Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Fiction
vr 3.00
2008-02-16
"Kit/Kat" by Abraxas | 2000-04-07
Chapter Five
WileyKat awoke suddenly and unexpectedly. Sprawled naked over the bed, his left-side and his sister’s right-side were intimately intertwined. Confused and bewildered, he could not recount that night’s events.
The morning sun was out in the blue sky and sparkled through the windows although most of the bedroom was shadowed by the silhouette of the extended drawbridge. Calm and still, almost lifeless, a ghostly silence had fallen upon Cat’s Lair.
“My sweetness,” he whispered as he kissed her cheek - but WileyKit did not respond. “It must have been quite a night.”
He crawled to the edge of the bed - sitting up, he rubbed his eyes and noticed it.
WileyKat’s hands were bloody and scared by fresh, new scratches. Panicked, he turned to his sister but she was unharmed. The blankets were unstained. Only his palms and the fur between his legs were tainted with both fresh and encrusted blood.
He grabbed a towel and walked to the bathroom. But before, just before he stepped in the doorway, he looked back at his sister. She was still asleep. Her left-hand thumb was missing. Pausing under the antechamber’s fluorescent lights, he wondered why he had never paid attention.
It was already midmorning and the inactivity of the Thundercat fortress persisted.
Under the cool, misty spray of the showerhead, WileyKat cleansed his fur.
“Will all the oceans of Third Earth ever wipe this blood clean?” he lamented, lathering yet another coat of shampoo upon his hide. “Where do these scratches come from?”
He noticed a lot of blood concentrated down about his -
Cheetara yelled - stammering out words that the lair’s innards muffled and distorted. And when that frenzied hysteria simmered it was accompanied by the telltale thumbs of running feet.
WileyKat’s heart pounded, throbbed attuned to the shock and horror of the startling disturbance.
“What happened last night?”
He turned off the water and quickly dried off his matted fur. He grabbed a fresh tunic - newly laundered, it was free of mud and blood stains.
No longer on the bed, no longer in the room, WileyKit was gone. The mysterious box she kept hidden was left out in the middle of the room, just under the table.
“Why can’t she pickup after herself?” he muttered. He had the urge to explore its contents - deep and inscrutable - but Cheetara screamed again. So he left the bedroom to investigate the strange case of that morning’s commotion.
* * * * * * * * * *
Tygra’s laboratory - the vast chamber was unchanged, unaltered as far as he remembered from that night. It was as quiet as a tomb and just as dark, just as gloomy even though the curtains of one of the tall, thin windows had been pushed aside to let the daylight through.
Past crowded workbenches and cluttered drawing boards, past bits of metal and pieces of machines, past appliances of all manner and variety, WileyKat walked unflinchingly to the doorway at the recess of the room where lights and soft, spoken words were emitted.
“How?” Cheetara asked, burying her face into Liono’s shoulder. The two embraced, standing over the gray, metal tub. “How can this be happening, Liono? Who’s doing this? For Jagga’s sake, who’s doing this to us?”
“I don’t know, Cheetara,” Liono replied with a sigh. “It’s not the Mutants; it’s not the Lunatacs - not even MummRa. The mutilation’s too disturbing, too sick even for them. No, it’s a different sort of evil -“
“Evil! I can feel it! I can feel it - it’s still here -“
The cheetah drew away from the lion to reveal -
“No! No! No!” WileyKat screamed and ran back - back from the doorway, back from the laboratory, to the shadowy oblivion of the interior of Cat’s Lair.
Panthro and Tygra were submerged in the water, in the tub, their heads leaning over the curled, lip-like rim - dead. Their fur stood on-end, their eyes were wide-open - blood trickled from their noses. Rigor mortis froze their arms over the surface of the water - their left hands, mangled and torn, were missing their thumbs.
A samophlange dangled within the tub, its electric cord was still attached to the power outlet - steam and smoke evolved like a fine mist from the soapy water.
Cheetara sprang toward the boy: “WileyKat! Wait!”
Liono grasped her, restrained her: “Don’t worry about him, he can take care of himself.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Cheetara trembled alone - unutterably alone - in the abandoned conference room. The tabletop glimmered - fragments of glass, small but sharp, littered its surface. Although the sun loomed above the distant treetops, shadows covered her face - Panthro had blocked out the broken window with a wooden board that night. The sky was cloudless and blue, yet the air reeked with the smell of fire - all over, everywhere, was the aura of death.
Liono entered slowly, nervously. He held a white parchment in his hands.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asked.
“I’ve calmed a little,” she answered.
“I haven’t touched the bodies - I can’t, I just can’t do it - but I know they can’t be kept there like that forever.”
“What have you done?”
“I removed the samophlange. I drained the water. I tried to get their arms down but -“
“Oh, Liono!” She ran to him, holding him in her arms.
“The eyes, I closed the eyes.”
The two Thundercats were very, very silent for a good long while.
“The message?”
He unraveled the parchment - the paper had been meticulously cleaned yet, like the atmosphere, it retained a most peculiar and unspeakable stench.
“I found it in a machine in Tygra’s laboratory. I think it’s as good as it gets, but I can’t make any sense of it. The words are random, unintelligible.”
Cheetara took the sheet - skimmed it - and looked back at Liono: “And this is what was found inside Snarf?”
“Yes - yes, this is it.”
“But - but doesn’t it look familiar? I mean, you’ve seen stuff like it before, right?”
“No, I don’t follow you.”
“Come with me.”
* * * * * * * * * *
In the classroom Cheetara scrambled through notebooks and loose-leaf papers.
“Look at them,” she said. “Look at them.”
Liono opened one of the notebooks and placed it side-by-side with the curled, parched document.
“The handwriting! The handwriting, Cheetara!”
“It gets worse - worse.” She produced a sheet of paper and lay it next to the parchment. “It was written yesterday, after Snarf’s body crashed through the window.”
Page after page, sheet after sheet, it was the handwriting and it was identical, it was absolutely identical.
“What did you think of it, when it was given to you?”
“Just that it was emotional. The random words, they’re often the products of -“
“Of what? Of what?”
He stormed out of the room, letting the papers drop in his rage - the Lord of the Thundercats barged through the hall, down the stairs into the bowels of Cat’s Lair.
* * * * * * * * * *
“What a mess! It’s like two animals live here,” Liono said.
Cheetara followed him into the bedroom. Clothes, clean and dirty, littered the floor. Some tunics were merely stained with blood, some were encrusted with it - and yet others were marred by the stains of another, unknown substance.
“The bathroom’s empty, but someone took a shower in it - the mirrors are still foggy.”
“Liono,” she said, “I noticed something about the words.” He turned to face her. “The words on the papers, they’re not all random.”
He stumbled toward her, over the awkward calamity of the bedroom. “So it is a message.”
“Here.” She pointed to a set of phrases at the centers of both papers. “The words here are about the same size and shape - the rest of the document was written around them.”
“Yes, the effect does stand out from the rest, Cheetara.”
While he read the words, she, too, explored the room.
“No, it’s not here, Liono, the evil has been lifted from this place.”
“Listen to this: ‘Gross, sister said, wouldn’t touch me, sister said, wouldn’t touch me, angry, wouldn’t let me touch her, anymore, anymore, wrong, angry and wrong, angry, I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop, what I did to her.”
The two were stunned silent.
“It’s a box; I found it on the floor next to the table. It’s full of something.”
She gave him the shiny, tin box - it rattled in her nervous, jittery hands. Its lid as well as its sides bent slightly when pressed firmly.
Atop its lid, scribbled with black ink, was a childish warning that Liono read aloud: “’he who opens this box will die, Wiley -‘“
To be sure, there was a ‘k’ and a ‘t’ at the end of the name, but the character in the middle was indiscernible. It seemed to be both an ‘a’ and an ‘i’ superimposed one over the other as if the name was written in error and only hastily corrected.
Liono opened the box and staggered back - it slipped and fell onto the floor - Cheetara sprung off to the side. Yet, despite the horror, the terror, neither she nor he could keep their eyes off what had spilt out of the box.
Thumbs. Thumbs. Thumbs.
Everywhere.
She looked at him, he looked at her. The two Thundercats knelt to sift through the gory details. Liono identified them. Cheetara moved them into a pile.
“Panthro, Tygra, Snarf.”
“What about these?” she asked, picking one up. “It’s not old, it’s recent.”
“It looks humanoid, but I can’t recognize it.”
“And this one. There’s nothing left but bone. Liono! It’s small, it’s - WileyKit’s!” She choked and ran into the bathroom.
The thumbs had been cleaned; their bases, where they had been cleaved, had been tied shut with the excess flesh. The nails had been decorated with a thick line that ran from the edge of the tip to the start of the fingerprint. Along the top of the knuckle was another mark - another line that went across the thumb’s circumference.
He stood and unsheathed the mystical Sword of Omens.
“Sword of Omens! Give me sight beyond sight -“
* * * * * * * * * *
Liono parked the Thunder Tank amidst the fields of yellowed grass and vine-covered monoliths. The air was calm and in the silence the only sounds came from the coursing river. There was no movement in the forest, in the underbrush that surrounded the tranquil yet ominous landscape.
The two Thundercats got off the vehicle and approached one of the many stone pillars that dotted the flat clearing. In the grass, on the side, was WileyKat’s hover-board. Its engines had been repaired but its frame remained badly mangled - Panthro, it seemed, had not yet finished the job.
The rocky column had been moved haphazardly to reveal a hole carved into the ground. Liono and Cheetara looked in - a red aura came from the chamber beneath, from the cavern below.
“How do we get in?” she asked.
He pointed to the river bank and replied: “There’s a larger opening within the marshes.”
* * * * * * * * * *
“Panthro, Tygra; Panthro, Tygra,” a male voice said.
Liono and Cheetara crept through the dim interior of the cave toward the one and only source of visible light. A chamber aglow by the warm, red luminance of fungi. A chamber resonant with distinct timbre of two voices.
“I said they’d pay,” the female voice said. “I said so, Kat - and now, look, they can’t hurt you anymore.”
“But all we wanted was the letter.”
Liono held onto Cheetara’s hand as they reached the oblong entrance into that macabre antechamber. They squatted behind the safety of jagged rocks while they heard and watched, overcome by pure and absolute horror.
“But all we wanted was the letter,” the male voice persisted. “Liono was going to be my mentor, not Tygra. Not Tygra. There was no reason to kill him - or Panthro.”
“My dear brother, you’re too noble, too forgiving. They had to die, don’t you see? They had to die so that we might live - together, forever, eternally, eternally.”
“And what about this man? What did he do?”
“He - while I scavenged through the forest, he came upon me from behind and - tried to - touch me.”
“Kit. Kit, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Kit?” Liono asked, turning to Cheetara - they could not believe what they were hearing.
The two walked silently into the mysterious chamber - WileyKat’s back was to them.
“Don’t be mad at me, Kat. Here, here - let me do that. You like it when I do that.”
“Kit, something’s got to be done about all of this.”
“But you killed Kit,” Liono shouted. “Just like you killed Snarf, Panthro and Tygra. Just like you killed that man, over there, with your hover-board.”
It did not seem that WileyKat had heard anything the Lord of the Thundercats had said.
“You took their thumbs; you stood on your sister’s grave! You -“
“Oh, Kit!”
Cheetara gripped the boy’s shoulder and spun him around. WileyKat stood before the adults with his hands over, running over, rubbing over himself, swiftly, violently. Liono tackled him to the ground.
“You killed them! You killed them all!”
“Liono, what are you doing here?” WileyKat asked totally shocked. “No, no, no, he knows, he knows,” the boy gasped in a female voice.
“He sounds exactly like her, Liono, exactly like WileyKit!”
“Get off of me! Get off of me! Kat, help! Kat, help!”
“No one’s going to help you!”
“You’re going to die, Liono, you’re going to die. Kat doesn’t need you. He doesn’t need you - he’s got me!”
“He’s turned into an animal, Liono.”
WileyKat snarled - he growled and oozed wispy foam that spread about his lips, his face. He struggled to flail his arms as his legs moved wildly, uncontrollably. Screaming, he yelled incoherently with both voices.
Suddenly he was calm - suddenly he lay still on the ground.
Liono arose gradually. The boy’s hands and feet were covered with blood and fresh, new scars. Throughout the fight the lion’s stomach had been slashed by the claws of WileyKat’s toes. The gashes were along parallel lines and were not very deep though they bled and ached nevertheless.
He looked at the boy, he looked at the cheetah. He pressed his hands into his wounds to quell the bleeding. She pressed her hands onto his and helped him turn around. With that the two Thundercats walked out of the antechamber, leaving WileyKat on the floor utterly still though the quiver of his lips suggested that he conversed with someone - someone who was not there, not there at all.
The last thing they heard before they left that underground cavern was: “I am evil,” but the voice was not feminine, not masculine any longer - it was a new and unheard amalgam, a bone-chilling mixture. “I am good. Kat, Kit, Kat, Kit. Ha, haha, hahaha, haha, hahahahaha, mwahahahaha, ha, ha."
END
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