something, wasn’t it? But he wasn’t ambitious. And he didn’t want to go there.

Matt drank and watched TV until about midnight. The house was a mess​—Clara hadn’t cleaned in weeks. He couldn’t abide a messy house, but he worked all day​—he didn’t have the time. But if he had the time he knew he’d do a great job. It wasn’t that hard keeping up a house​—you just had to understand how to manage time and not let it get away from you. He hadn’t signed up for this. He’d tried​—and you owed your wife at least to try. But everybody had limits. You couldn’t expect a man not to have his limits.

She didn’t wake up when he crawled into bed with her. Good thing​—she’d ask about the rabbit, and he didn’t want to talk about that damn rabbit anymore.

He woke up once and saw her standing at the window, looking out onto the back yard. He started to say something, started to ask her what was wrong, but he stopped himself. He was tired, and he knew what was wrong.

He woke up alone. He didn’t like waking up alone, but he didn’t want to answer any of her questions. He fell back asleep, and when he woke up again the room was bright from the sun coming through the window. He’d overslept, but at least it was the weekend. Nothing important ever came up on the weekend. They’d stopped doing the important stuff a long time ago.

“Clara, you up here?” She didn’t answer. “Clara!” Nothing. He got his pants and shoes on and went downstairs. He still couldn’t find her. He felt a little panicky, and he was mad at himself for feeling a little panicky. He made himself be methodical. He went back upstairs and searched each bedroom as he went down the hall. He wasn’t sure why they had all these bedrooms​—they didn’t have any kids. They had way too much house, but he’d gotten such a good deal on the place.

He felt a pressure building behind his eyes. He tried to shake it off. He went back into their bedroom and looked in the closet and in the master bathroom. He got down on his knees and looked under the bed. There were several socks, another larger, unidentifiable piece of clothing. He made a note to sweep under there later.

He called again from the top of the stairs. “Clara! Are you in the house?” Nothing. No steps, no rustle, just the soft hum of the refrigerator. He went downstairs and jerked open the front door, a little too hard. It banged against the rubber bumper mounted on the wall. He hadn’t realized it before, but he was beginning to feel pretty angry. Maybe she couldn’t help it, but this was ridiculous.

She wasn’t lying on the front lawn again, thank God. And the Subaru was still there, which was a big relief. Matt thought about getting in his car and driving around looking for her. But she could be anywhere, and besides, he knew that once you started chasing after someone like that it never ended, not until you’d given yourself a heart attack. She was a grown woman​—he shouldn’t have to be searching for her.

He made himself stop. Most things got better that way: taking a break, waiting. People needed to be patient, not make such a big deal out of everything.

He went out to the porch and sat down. That’s when he saw her kneeling down at the bottom of the yard, her back turned to him. Just like she always did. Her shoulders were heaving.

He slid open the door and stepped outside. “Clara?”

She didn’t speak, but he could hear her crying. Then he saw the blood streaks on her sleeves. He started running. “Clara!” Not again. Not again.

He came up behind her and grabbed her by the shoulders, twisting them to stop her from whatever she was doing. He grabbed both of her hands and raised them, trying to get a good look at her wrists. Her forearms, his hands, everything slick with blood. “Where’s the knife, Clara!”

She looked up at him, wide-​eyed and dull. “No knife. I didn’t see a knife.”

He couldn’t find any cuts on her wrists, her arms, her hands. He looked down at her knees, and then the grass, and then the bloody bits he was standing on. He jumped back in alarm. It was another rabbit, skinned and gutted, its flesh weeping fresh blood.

“It’s back!” she said, her voice rising. “It’s back!”

“Dammit, Clara. It’s not the same rabbit!”

She stared at him, her face tilted. “But how can you tell it’s a different rabbit? How do you know for sure?”

He started to explain, but what was there to explain? “Because this is real life. We live in real life, Clara! Just stay right here. I’ll get something to cover it with, and then we’ll go wash you up, okay?”

He ran into the garage and grabbed a drop cloth, and on his way out he grabbed the rake, too, just in case of, just in case he needed it. But when he got back Clara was gone. The rabbit was still lying there, but there was no sign of Clara in the yard. How could she have moved so quickly? He stared down at the rabbit. It looked like all the others, as far as he could tell. One huge eye, pushed almost out of its socket, stared up at him.

He looked around the yard, the edge of the house, inside the house. He couldn’t find her anywhere. He gave up. He imagined her walking around the neighborhood, her shirt bloody, her arms and hands bloody. Somebody would call the police. Well, the hell with it. He’d done everything he could.

Matt left the rabbit and went back inside. At least he could clean himself up. At least he could get that much done.

After his shower he grabbed a jar of peanut butter out of the fridge and stood at the kitchen window digging two fingers into the jar and eating the peanut butter right off them. Looking through the window into the porch and then through the sliding glass doors made the yard seem a pretty safe distance away. He could still see the fields and the line of trees beyond, and he was sure he’d be able to see any movement out there if there was any. But there wasn’t any. After a while he collapsed into that old chair on the back porch and sat watching the yard for a couple of hours. It was midafternoon by then and he hadn’t had any lunch. He supposed he could find something in the fridge to heat up, but then maybe Clara would come home. Fixing him something might occupy her, keep her mind off things.

He was actually pretty surprised she hadn’t shown up yet. If the police had picked her up they would have come by now. He was used to her being anxious, but she usually snapped out of it after an hour or so and managed to get going on whatever needed to be done. He’d call some of her friends but that woman Ann had moved away six months ago and he didn’t know any of the others, if there were any others. Clara never made friends easily, at least not since he’d known her.

He couldn’t get over those damn rabbits. Whatever had gotten to them, it must have wiped out an entire den. Why had the thing left its kills in his yard anyway? Like a house cat dropping the mouse it slaughtered at your feet. But you had to trust your eyes​—most of the time it was the one thing you could trust.

Clara needed to be back soon. She’d always been this timid thing, couldn’t protect herself worth a damn. Terrible things happened to timid creatures like that. She knew. That’s why she kept saying that. Well, terrible things do happen, Clara. It wasn’t too hard predicting that.

He must have dozed, because the back yard suddenly looked dimmer. That shady bit down by the fence had grown, spread half-​way up the yard toward the house. Lights were popping on over at the neighbors’.

He sat up suddenly as a chill grabbed his throat. “Clara!” he yelled as loud as he could to scare it away. Still no answer. He listened hard now. The refrigerator still hummed. It was like he was living by himself again.

He could check with all the neighbors, but the last thing he needed was for everybody to know his business. He could call the police, but would they even take a report? Maybe if he told them Clara was a danger to herself. She’d cut her wrists more than once, but she’d always botched the job. Timid people like that, he reckoned they intended to botch the job.

He thought about talking to some young policeman, trying to explain how Clara was, trying to explain about the skinned rabbits, how they must have a predator in the neighborhood, and how the cop would act deliberately patient, and condescending to this older guy who had just called in about his missing wife, who’d only been gone a few hours, probably on some impulsive shopping trip. Matt couldn’t bear it.

She’d been a lovely girl when he’d met her​—pretty, and shy. She’d made him feel like he was about the greatest man in the world. Then she got nervous, and then she got old, and surely she was crazy now. Maybe if he was truly a good man he could handle that​—he’d stick with her and make the best out of a sad situation. But people had to be realistic. Good men were few and far between.

Flashing red lights broke through the trees on the other side of the field. They made it look as if parts of that line of trees bordering the old canal were on fire. But then the wind shifted the branches a bit and he could see that he was mistaken. There were scattered fires on the interstate beyond. And many more lights and faint, but explosive noises. People shouting maybe. Or cars being pried open like clamshells to get to the meat inside. The Jaws of Life, that’s what they called them. But only if the people inside were still living. If not, then they were the Jaws of Death, weren’t they?

The radio was right by the chair, so he could have turned it on. But he’d rather wait until Clara showed up and then they could learn together what terrible thing might have happened over on the highway. Matt supposed it was an unhealthy thing in people, how listening or watching together as the news told the details of some new disaster tended to bring couples and families together.

He sat and watched the red flashes and the burning and listened hard for the noises and the voices until it was dark enough for the automatic yard lights to come on. The gnawing in his belly was painful but he had no interest in eating, assuming eating was even the sort of remedy required.

He could see everything, except for that shadowy region down near the fence. He could see the rake where he’d left it, and the folded-​up drop cloth. But there was no sign of that rabbit. Something had moved it, or maybe​—and the idea made him queasy​—it hadn’t been completely dead. Skinned, but not dead. Crawling around suffering.

As Matt’s eyes grew weary he found himself focusing on that area of shadow. It had always seemed odd that the longer you stared at a shadow the more likely you were to find other shadows swimming inside it. Something moved out of the edge. In the border between dark and light a skinned body lay in the slickened grass. Bleeding heavily, and this one much too large for a rabbit. Stripped to muscle and bone, it was an anatomical human figure made real. The skin over part of one breast remained. And when it reached its scarlet arms toward the house it called his name.

The post Red Rabbit appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

What is Deadfall Hotel about? A haunted hotel with a long pedigree that has fallen into disrepair. To this afflicted place comes a widower who takes over the job of managing the hotel, accompanied by his daughter and the ghost of his wife.

Over the last three weeks we ran Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the four-part self-contained excerpt from Deadfall Hotel “The King of the Cats.” Here is the concluding Part 4…

***

Sometime in the middle of the night Richard heard the voices: a variety of low, musical murmurs, a blending of chirruping noises, punctuated by open-throated calls, cries, howls, screeches. Requests, demands, greetings, signals, the most elementary bits of a language. He wasn’t sure if he was awake or not, if he heard or had only dreamed he’d heard the cats speak and sing. Abby had been trying to awaken him for hours. The cat needed to be let out, the cat needed to be fed. His turn. He never took responsibility. He never did what he was supposed to. He wanted to clamp his hands over his wife’s mouth, shut her up. He was so tired; all he wanted to do was sleep. People murdered when they were denied their sleep–they couldn’t help themselves. Waking up a sleeping, dreaming man was a dangerous thing to do. You took your life in your hands. The sleeper was like a cat: basic, elemental, amoral. You couldn’t help yourself. Instinct took over. The beast was at home.

He dreamed of hordes of cats being burned alive over great bonfires, and single cats turning black on a spit. An army of peasants at war with the cats, chasing them down and smashing their spines with iron bars. Sack loads of half-dead cats stinking up the courtyards. Mock trials with prosecutors and executioners, the guilty cats strung up on a makeshift gallows.

In the middle of the night the cats howled, and it sounded like human screams, torn from some visceral old world in the back alleys of the brain.

Richard watched as Dragon brought a small fox into the midst of some kittens, and then let it loose. The fox backed away, but there was no place for it to go. One by one the kittens reached out tentatively to swat at the fox. Richard wondered why the fox–so much larger than the kittens–did not attack or fight its way through. But the confused look, the nervous weaving of the head, suggested the fox sensed something different about these particular kittens.

A few of the kittens began hissing and spitting. Then with an eruption of noise they all bolted toward the fox, their forepaws raised. Suddenly the fox disappeared inside an explosion of red mist. Serena’s face appeared in its place, eyes wide, cheeks claw-torn and chewed.

He jolted awake, rubbing at the fur collar around his neck, straining against the pressure at his throat, pushing the collar open, gasping for air. He opened his eyes and gazed at the cats piled high around him, sleeping contentedly, except for the one, Dragon, who crouched by his feet, staring at him unmoving.

He knew it was Dragon from the way the cat tilted his head, the way he stared, licked his lips, and looked down at his paws: a kitten with a monster inside. But his physical appearance had changed some. At first Richard thought the changes were subtle, but as he dared to raise his head for a better angle, more and more of Dragon’s transformation jelled from the shadows.

Dragon had become a scraggly cat, with wild long fur in such disarray it appeared randomly glued to his back. Richard followed the improbably long legs and saw that Dragon now had cloven hooves instead of paws. Bumps in the fur above his pink glowing eyes suggested horns.

“Pssst. Kitty!” Serena’s voice. Richard turned his head–too quickly, dizziness made his eyes swim and fill with cats he had to shake and shoo away–and saw Serena inside the doorway of her closet, Jacob’s pale old face right behind and above her, surrounded by little girl party dresses Serena had outgrown but been reluctant to throw away. With a pang Richard remembered that Abby had bought them all on “just us girls” shopping trips with their daughter. That it had never occurred to him before why Serena might have kept them made him feel like a creep, not deserving the honor of being her dad.

“Kitty kitty!” she called out again. Dragon turned his head stiffly toward the closet. Serena held a ball of yarn in her upraised hand.

Oh come now, Richard thought. The ball of yarn left Serena’s hand as if in slow motion, lobbed through the air in a high arc, one end of the yarn freeing itself, trailing a tail. Dragon appeared mesmerized, following the yarn with his head, then suddenly he leapt, caught the ball in midair, tumbling over and over into the midst of the other cats–who scattered as if a burning coal had been cast into their midst–growling softly with the yarn clutched to his belly.

“Daddy, come on!” Serena demanded, and Richard looked at the two of them squeezed into the closet, Jacob’s head haloed in little girl lace, and he wanted to laugh. But he surprised himself and climbed to his feet, stepping carefully over sleeping cats, watching as other cats slipped slowly from a hole that had been scratched and torn out of Serena’s bedroom wall, saw the cats pause, looking around, hissing irritably, apparently agitated by the rearranged furniture, then seeing Dragon with the yarn they bounded over to join in the king’s play. Richard chose that moment to leap over the remaining slumbering cats and into Serena’s closet like a character in a kid’s fantasy novel.

He looked at Jacob with what he imagined to be a sleepy and crazy smile. “So now what? We pass into some other dimension from here?”

Jacob glanced overhead. Richard looked up at an open trapdoor, into the darkness beyond. “I didn’t tell you about it because it wouldn’t be good for Serena to explore the hotel by herself,” Jacob explained. “Closed, it simply blends into the ceiling.”

Dragon was still playing with the yarn, looking every bit the kitten, completely harmless. “Time to go now, Daddy.” There was pleading in her voice, as if her daddy had gone crazy and had to be brought back to his senses. Richard watched as Dragon’s ears moved, following the sound of Serena’s voice. He shut the closet door carefully.

Jacob was up inside the trapdoor in seconds. The old man’s agility never ceased to amaze. He pulled Serena up and Richard followed, struggling even with their help. Jacob slipped the trapdoor back into place, bringing the darkness down on them completely. Then with a shush a match flame appeared, touched to a candle mounted in a wall sconce beside them. The dusty wall glowed, layered in cobwebs. “I completely forgot about this section while we were cleaning–I must be slipping. Now don’t straighten up all the way,” Jacob warned him. “The ceiling is quite low until we get to the sitting room.”

They followed Jacob through the winding, low corridor, stopping to light more candles along the way. Richard thought these might be the oldest candles he had ever seen: thick as small tree trunks, made of a greasy, yellow wax. The floor sloped downward for a time, which made little sense architecturally, but then what about this ancient hotel pretended to logic? But even as Richard pondered the Escher-like perplexities of the structure, the corridor made a sharp left, followed by a sharp right, and then the floor seemed to be on an incline. There were rustlings along the edges of the walls where the candlelight did not reach, but Jacob did not react, and even Serena seemed calm, no doubt taking his cue. At one point Richard noticed faces painted for several yards on the ceiling: women with shapeless, earthworm lips expressing pain or ecstasy or both, and white crosses furiously carved into the wood to scratch out their painted eyes. Then the faces were gone, and there were large sections of black paint, the corridor widened, and Jacob led them into a large room.

This had to be the sitting room. There were an assortment of benches and loungers and Adirondack chairs scattered about the odd dusty space. A grimy glass with one withered straw perched on a TV tray beside one of the chairs–Richard imagined it filled with lemonade, or some other liquid he wouldn’t have cared to drink. In any case he didn’t imagine the place had been utilized in some years, although in the Deadfall signs of disuse and neglect weren’t always what they might seem.

“This spot used to be quite popular,” Jacob said as if in answer, “although I won’t pretend to know why. You can see the front lawn from some of these peepholes over here.”

Richard joined him by a row of white circles, and then realized the circles were painted around actual holes to the outside. He bent slightly and tried them: a number were clogged, and although they appeared to come in pairs, several of the pairs were too widely spaced for the eyes of anyone he had ever met. But finally he found a pair he felt comfortable with: he brought his hands up to the sides of his face and leaned forward. He thought of a peepshow he’d gone to with some friends back in college. You put in your two quarters and were shown things you had never seen before. Some of those things you really didn’t want to see, but you’d paid your fifty cents so you just had to look.

Dawn was about a half hour past, and there were cats everywhere, their frenzy unabated even after a night’s revelries. Cats tearing at the shrubbery, climbing on each other’s backs, spitting and howling, fighting over the carcasses of small animals, dragging half-live creatures into the center of the front lawn to become the focal point of a new round of feline play. Richard was amazed that they were still able to discover prey anywhere in the surrounding fifty miles.

A scrawny, ragged cat staggered back and forth near the hotel porch, its skin opened, internal organs on display as if it had crawled off the dissection table of a high school biology class.

Watching the cats spread out over the lawn, foraging, hunting, Richard thought of meat, how this was all about meat, the hunger for it, the consumption of it, the rapid and efficient excretion of it. Limber cat bodies directly out of the Pliocene, with those prehistoric memories still intact. He watched as they lurked behind various vegetative materials, as they leapt to consummate a kill.

“Why do you think dogs eat cat feces? They can smell the meat inside.”

Richard twisted around. “Do you read minds, Jacob? It would be unfair not to tell us if you did.”

Jacob smiled grimly. “No more than you, my friend. I simply have a dark turn of mind. It is one of the qualifications for working here. When I’m with other people with similar dark turns of mind, and when we’re looking at the same scenes, it’s not too difficult to guess what you’re thinking.”

Back at the peephole, he watched as Dragon trotted out into the center of the Deadfall’s front acreage, a line of frisky kittens in tow. The other cats parted before the procession, dragging their victims with them. Within a few minutes they’d made a large rough circle: Dragon at the hub of a wheel, the rest of the cats arranged around the rim. It was at that moment that Richard realized where this “sitting room” was, where these peepholes were located.

High above the Deadfall’s front entrance was a row of carved heads: a lion, a bear, a dragon, then several abstract-looking faces so fantastic they refused to stick in memory, leaving you only with the nagging question of whether they were based on life, or based on madness, and finally, a head that might have been a beautiful woman, or might have been a young child, depending on your mood and the time of day. The faces had always looked wide-eyed to Richard, intensely observant.

His immediate thought was that whoever watched from here simply wanted to observe new visitors to the hotel. But this was more a lounge, a gathering place. Then he thought of how that front lawn with the activities that took place there was actually the most “normal” location on the Deadfall grounds. On first arrival new guests usually did not reveal their peculiarities. They waited until safely tucked inside the Deadfall’s plush and complicated interior (although a few came heavily hooded, wrapped in bandages, or masked). Normal deliveries from normal businesses came through the front entrance, as did the mail carrier and the rare salesman. And they had family picnics on this lawn. He played with his daughter on this lawn, and she played there by herself.

And maybe that was the attraction that might draw a crowd. A beautiful, well-adjusted young girl. A father adoring his daughter. Normal life. For some, it would be the only place they could witness something like that.

He took his eyes away from the cats and scanned the room slowly. Jacob saw what he was doing, but made no comment. Richard noted how thick with dust everything was. Except the chairs, the seats and backs and arms of the chairs. Clean and almost shiny from continued use. He considered this as he pressed his eyes against the peepholes once again.

Involuntarily he cried out. Dragon had come up behind the gathering of kittens, killing each with a bite to the back of the neck. Even at this distance their cries were piercing. Was that possible? Their screams were the agonized screams of young children. The worst sound on earth: babies dying in pain.

The monster cat stood up on his hind legs and grinned with his teeth, his contorted face tilted up toward the Deadfall. “He knows we’re up here!” Richard said. “My God he can find us anywhere!”

“Eventually, yes. We cannot know for sure he knows about this place, but eventually he will, I have no doubt. So far he’s worked his way into every other nook and cranny, places I’d not thought possible.”

Richard rubbed his face. “So is that where you were while my daughter was in danger? Taking the tour?”

“It was important to gauge the extent of their infiltration, to find out if there were places they wouldn’t go. Unfortunately I see no area they’ve avoided in any deliberate way.” If Jacob had taken offense at Richard’s tone he wasn’t betraying it. “Besides your station wagon, his cats have rendered the Deadfall’s pickup inoperable, as well as my old Ford. They even managed to remove key parts of the riding lawnmower.”

“This is unbelievable. I’ve questioned my decision to bring my daughter here, despite your fanciful reassurances. And now her greatest danger comes from her pet cat?”

“None of us is entirely safe in this world. It’s understandable when a father cannot accept that. We do what we can. Our guests here know these things better than anyone. I’ve also spent a couple of hours this evening checking up on those guests–you may recall that we have a certain responsibility to them, however alien and invulnerable they might appear to our more elementary sensibilities. Many have left, or hidden themselves in ways I cannot detect, but I’ve found three dead in their rooms, marked and unmarked, with perfectly innocent-looking kittens posted nearby.”

Richard tried to keep his voice under control, not wanting Serena to know how wrong everything had become (And how ridiculous was that? How crazy had he become?). “Then tell me what to do, Jacob. Tell me how to protect my daughter.”

“Serena,” Jacob said softly, his eyes sad, “is the only one capable of protecting anyone here today.”
“How can you ask me to put my daughter in that kind of danger?” They’d moved back down the corridor, leaving Serena asleep on a blood-colored corpse of a couch in the sitting room.

“She’s already in danger. We’re all in danger. Deadfall guests we can control, for the most part. I know very little about what to do in this situation, except to keep my eyes and ears open, and pay attention to what my senses tell me. And what they tell me here is that we are simply more toys to this monstrous cat–and what he eats and what he plays with are all pretty much the same to him. He’s going to tire of us, and then the play’s going to become much more violent, and then he’s going to get rid of us. He’d already be tired of us if it weren’t for Serena. Whatever he’s become he remembers what he used to be–and what he used to be has much to do with Serena.”

“Does the hotel have anything to do with what’s happening here?”

“Not directly, but one of my predecessors had this saying, ‘The Deadfall makes you live up to your potential, good or bad–it’s all the same to the Hotel.’ I think this little kitty just may have achieved its ultimate potential.”

“She’s just a little girl. How is she supposed to handle this?”

“She’ll handle this by being who she is. She needs to turn that cat into her pet again. Those other cats aren’t anything without their king. She’s going to have to get him away from the others. That’s when the two of us will take over the job.”

“And what will the two of us do with him once she delivers him to us?”

“I have no idea.”

“Great plan.”

“It is the only one we have. I suggest we improvise from there.”

Serena’s eagerness to pursue the plan appalled him. “We can always find another way,” he told her. “You know how clever Jacob is. Remember how he organized things for the cleaning? Pretty amazing, I thought, the way he figured everything out. He’ll come up with another way–I should never have even told you about this crazy idea. I’ll go ask him right now.”

“Daddy.” She sounded so much like her mother, struggling to find patience. “It must be the only way–or Jacob wouldn’t have suggested it. Besides, he is my cat.”

Richard reached to squeeze her shoulder. “Honey, don’t you find it a little–difficult–to think of Dragon as a housecat anymore?”

She let go of an embarrassed little smile. “I guess so. But I’m supposed to take some responsibility, I think, whatever he is. You taught me that, Daddy.”

Richard tried to think of what stupid little homily he might have let slip that would encourage her to risk her life. “And Dragon still likes me, sorta, I think, and I guess that’s all we’ve got going for us right now. And pretty soon, who knows, maybe he’ll change so much he won’t care anything about me anymore, maybe he’ll even have forgotten how to care.”

Her analysis was so close to Jacob’s Richard felt defenseless, foolish for trying to argue against it. She stood up and put an arm part way around his waist. “Let’s go talk to Jacob, Daddy. I guess we should do this pretty soon. I’ll be too scared if Dragon changes much more.”

As they made their way down the staircases they discovered a few cats no doubt left behind because they were either too tired or too wounded to travel with the rest of the pack. Richard and Jacob and Serena avoided even these non-threatening felines, detouring through abandoned rooms and dusty passageways. Everywhere there were signs of carnage, of cats having attacked other cats: scattered fur patches and rags of scalp, tears and scratches so numerous in the woodwork and walls Richard feared some sort of collapse. So much for Spring cleaning. Light fixtures dangled from the ceiling: here and there chewed electrical wire hung down above electrocuted cat corpses. And everywhere noxious yellow painted over the furniture.

Richard went with Serena out onto the porch. He tried to follow her down the steps but she pushed him back, urging him with her eyes to remember the plan.

Serena stepped out on the front lawn. She wore her hair pulled back into a ponytail, the same way she’d had it the day they brought Dragon to her. She hadn’t remembered that, nor had Richard, but Jacob was sure. Richard stayed back on the porch: Serena’s idea, and it made sense. She had to establish the contact with Dragon, recall the relationship. No one else could be involved.

He didn’t see Dragon at first. There were a number of cats around: slow-moving, fattened, somnolent. They pretty much ignored him: too tired, too preoccupied with the pleasures of digestion. He thought about the possibility that Dragon might be in very much the same state. But surely that was too much to hope for. Then Richard saw the large yellow dog sprawled out to one side, recognized it as the poor old stray that sometimes dropped by the kitchens, waiting until someone–usually Jacob–fed him. The dog appeared to be asleep, but then he saw the cat’s paw rising and falling, batting at the lifeless head. Dragon’s face suddenly appeared to one side of the dog’s, grinning. Richard looked at Serena: she’d spied her old pet as well.

Dragon gazed into the dog’s empty eyes. Trembling, Richard could easily imagine the cat looking into Serena’s eyes that same way. Serena was crossing the lawn slowly, avoiding piles of sleeping cats. “Kitty kitty,” she called softly. Suddenly the plan seemed ridiculous.

Dragon’s purr drifted across the lawn, rising in volume. Mesmerized, Richard didn’t want to move.

Serena stopped at the dog’s carcass. Dragon gazed up at her, tilting his head quizzically. “Oh.” He could hear the shake in her voice. “There you are, kitty.” Dragon became very still. “Come with me, kitty. Wanna play?” she asked musically. Dragon tilted his head in the opposite direction. Richard held his breath as his daughter turned, began walking slowly back up the lawn toward the Deadfall entrance. After a few moments she paused and peered back over her shoulder. Dragon took up the old cue and bounded after her like a kitten.

Serena left the front door open as she entered the Deadfall, Dragon by this point trotting in beside her. Richard followed at a discreet distance, staying just close enough to get a feel for Dragon’s attitude, ready to call the whole thing off if the cat became the least bit threatening.

Once inside Serena headed toward the library. Dragon seemed suddenly excited, started racing up and down the carpet as if chasing an invisible companion, the typical kitten.

When Serena opened the library door Dragon raced ahead into the dark chamber. She stole a nervous glance back at her father, then reached in by the door to flip the switch that controlled the reading lamps: the green glass-shaded lamp–gorgeous and oversized–that sat in the center of the cherry wood study table, and the brass floor lamp by Serena’s favorite Queen Anne chair. These lamps were just the thing for some cozy late night reading, but provided only two pools of illumination, barely enough to see to make it across the room. The rest of the vast library was completely missing, swallowed by the darkness. Yet you could still feel the massive weight of all those books, and the dust that lay upon all those volumes (the weight of a few large men in and of itself), and the significance of centuries’ learning, just out of reach, a burden of possibility in the shadows.

Serena followed Dragon into the dim chamber, leaving the library door open slightly, just wide enough for Richard to slide through. The cat would be blocked by the bookcase by the door from seeing him. He brought his head around one edge of it, and saw Serena sitting herself down in the Queen Anne, and Dragon pacing back and forth before a low bookshelf beneath the tall windows. Suddenly the cat pounced at a volume on the bottom shelf, his claws catching it at the top of its spine, his weight tilting the book out of the bookcase and tumbling to the rug below. The book lay opened, the cat rubbing his head into the trough of pages as if reading closely, before circling the book and lunging as if at sleeping prey, clamping his jaws into one corner of the thick leather cover, then dragging the tome across the library toward Serena in her chair.

Richard considered the jaw strength required, and found himself gazing up, at the narrow second floor gallery hugging the walls of books, knowing that Jacob was poised somewhere there in the shadows, ready with one of the ancient fishing nets he’d retrieved from the basement walls. Don’t wait long, he prayed, and looked back at his child as she leaned forward in her chair to retrieve the book where Dragon had brought it. It was an old, well-used book, the words on the cover in large gold script: CAT LORE. Dragon took his place, erect on his haunches by her feet, as Serena began to read.

“Cats have seven lives. Cats have nine lives. For three they play, for three they stray, and the last three they stay. A cat isn’t accepted into heaven or hell until he uses up all nine.”

She looked up from the book and down at Dragon then, as if gauging his reaction. The cat swayed and leaned forward, as if needing more.

“On Christmas Eve the cats get on their knees to pray. On New Year’s Day all the cats in Ohio kneel down to pray.”

The repetition and variation seemed a bit strange to Richard, then he realized Serena must be reading from a catalog of cat beliefs, not all of which would be consistent. But all of which, he thought now, the great King Dragon might understand to be true.

Then Serena took a deep breath, and Richard tensed, knowing what was to come. There was a slight shifting in the shadows overhead, the tiniest glimmer (Jacob’s buckle?), but before Dragon’s attention could be drawn away, Serena’s recitation rushed out of her straining lips, “A pink-eyed cat brings bad luck. A three-colored cat is good luck. A five-colored cat is good luck. A white cat is good luck. A white cat is bad luck. A white cat at night is bad luck. A six-toed white cat is good luck.” She gasped, as something fluttered in the dark. “See a one-eyed cat, cross and uncross your fingers three times if you don’t want bad luck. See a one-eyed cat, spit on your thumb, push into your palm, make a wish that will come true. A sneezing cat is good luck. A black cat is good luck.” As the net came down, the weights along its edges clanking against railings and bookcases. “A black cat is bad luck. A black cat seen before breakfast is bad luck. If you see a black cat, oh Daddy!” she cried, leaning away from the net as it covered the floor in front of her. “Spit three times to avoid bad luck!” Which she did, right into the net.

For a few moments Richard remained in the shadows staring at the tableaux: the net spread across the library floor, dust rising in a haze, the scattered corpses of books ripped from their shelves during the net’s descent, his sweet child leaning over the net, her fists balled, screaming. “I was good to you! You had no business hurting us! It’s not right!” He ran and grabbed her, held her close. “Oh daddy he’s dead he’s dead.”

Jacob walked slowly past them and stood by the net. He leaned over to examine the wreckage.

“Stand over by the chair, honey,” Richard said, leading her away. He returned and helped Jacob search. They tugged on each link in the net, lifting and peering through the still-flying dust.

“He’s not here,” Jacob said simply.

“Impossible! He was right under the net! I saw! It swallowed him whole.”

“You can see it as well as I, Richard. The cat is not under here.”

“Then where is he?” Richard pulled on the net–it was so heavy it hurt his fingers. So he kicked at the net, ran into the net and stomped wherever he could. Jacob said nothing. Finally Richard looked up at him, and past him to the chair where he had left Serena. But Serena wasn’t there.

“Serena!” Richard ran across the net, stumbled, grabbed the chair for balance, moved it aside, knocked it over, looking. “Serena!” He looked wildly around the library, ran up and down the shadowed areas. “Is there a secret passage, Jacob? Tell me!”

“Hold on hold on,” Jacob raised both hands. “Listen.”

Richard tried to silence his breath. He had limited success, but he could hear a faint and descending tapping. Serena’s shoes. Jacob jerked his head toward the child-sized door in the darkness behind the chair. “I don’t know why they put it here,” he said, “but it’s another way to the basement.”

The miniature door splintered in his hand. He threw away the doorknob. There were tiny stairs going down. He thought about Alice in Wonderland. He required the pill that makes you small. The opening was no more than five feet high, and only slightly wider than his shoulders. Pitch black interior, a cloying mildew smell. He pushed himself inside feeling like a ragged cork one size too large. He half-fell to the first tiny landing. A sudden change in air and sound told him that Jacob had squeezed in after him. Now we’re both in the dollhouse, he thought, and it did not reassure him. We’ll never get back out. A rapid tapping down the steps below him, an oppressive cat’s purr that shook the walls pressing against him, and he plunged forward again without a word.

The passage seemed to shrink even further as they went down. A few feet more and he was crouched so far he had to be careful not to ram his knees into his chin when he moved. He could hear Jacob huffing and puffing behind him and it worried him thinking that the old man might have a heart attack. How will I find Serena then? he thought uncharitably. But he hadn’t the time to indulge his guilt–Serena’s shoes sounded closer, and the rumbling purr of the cat so loud he felt as if Dragon had swallowed them all, and they were descending the feline’s esophagus into its belly. “Serena!” he called, but she didn’t answer, and after a few moments more he could no longer hear her shoes, or the cat’s purr–just the close thunder of his own panicked breath.

The steps ended before a smallish window. Without stopping Richard hauled himself up into the frame and pushed his head and torso through. They were in the Deadfall basement. In the dim light beyond rows of dusty cartons and abandoned furniture he saw a flash of Serena’s dress, and a flash of rapidly-moving fur. He forced himself through the window and landed hard on the slightly damp floor. A scurrying in the surrounding dark but he had no time to look. He still could not hear Serena’s footsteps, but off in the darkness things were being bumped against, things were being displaced. He moved as fast as he could in the enveloping dark, dim light from some unknown source illuminating the edges of columns and wreckage, but not much more. He heard Jacob drop to the floor behind him, but did not take the time to turn around.

Things were stacked so high down here he could not see above them. There appeared to be enough old furniture to equip several homes. Now and then bits of paper flapped or crackled with his passage. He pressed past shelves full of oddly-shaped glassware, dinnerware of unknown function and origin. They rattled musically when he bumped them, and he feared they might spur some desperate maneuver from the cat, so he quickened the pace. The fact that Jacob was right at his back, sounding equally urgent, did not reassure him. He rushed past an intersection of lanes, not realizing he’d seen Serena at its end. He stopped and stepped back, peered around the edge of a gigantic antique sideboard–how’d they get this down here?–Serena stood motionless, staring at something he could not see. Then she began to step backwards, out of his frame of vision, and then Dragon crept into view, advancing, back raised, tail up and whipping side-to-side like an agitated snake. Then Dragon, too, moved out of view.

Richard moved quickly to pursue.

“Careful!” Jacob whispered, grabbing Richard’s shoulder. “You don’t want to startle the cat!”

So the two of them eased through the narrow space between boxes and furniture, coming around the end to discover Serena facing them, her head outlined by the dark square window behind her. Dragon had his back to them, facing her, his body looking swollen as every muscle expanded and the fur stood away from his flesh. He hissed and appeared to grow some more, rocking back on his haunches, ready to strike.

Richard clutched the floor lamp a foot or so from his right hand, began lifting it from the floor.

“Daddy, no!” she screamed, looked directly into Dragon’s eyes, raised her shoulders and arms, dropped her mouth open and screeched as loud as she could.

“No!” Richard howled with helplessness as the cat leapt into the air, front legs out and reaching for his precious daughter’s head.

At the last second Serena jerked sideways as if shot, the same moment as the cat disappeared through the black window. Serena recovered her balance, and pushed the heavy iron hatch of the ancient Deadfall furnace closed.

Richard stood dumbfounded. The furnace was so huge–six times larger at least than any furnace he had ever seen–he’d always thought of it as essentially filling the basement, with no specific location, no specific door.

Jacob walked up beside her. She’d looked so large a moment ago, making faces at the monster cat. Now she seemed improbably tiny, even beside the shrunken old caretaker.

Jacob put his hand on a large red button mounted on a metal box above the furnace door. He looked down at Serena.

Serena looked over at Richard, an ineffably sad expression on her face. She stared up at Jacob. And nodded.

Jacob pushed the heel of his palm into the button and the furnace exploded into life. It made a terrible, anguished, and almost organic sound.

At one time a sign by the front door of the Deadfall stated “NO PETS ALLOWED.” It has been missing since before my time here. If I cannot find the original, I will make my own.

I do not believe that any of the three members of the Carter family now residing here will object when I post it. — from the diary of Jacob Ascher, proprietor, Deadfall Hotel, 1969–2000

The post Deadfall Hotel: “The King of the Cats,” Part 4 of 4 appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

What is Deadfall Hotel about? A haunted hotel with a long pedigree that has fallen into disrepair. To this afflicted place comes a widower who takes over the job of managing the hotel, accompanied by his daughter and the ghost of his wife.

Over the last two weeks we ran Part 1 and Part 2 of the four-part self-contained excerpt from Deadfall Hotel “The King of the Cats.” Here is Part 3…

***

The chaos of the cleaning (and, he thought, perhaps the chaos generated by the cat as well) had kept the hotel’s residents almost completely absent the past few weeks. Occasionally Richard might hear a footfall overhead, or hear cabinet doors opening and closing as he passed a kitchen, but otherwise the residents had made no appearances.

And now that the big cleanup was over caution still appeared to be the order of the day at the Deadfall. One afternoon Richard watched as two figures covered head to foot in matching suits of stained canvas crept around the front lawn with badminton rackets in their hands, swinging at low-lying branches and into the shadows beneath bushes. There was also the incident in which he was stopped walking down the third floor hall by a voice behind a door.

“Sir? Sir! A moment, if you will.” The voice was gravelly, garbled, and wet, as if the speaker’s mouth were just under the edge of water.

Richard went over to the door, putting his ear against the panel to listen. “Yes, I’m Richard, the manager. Can I help you?”

“Just a piece of information I would like to share with you.”

“Yes?” He could hear a soft, pleasant splashing sound from inside the room.

“I–cannot–abide–a cat.”

And try as he might, he could not get the speaker to say more.

The oppressive heat slowly leaked out of the Deadfall over the next two weeks, supplanted by a cool, which, because of the contrast, actually seemed uncomfortable at times. Life was strangely slow now, as if the heat had used up all available energy.

For all Richard’s doubts and ignorance as to the efficacy of their cleaning procedures, the hotel did feel like a much more sanitary environment these days. He breathed more easily, slept more soundly, and the hotel in general was a less gloomy, less shadowy place. The windows must have been rather grimy for there to be such a difference, and yet he didn’t remember anyone actually cleaning the windows. In the midst of all those odd and complicated instructions, no one had even been assigned the windows.

“I can’t believe how fresh everything feels and smells around here lately,” he said to Jacob one morning as the old man busily sprinkled a green powder around the flower beds out front. “Not so much like a mausoleum.”

“Well,” Jacob stopped now and then and dug a small hole with his trowel, filling it with a portion of the powder. “Even with a structure like the Deadfall, sometimes you just have to clean some of the dread out of a place, before the situation becomes critical.”

Richard watched for a time. “Is that green stuff meant to encourage growth?”

Jacob hunched his back, vigorously attacking one corner of the bed with his trowel. “No,” he said, as stems and petals slapped at his hands and shoes. “It is to keep them a bit less active.”

Richard meant to ask what exactly he meant by that, but never got around to it.

Serena spent a great deal of time to herself these days, brooding in her room, or curled up in a library chair reading.

There was no peace in the way she held herself–she looked edgy, ready to spring. She wouldn’t talk to him about it; when he tried to talk to her she snapped at him. But he’d been the same way at her age. No one really liked growing up, the way the body, the mind, changed. He remembered feeling like some sort of animal. In fact, he remembered smelling like some sort of animal. Cornered and in a constant state of confusion. Transformed. As if you didn’t know what kind of animal you were going to turn out to be.

The next cat showed up around sunset one evening. Richard had been out on the front lawn trying to track down the source of a sound: an elusive whining somewhere between a baby’s cry and the soft keen of an injured animal grieving for itself. Usually he ignored the various and mysterious sounds which traveled through the Deadfall. Too far displaced in time and location–to pursue every one of them would have been maddening. But this particular sound was especially distressing to him. It had gone on most of the day and by mid-afternoon Richard had felt a heavy depression descending through his body. He’d gone out looking for the source of the sound less to render aid than to stop the outcry.

He was approaching a line of singular bushes–their tiny brownish leaves recently having burst back into a fiery kind of life, having become so red he could almost feel the heat from them–when a portion of one bush flared up into a roughly ball-shaped cloud of fire which fell to the ground and rolled on to the next bush. It was only after it joined these flaming leaves that Richard realized it had been a cat: a red tabby Persian with bright copper eyes discernible among the brilliant red foliage. Watching him, and wanting him to know it was watching him.

For a few brief moments Richard actually thought about calling Serena so that together they might coax the cat out so that she could have a replacement for Dragon which could only cheer her up again. But then he knew he wouldn’t mention it to her at all, and hoped that this new cat would make no such dramatic appearances while she was around.

Less than a half hour later he caught sight of a huge blue cat perched on the edge of the porch roof. A Russian Blue, if he wasn’t mistaken. He’d once dated a woman with a Russian Blue and this one could have been the twin. That one had been an incredibly gentle cat. This cat had a presence which projected anything but.

Its eyes seemed unnaturally light, large and flat as if painted on. But it was the mouth that was impossible: fluid and mobile like the mouths of talking cartoon cats. It screamed silently at him and leapt. Richard instinctively covered his face; when next he looked around the cat had disappeared.

But the deepening shadows around the edges of the front lawn were shifting. There was a nervousness in the way Richard was looking at things. Then he realized it wasn’t his eyes: the landscape had grown agitated, a fierceness barely contained.

Cats in twos and threes suddenly sprouted from the bushes, slunk out of the shadows spread under the trees, dropped from darkened eaves, jumped into the warmth of windows. Then there was a scream like a baby’s scream and all movement stopped, the cats became shadows and stone, and a cat very much like Serena’s Dragon crept slowly up the Deadfall drive toward Richard.

The cat halted a couple of feet in front of him, tilted his head and gazed up and held Richard’s eyes, then murmured and moved his pink tongue in and out, yawned enormously and moved a paw up to rub his face. That was all that was required to make Richard feel utterly foolish: this was a kitten after all. No demon. No fire-breathing dragon, either, but unmistakably Dragon, Serena’s lost cat. Richard stepped forward and crouched. “Here kitty kitty,” with one hand outstretched. Serena would be so pleased.

But Dragon moved, first side to side like a weaving snake, which made Richard hesitate and draw back, then the cat bounded away, batting at fireflies as he went, leaping to snap at a flapping moth, running and tumbling across the blackening lawn. “Kitty kitty,” Richard called again, thinking how stupid he must sound, how he had never called the cat this way, and walked briskly after, thinking he could deliver Dragon into Serena’s arms before she went to bed.

Richard tried following the cat as he shuttled across the lawn, in and out of bushes, clumps of vegetation, up one tree and down another, passing through light and passing through dark. Sometimes Richard could hold the cat in his eyes and sometimes he could not. When he could not he imagined the animal’s progress, dreamed the dance in and out of this world and the worlds beyond and in between. The cat was some sort of messenger, but Richard wondered if this was a message he really wanted to hear.

Then he came upon the cat again cast in the circle of a security light that had just switched on in the thickening gloom. There were four or five such working lights scattered somewhat randomly along the Deadfall roofline. There were many more, however, which did not work, had been painted over, or had things growing out of the sockets.

Dragon was playing with another cat, wrestling, mock stalking, embracing. But as Richard grew closer he realized this wasn’t another cat at all, but a light-gray, emaciated squirrel, struggling to get away but caught and dragged back by Dragon’s delicate but amazingly strong paws. The squirrel began to squeal, a noise Richard didn’t think he’d ever heard a squirrel make before.

Richard watched Serena’s Dragon as he played aggressively with the squirrel, but a squirrel was so much bigger than a mouse, so much wilder, surely a kitten could not play with a squirrel as it did with a mouse, but Dragon did, tormenting the squirrel, torturing it. Richard was glad Serena wasn’t seeing this–Dragon scratching away at the squirrel’s belly just enough to expose the most sensitive layers of skin, but not enough to kill it, just enough to precisely heighten its agony? He didn’t want her to see things like this, to even know about things like this, even though it was everywhere. Cruelty that came unplanned, that came out of a creature’s nature.

With a final bite to the neck Dragon ended it, and then almost immediately came a murmuring and a rustle that stiffened Richard’s neck. He turned around as the surrounding dark began to move again, and cat after cat came out to witness Dragon shred and devour the squirrel inside the circle of light.

He had never seen so many different types of cats gathered together in one place. He recognized several Burmese: a brown like his neighbors used to have. Then a lilac. Then a red. Then bounding in front a Siamese with a glacial white coat which shaded into a light blue as it twisted in apparent ecstasy and displayed its back.

There were more breeds here, he realized, than he could recognize. He could identify a large, plump angora in the crowd. A couple of others might have been Turkish. There were several long-haired tabbies. A huge, raccoon-like animal slunk up the rear–he’d seen pictures of the breed. A Maine coon cat. Several black cats of different varieties–both short- and long-haired–blended in with the others to make a neutral background of night.

Then three aristocratic-looking cats with fur a blend of gray shades strolled in front of him. They looked at him with a precise, synchronous turning of heads, and he could feel an electric charge of anxiety passing across his nerves. They twisted around and displayed their double tails.

Pieces of the dark started breaking off around him. He made a staggered turn and tried to walk swiftly, but not too obviously, away.

His foot kicked into softness with a hard center. He looked down at a rag doll cat chewing at the offending shoe. Feeling the cats behind him beginning to turn, he glanced back at hundreds of bright, focused eyes.

The cats had been focused on the squirrel, leading and playing with the squirrel. Now they were focused on him. He jerked his shoe away from the snarling rag doll and started trotting toward the front door.

Several brightly-colored bodies shot past him, then slowed down to keep pace. Other cats shouldered them aside and trotted along, grinning up at him. Soon there were a dozen cats keeping pace with him, running ahead, falling back. As if they knew with amused confidence they were in a race they were going to win. At the middle of the group were a couple of larger cats–mountain cats, wild cats–cats you might expect to see in a zoo.

Richard reached the front apron of the Deadfall and started up the porch when the dance of light and shadow overhead made him look up. The line of the porch roof was jammed whisker to tail with cats. They peered down at him as one creature, their numbers giving increasing thickness to the shadows massed above the Deadfall.

Cats crowded so closely to the edge of the roof that the ones in front began tumbling off, twisting and stretching out their backs during their descent until the legs came around, feet ready to cushion their landing. They dropped in front of Richard and shot behind him, gathering together again so that he was surrounded.

Suddenly he felt a sharp tearing at the back of his ankle–he twisted around and found Dragon clamped onto his lower leg, biting down with all his might. Richard kicked and kicked, but could not shake the cat loose. He dragged his leg, cat attached, to a wooden box beside the front steps where they kept a variety of brooms, clippers, shovels. He reached in, grabbed a shovel, and tried beating on the cat without hitting his own leg. The cat howled and dug deeper with teeth and claws, until in agony Richard dropped the long-handled tool.

At that moment the front door of the Deadfall slammed open and a ball of fire shot out, made a high, brilliant arch and landed in the middle of the cats with an explosion of sparks. With a ragged howl that chorused and echoed throughout the feline mass the cats scattered to shadow. Dragon released him and went after them.  

“Richard! Come on! Move your feet!” Dazed, Richard looked up at the doorway. Jacob stood there, motioning vigorously with both hands. “Come on! Before they understand it was just a burning ball of rags!”

Richard trotted up to the porch and leapt to the first step, then through the door past Jacob who smelled strongly of gasoline.  “All those cats–”

“A field of kitties,” Jacob said. “It appears that Serena’s Dragon turned out to be King of the Cats!”

“King of the Cats?”

Jacob’s eyes were brilliant in his soot-coated face. “Surely you don’t imagine human beings are the only ones into politics? I know you must have heard of alpha males and such.”

“But that’s hardly politics.”

“Politics was born the day the first creature opened its eyes to the realization that it wasn’t a physical part of everything else. That made it lonely, and that made it angry. That was the day the real darkness first came, the beast was born, and politics along with it.”

“So we have a political problem here?”

“At least. And a pest control problem of somewhat major proportions. I would have suggested that we throw out a few mice to pacify them but I think one of our guests has eaten them all.”

Richard glanced down at his hands which had been feeling alternately hot and clammy. He hadn’t felt the claws go in, but the backs of his hands were criss-crossed with thin lines of blood. He looked back up at Jacob. “Maybe one of those guests might help.”

“No, Richard–that runs counter to the contractual understandings we have here. We’re staff, they’re guests–the lines don’t cross. Besides, most of those guests would not help in any case. Remember that they are of a different world–it simply rubs up against ours now and again. Most of them would be quite unable to parse what the fuss was all about.”

“So what do we do? Bring out the flame throwers? Stay inside our rooms with the doors locked? I’m about ready to do that.”

“We do what people have done throughout the ages when serious political grievances arise–we take out the king.”

Richard glanced around warily. He could hear a distant, directionless scratching. “So do you have a shotgun?”

Jacob shook his head. “The first time we had him in our sites there would be a dozen other cats throwing themselves into the line of fire, and a few dozen more clawing up our backsides before we knew it. No, we’ll have to be cleverer than that. We’re going to have to get up close to Dragon with someone he already trusts.”

Richard had been distracted, listening for the vague scratching that moved in and out of his hearing in waves. Then suddenly Jacob’s words registered. “You’re out of your mind.”

“She’s not just a little girl, Richard. There are limits to what you can protect her from.”

“I’m not sending Serena out to face that thing! We’ll find another way! If you were a father yourself you wouldn’t even suggest it.”

Jacob stared at him, then he opened a hand and shrugged. “Then we look for another way.”

“Fine then. I’m going to wash this blood off and check on her.” Then, seeing Jacob purse his lips, “Because I don’t want to alarm her. I’m alarmed enough for the both of us, goddammit.”

Richard scrubbed and disinfected his hands vigorously. The skin burned and reddened, then paled amazingly, the surface looking like skate tracks in ice. Maybe she wouldn’t notice, he thought, knowing full well that these days Serena noticed everything. He threw cold water on his face then ran down the hall.

In the corridor outside Serena’s room two cats stood guard: a tall, thin black, a short stout gray. Wide mouths, slightly goofy expressions. Richard thought immediately of Laurel and Hardy. He forced himself to smile down at them as he started past, putting his hands palm down as if to placate or pat.

The short cat approached him with tail and ears erect: friendly, interested. But as it climbed onto his shoes its tail suddenly began lashing side to side, the tip twitching, and then the claws came out, and Richard started kicking when the claws entered his pants leg. The cat landed against the cushiony flocked wall and commenced a deep and harsh purring.

Then the tall cat rubbed up against him, its fur electric, and Richard tried to pull away, but could not. It was as if he’d grabbed hold of an electrified fence and his charged muscles would not permit him to let go. But the Hardy cat broke the connection by barreling between them, then lolling playfully on its back to expose its huge belly, looking up with an invitation for Richard to scratch. Richard declined.

The Laurel cat took one swat at Hardy’s belly, opening it in a broadening red line. Hardy looked surprised, and then sprayed the air with fur and phlegm. The emaciated Laurel leapt up into a small open window and crouched there, ready for any retaliation from Hardy. Laurel kept turning its head toward the outside, sniffing at the air, then when it seemed to find a particular direction of interest it opened its mouth and gasped in more air.

Meanwhile Hardy spread itself wide in front of Serena’s door, its eyes mad with fury and pain, obviously determined to bar entrance even with its ropy guts hanging out. Richard would need something more than his feet and his unprotected hands to get through to Serena. He ran back down the corridor to the closet in his own room, groping for the baseball bats and tennis rackets he kept stored there.

And felt fur moving back and forth against his hand.

He stepped back as the closet door eased fully open, the huge white and yellow-streaked creature coming with him as if its fur were glued to his hand. The cat rubbed the side of its head back and forth against his palm, staring up at him with wide, fixed pupils. With an effort of will Richard pulled his hand away–the fingers tingled. The cat’s zombie-like stare broke and its mouth suddenly grinned impossibly wide.

Richard ran into the bathroom and washed his hands thoroughly, near delirious with his need to remove the feel of the thing. But the tingling was still there. Another cat appeared outside the bathroom window, its doughy face pressed into the glass until eyes and mouth went loony. Richard opened the back door to the bathroom and made his way down the dim-lit back hall. But from behind each door he passed came a scratching, a sniffing, as if they were tracking him.

A rubbing against the outside of his leg as a cat passed from behind. Richard looked down: the small, multicolored creature trotted ahead, coat changing shade and pattern as the light changed. But the way the cat moved seemed so normal, so innocuous–here and there stopping to snap at a moth, or to lunge clumsily at a moving shadow–Richard tended to think this cat must not yet be part of the others, until the cat glared at him, doubling size with a glance, and Richard recognized this cat as Dragon, Dragon in the eyes and in the teeth, whatever size and shape the cat might take.

Richard stood his ground, or, more accurately, was afraid of what might happen to him if he ran. But Dragon swiveled his head back around and continued to trot down the corridor as if he hadn’t noticed Richard at all. Richard turned, indecisive, wanting to return to Serena’s front door, but this back hall connected to Serena’s bedroom as well. Could Dragon know this? Without a doubt–he’d pretty much had the run of the place since he’d shown up (except for certain corners, certain stretches of floor and carpet, certain thresholds even Dragon knew better than to cross)–and Dragon was headed in her general direction. Richard started after the cat, who seemed completely oblivious to him now.

Dragon kept several yards ahead of him, raising his leg and spraying each door before Richard could get there. The odor accumulated, intensified, and it occurred to Richard this was more than one individual cat’s marking of territory, but a claim being staked for the whole of the Deadfall, a claim for the kingdom of the cats.

To his relief they passed the innocuous-looking rear door of Serena’s quarters. Dragon didn’t even bother to mark it (or did the cat already consider it marked?). Richard didn’t stop in any case, not wanting to alert the cat to Serena’s whereabouts if he didn’t already know. They left the worn carpeted hall for a series of tiled, empty rooms which Jacob always referred to as “the overflow kitchen.”

Richard heard the first click-clack, and then a series of them, click-click-clack, an overlapping syncopation of hundreds of clicks and clacks, then around the doorway came dozens of Siamese cats trotting across the floor, their claws extended.

Richard moved into the carpeted back hall. And there was Dragon suddenly blocking his way, sniffing at his palm, then moving his mouth over Richard’s thumb and closing, not too firmly, keeping his teeth back but still holding Richard’s thumb well enough that Richard knew Dragon wouldn’t easily let his prize go.

Dragon’s tongue began caressing the trapped thumb, wrapping around his thumb so tightly he couldn’t possibly pull loose. The cat started moving the tongue slowly back and forth, its rough texture grating away his skin. Finally Dragon uncoiled his tongue and walked away slowly with an air of dismissal. Richard examined his thumb: it was bloody. Layers of skin had been scraped away.

“Dragon!” Serena squealed behind him. Richard turned as she rushed past him, slipping across the tiled floor and landing behind the cat, who still would not turn around. “Oh, Daddy, you found him!”

“No, Serena!” he shouted, as the cat’s eyes became huge and hard, one paw raised, claws shiny even in the dim light.

“Daddy?” Serena looked back at him, at the same time reaching out a hand to caress her long-lost cat. Richard held his breath. The cat’s ears shot up like rigid cones. Richard started running, reached his hands down to scoop up his daughter or grapple with the cat if required. “Daddy! You’ll scare him again!” Sudden defiance, resentment in her voice.

“Honey, I didn’t.”

“Yes you did! You never liked Dragon! And he’s all I have left!” Serena burst into tears and pulled Dragon to her. Richard tensed, but the cat allowed himself to be held. A low purr filled the room: directionless, and impossibly loud. Even in her upset Serena must have felt the wrongness of the sound. She held the cat out and away from her, her hands under his front legs. He opened his mouth wide with a loud, snake-like hiss. Serena dropped Dragon, scurried over to her father on her hands and knees, clamped on to his leg. “Da–deeee.” She began to cry.

The cat stretched himself out to twice his length, fixed his eyes on Richard and Serena, and then lowered his ears half-way, waiting.

Richard tried to ease himself and Serena toward the back hall, at the same time pulling Serena up along his leg from the floor. She held on so tightly he could barely move. But Dragon hissed yet again, even more loudly, more like his namesake than any garden-variety serpent. They stopped. Serena was rigid against him.

 The cat flattened his ears completely and began to circle them. The ears twitched back and forth, followed by two quick flicks of the tongue around the lips. Dragon padded over to Serena’s feet and raised his paw. Without thinking Richard reached down to bat him away.

Dragon’s paw pushed against his hand. He could not believe the strength in the gesture. He could feel the claws coming slowly out of their pads. He jerked his hand away and moved his right shoe between Dragon and his daughter.

The cat clamped his mouth over the toe of the shoe. Serena squealed. Richard struggled to pull his foot away, but the cat was like a lead weight, impossible to budge. Richard felt enormous strain on his lower leg as he yanked. He almost laughed–such a small cat, and yet it was as if a boulder had rolled onto his shoe. He flashed back to a time just after they got Dragon, and the kitten had attacked, and chewed playfully on his big toe, exposed through a hole in the sock. This was insane.

Suddenly Dragon released the shoe and Richard staggered back against the wall. Serena was screaming. Richard looked down at the front of his shoe: a couple of inches of leather gone, shreds of blue sock pulled out and dangling, blood trickling from the ragged cavity.

Dragon stretched his mouth into a hideous grin and sniffed loudly.

“Daddy, look,” Serena said softly.

Richard lifted his head and looked beyond Dragon, to the doors of a second auxiliary kitchen, and the hall beyond. All of it packed wall to wall with cats. There were breeds he recognized and breeds he did not. Abyssinian, Bobtail, Burmese. An indescribable breed with a yellow-dotted coat and scarlet whiskers. And on the left pressed against the wall there was a Cornish Rex (or so he thought–he’d never actually seen one before). An Egyptian Mau, an aged Sphinx. White cats with whiter eyes. Black cats with blacker eyes. A reddish cat with a blue-tipped tail. Two Norwegians. A huge cat, almost hairless, and Richard would have thought it a pig if not for its teeth and claws. A variety of Orientals. A long narrow cat. A tall crooked cat. A Himalayan, several Persians.

One incredibly large cat with an unlikely amount of muscle was shaking its heavy, bull-like head from side to side, more dog- than cat-like in its movements. Several creatures tumbled out of its ears onto the floor and it lapped them up with a skinny, pale yellow tongue.

But it was the distinctiveness of their various eye colors that impressed him the most: yellows, hazel-greens, greens, rich oranges, red-tinged whites, the occasional blue. But when Dragon stepped back into the midst of them, creeping in reverse like some grainy silent movie wound back, their eyes all gradually changed, until eventually they took on the silver hues of Dragon’s great, brilliant eyes.

Dragon lifted his head toward Richard and Serena, stretched out his throat, and began to purr. The purring quickly fell through the registers into a soft growl, then, as if testing the various muscles and sinews involved, Dragon’s mouth went through a number of contortions, but with no sound resulting.

Dragon’s throat appeared to move differently than a domestic cat’s–there was something vaguely panther-like about it, Richard thought. In the next moment, Dragon began to roar like one of the big cats, a large, full-throated sound. But Richard was sure domestic cats did not have the ability to roar, even to execute some sort of pale imitation of a roar. Dragon cut off the sound with a sudden smacking of his lips. His tongue shot out briefly, and Richard thought it much too large for his mouth. He watched as Dragon stretched on his front paws. For his relatively small size, Dragon’s muscles seemed massive. He arched his back and twisted around, showing them the grandness of his tail: this new tail was almost four times the width of the one he’d come to them with. The enormous tail bobbed forward over Dragon’s head as he pranced in front of his followers. The other cats appeared tense, fixed on him, taking measure of his every gesture. Richard felt as if he and Serena had been finally dismissed, but doubted this was truly the case.

“He’s changed, Daddy. Oh, he’s changed so much.”

“I know, honey. I know. I’m afraid he’s not your little pet anymore. Come on, we have to go now. Just hang on to me, whatever happens.”

They were able to slip out of the room and halfway down the hall toward Serena’s room before seeing Hardy, sprawled dead across the middle of the hall, three tiny black and white kittens tearing away at its insides. Serena started to squeal and Richard clamped a hand across her mouth. Her eyes grew enormous. He moved her into an even narrower connecting hallway, his hand still over her mouth.

They were several yards down this hall (which led, Richard thought, to a door off the front lobby) when he became aware of a tearing sound behind him. He twisted to see a half dozen cats entering the hall, claws in the wallpaper on each side, tearing their way toward him. He kept Serena ahead of him, moving her along as he picked up the pace.

They pushed through the door at the end of the narrow passage, discovering that indeed it did bring them out into the lobby. Richard locked it. On the other side the cats began to howl.

“Daddy, what’ll we do?”

He held a finger to his lips and Serena clamped her own hand over her mouth. There was a multi-layered popping noise, rising in volume. He couldn’t imagine what it might be. Where was Jacob? He didn’t think much about the fact that he hadn’t seen any of the guests the past few hours–they tended to lie low as a matter of course, more so if anything unusual was going on. And was this unusual? Certainly, even for the Deadfall. But he’d expected to see Jacob in a crisis. This was a crisis, wasn’t it? Under the circumstances, the man’s secretiveness seemed intolerable.

The popping noise was even louder. And there was a bass ripple cascading from above. Then he realized what was happening, turned his head while pulling Serena to him, foolishly clinging to some thin thread of an idea that he might shield her from this.

At the top of the left-hand staircase a wave of electrified cats appeared, followed a beat later by a wave of cats on the right, both floods descending toward the wide landing at the top of the lobby where they would join and overflow the Deadfall’s great central stair. Their claws were out as they ran, making the popping noise as they snagged and pulled carpet thread in rapid succession, sending dust and bits of material flying, a gray cloud of it drifting to the red-tiled lobby floor. Many of them eeyowed in pain, or anger, or excitement–Richard imagined claws snagging and snapping, but there was no apparent impairment to their descent.

The registration desk was just a few feet away. “Stay here,” he whispered, and the wide-eyed fear that spread through her face almost made him stop, almost made him want to wrap his arms around her and wait for whatever happened.

He tore himself away and moved swiftly behind the desk, slid open a small drawer and retrieved the loaded pistol there. He eased back to Serena’s side. The cats were louder, almost to the bottom of the stairs. Serena stared at the gun, looking even more frightened. “Daddy.”

“Just come with me.” He grabbed her by the hand and pulled her with him toward the front door. Several cats bounded ahead of the crowd, immediately targeting Serena. Richard pointed the gun in their direction and fired. One of the cats tumbled amid a general shrieking. Richard was surprised at how loud the gun sounded in the high-ceilinged lobby. He’d never shot a gun before.

The great mass of cats still on the staircase sat motionless, heads butting forward, peering. Then one by one they stretched themselves–there was a final chorus of popping as they freed their claws, bits of carpet flying like flowers under a mower. Then one by one they grinned and began to move from the stairs. Richard threw away the gun and ran toward the front door, Serena dragged along by one arm, eeyowing her own gritty pain.

They squeezed through the door just ahead of a rainbow-colored tide erasing the lobby. Richard slammed the massive door on a scream of babies, looked down and saw bits of bloody fur and paw sliced off by the smooth steel edge of the door jamb. On the other side of the door was more popping–heavier, softer–made as the cats broke their bodies against the carved wood panels.

Serena clung to him and shook uncontrollably. He slipped his finger under her chin and tilted her face up. Only a couple of scratches across her cheeks, nothing serious, but her eyes looked dazed, her forehead white. “Honey, it’s okay. They’re locked on the other side of the door.”

She jerked herself away and shook her head wildly. “It’s never okay!” she screamed, spit flying off her lips. “Not in this place! It’s made not to be okay!” Her body twisted–she seemed barely able to stand. She made a staggered turn and started down the front steps. “Sometimes, Dad,” she threw back over her shoulder, “you’re an idiot!”

“Serena! Stay with me!” He went after her, stumbling over something on the porch. With a flash of anger he kicked it, saw soft, bloody flesh flying. He focused on her back, going gray as she raced ahead of him over the dark lawn. “Serena, we have to stay together!” as he stepped into another lump of flesh. And another. What the hell? Blood slimed his shoes. He could barely contain his fury at her. He couldn’t believe what she’d just said to him–it wasn’t like her–and now she was putting herself into even more danger. She’d been like this since the cat came, more and more unpredictable.

She’d stopped a few yards ahead, was looking around, down at the lawn. Again his shoes went into something soft, with a vague crunch inside. He stopped himself, made himself see more clearly, stared at the hundreds of small lumps littering the Deadfall lawn. 

Hundreds of mice, the heads gone, chewed from the bodies. Dozens of birds, opened throat to tail feathers like overripe pods. A dozen or so squirrels, their heads gone as well, bodies stretched and rigid, and flattened a bit, like road kill (and when before had he ever seen a dead squirrel that wasn’t road kill?). An eviscerated mole. A mound of skunk. A helping of miscellaneous, unidentifiable flesh: well-chewed, and regurgitated. And a couple of small dogs, their dog days past, the attempt to remove their heads not quite successful, so that the flesh of their necks was mostly gone, but the bone remained, and Richard marveled at how snake-like those neck bones appeared, so that in death the dogs had become dragons, transforming into other, mythical creatures.

He wondered if this mass offering was meant for him–he’d had cats before, and except for the quantity and variety this was not unlike something they might have done–but then he heard the deep-throated purr, and turned to see Dragon perched gargoyle-like on the edge of the roof.

Serena looked up at Dragon. She slumped to the ground and began to cry. A smallish white cat crept out of the shadows, walking around her in a circle, spraying the ground, claiming his daughter as its territory.

Richard watched as two huge gray cats–both of them twice the size of the largest, fattest house cat he had ever seen–approached Serena from opposite sides of the field of carnage. He gasped and started toward her, even more alarmed when he heard Dragon growl menacingly behind him.

Then the two cats appeared to look past Serena, seeing each other as if for the first time. They stared, fixated, fur bristling, bodies in apparent slow expansion, tails fluffing out, until the king came into view–Dragon had moved so quickly Richard wondered if maybe this was a twin cat, but the way he held himself was all too unmistakable. The two huge cats shrank up inside themselves until they seemed practically nothing.

“Daddy, I want to leave. Let’s get out of here.” It was the soft, broken voice of a little girl inside her bad dream. Dragon trotted over to her, purred, rubbed against her. She didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge the cat’s close proximity. The cat’s eyes went from black to steel. Then he turned his back on her and slipped into darkness with a rush as if the film of the world had suddenly speeded up. The two fat cats followed him at a more leisurely pace. And all was silent. Not even a murmur from the hordes of cats locked inside the Deadfall. Richard found himself waiting for the sound of broken glass, for the mass of cats to come crashing in a stream of blood and fur through the Deadfall’s many windows, but there was nothing. He and Serena might have been completely alone. He could almost laugh at that. He’d wanted a quiet place to recover, to raise his daughter. Jacob had essentially promised him as much.

Something soft was at his waist, embracing him. The sweet smell of his little girl mixed with something else, a musky odor of cat, the charged scent of madness and terror. “Daddy, where’s Jacob? He should be here somewhere, shouldn’t he?”

“I’m sure–he’s working on this, trying to figure a way to get rid of the cats. He’s been doing this a long time–he’s been at the Deadfall a lot of years, you know? I know it’s scary, sweetheart. But Jacob knows what he’s doing.” He pulled her closer, feeling like a fraud.

“What will we do? Where will we go?” She turned her face into him.

Richard stroked her hair, felt something wet, sticky. He looked at his hand: there was blood in her hair. He tilted her head: scratches across the forehead, down the cheeks like exaggerated tears. “We’re going to get into the car,” he said. “And then we’re going to drive away from here.” She looked relieved, but somewhat alarmed as well. “Hush now. Maybe we’ll come back later, after the problem’s been solved.”

They slipped out of the light and into the shadows along the wall. It was ridiculous to feel any safer with that route, of course–cats stayed to shadow, as did other terrible things. But it still seemed to make them both feel better; at least they weren’t tripping over the display of tiny corpses. The garage was recessed into the Deadfall behind a screen of small trees, twenty, twenty-five feet away–you couldn’t see it from the drive, you had to know where it was.

Richard eased open one of the great slabs of weathered wood, Serena tucked behind him. The air was stale burlap, and scratchy in the nose. He didn’t think anyone had been in here since they moved in. Once at the Deadfall you didn’t think of using an automobile except for leaving.

He drew her a few feet inside, shutting the door but not all the way. He imagined breaking out at high speed, wood splintering everywhere, more easily accomplished if the door wasn’t latched. He was reluctant to turn on the dim bulb suspended high overhead, thinking it might draw the cats’ attention. Birds fluttered up in the rafters–a good sign, he thought. He pulled Serena to one wall and flipped the switch there decisively.

His station wagon appeared older than he remembered, a snapshot in silver, bathed in low-watt white from overhead. The old look of it made him nervous–he hoped it was still drivable.

The balance of light and shadow changed with each hesitant step into the dim recesses of the garage. Bits of alien equipment hung from pegs on the high walls: fanciful grilles for car makes he had never heard of, hoses kinked into exotic designs, discarded fenders stained garishly, an assortment of pipes, struts, wires and baroque tools. Up in the rafters the birds shifted in unison, then shifted back again with a synchronous rise and fall of tail feather and wing. The occupied territory of birds.

As he approached his car he began experiencing a strange sort of vertigo. The station wagon seemed already to be moving, rolling slowly through the vague light as if in dreamy anticipation. Shadows boiled out from behind the tires and beneath the chrome bumper. They dropped bits of plug wire, small fragments of black plastic, and shreds of cloth and dingy yellow mats of upholstery pad. No, not shadows at all. Cats, dozens of black cats. Then all the black cats began to hiss, so softly at first it seemed the noise was some distance away, then increasing in volume and deranged raspiness: tires losing air, steam kettles whistling, calm intention in screeching escape.

A great black mass of muscle and fur leapt from the car’s roof and approached the motionless pair. It rose on its hind legs, swelling impossibly, until it seemed it would soon be Serena’s size. It opened its mouth to screech when a shaft suddenly entered its throat, pinning it to the side of the car, silencing it.

“Out of here!” rasped behind them. Richard turned to see Jacob standing half hidden by the double door, an ancient crossbow hanging from one hand. “Let’s go if you don’t want to end up like your car!”

Jacob led them back into the Deadfall through doors and down narrow corridors which seemed vaguely familiar, but which Richard was sure he’d never seen before. Certainly he could have never repeated their steps. But suddenly they were in Serena’s bedroom, and there were no signs of cats, except for a few kitty posters on the walls which Serena ripped down immediately and without comment. Then, amazingly, she curled up on the bed and went fast asleep. Richard leaned over to kiss her head, felt himself sliding, and sat down on the floor by the bed instead. He stared up at Jacob, whose face in the darkness appeared elongated and feline. “What now?” he asked.

“Now, we rest,” Jacob replied, and busied himself moving Serena’s furniture around, pushing it up against her doors.

The post Deadfall Hotel: “The King of the Cats,” Part 3 appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

What is Deadfall Hotel about? A haunted hotel with a long pedigree that has fallen into disrepair. To this afflicted place comes a widower who takes over the job of managing the hotel, accompanied by his daughter and the ghost of his wife.

Last week we ran Part 1 of the four-part self-contained excerpt from Deadfall Hotel “The King of the Cats.” Here is Part 2…

***

One of the cleaning crew found the thing. The jittery old fellow brought a bucket of red paint over and set it down where Richard and Jacob were standing. At first its only movement was a slow wet explosion of breathing and with everything tucked in so it resembled a heart pulled out of somebody’s chest and still, determinedly beating. He looked over at Jacob thinking explain this one, will you please? Then he noticed the edges of dark fur beneath the red paint and just for a moment tried to remember if there were any creatures with fur on the inside, then thinking werewolf, of course, he amazingly felt as if he were back on known, comfortable ground, and tried to smile at Jacob as if to say See how I’ve adjusted? But Jacob continued to stare down at the heart now thrashing around, now spinning like a fur-covered top, now screeching through the goopy layers of blood-red latex enamel.

“Still alive,” Jacob said. “I suppose now we must clean the poor creature.” Then glancing at Richard, “It looks as if Serena is about to have a pet. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not on your life, Jacob. Get rid of that thing.”

“Just bear with me, please,” Jacob replied. He reached down into the bucket carefully, and to Richard’s continued amazement, clutched the creature on both sides behind the head, squeezing a bit until it stopped struggling, and lifted it out of the can and onto the grass. “I don’t believe he will be going anywhere,” he said, and, as predicted, the thing–a rat, a ferret, a squirrel, what?–sat and shivered and shook off the excess paint in long ropy strands that made it appear to be flying apart. Richard stepped back so his shoes and pants wouldn’t be splattered. Jacob didn’t appear to mind.

Jacob said they should get as much paint out of its fur as they could and check out the mouth and nasal passages to make sure the creature was going to live–and Richard nodded dumbly. It looked up at Richard with a broad, flat head, bloody tears barring its face. Behind the vertical red streaks were eyes like blackened portholes, a dim glow barely detectable as if from far back in the creature’s brain.

“We’ll need a mixture of relatively mild solvents to get the bulk of it out. This heavy-duty paint will not come out easily. Scissors will take care of most of the rest. If there are still streaks of paint here and there, well, I suppose Serena will find it that much more appealing.”

“Jacob, we’re not bringing this monster anywhere near my daughter.”

The creature opened its mouth and coughed out bright red mucous. Then it stretched its body so that the paint-stiffened fur stood out up and down the length of it, bare patches of grayish hide showing between the spikes. It snapped its head back suddenly, staring at Richard, opened its mouth and hissed and more red mucous and pink foam and clots of paint came flying out. Richard stepped back out of the way.

“Jesus, what is it?” he said, watching as Jacob began a gentle rubbing of moist rags over its surface. A murmur came from deep within the animal, rising into a remarkable, engine-like rumble almost appalling coming from something so small and thin. “You wanted to give that to my daughter?”

Jacob glanced up quizzically. Then speaking so softly Richard could barely hear him above the creature’s throaty vibrations, “I’m sorry to disappoint you. Richard–it’s merely a little kitty cat.”

Jacob had the notion that they should present the cat to Serena in the cleaned out paint can he had been found in, nested in black and red tissue paper. Richard didn’t think twice about it until he held the can in his hands, its exterior encased in thick, layered webs of bright red paint.

The cat had torn the edges of the tissue paper to tatters, chewed it up until it was wet and twisted. As Richard carried him toward Serena’s room he wriggled and heaved, looking like a dark parasite writhing within the center of a great plague boil.

Richard knocked on her door. Like all the other carved doors in the hotel it bore a large dragon’s crest with a massive doorknob and hinge hardware patterned after a lion’s paws, a lion’s face with roaring mouth for a keyhole, but this door had been painted glossy white to distinguish it from the others, and there was a small cardboard sign inscribed in bright pink marker: SERENA’S ROOM–ALL YOU CHARACTERS KEEP OUT!!

Richard again knocked lightly. “Come in,” she said softly from a distance.

Richard opened the door and stepped through two layers of soft music–she had both her portable radio and the stereo he’d given her for Christmas on, playing “mush” music, as she liked to call it. Serena lay sprawled across her four-poster bed as if she’d been shot. Around the room were posters of a variety of animals, and pictures of babies cut out of magazines and thumb tacked to the wallpaper. Jacob said it was okay–family quarters could be decorated in any way they saw fit.

“I’ve got something for you, honey,” he said, and then hesitated, for some reason not quite ready to bring out the cat, in that hideous packaging, from behind his back.

But the cat had already jumped down and padded across the baby blue carpet, and was now nuzzling Serena’s bare toes. “Daddy!” she gasped. “Oh, it’s precious!” The cat of many colors attacked her toes as she moved them, then rolled onto his back to offer some belly to her, but as she reached to stroke him the cat twisted around again and batted at her fingers.

What a ham, Richard thought. Serena laughed. “He’s as ferocious as a little dragon. That’s what I’ll call him–Dragon!” Dragon stopped as if he’d recognized his name, then glided up the length of the bed to nuzzle her neck. He allowed her to scoop him up and rub her face into his fur. This cat knows exactly what to do. The thought vaguely troubled Richard, but he had never particularly liked cats. Then he was distracted by the weight of the ugly can and tissue monstrosity he held behind him. He didn’t want Serena to see it so he backed out quietly. She was too busy with Dragon even to notice him leaving. He knew she’d ask about the can once she’d heard the story of Dragon’s discovery. But Richard didn’t like the look of it, and planned to throw it away.

By the end of the third week Dragon had become a well-established member of the Deadfall staff. It was remarkable how quickly the cat became attached, and trained, or at least as trained as a cat could possibly be. It amused him to see Serena walking with her kitty in tow, stopping, glancing back over her shoulder, and waiting for Dragon to come trotting.

He discovered that besides reading everything she could find concerning babies and small animals, her personal studies had recently turned to volumes of folklore concerning dragons. The Deadfall library had a number of these. Now and then he would come into the library to do researches of his own–into former owners, unusual guests of the past, highly speculative histories of the hotel itself–and coming out of the low-ceilinged, claustrophobic entrance tunnel, which always gave Richard the sensation of being in one of those World War II era submarines, he would find her around the corner in the L sitting cross-legged in a high winged-back Queen Anne chair, some dusty tome spread across her lap. Dragon was always close by, making only occasional forays to search for mice among the crumbling volumes on the bottom shelves, or to bat at a bug tapping at one of the tall windows over the reading chairs. Serena couldn’t see Richard from her position, and more often than he could feel good about he’d make no attempt to let her know he was there.

Dragon stalked like a tiger. Dragon leapt and rolled like a fox. Dragon curled around her legs like a snake. Dragon widened his mouth and came hissing in Richard’s direction like a great walking bat.

“Dragon! Come here! I have a story to read you,” Serena called. And Dragon slunk back, all disappointment. “It’s a story about the king of the cats!”

Richard couldn’t help marveling at how nicely his daughter read, and assumed it had much to do with Jacob’s recent tutelage. All her childhood hesitations seemed to have vanished here, the earlier signs of a stutter absorbed into a slightly nasal accent she affected during the stereotypical male parts of the piece. But then he listened more carefully to the story she read, and found it troubled him.

“So he roasted them and toasted them. He baked them ‘til they flaked. Thousands of living cats were lost this way, and the man cared not a jot, for he was a man and believed he owned the world.

“But finally after days he had to sleep, and as he slept the spirits of all the cats he had killed entered his house like streams of dark water through every window, chimney opening, and door. Even the calicos, even the white cats were black in spirit, and they were so many they filled every room in his house with their bodies of night and hundreds of them sat on his bed, sat on his legs and chest waiting for him to awaken.

“When he did awaken and opened his mouth to scream the black cats entered his mouth just like another door, and one after the other they marched down his tongue and down his throat until they reached his secret places, all the time making a terrible din.

“The last thing he saw, they say, back in the shadows and surrounded by his smaller kin, was the monstrous cat Cluasa Leabhra, old Big Ears, the king of all the cats.”

As Serena read these passages aloud, Dragon glided back and forth across the top of the chair, pausing now and then to perch on his hind legs and stare at her and sway with the sound of her as if he actually understood what she was reading to him, as if he were mesmerized by the words. But if she paused for a moment to catch her breath, to admire a particular description, or to puzzle out a word, Dragon resumed his incessant movement, his stalking of things invisible.

After a few weeks of Serena’s constant grooming the cat had become something extraordinary. Extraordinarily beautiful or extraordinarily ugly Richard couldn’t quite decide. He supposed it depended on his mood, and/or the weather.

Much to his surprise the cat revealed itself to be of a long-haired variety. As the days had passed and the paint turned to powder and the hide was scraped clean, long strands of fur appeared to erupt from hidden pockets all over the cat’s body, uncoiling a good inch and a half on the hottest days. The hair was fine, the texture silky, in places more like down than feline fur. Unlike any other cat Richard had ever encountered Dragon seemed to have no interest in grooming himself, content to let someone else do the job. This cat seemed to expect Serena to groom him.

Generally speaking, the cat’s coloring made him a calico, with the usual bright patches of brown, orange, black and white irregularly distributed from the roots to the outermost edges of the hair, so that a variation in the stroke of Serena’s brush resulted in a quite different pattern of colors. This varied the cat’s appearance so drastically from one moment to the next, from one posture or ruffling of fur to the next, that this specific calico became a pattern book for any calico imaginable.

The cat leapt from the back of the chair as if in slow motion, twisting his body until he resembled a bird, a hawk in attack. He severed the mouse that had risked the open rug, ate the front half quickly, leaving the thick hindquarters at Serena’s feet as a kind of offering. She uttered an unconvincing “yuck,” and went back to her reading, but silently this time.

Dragon was a master at mimicking birds in his leaps, bears in his bulk and power, sea creatures in his floating grace, wolverines in his snap and bite. Wandering among the twisting trunks of the Deadfall grove, Richard had been startled to see the cat leaping from one tree to the next almost directly over his head. Seen from underneath Dragon was another thing entirely–dark lines of fur outlining ribs and pelvic bones on stomach fur a shimmering blend of pink and brilliant white fibers–so that when Dragon lounged belly up in the grass Richard could think of little but butcher’s charts and antique anatomical engravings, x‑rays and transparent models.

To see the cat in Serena’s lap, the way she stroked him so slowly, Dragon’s purr thrumming up into the still, hot air, Serena’s eyes and the cat’s eyes half-closed, his claws slightly extended onto her pants’ leg but promising much more, made Richard feel anxious and foolish, but he could not stop himself from spying on them, sneaking glances wherever possible.

He could not bear to pick up the cat himself, imagining remarkable claws hidden within Dragon’s paw pads. The few times the cat passed by him close enough for those impossibly long whiskers to brush him, their stiff edge sent him to the mirror to search his flesh for scratches.

Then one afternoon Dragon disappeared and Richard thought for a time his unease had vanished with the beast. Serena was inconsolable.

“He’s just a kitty, Daddy!”

Richard felt badly for her, but he’d never felt entirely comfortable with the “kitty.” Sometimes when he came into her room at night to check on her (which was every night, had been every night since Abby had died), he’d find Serena asleep and the cat curled around the top of her head.

That should have been a touching, a comforting portrait of his daughter, but it was not. There was a peculiar sort of tension evident in the cat’s body, a coiling so unlike the image of the plush toy he appeared to be emulating. As if he might explode at any moment, ramming his claws into her scalp. As if he were simply biding his time.

There was the obligatory search party, and Richard made a show of looking in every hiding place imaginable. After a couple of days Jacob joined in. After two weeks the search seemed to be at an end.

“There are quite a few places for a cat to hide,” Jacob said softly, stroking Serena’s hair as if the cat might be hiding some place in her head. “Thousands of places. There are all these rooms and ducts and chimneys and air passages, not to mention the attics and cellars and miscellaneous crawl spaces.”

This is supposed to make her feel better? But Richard said nothing.

“Of course there is the deadfall as well,” Jacob said, jerking his head in that direction. “Kitty could wander around that massive old tangle a long time without losing interest. Kitty could find plenty to hunt, and eat, enough to satisfy most appetites. Kitty could spend a year or two exploring that deadfall and we would not even know he was there.”

“Then that’s where I’m going!” Serena stomped away. Richard just stood there. His little girl was slinging her arms with real, teeth-clenching rage. Then she stopped and turned around, “Are you two coming or not?” Then she spat on the ground.

Richard was so surprised he didn’t say anything, just stood there while his child walked away from him toward that twisted mass of trees. Then Jacob touched his arm. “You cannot let her go in there, Richard.” And that was enough to galvanize him, sending him running after her. He reached out and touched her back. She spun and snarled as if ready to attack.

“Don’t touch me!” she screamed.

Richard stared at her. She was reaching that temperamental age, of course. But she’d always been remarkably sweet for all that. He backed away a step, but he felt in charge again, maybe a little angry.

“Calm down. I’m still your dad.”

“Did I say–”

“You’re not going in there, sweetie. You’re going back into the house to wait. I’ll search the deadfall myself, and I promise I’ll go over every foot of it. I mean it. Every foot.”

Her face fell. “Daddy, I’m sorry, but–”

“It’s okay. Don’t apologize–I understand. Just go in the house. Read a book, whatever. I’ll come inside when I’m finished.”

And just as quickly Serena was a little girl again. Sadly he watched her go inside the hotel, looking smaller, less sure.

He looked around for Jacob, hoping to get some clever suggestions as to how he should proceed into the deadfall, but the old man had disappeared. He was getting used to that.

He walked across the wide lawn that sloped down to the deadfall like an erasure, noting how brown and wispy the grass was, vaguely wondering if it would recover but knowing that things had no trouble growing here. You could burn, blast, strip away–there were always deep roots you could never touch. In fact, the grass had a pleasing, tamed look to it. It was only as he neared the vast tangle of limbs that he found himself pausing to look at the stray, burnt flowers, their heads blackened and crusted, ruptured, the seeds popped.

On this side of the deadfall the limbs were piled almost two feet high. The layers were shallower around the curve near the cliff’s edge, but he didn’t want to walk that far. Besides, he didn’t much care for the cliff. He stepped up onto a thick branch, and then teetered over to one even thicker. Then he was able to stand, however unsteadily, and get a better look at where he should be going.

The tangle did not make a consistent spread below the skeletal network of trunks and limbs overhead. There were paths and partial paths through the complexity, as well as areas of two or three square feet which appeared to have avoided coverage completely. He really couldn’t see all that far into the deadfall. Deeper into the tangle, sunlight was only intermittent. Despite the fact that the branches were almost totally devoid of leaves–just occasional triangular green things at the ends of long, limber stems, that fluttered in the slightest breeze, that fluttered even when there was no breeze–the trees were so closely packed, the network of interlocking twigs and branches and limbs so complex, that they made an almost opaque canopy, the little light that did escape becoming almost suspect in the vague way it illuminated certain hidden recesses and deformities in the fallen branches.

As Richard stepped off the thicker limbs into the snarl of narrow, brittle wood that cracked and disintegrated beneath his heavy boots, here and there was a shifting, a repositioning which could not be accounted for by his own progress through the deadfall. As quickly as he could he made for one of those bare paths through the branches. Some of the larger branches were slippery, slowing him down as he thought about pitching face-first into the snags and spines. Sudden movements to his left made him turn too quickly and he lost his balance. Thrusting out for any feasible support he left half an inch of skin from the back of his hand on a greedy reach of limb. He crawled out of a nest of branches left broken and sharpened by his fall into a relatively clear pathway.

The regular travel of animals had made the path, such as it was. Droppings of various sizes displayed a range of diets. There were scattered snags of brown, red, white, black and–if he was not mistaken–dark blue fur. There were also prints: broad and narrow footpads, three-toed, four-toed, five, claws and more than claws, bits of teeth and bone, buttons and shoelaces and shoes and here and there a human footprint as well. Barefoot. About Serena’s size. And, more disturbing, sizes even smaller, making him wonder about feral children. Feral babies. If Serena had any idea there might be babies in here, of whatever kind.

Then, around a thick trunk directly ahead, a flash of calico fur, changing patterns iridescently as it moved, a soft murmur building into a full-throated engine purr.

“Hey! Kitty!” Richard called out in surprise, recklessly dashing forward.

After only a few steps he snagged a foot. He threw his arms in front of him to break his fall, but curling his hands away to shield them from the wooden fingers and teeth.

“Myyaaaaaahhhhh.” Something dashed around his head, digging a claw into his cheek just before he crashed into the branches.

“Jesus!” A flurry of winged insects exploded from the mass of dead brush and filled his face. He flailed at them with the arm not jammed elbow-deep into the branches, hit something a bit larger but still winged, beating against his hand, and he figured it for either a bat or a bird but he couldn’t see because things were crawling in his eyes. “Oh, Christ!” Something bit him near the wrist. Something squealed and raced down his back. Something heavy for its size. “Christ, oh Christ oh Christ!” He thrashed around, forced himself over onto his back, flung his arms to detach the squealing, clinging weights and forced his eyes open even though for a moment something was caught, struggling beneath the edge of his left eyelid.

The thing moving through the skeletal branches was a sharp-edged shadow under the glare of the afternoon sun. But even denied the fine details of its appearance Richard could detect something distinctly primitive about the animal. It was short-legged, long-bodied, about the size of a weasel or a small wolf. It moved in and out of the fallen limbs of the deadfall with ease, as if it had been born there. Its large front teeth stabbed down through the neck of a small, unidentifiable rodent-like creature.

Suddenly the animal raised its head high into the glare of sun, and from its silhouette Richard knew immediately it was some type of cat. But the light illuminating the back of its head gave it the glow of decay, its eyes the sheen of a dead thing’s.

It stared at Richard, then leapt once, twice, and Richard knew that a third would bring it right on top of him. He struggled with the branches holding him down, tore his hands open untangling himself. Then the cat struck him high in the forehead and he was down again, torn hands trying to shield his face. He looked between his fingers through a haze of blood, but the creature seemed somehow clearer, more definable.

Hanging upside down from the limb overhead was a gray mass of anger, the fur standing out in silver-tipped spikes, and though the thing was half in shadow Richard was sure he could detect traces of orange and brown, traces of calico, blended into the gray.

 “Myyyaaaaahhhh!”

The jaw wobbled weirdly on its hinge, then opened even farther. Richard saw a tongue caked in garbage before the cat started spitting at him. He moved his head to the side and sticky glop splattered the side of his face. He stared up and saw how its coat was veined first in silver, then in red, saw how its sides heaved, how its muscles had expanded, how its teeth had grown.

“Dragon?”

The cat looked down at him with eyes like stones. Then the animal leapt. Richard cried out and tried desperately to shield his face. But then nothing happened; the cat was gone.

He’d have to tell Serena he could not find her cat. He would make some pretense of looking in other places, but he would make sure this cat was not found again.

The post Dead Fall Hotel: “The King of the Cats,” Part 2 appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

What is Deadfall Hotel about? A haunted hotel with a long pedigree that has fallen into disrepair. To this afflicted place comes a widower who takes over the job of managing the hotel, accompanied by his daughter and the ghost of his wife. The hotel isn’t exactly promising real estate: “A curtain of gnarled, skeletal oak and pine hides it from the rest of the world. The hotel is not well-lit, there is no sign, and night comes early here …the hotel appears to follow the jumbled line of a train wreck, carts thrown out at all angles and yet still attached in sequence.”

In addition to some affinities of place with Peake’s work, Deadfall Hotel reminds the reader of Ray Bradbury, Edward Gorey, and Shirley Jackson without being derivative. Far from it—indeed, the novel provides a smorgasbord of sweet spots for the weird fiction connoisseur. Nightmares, supernatural creatures, cults, eccentric characters, and the atmosphere of the titular hotel all combine for a fascinating read. With the popularity of TV shows like American Horror Story, the timing seems right, as well (although we think Deadfall is much more interesting.)

We’re pleased to bring WFR.com readers a long self-contained excerpt from the novel, “The King of the Cats,” which we will run in four parts, every Thursday between now and Christmas. Many thanks to Tem, Solaris, and Centipede Press. – Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

***

“And death shall have no dominion,” at least that was his hope, that Dylan Thomas who drank and sang and insulted and roared and made immortal poetry. We write, we sing, we have our children and have our way, all in an attempt to defeat that fatal king. Perhaps the famous succeed–I can’t really say. But certainly it isn’t their true selves the people remember, but rather the great and interesting lies they told about themselves. And whose children remember them as they really were? Your children remember you too harshly, too well, or seemingly not at all.

The dead should be grateful that we live our lives so poorly, that we have so much trouble actually being where we are and when we are. It is the dead who fill in the blanks, who occupy the empty spaces in our minds and hearts. If you see someone living their life as if their life were living them, if the most remarkable aspect of their day is their lack of participation in it, then I wager if you look closely enough you will find one or more of the dead buried waist-deep in that life, gazing about in wonder as the poor soul wanders from event to event.

It is the dead who benefit from our lack of care. And they fully understand on what side of the bread their butter lies. I must admit that I was so taken by Richard Carter’s daughter Serena I was compelled to discuss their situation with Abigail Carter, the dead wife and mother who tagged along for the ride. I attempted to explain to her that a dead mother was no help for such a child, and that whatever she might be feeling about her recent demise (and, yes, the dead have feelings–in fact emotion is the sum total of most of them), she was doing her daughter no favors by lingering about.

Mine was a futile endeavor, of course, as the dead are remarkably self-centered and narrow-minded.

My own dead wife and children have never appeared here. I cannot honestly say whether I am relieved or disappointed. I wonder if I may have so expunged them from my growing list of heartbreaks that they feel no need to make an appearance. Does that make me a terrible husband and father? I have no answer for that.

We carry our fears with us wherever we go. We pack them neatly, holding them close because if we lost them where would we be? Lost in some foreign land without proper clothing I suppose. Our current and past guests have brought their fears to the Deadfall, and so many of them have left theirs behind. I sometimes wonder if these missing items are mourned, or if the visitors are aware of an unburdening, a lightening of attitude due to a mysterious cause they cannot quite put their finger on. This hotel has become a warehouse of such items, and we take our duties as conservators quite seriously. From time to time some group which does not understand attempts to rent the Deadfall for parties, particularly around the season of Halloween, as if this establishment might function as some sort of funhouse. Such applications are, without exception, denied.

The strongest presence is so often an absence. Life here underscores this point almost daily. Yesterday I was up on the third floor when I became aware of the odor coming from #302. I had almost forgotten–it has been almost a decade since I thought of the tenant residing there. I stood outside the door and breathed in the stray wisps of perfume, that particular tobacco-and-fried-food aroma. No actual physical being resides in that room, but it has long been occupied by a lingering after smell of the man who lived there in the forties and fifties. The room is sealed so that a sufficient quantity of the smell may be preserved. We do not rent the room, nor do we enter to clean.

After the summer break I intend to intensify Serena’s home-schooling. I had originally been reluctant to take on the job, hoping eventually to replace myself with a tutor lured away from some institute of higher learning. But I have been surprised to discover an unexpected enthusiasm in myself for the project. Since the beginning of the summer I have read a number of volumes of educational theory, and made hundreds of pages of notes concerning strategies and exercises I intend to try out in the fall. I believe there is much I can teach her in a relatively short span of time. In the meantime I have filled her Summer with books taken from our magnificent Deadfall library. I feel confident that Richard Carter will be satisfied with the richness this educational mixture has to offer.

There is a seasonal aspect to learning, I believe, and we do our best when we respect this. Now is her season to explore, to let her fancies guide her to whatever knowledge she might find.

This spring the Deadfall revived from its long winter sleep. By the end of summer we will see exactly what has been awakened.

– from the diary of Jacob Ascher, proprietor, Deadfall Hotel, 1969–2000
Life in the hotel was a bumpy ride. Each arrival brought some new story. Each checkout left yet another narrative incomplete, demanding that Richard’s imagination supply some sort of conclusion or at least a few seconds of summation. His and Serena’s time here felt splintered, jiggered by rising and falling excitements and stray, inconclusive climaxes. Only their consistent presence, and that of the hotel with its minimal staff, provided some sort of stability. But that was human life, wasn’t it? The sadness and the thrill of it. If people did their jobs properly, they would never outlive their own homes, the places they met and studied in, made love in, sculpted their destinies in. It was all a collection of incomplete, yet meaningful tales.

Abby, of course, would have loved it here. It was an attitude and an interpretation so much in sympathy with her own. She would have loved the excitement and the anticipation, even the strangeness of it all. Richard thought she belonged in this setting much more than he.

Not that she wasn’t here, of course. There was this remnant, this reminder, pale simulacrum of what his wife had been walking these halls, peering into things, taking the air.

Perhaps he had no business thinking that way. Even the living changed, went their separate ways, disappointed. And what bigger change than that turning from life into death. It wasn’t her fault. But still, he found that he harbored resentment. He saw her often in the halls, particularly around bedtime, looking under and around things, testing chairs, sometimes lying down on a step or underneath a table as if to test the comfort of a rug, measuring windows and doors with her pale, transparent and near-to-transparent hands. Always smiling. Always using those intelligent eyes which burned with their own, independent light it seemed. There was a sadness in it, but there had always been a beautiful sadness in Abby. Death seemed not to have changed her that much in this regard.

What he felt when he saw her, besides his own sadness, was a certain irretrievable disconnection. It must be the way divorced couples must view each other, he thought, if the divorce has been relatively amicable. She was no longer part of his life, really. He might wave to her in the hall; she might smile his way. But she was no longer part of his life. She had moved on. He needed to move on as well.

If only there hadn’t been Serena to consider. As far as he could tell, Abby made little contact with their daughter. Maybe Abby thought that best; maybe it was for Serena’s benefit. Did Abby think now? Richard understood none of it. 

The hotel and surrounding wood had baked for two months. Each day the heat built without leveling, before night or the rare downpour discouraged it until the following morning, when the climb started all over again. Guests and the occasional delivery driver sat with their heads lowered. Small animals made noises like babies calling for their lost mothers, and Richard stayed awake nights trying to make sure in his own mind that they were not, indeed, babies. Insects danced madly in silence. Richard spent his days worrying over Serena, who filled her mornings with imaginary playmates–but wasn’t she too old for that sort of thing?–and in any case who might say that an invisible Deadfall playmate was truly, irrevocably, imaginary?

“Here, we’ll provide these gentlemen with some lemonade and send them on their way,” Jacob said, gesturing to the row of uniformed men sitting on chairs on the Deadfall porch. Bus drivers: staring out at the wide lawn, their faces dripping sweat. Jacob had told him how large numbers of these bus drivers had shown up at the Deadfall over the years, in uniform, with their empty buses, having just walked off–or driven off–their jobs. “This year, well I believe this year will be a good year for bus drivers,” Jacob had said a few weeks earlier. And he had been right. They’d been showing up all week.

There’d been fewer official check-ins than usual, however. Jacob didn’t appear surprised. A few guests had shipped themselves to the hotel in crates and barrels, and Jacob had wheeled these containers up to their reserved rooms without fuss. A family had checked in: short people in tight brown coats, the parents no bigger than the small children. And then there was the naked man covered in bite marks and sutures, who’d wandered in from the woods without baggage and Jacob had taken him up to a room immediately. Richard was glad Serena hadn’t been down in the lobby for that one.

During the afternoons Serena spoke obsessively of babies and of more than babies–of embryos and fetuses and how there might be hundreds of thousands of them hidden in the world around us, so tiny we can’t see them, floating into our open mouths and gathering into our soup spoons and crushing under our bodies when we rolled sleepless in bed, and how angry they all must be at not having a chance to be born. Of course, it made him uneasy. She was his baby, after all. She asked her father if maybe the Deadfall and its grounds contained more of these invisible lives than most places, and he had no idea how to answer her.

Then after dark there was the Serena of mercurial mood. She’d suddenly be angry at him with no reason, talking so loudly, so rapidly she was in fact spitting. Over nothing. Over things Richard couldn’t even recall having said. Over things Serena said he would have said, if she’d only given him half a chance.

And still the heat intensified. What had begun as a warm welcome to the sunniest part of the year had exaggerated itself without relief, until the sun was an eye in flames and breathing became a miserable chore. Then came an afternoon when the season collapsed suddenly, parched and exhausted, falling hard into what Richard’s grandmother had always inexplicably called the dog days of summer.

“The expression comes from Sirius, the dog star,” Jacob offered. Providing explanations was second nature to him. Whether his explanations actually explained anything was another matter entirely. “The brightest star in the night sky. The Romans thought Sirius rose with the sun this time of year and added its heat to the sun’s heat. Thereby making the dog days the hottest time of the year.”

From the sound of it you might think this was supposed to be the best time for dogs. But mid-July through August had always been unbearably, impossibly hot where he’d grown up, and he remembered rarely seeing dogs during this time, and wondering if maybe they’d retreated below ground, into vast underground dog runs and chambers where they had their own government, queens, dukes, and kings.

Every now and then through the years his interest would bubble over when he spied a dog digging in an out-of-the-way patch of ground, so that he could hardly contain himself. He would wait for hours sometimes, hoping that dog might suddenly disappear into the earth.

He’d also wondered if there might be special times of the year for other animals, which had heretofore gone unrecognized by the human world. Cat days and mouse days. And maybe they had places of their own, lives human beings knew nothing about, seasons and cycles and natural rhythms that affected humans, even though humans took no notice of their effects. Maybe there were realms of birds, empires of ants, counties of rabbits, kingdoms of cats. Bat weeks and months for deer. Who could know? Sometimes it seemed only human beings, with their all too unfocused lives, their chronic social awkwardness, had no calendrical dominion they might call their own.

These were the thoughts of a man suffering from too much heat, he supposed. No new guests had arrived the past few days, and those who were already buried within the walls of the Deadfall appeared to have become more deeply buried still. He imagined them sitting naked in their rooms, their usually hidden deformities at home in the shadows, occasionally getting up to gulp cool air down by the grates in the floor.

The Deadfall’s cooling system did appear to work well enough. Despite the heat outside it was possible to sleep the night through, if that’s what you wanted to do. Jacob had told him that sections of the upper level lacked air conditioning, but that these rooms were by special request only this time of year. He couldn’t imagine it. Even the relatively cool Deadfall interior held pockets of cooked, pressurized air. Sometimes he would be sitting, thinking idly, and it was as if the ideas adhered to the stale air around him–for hours he might watch their afterimages float languidly about his head.

A few weeks earlier Jacob had informed him that the time was fast approaching for the Deadfall’s more or less comprehensive biannual cleaning.

“Now, please remain calm. There is no need for panic,” Jacob had told him. “We’ll be hiring what local crew we can obtain, and I have a list of past laborers who will travel this far out just for the money we will be paying them. All you have to do is provide a little supervision, and keep them out of those rooms, and floors, where they do not belong, or for some reason we do not wish to be cleaned.” Richard understood there was a fund available for such work, but Jacob had never bothered to reveal its source.

Richard hadn’t thought any more about it–maybe because it seemed too much to think about, a cleaning task beyond any he could imagine, particularly during the hottest, most miserable time of the year–and why choose this time of year in any case?–until one morning, when Jacob off-handedly informed him he’d already made all the arrangements, and that the workers would be arriving that afternoon. Well, let the old man do what he wanted. He couldn’t be responsible for the consequences. He couldn’t even think clearly. If things continued like this, soon he’d be seeing Serena’s invisible fetuses and embryos himself. 

At lunch time Richard went into the kitchens to ask Enid if she would make him a sandwich. Serena liked making her own (no self-respecting cook would serve up such unattractive combinations), and part of the fun for her was taking the sandwich somewhere she didn’t belong and curling up with a book to read and eat, dripping unidentifiable juices on book, clothing, carpeting and furniture. He’d decided not to stop her–you had to choose your battles, and Jacob didn’t seem to mind. Besides, the secret army of housekeepers always had things spotless by the next morning, and he had never received any notes of complaint.

He really should learn to make his own sandwiches, he thought, but he wouldn’t be able to top Enid’s wonderful lunches in a hundred years, so why bother? And she obviously thought fixing him lunch was just part of her job.

He walked in to find Enid packing utensils and gear into two large canvas bags. Her son stood impassively nearby, two suitcases hanging from each hand. He blinked acknowledgement in Richard’s direction, but said nothing.

“You’re not leaving us are you?” he asked her, unsuccessfully trying to keep alarm out of his voice.

“I always leave during The Big Cleaning,” she replied, “go down to spend some time with my sister. Besides, I just can’t abide this heat! I’ll be back by the first snow. This is the slow season, didn’t Jacob tell you?”

Richard thought that the hotel always seemed to be a bit on the slow side, but he said nothing. It wasn’t his place. “I would have thought you’d want to stick around, make sure they didn’t mess up your kitchens.”

“Hmpf. They do what Jacob says. It’s all down on that list of his, been done the same way for decades, way before he came. He never asks for my input. He probably can’t–asking for my input isn’t on the list, I bet.”

“What about the housekeepers? Do they help out, or do they go away as well?”

“The housekeepers–do what they do, that’s all anybody can say. We don’t interact. Now, you have a good couple of months, and take good care of that sweet child of yours.”

She nodded at her son, picked up the bags, and they left. Her saying “sweet child” had been an unexpected, and endearing gift. 

When the workers pulled up to the hotel in assorted pickups, vans, rusted Volkswagen Bugs, and stripped-down and sloppily-puttied old Cadillacs, Richard was ready for them. He’d prepared a rough map of the hotel, breaking it down into areas and assigning so many workers to each area, accompanied by a specific list of tasks. That had required some occasionally puzzling input from Jacob. The full meaning of such tasks as “wrap the yellow vase at the end of the hall in #14 copper wire” and “dip the fringe of the triangular area rug with the red cat pattern into a solution of 3 parts graphite and 1 part lemon juice, but under no circumstances do the same to the similar rug with the green cat pattern” was not immediately apparent.

“So what does this one mean? ‘Stand with your back to the closet door while rubbing two ounces of butter on the back side of the lower right-hand door frame.’”

Jacob studied the note on the map, hastily scribbled in his own handwriting and said, “You had best obtain someone unusually limber for this particular task. I saw a couple of tall young men; perhaps one of them will do.”

“So what does it mean?”

“I have no idea, Richard.”

“Terrific.”

“That is simply the way it has always been done. I received those instructions from the manager before me; now I’m giving them to you. There are rituals about these things, precautions to take, restrictions to be respected. It has all been passed down.”

“I just wonder how I’m going to remember all this when you aren’t here anymore.”

“You just will. I did. You find you have to.”

But the nature of the Deadfall seemed increasingly unreal and arbitrary, something to be memorized, to deal with ritualistically, to be accepted as a matter of faith. Working on that map made it clear how confused Richard’s sense of the hotel’s structure actually was. He thought he knew where most of the rooms were by now, and their relationship to various central architectural features such as halls, chimneys, and staircases, but once he started diagramming them, the pieces didn’t all fit.

It appeared impossible to capture the hotel on paper. Rooms were either larger or smaller than they should have been, and the separate pieces of the hotel seemed incapable of forming a coherent whole. Chimneys did not flow unbroken from floor to floor as they should have. Tracing one such chimney all the way up from the basement Richard discovered that it took several impossible jogs, changing its position a full ten feet from floor two to floor three (as well as the type of brick from which it had been constructed) and in no way matching the apparently corresponding chimney leaning precariously from one side of the Deadfall’s roof. He had similar problems making sense of the construction of staircases, and the arrangement of pipes and ductwork moving between rooms and floors was an impossible tangle.

“We have to clean all the ducts somehow,” Jacob muttered in passing. “I shudder to imagine all that might be growing inside them.”

Richard got the bright idea of attaching a long cord to the heavy, detached wheel of a toy wagon, and tossing that down the ducts to see where it might lead. He could hear it clanging in the metal shafts for a long time, bouncing off walls, taking long drops. Then silence. Then the cord burned its entire length through his hands, the whole of it disappearing into the dark mouth of the duct. Every few hours he would hear it in some distant wall, or rattling the boards under his feet, or making a brief appearance at the bottom of a toilet bowl before disappearing again.

He and Jacob tried to pay the smaller workers to climb into the ducts with a sponge, a bucket, and a net, but they got no takers at any price. Finally they decided to clean the best they could with mop heads attached to long limber poles, and leave it at that.

The used mop heads were dumped into a pile by the driveway. Now and then Richard would prod it with one of the long poles. There was always some arousal of movement, and tiny things scuttled or slithered out of the pile into the tall grass. Once Richard had read a book all about house mites, how they fed on tiny flakes of human skin, how millions of them lived in even the cleanest of houses. He imagined those mites nourished in the perfect environment, and magnified hundreds of times. Deadfall mites.

House mites were not something he could ever have talked to Abby about. Someone looking into their house from the outside might have called her a meticulous housekeeper. But the word he would have used was “frightened.” She was frightened of dirt, not just because she was afraid that people would judge her on the basis of her housecleaning, or that she would be a bad mother if she didn’t maintain a filth-free environment for her child (although she believed both of these things), but because of what she couldn’t see, and of what she didn’t know.

“There are things in dirt,” was all she would say about it. And the vigor with which she wiped everything down before the baby Serena was permitted into a room, and the way she studied newspaper stories having to do with disease and freak accidents as if they were biblical text, and the constant journeys she made to the doctors, and how she tried every new remedy on the market until cautioning newspaper stories kept her away from medicines and chemicals of any kind for a while.

Chemicals, molecules, microbes–all bits of the unseen world were like ghosts to her. They haunted her to distraction.

He’d sometimes wondered if it had something to do with the baby–not Serena, but the one who hadn’t made it. The one she’d been told was dying in her womb after six months, and then was dead, and had to be pulled out like a bad tooth. Abby had been a woman who couldn’t even say the words fetus, or embryo. Early in her pregnancy she’d sat up in bed one night and said, “There’s a secret growing inside me.” He’d switched on the light, expecting to see a silly smile on her face, but she hadn’t been smiling at all.

He didn’t think she should see it, but she’d insisted, and she said it looked like a dark doll, like an unfinished sculpture, and she had been right. But then she had said it couldn’t be human, its fingers weren’t right and she was sure there had been claws, and that the doctors had planted this thing inside her, and she’d never been pregnant at all. They’d had to sedate her, and he’d gone home alone to drink and cry all night.

Embryos and fetuses. For the past two years Serena’s interest in babies had remained constant. She clipped their pictures from magazines and hung them on her wall. When she tired of talking about babies, then she talked about animal babies instead, which she might always have access to, which she could hold. So unlike her mother, she had no fear of small, hidden things, even the things that smelled, crawled, and bit. But Richard had never told her about the older brother she’d almost had.

Jacob assigned Richard the task of inspecting the cleaned areas of the hotel.

“Don’t you think you should do that? I mean, I’d like to make the rounds with you to see what I can learn, but that’s my point–I don’t know enough about what’s right, what’s wrong. Christ, I hardly know what’s up or down, left or right in the Deadfall yet.”

Jacob looked harried, his normally neatly-combed hair sticking up in all directions, his belt askew, cuffs spotted with black dust. “I appreciate that,” he said, distractedly, “but I can’t really take the time right now, and I do believe it might be beneficial if you were to examine the hotel with new eyes, without the influence of my observations.”

“So you’re teaching me to swim by just throwing me into the water.”

“A bit of an exaggeration, but if you wish. Necessity is the great teacher, and all that.”

In Richard’s experience there had always been some buildings that looked huge on the outside but proved cramped and impossible to navigate inside. Other, smaller looking structures, appeared to go on forever for those taking a first-time tour. He’d noticed it from the beginning, but today underscored the impression: the Deadfall managed to be huge both outside and in. From the outside the central section resembled one of those grand old mansions from the South, with large white columns framing the enormous hard-carved front doors. The columns supported an elaborately carved porch roof two stories off the ground, and small windows like peepholes had been carved out of the wall above the doors in an arcing arrangement. On either side of the columns were the great front windows, four to a floor, each running practically floor to ceiling to maximize light and impressiveness. Out of this central portion the wings spread, but instead of running parallel to the porch line they were composed of segments which stepped back from the main building at random angles, following the slope and irregularities of the hillside, so that the farther from the front doors the more chaotic (and less elegant) the structure became as it groped for stability, and the natural stresses of gravity pulled walls and framing out of alignment, until you arrived at the last segment which should have been condemned. In fact, many sections were boarded up and isolated from the rest of the hotel.

Richard thought the Deadfall looked not so much constructed as landed, the body of some great creature fallen to ground and into its final resting place.

He had been assembling a rough interior map of the hotel since his first few days here, surprised that one didn’t already exist. (“Every new manager starts one,” Jacob explained. “But all eventually quit the enterprise. You will, too, I assure you.”) Richard’s map was now several sheets taped together, walls drawn with pencil, erased, and redrawn, arrows used to indicate geometry which made no logical sense.

He did the main structure first, which was straight forward enough, although he did have trouble in the southeast corner of the third floor, where one room featured closet within closet within closet, the final closet leading him out to the middle of the second floor hall, with no sensation of having descended. He entered a number on the sheet for each room or hall, described its location as best he could, added notations regarding closets, private baths, and similar utility spaces, and attempted some critique of the cleanliness (“Floors spotless, ceiling could use some work, mirror over the fireplace filthy, or severely corroded.”). Sometimes he caught a glimpse of residents (gray flesh, curled claw, balding, rash-eaten head) as they quickly entered a closet or hid behind a curtain while he made his inspections. This always embarrassed him, even made him feel slightly ashamed of himself. Many residents didn’t let him in at all, of course, and these he duly noted and went on his way. Jacob had told him that a number of them chose to travel during the annual cleaning period, and in their rooms Richard often found personal possessions awaiting their owners’ return: odd, unshapely garments, twisted bits of toy, elaborate wrappings, ornate brushes and combs, scissors, and accompanying tools of unimaginable purpose he assumed to be grooming devices. There were also pets in covered cages whose plaintive, ominous cries he decided it best to ignore.

The wings proved more difficult, as he had expected. The halls seldom followed straight lines, and the twists, turns, and doublings back made him abandon his descriptions of location in favor of relative descriptions (“eighteen steps down the hall from the previous door”). Ceiling heights were unpredictable so that sometimes he had to crouch and other times there was insufficient light to tell him the ceiling’s height, but he knew it was some distance because he could hear things flying up there.

Furnishings also varied greatly in the wings. In some rooms he had to walk over the tops of a series of beds and sideboards just to reach the other side. Others were completely bare of furniture even though the room was still occupied (“coughs and throat clearings from the closet suggesting more than one guest”).

At the end of three days Richard had gotten up to 232 on his numbered list, and couldn’t really tell how much more he had to do. This confusion of scope was further complicated when he discovered he had somehow skipped a series of rooms–as many as twenty doors–from the first day’s inspections. His map was falling apart from pencil corrections and arrowed notations, indecipherable worn and smudged sections, torn bits from anxious handling.

After a week with no clear end in sight Jacob stopped him in the hall. “Perhaps it’s time for a rest. Do the rooms appear to be getting cleaned, or at least dealt with?”

Richard nodded wearily.

“Then so be it. Go spend some time with your daughter.”

***

One of the cleaning crew found the thing…

To be continued, next Thursday…

The post Dead Fall Hotel: “The King of the Cats,” Part 1 appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.