The Big Meow

Rhiow started walking down Thirty-Third. Down that way, in this time as in her own, was Hell’s Kitchen. But in this time the place was much closer to deserving the name: a neighborhood – if that was the right name for a place so un-neighborly – home to gangs and crooks of all kinds, whorehouses and sweatshops, mob-run factories and unsavory bars, gambling dens and dives. It was a place that Rhiow gathered from Urruah that the Silent Man had come in a strange way to love as he devoted so much of his working life to chronicling its ways. But ‘Ruah also said the stories the Silent Man told about the place, for all their dry humor, were dark at the heart. A lot of pain, a lot of death… with always the Shadowed One’s laugh at the end – a co-opted ehhif version of it. And the pain acknowledged… but always, the ehhif trying to make it bearable. So of course what she was looking for would be down there. All that remained was to discover the shape it had taken this time.

As Rhiow headed down Thirty-Third, the sense that someone was watching her got stronger and stronger. Not just one someone: many of them. The fur stood up all down her spine, but she refused to stop and shake it down into place again. She would not give what watched her the satisfaction. Soon enough I’m going to have more to worry about than my fur, Rhiow thought as she made her way down the street, glancing from side to side at the dark buildings, all stained brick and cracked concrete, the unlighted windows. Dirty glass from them lay shattered on the sidewalks. The street, what she could see of it under the layer of pooled smog, was a patchwork of potholes, dug-up places that hadn’t been mended, open manholes from which the covers had been stolen. Here and there a building was missing from the street entirely, reduced to rubble piled up in the lots where they’d stood. On either side of these their neighboring buildings tottered, their adjoining walls pulled away to reveal empty fireplaces, ancient cast-iron radiators hanging in space, wallpaper peeling away and flapping in the cold night’s wind, staircases all open on one side with the stair-treads hanging down into the void. In the rubble that was all that was left between them, dark things shifted and rustled.

Rhiow licked her nose nervously. This was the Silent Man’s body telling her what was happening to it, the destruction of basic infrastructure. But much more was going on. As she kept walking and the street kept darkening, the only light now coming from an ugly bloated red moon setting over the river down at the far end of Thirty-Third, Rhiow started seeing more movement inside the derelict buildings. Inside the dirty windows she could hear things moving. As she went, and that reddish moonlight seemed to get stronger, she started seeing the movements inside them as well. Lumpy shapes in tissue-colors of dark red and spotty dark pink and fat-ivory, rounded, bulbous, glistening a little sometimes – they were getting bolder, pushing themselves right up to the windows, right through the broken places. Eyeless, they nonetheless peered at her, and though faceless, their expressions were mocking as they leered and tittered at her.

Rhiow’s lips wrinkled away from her fangs in distaste. She itched to assemble some minor wizardry that would blast the nasty things away from the windows and put a stop to their snickering. Best wait, though, she thought. No point in wasting energy I might need later… On she went down Thirty-Third, crossing Eighth Avenue and heading for Ninth. Above her, the sky lost the last reflection of city light, went starless. Around her, the structure of the buildings themselves was beginning to shift, and the watching, leering tumor-shapes were no longer just inside them, but starting to appear on the otherwise deserted sidewalks – first just a few, then in groups. By the time she reached the middle of the block between Ninth and Tenth, the edges of the buildings were starting to go unnervingly soft.