A Kitten of a Chance

The moment I stepped past the threshold, the common sounds of the city fell away into an eerie silence. I found myself not in a simple alley, but in a labyrinth of interlocking passages, a veritable canyon of dilapidated brick that seemed to obey no earthly geometry. Paths diverged and split on all sides, turning back upon themselves amidst structures I could not recognize. It was a place of continuous decay, a forgotten quarter of the city that could not possibly exist so close to the familiar waterfront. A chilling realization crept upon me: it was as though I had, in taking a single step, crossed an unseen border into some other place—somewhere long, far, and gone from the world I knew.

A damp and clinging vapour filled the passages, obscuring the very stars from the sky, yet I pressed forward, possessed by the dreadful surmise that I had either been lured into this maze to be lost, or that their lair was ever the more near. I rounded a corner, only to find the path devolve into yet another branching of ways, each as uninviting as the last. It was here I discovered, with a jolt of alarm, that my revolver was in my hand, though I possessed no memory of having drawn it from its holster. My own hand had acted upon an instinct separate from my conscious will.

The air was filled with faint and disquieting sounds: the steady, measured drip of water from some unseen height; the sighing of the wind through narrow apertures; and other, less discernible noises that manifested themselves as a cold sweat upon my brow.

As my foot disturbed the stillness of a puddle, that same plaintive cry I had heard earlier cut through the melancholy. I turned, and there it stood, the jet-black kitten, regarding me from the entrance to another alleyway. It issued a second meow, then trotted away, pausing only to look back once more. My eyes widened. All reason and training bade me to be cautious, yet in that moment of dislocation, the appearance of this small guide felt less a coincidence and more an act of providence. I gathered myself and followed, surrendering my path to the whims of this strange, four-footed ferry.

I did not need to hasten my step, for the creature kept a pace that seemed measured precisely to my own. It would, from time to time, glance back at me with its luminous eyes, and on one such occasion I offered it a small, foolish smile, to which it made no reply save to turn its head once more to the path ahead. I cannot say for how long we travelled in this manner. Time itself seemed to have grown thin and lost its customary measure in that labyrinth, so that what may have been but a moment felt an age, and an hour might have passed as an instant.

At last, our strange pilgrimage brought us to a low, dilapidated structure—an outbuilding, I supposed, that had long ago fallen into disuse. Its garage shutters, maimed and crooked upon its hinges, left a jagged opening near the ground. My guide made no sound, but with a final, fluid motion, slipped through the opening and was gone. It was an ingress to which I was clearly being directed, an invitation into a darkness I felt I had no choice but to accept.

Drawing a breath that did little to steady the tremor in my hand, I crouched low and passed through the hole. Within, the air was thick with the scent of dust and something cloyingly sweet and unpleasant. From some unseen chamber ahead, I could hear voices—a low and rhythmic susurrus, like a droning litany.

The feline paid the sound no mind, but proceeded down a long and decaying hallway. I followed, my revolver a cold and inadequate comfort in my grasp, placing each foot with such care that not so much as a whisper of my heel disturbed the dust-laden floorboards. My small guide stopped before a door, from which a tremulous, yellow glow emanated through a narrow gap where it stood ajar.

The chanting grew louder now, a sound both monotonous and filled with a strange, malevolent energy. I held my breath and peered through the opening. There, I saw them—the robed figures, huddled in a circle, their cowled forms made monstrous and indistinct by the flickering, collective light of a hundred candles. They surrounded something upon the floor, their attention fixed upon the center of their profane congregation.

A violent tumult seized my mind, a warring of impulses that bade me at once to flee, to enter, or to wait for the return of my inscrutable partner. But the chilling memory of the labyrinth, of that melancholy and spiritual dread of being irrevocably lost, held me fast. To retreat was impossible; I should never find my way out. And to face what lay within that blasphemous chamber alone seemed a feat beyond all mortal strength.

I glanced about for my small, feline guide, but the kitten had vanished from sight, leaving me in a state of utter and absolute isolation. I leaned my weight against the decaying wood of the door, my mind still a storm of indecision. It was a foolish and careless motion, for the aged hinges gave way with a protracted, groaning shriek.

Under the crushing weight of their murmured, uniform regard, some desperate instinct for self-preservation took hold. I kicked the door open, and it swung inward, exposing me fully to the chamber and the terrible congregation within. I took a step, my arm rising with a tremor I could not conceal, and pointed the weapon into their midst. It was a gesture of… a terror so intense it demanded some form of physical expression.

The droning litany ceased at once. A silence, more dreadful than the chant itself, fell upon the room. And every cowled head turned, with a slow and impossible synchronicity, to look upon me.

At the center of the room, upon a sigil drawn in what I knew with a dreadful certainty to be blood, lay the lamb from before. It rested in a state of unnatural stillness. The sigil itself was a perversion of a Western holy cross, and at its three upper ends, the small, bled forms of lambs were affixed like dreadful offerings. Their blood fed the sigil's lines, and a great sickness rose in my stomach. But this was merely a precursor to the sight that truly unmanned me: Mary, my strange partner, cast aside in the far corner of the room like a discarded doll, a dark wound upon her forehead from which the blood trickled down her pale and insensible face, matching the colour of her jacket.

A cry, with my partner’s name strangled in its utterance, escaped my lips. My presence, however, went entirely unheeded. I screamed, to freeze, to raise their hands to the dry air. It was then that one of them, moving with a solemn and dreadful purpose, produced a long, sacrificial knife. Before I could even think to fire my weapon in protest, the blade descended, and the lamb’s life was extinguished in a final, silent convulsion. A low hum began to emanate from the blood-drenched sigil, and I took an involuntary step forward, as if pulled by some invisible current.

The rest is a fugue, a terrible collapse of the senses. The humming grew into a roar, and an unendurable, white light erupted from the center of the room. My mind was flooded with fleeting, tormenting phantasms: the pale, green eyes of the kitten, wide with knowledge; the sight of Mary’s bludgeoned face, serene and lost. The world did not so much vanish as it was unmade, torn away in a silent, blinding cataclysm.

Then, there was stillness. And I found myself upon a veranda of burnt orange dust, under an infinitely black sky utterly devoid of stars, in a place I knew, with the last vestiges of my sanity, was not of this earth.