GITJ Post 399: Cat n Mouse, Epilogue (Bliss Interlude Number Three)

He knew he recognized that symbol from somewhere, and it had only taken him a few minutes to find it.

“According to Hesiod's Theogony, the Erinyes were female chthonic deities born from the blood of Uranus when he was castrated by a titan and his genitalia thrown to the sea.The drops of blood which fell upon Gaia, the Earth, grew to fearsome, demonic women while the seafoam birthed the beautiful Aphrodite. Other accounts name them as the daughters of Nyx and Hades. These furies relentlessly pursued and tormented those who had mistreated the weak, driving them to madness and suffering. They represented the concept of divine retribution and were seen as agents of justice, ensuring that the natural order was maintained by punishing those that disrupted it. Despite their terrifying nature, the Erinyes also held the power to grant forgiveness and absolution once justice had been serv-”

Suddenly, darkness. All the lights in the apartment had gone out..

“What in God’s name i-is…is going on here?” Judge Horace Smalls muttered to himself, closing shut the old book he’d pulled from his wall of shelves.  He could hear it himself, despite how ridiculous this all seemed: his voice was shaking. When the echoes of it stopped, all that was left was the pounding of his heart, now the loudest thing in his ears. The apartment was otherwise deathly quiet and dark, save for the scant light coming from the sleeping city outside. Where are those policemen?!? I called them ten minutes ago. Don’t they know who I am!?!

He wiped the cold sweat from his brow, and reached to put back the old tome from his classics studies at Haverford, back where it belonged. The book slid back into place, but an old award from his litigation days clattered noisily to the floor. Damn these knees, he cursed, bending over to pick the plaque up off the floor. Horace glanced over at the wheelchair sitting against the wall, the one his doctor insisted he use, but Horace refused. His legs still had some use in them. He grabbed his cane, and his eyes were brought back to the window, looking out over the darkened city. That horrific symbol, still wet, dripped.

Just fifteen minutes ago, Judge Smalls had been having a fine night, sipping his 30-yr Highland and going through the briefings he’d needed to review for tomorrow on the bench for the minor upstate circuit court. A strange noise had pulled him from his papers and when he looked up to the window, he’d been shocked. Pulling himself up to his wizened, nearly useless legs, he’d made it over to the window and ran his gnarled hands down the glass. That strange symbol had been painted from the outside of the building, in what must be red paint.

A prank, he thought at first.  “Send them right away,” he’d told the female dispatcher on the other end of the line, and hung up curtly. Yes, he’d recognized the symbol, and while waiting for the police he would start his own research. 

The Erinyes. The Furies. What sort of shim-sham was this??

A threat? A game, maybe…but painted on his apartment’s window? On the outside of his apartment’s window? On the outside of his 23rd floor’s apartment’s window? Scrawled in what looked now horrifically like-

A noise, a noise from the bedroom, breaking glass that made his heart jump. “Is someone there??” he called out, his reedy voice sounding hoarse and worn. He worked his way through the dark, one hand on his cane, the other grasping the furniture for purchase. But as he hobbled towards the door he was stopped. A zephyr hit him, a cool knife of air from the bedroom that made his spine tingle and the hairs of his half-bare arms stand on end. Had that been the window breaking???

“Is someone there?!!?” he called out again.

He could faintly hear the sound of the city outside, filtering in from the other room. Something had broken the window, and, as he - trembling, now - slowly moved towards the bedroom he saw it immediately. Glass lay shattered, shards of it glimmered on the sill and the hardwood of the floor. Something had broken a window from the outside. He stepped himself in, heart pounding, the slippers on his feet crunching the broken glass. He saw no one.

But something moved behind him.

“IS SOMEONE THERE?!?!?” he belched, hearing the crack in his voice as he spun around, as quickly as he could in his building panic, nearly falling right there. More glass crunched below him.

Then the room was quiet again, save for the distant sounds of the city still coming from down below and his own rattling breath. This was the bedroom he once shared with Loreen, his wife of 42 years. He missed her, now, despite everything. Good riddance, he usually thought, I’m better without her and her new feminist ideas, but now he was alone. And frail.

At this point, his blood was fragile with ice. Damn those cops! Where ARE they?!?! Slowly, in the darkness, he began to grope his way back to the main living room, the pain in his knees becoming an agony. <clop, clop, clop> came the sound of his cane on the hardwood of the floor, silenced as he stepped onto the asian rug centered in the room. If he were more lucid he would have noticed the new smell in the air, an unfamiliar perfume, strong and sensual…and underneath it the distinct smell of oxidized hemoglobin, iron and blood.

Losers, losers and failures, the old Judge silently railed.

The city police these days, they were worthless, ever since the department had been taken over by a woman. They were as hapless as the whelps that had been sent out today to serve his warrants and injunctions, the boys who called themselves attorneys, more failures. If they were going to put a much-needed stop to this “movement”, it was going to have to be done locally. Luckily the courts - some of them, at least, the lower ones - still had men like himself, men who were willing t-

Someone had moved the furniture in the living room, pushed aside the coffee table and overturned an easy chair. Then, a strange noise. A knock on the wall and - was that the sound of someone, high and bright, whistling? An eerily happy tune pierced through the silence, along with long, hard scraping sounds as something tore along the walls. It was coming closer. He looked around, terror building inside his brittle bones. He stopped, listened, for a good long moment. And then another, frozen in place. Now, whatever it was, it was just taunting him in silence.

Until it laughed.

Unmistakable, a young woman’s icy giggle, a blend of mirth and menace shivered the air around him like frost across a windowpane.

“Who…is…THERE?!” he yelled out to the dark.

His only response from the apartment was another disembodied female laugh, this one more cold and chilling than the last. He had to get out of here, he had to. As he hobbled as fast as his brittle legs could carry him towards the elevator door that opened up right to his apartment, the laughter followed, now unsettlingly maniacal and right over his shoulder. It seemed to carry an otherworldly quality that would be out of place in any ordinary setting but now in this moment sang in symphony with the cacophony of dread slowly closing in around his failing heart. The laughter’s unpredictability - how it rose and tittered, snarled - made it all the more unnerving, as it shifted between amusement and something much darker. It terrorized him, and as he looked wildly about as he faltered himself towards the elevator he could not discern the source behind the laughter. Where are they?!?!

He was at the elevator, now, pushing wildly on the buttons. <DOWN DOWN DOWN!!!>

But - oh god, oh no - the buttons! They weren’t lighting up! There was no power, no power to the entire apartment! The elevator couldn’t be called and - a glance towards the door which would lead to the stairwell - he made a break for it. Unsteady, nearly falling - DAMN THESE USELESS KNEES!!! DAMN THE USELESS POLICE!! - he made it to the door. Maybe he could, somehow-

LOCKED!!

For a brief second, a moment of clarity. He knew, right then, that the police were not coming. He’d spoken to a woman, a dispatcher, at the station. He’d had a direct line, one they’d known he’d use. The women were coming for him, for what he’d done. “Whoever you a-are,” he wheezed, as forcefully as he could manage to whoever was there with him, “please…please. Let’s find a way to talk about this. I’m sorry about today, I’m sorry about the search warrants.” Something was there, waiting in the darkness. The panic had crept back into his flesh, and his voice had begun to crack. “I’m…s-s-sorry!”

The walls around him, they were closing in. He spun around, shaking now in abject fear to face the inside of his apartment and whoever was here. Suddenly, his cane slipped and his withered knees gave way and he fell, crashing forward onto his hands and slamming his face into the carpet. The cane clattered uselessly at his side. For a long moment the world spun around him but as it cleared he was able to raise his head, look up.

Someone had lit three candles in front of him. And she was crouching right across from them, wearing one of his wife’s old tops and looking down onto his crumpled form. She was bigger than she should’ve been...

He froze, quivering.

With a sickening squelch something stopped, having come rolling towards him on its side. He gasped as it came now face-to-face with the severed head of a man, eyes turned up horrifically into its head. Blood already pooling below it and draining it of color, it was unmistakably one of the young whelp attorneys that had been sent to the women today, armed with his warrants and injunctions.

Judge Horace Smalls wet himself.

“Good. You’ve finally stopped talking,” the pale, dark haired woman spoke, “Now you can start screaming.”

…

...

He wished he would have been able to say that her teeth were the last thing he saw, when suddenly she hissed and bared her fangs. But she made sure it took a little longer than that.

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thank you thank you RiF for editing