Thomas Randall - The Waking

Head low, sniffing the ground, tail swaying, it moved from a bouquet of decaying flowers to a pink pillow, sewn with silken hearts and ribbons. After a few seconds, the cat moved around the edges of the shrine.

Abruptly it hissed, arching its back.

Kara frowned, staring at it. The cat began to yowl and shake its head, and then it cried out the way she’d only ever heard cats cry while fighting. While injured.

It stiffened and slumped to the ground.

Kara’s mouth hung open. “Kitty?”

The cat did not move. Not so much as a twitch of its tail.

Slowly, she walked over to where the cat lay on the ground. Its chest did not rise. Kara thought about dead things she had seen in the road, and she saw in the cat the same stillness, sensed the absence of life that she associated with dried, desiccated creatures, their fur or feathers flattened down like a rose pressed between the pages of a book.

She lifted one hand to cover her mouth, horrified, but quickly dropped it. That hand had touched the cat, and if it had some kind of disease, who knew what might happen to her? She needed to get home to wash up.

She shivered but could not turn away. Staring at the cat, she pushed out a foot and nudged it with the tip of her shoe. Dead. She hadn’t really needed confirmation, but there could be no doubting it now.

Crossing her arms, she stared one last moment, about to turn away.

The tail twitched.

Kara yelped and jumped back, eyes wide, watching as the cat stretched, and then rose. Now she did cover her mouth, all fear of disease forgotten. It moved differently, lower to the ground, and it swung its head around and looked at her. At her. Its eyes glittered in the dark.

In the spot where it had lain dead a moment before, the cat let out a stream of piss. Kara wrinkled her nose, first in disgust, and then in revulsion at the rank stink that rose from the ground. She gagged, covered her mouth with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and backed away. Maybe her first thought had been the right one: disease. Nothing healthy smelled like that. Nothing natural.

The cat looked at the shrine to Akane’s life and death and hissed.

It darted at Kara. She cried out and staggered back, but the cat ran right past her, headed up the slope, toward the school.

On the short walk home, Kara broke into a jog and entered the house breathless. Her father had fallen asleep at his desk. Though she didn’t want to wake him, she sat for a few minutes in that room, just to be near him, to feel safe. In her mind, Kara could still see the cat’s eyes, the way it had stared at her, had noticed her. That look would haunt her tonight. She only hoped it didn’t keep her from falling asleep. The sooner she got to sleep, the sooner morning would arrive. Sunrise, when it came, would be very welcome.

T he first drop of blood is in the genkan, where the students store their street shoes during the day. Kara notices it only because she steps in it, which is when she realizes she is barefoot. A rush of guilt shivers through her. If anyone comes and sees her walking in the school without slippers on, she will be in trouble. What would be worse, wearing her street shoes into the school or no shoes at all?

She slips on the blood, smears it on the floor. Frowning, she lifts her foot and stares at the bottoms of her toes, painted red.

Behind her, back at the entry doors, something moves and Kara flinches. She doesn’t want to be here, but going out that way seems a terrible idea, so she walks deeper into the school. The lights are off, and yet she can see. On the stairs is an arrangement of candles and flowers, as though someone has set them up to create an atmosphere of romance, but all she can think is that it’s a shrine.

To what, or whom, she doesn’t know.

Something shifts at the far end of the hall to her left, in the shadows. For a long moment she watches, trying to make out what it is, and then, just as she turns her attention once more to the candles-which are in a new arrangement now, a new pattern spread all across the stairs-something darts across her peripheral vision, dark and low to the ground.

Kara stumbles up several steps, knocking over a candle. Eyes wide, she stares down at the melted wax as it pools on the step. Flame licks the wood and begins to spread. She reaches down to snuff it with her fingers, but when she touches the step, the wax and flame are gone. Instead, she touches something sticky and warm and red. Blood.

Soft laughter comes from behind her and Kara turns. A small parade of girls shuffle through the genkan. It must be them laughing-the sound comes from that direction-but still it seems unlikely, for they have no faces. No eyes. No mouths.

Trapped, for a moment Kara doesn’t dare move up or down the stairs. Then a breeze flutters the candlelight and she glances around to find that the blood is gone and only a single, large candle burns at the top of the steps, as though to light her way.

With the rustle of laughter below, she starts up, away from those no-face girls. Her own breathing is strangely loud, echoing off the walls as though to smother her, and she can’t stand being in the stairwell anymore.

At the top of the steps, she finds herself in the hallway of the house where she’d grown up, back in Medford, half the world away. This feels right, natural, and her fear abates. Down the hall, the door to her parents’ bedroom is open and a butterfly of hope flutters in her chest.

Kara runs for that open door, not wanting to admit to herself what-or who-she believes she’ll find in her parents’ bedroom. The hall feels longer than it should, and at the end is a window she doesn’t remember, with candles of various sizes and colors arranged on the sill, flames dancing.

She reaches the bedroom, grabs the frame, and turns to look inside.

It isn’t her parents’ bedroom at all. It’s her homeroom, back at her old school. Lying across the desk is the body of a Japanese girl, her sailor fuku plastered against her body, hair matted with blood. But she has no face.

Kara screams and no sound comes out. A sudden terrible certainty fills her and she reaches up, fingers searching, to find that her own features are smooth and dry. No mouth. No nose. She no longer has eyes, yet still, somehow, she sees.

On a desk in the far corner, by the windows, sits a cat with eyes that flicker like candle flames. It watches her, arches its back, and then leaps to the floor. The cat begins to pad toward her, or so she thinks, until it stops at the teacher’s desk and begins to lap at the blood that pools on the floor there.

Still silently screaming, Kara staggers backward, breath coming in gasps. Everything around her shifts, changing. Now the inner wall of the classroom is comprised of sliding doors, like in Monju-no-Chie School. She bumps into one, shoves it aside, and stumbles into the corridor. It isn’t her home anymore. She’s back at her new school, outside Class 2-C, and all she can think of is getting out.

Kara runs. She passes one classroom, but through the sliding doors she can see the shore of Miyazu Bay, water lapping over the legs of the desks, though this is the second floor. Quaking, she passes another classroom, and its walls and windows and desks are spattered with blood. No-face girls are collapsed on the floor and over desks like abandoned marionettes. A dead boy hangs from the ceiling.

She can’t breathe and turns to run, but now there are cats at the top of the stairs. Too many of them. They move from the shadows, out of classrooms, and down the hall behind her, and then she is surrounded. Their feet leave bloodied red paw prints on the floor as they close the circle around her.

Again, she screams…

And wakes.

Kara drew in a gasp of air, as though she’d stopped breathing while asleep. Her heart hammered in her chest and she sat up, clutching fistfuls of her sheets as she stared around her bedroom. In the corners, shadows lingered. The light that filtered through the shutters over her windows cast only gloom into the room. Early morning, then, barely dawn. Too early to be awake, but she didn’t dare lie down for fear she might fall back to sleep and back into that dream.