Published at the Treasures of Thundera Group June 17, 2003
:taken from my original author's notes:
It was about a year ago (nb: 2002) that I began to write my anthology of horror - - and now at last it's complete. All ten stories have been written. Overall, it didn't turn out quite as I had planned. More than once I had to throw out plot ideas just 'cause it was all unworkable. The rules of this anthology are as follows: about 5000 words or so and nothing sexual beyond the pg-13 rating. I think, more or less, I followed those rules. I don't plan on writing anything serious soon, so this is my effective temporary retirement fic. I'll still be here, I just won't be as active on the writing front as I had been.
OK, so what's this one about? Well, it's been ages since I've done a full-fledge summary. After WileyKit dies, WileyKat goes bonkers. Tygra tries to help him by getting him involved with the Tcat world again. But, after he uncovered relics from ancient earth, it seems to Tygra that the boy has totally unraveled. But who's really unraveled? It's also something of a crossover, but it isn't. You could also say it's a coming of age tale, but you'd have to be extra-special perverse to say it. It's also more than just a kitten 'torture' fic cause, if you pay careful attention, there's something wrong with Tygra here, too. lol
(NOTE - the premise of the story would be revisited in my Inuyasha fanfic 'Love And Madness' which I consider to be superior; you may find that separately at FF under my other penname, Dr. Abraxas)
"The Uncanny WileyKat" by RD Rivero (2003-06-17)
"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far." – HP Lovecraft 'The Call of Cthulhu'
The vast, inscrutable reaches of unrecorded history are colored by the likes of MummRa, MummRana, the Swords of Omens and Plundarr – the realm of the senses is corrupted by powers inhuman and supernatural, the outward expressions of inward tendencies of untamed Creation. But still! One cannot – one ought not – by simple determination of will, bid the sun rise and set, command the eccentricities of the weather or issue forth from the bottomless womb of the Earth damned, detestable monsters of the impossible and indescribable. How, then, how? By what secrets, by what arcana revealed and exploited? Indeed, who among the sane could have imagined – could have believed – such things to be true?
I must be coherent for I fear the tale will tax my weary mind. Cold logic and icy reason have always been my strengths as a Thundercat. All of us have our individual strengths, excelling more in one than in the other. Yet WileyKat, a Thundercat, was unable to grasp it.
Do not be quick to judge for you see I sympathized, I understood – I knew how and why his mind so fatally erred. It was his sister's death, sudden and unexpected, that stung his yet-untested mettle with the sharpest of blows. Besides the familial tie, besides even the unquantifiable bond that connects twins through space and time, was the complementary nature of their temperaments that necessity impelled to exist for each other. They relied on one another for they had no one else: no one to turn to express their wants and dreads, no one to confess to their loves and fears. Words by an outsider, ignorant of such tight-knit relations, cannot describe the devastation when the one is lost to the other by the embrace of death.
So be it – guilt, guilt that he was at fault, that he was responsible for the tragedy though inability, his inability, precipitated his descent into madness.
Of the exact nature of WileyKit's untimely demise, I will not discuss – it is imperative only to know that it was pure accident. No one, no one can be blamed. Yet he did, he did himself. He wept over the fresh grave. He languished amid its flattening mound, still and silent, eyes dry and blood-red. Kneeling, stooping, laying across it – it seemed he had become the most macabre of ornaments; he had become part of the crypt.
I recall it well: the cloudy white skies, the murky, black forests and the smell of anise blossoms that clung to the air like a perfume faintly masking the ghastly smell of the dead. The slippery earth was carpeted by the dewy remnants of brittle, fallen foliage – the multicolored specimens of autumnal brilliance seemed to move, to writhe, to my naked eye until I realized it was merely the action of worms responsible for the unsettling effect. He, too, was infused by a living slime that clung to his fur from head to toe.
I wanted to save him, spare him, I mean, the embarrassment and shock. So I wrapped him with a clean sheet and secured him to the back of my vehicle. I brought him to Cat's Lair, to my room and washed him all without resistance, all the while he stared blankly.
"Why am I a Thundercat?" he asked, whispering just over the drone of the tub's flowing faucet. "Tygra?" He looked at me then and only then, touching my shoulder with a shaky, debilitated hand. "Liono's Sword of Omens, Panthro's strength, Cheetara's powers – your powers – what about me?"
He looked at his hands, at his claws.
I tried to comfort the boy as it was obvious to me where his troubled mind was going: "You have powers, too, WileyKat, you have skills you're only –"
"What good were they, if I couldn't save her?"
"It was an accident – no one, no one could've saved her."
He collapsed into my arms – I held him, patted his mane.
It was not easy, but in time grief ran its course – he did accept his sister's death but at a price I would not understand until much, much later.
Day by day, I became aware of a burgeoning, emerging rebellion, a new kind of youthful upheaval. For it was that he behaved more a servant than an equal: he refused to wear the insignia, he refused to attend the council meetings and he took to inhabit the lower portions of the lair. I acquiesced to the changes only because I felt they were temporary. A phase. In time, too, he would have to understand – it would have to dawn on him – that he was one of us. That he was endowed with strengths necessary for the group's survival. But I admit the alterations took on an air permanence that unsettled me. So, I engaged him in a project certain – at least I was certain – to soothe this fears about his nascent talents.
And there again the well-trained mind must ask: how was anyone to know?
It was by the slimmest of miracles that we Thundercats arrived at a fair corner of Third Earth – and only gradually, as the topography of danger emerged from obscurity, did we move deeper and deeper into the safety of the interior regions. We realized, too, it was important to establish a covert new base near the Plunderian encampment. And it was that following spring that plans were drawn for just that purpose.
Eager to get WileyKat involved, I took the boy with me to survey those uncharted portions of the continent. Those unexplored areas of singular curiosity: sprawled chains of salty lakes, ragged beaches of weathered rocks, translucent cliffs of iridescent stones and finger-like remnants of streams that had been mighty rivers once ages innumerable. We were taken by a collection of queer islands at the center of the largest lagoon; we were attracted to two islands: one flat, the other jagged, both overgrown with thick wilderness. Within the verdant oasis we found the typical life – unchanged as it were over the millions of years since the ancient ocean first bore them onto the land – and, partially buried by the fertile soil, relics of long-lost civilizations.
It was at the southern tip of the first island – the flat island – where the coast jetted out into the lagoon wispy tendrils of brittle terrain, that the foundations of the new base were excavated. Of the details – its exact location and construction – I will say little on the grounds of security for it still remains a mystery to the greater portion of our enemies. I will say only this: that the excavation unearthed more, much more than mere loose ends of Second or even First Earth history. There – there just inches below the virgin surface – were ruins of immense structures and myriads of complex tunnels. Tunnels I recognized as conduits for sewage – empty – canals for water – still flooded with fresh water – and channels for electric circuitry mostly lost through time. But of utter significance were other passages whose purposes were not immediately evident until we explored further.
Aside from its brick and stone masonry, that showed telltale signs of past flooding, we found little more than wooden splinters and powdered gravel – all of which had to have been artificially, purposefully deposited in their locations by the tunnel's constructors. We found, too, mangled iron rods whose purposes and uses were even more dubious, mysterious. The passages unwound beneath desperate, uninteresting parts of the island, terminating every so often within subterranean chambers of elevated platforms, upright columns and caved-in steps. Writing, carved into the walls, was so obliterated by age it failed to yield any clues.
It was not until WileyKat and I reached the yawning mouth of the longest canal – located under the lagoon and headed, it seemed, toward the second island – that it occurred to me what it meant. The passageways were all that remained of a vast transportation network. The constructors transported through the tunnels – and the possibility that one led directly into the second island instilled in me the notion that there was more, much more yet to be revealed below the ragged line of its violent peaks.
Duty first – always first – the secret lair had to be finished. The archeology had to wait. Though, I confess, I did make use of the various, unearthed structures. Especially that long, dark tunnel – once I saw and learned where it terminated, I fitted it with rails and refurbished it to serve as an emergency exit.
In the months that followed the outpost's completion, WileyKat and I unearthed various tombs, crypts, as it were, of the ancient settlement: collapsed temples and shattered buildings. And we uncovered the most prized of discoveries – a storehouse of books preserved by the salts of the earth's still interior. The mysteries of the tomes, however, remain as distant to me now as then – always just outside the realm of my comprehension. Something about the letters and fragments of words that I can decipher are quite utterly, deceptively familiar.
It was there amidst the babble of eons and far, far away from WileyKit's grave that I saw the reemergence of old WileyKat: the studious, determined and motivated WileyKat. Archeology had awoken an adventurous side of his personality that tragedy had for so long done much to quell. I was at last relieved that progress had been made toward bettering his well-being – until the discovery of a new set of books came to my attention.
Hidden within a remote corner of the partly-exposed library, was a collection of thin, frail 'picture-books.' Pictures, drawings, complete with captioned text. The colors – dulled by age – were composed of simple shades of primary colors. The art – if such was the word – was a peculiar sort of perversion that revolted me as it was, I felt, grotesque, macabre and unwholesome.
He said the picture-books were geared toward the youth, but I could not fathom how, or why, the youth of ancient Earth would have been allowed to see, read or possess those damned, detestable booklets. But he was determined and focused his attention squarely upon decoding and revealing the gory arcana. And I was baffled and puzzled by what had become a morbid obsession.
WileyKat's acute interest in the picture-books was accompanied by what I observed to be a growing fascination with his claws. He trimmed his outer two but left his middle three to grow unrestrained until eventually it seemed impossible that he could ever retract them fully. I ordered him to cut them for his own safety. It was at that time that I discovered – tucked under his own mattress – a pair of black gloves that had been fitted with three, extended blades between the knuckles. I stared at that sight from a nightmare agape for it was conspicuously recognizable and then I realized why. The claws, the long, obscenely long claws, I had seen the very like on a character in those picture-books.
He was belligerent to me and lax to his duties. He would leave for prolonged periods; he would reappear without explanation, only to collect more and more of the mind-numbing riddles and the brain-wracking enigmas tightly held between its withering folds. Alterations in behavior were followed by alterations in appearance: a change in dress from dull earth-tones to bright yellow, a change in insignia from the familiar Thundercat to the unusual 'X'.
For a time I was haunted by clandestine powers until I grew accustomed to the daily growling of unseen animals and the common brewing of freakish weather. Even the relics of unknown origins, purposes that periodically appeared and vanished I dismissed as the mere aftereffects of the stress induced by the youth's new and uncouth ways. By autumn, two years to the dreadful date of his sister's death, I had had enough – we had had enough. Intervention was necessary and I along with Liono and Panthro conspired to straighten-up the faltering WileyKat.
I fear, in retrospect, we were already too late.
Confined to his room, secured to his bed – and drugged to sleep – I waited within the gloomy chamber. A disembodied, remote scream, sudden and unexpected, alarmed the boy out of his dream. A dream, yes, it was as if the whole ordeal had been no more than a flight of fantasy. Comforting his broken body, calming his fevered mind, I engaged him to converse and in short order he confessed that he had unlocked the secret of the ancient language and learned what had been thusly written into the picture-books that consumed and dominated his every waking moment.
I was told that the thin, flimsy tomes centered on the lives of beings that appeared more or less human yet possessed powers beyond the mortal sphere. They were – and I use his words here – superheroes hated and oppressed by a society unable and unwilling to accept their oddities. And here he reiterated a statement he had whispered to me all of those years ago: that in this world he was powerless and hated for it, but in that world he was the Uncanny WileyKat, the Wildcat from another world. He had powers, of course, though what they were he would not say. In his visions the superheroes were real and he dwelt among them – he followed them on many adventures and was only then, thanks to an obscure professor, honing and training his latent skills. And he admitted, too, that for a long time he thought it was all just in his head until the dreams began. The vivid, life-like dreams – and the assortment of items he had brought back: the claw-gloves, the uniforms, the 'X'-insignias.
But that was not all he said, for as he lay there, shivering, smiling – convinced of his surety and I of his depravity – he added in the frankest tone and sanest voice that from time to time he had brought back more than just inanimate objects.
It was fantastical – but I saw through it for what it was.
Since he believed he was a failure at being a Thundercat – and since that was coupled to his sister's death – he believed, too, by extension, that he was a failure at life. Alone, so unutterably alone until he discovered the picture-books and became aware of a new, untried fantasy world where he thought belonged, where he felt he was powerful – a world where he was amongst equals. It revealed the true horror of his psychological metamorphosis: he could not accept the loss of WileyKit so long as he lived. So he had to die – that was the only solution – WileyKat had to die and in the process the Uncanny WileyKat was born.
Weary but willing, for he lacked the mental fortitude to accept reality as it was, he was drawn to fantasy as once I was drawn to Silky Fruit: to escape the pitiful melancholy of this world. Thus understanding him full well, I knew only I could help him break free – I set off at once to confiscate and destroy all visible traces of that fantasy gone-awry.
The claw-gloves, the uniforms, the insignias and the anthology of art-work – diverse and enormous – that he had traced and adapted from the picture-books were destroyed in a systematic, dispassionate manner. The aged, withered tomes, the tools with which he facilitated his corruption – I was uncertain if I should either obliterate or conceal the very evidence of their existence. But, as much as I detested them, they were legitimate relics of the past and I did not have the right to tamper with the defenseless, remote past that way. So I kept the thin, flimsy booklets in my office under lock and key.
Of WileyKat – if only the fevered dreams of his perverse mind could be similarly put away and forgotten, but, alas, the cure the patient must administer himself and he did not fathom his mind was awry. I kept him under lock and key, too, in the grim prison that was the secret outpost. The hidden base that I had so diligently, so meticulously constructed – once youthful and ambitious, its masculine constructs and functional simplicity were – during those trying times – quite akin to the bleak, stark nakedness of a mental asylum.
Perhaps it was not just WileyKat who succumbed to the torments of his mind. Perhaps I, too, went mad. A long, long time ago, long before WileyKit's death. As I look back over my career through the years, I can see in the body of my work certain expressions of things best left unimagined and unspoken – things that to the sane mind ventured no further than the spare, inexplicable dream that surfaced from time to time.
Yes, yes indeed – as I brooded about the empty corridors and languished within the vacant passages of that, of my, architecture, I fancied that he and I had more than merely chosen its location. The mutual peculiarities of our singular minds that had bonded us among the Thundercats seemed to share the subconscious abilities to communicate secret silent messages in ways that words or gestures failed to convey. It seemed that what was needed was not an outpost but a madhouse – and by Liono's subsequent detachment when it was apparent the boy was not getting better, it seemed, too, that it was obvious he wanted me to build the lair to be our tomb. The thoughts, the thoughts running through the frayed nerves of my unsettled brain all because of WileyKat's obsession.
With fitful sobs I derailed that train of thought for I knew – I was certain I knew – it was not, it could not be true. How could it be true? How? It was the power of suggestion – of course – I was always unduly susceptible to suggestion. It was all just in my head, yet it was not I who was insane. It was not I who disturbed the nighttime stillness with shrieked, shouted fragments of narratives of that nocturnal world that lay perpetually beyond the capacity to understand. It was him – him – the Uncanny WileyKat.
He sketched his visions, he wrote his dreams out with the most vivid details. He devoured every square inch of paper in his room and when I refused to supply him with more, he carried his activities onto the walls of his chamber. In keeping with my policy, the evidence was destroyed. I further deprived him of pens on the pretense that he might hurt himself for I had observed him pressing the instruments into the spaces between his knuckles mimicking those – those – very distinct claws.
At last unable to express his madness openly, WileyKat retreated deeper and deeper still into that mysterious oblivion of sleep. Sleep! Sleep that consumed his life to the point – as I realized to my personal horror – that he spent very little time awake and if awake it was to eat, to drink, to satisfy the operations of biology that the power of will alone could not suppress fully. The dreams, too, grew intense and violent – and then it seemed they had transformed from the sporadic leitmotif of 'watch out' to the new-found, distinct air of continuity, as if he were living out a complex, detailed other life.
I revealed little of my findings for as events progressed he and I were more and more isolated.
Vigilance waned and I gradually removed the vast majority of WileyKat's restrains. The boy spent most of his time in bed already, so it did not occur to me that he would be a danger to himself or to anybody. Still, I forbade him to leave the lair, enter my office and explore the library for whatever reason especially unsupervised. I did not worry – or at the very least I convinced myself I did not worry – of his violating the list of grievances I so iterated for outside the kitchen, bathroom and inner courtyard he scarcely ventured.
I caught him in the atrium on a bench very, very still, sitting in a manner I saw only once before – I thought he was asleep but he was most distinctly and remarkably awake.
"I used to think I did not have powers," he said with what passed for a smile on his lips – his hands, fingers trembling. "It took me a while, it really did, but I know better now."
"WileyKat," I gasped, speaking his name for the first time in weeks.
"Tygra, do you know where dreams come from?" he asked with the softest, coolest of tones that I thought impossible for a boy so young. Belying the utter naiveté of the question was manner that suggested inscrutably deep experience – wisdom albeit perverse and disjointed. And as he looked upon me with eyes acutely focused it seemed as if he already knew the answer.
"Dream?" I leaned forward, toward him – bare, gnarled branches rattled about the open-air confine of the courtyard. "Just what sort of dreams?" I prodded inquisitively if just to unsettle the quiet, smug look his very demeanor conveyed. "Dreams are the stuff we think about," I added: "the things we wish about. Things, sometimes, we don't even know we're wishing."
"I don't wish anymore," he replied, leaning backward. "Tygra."
"Oh, I see." I copied his relaxed posture and asked: "You have it all, is that it?"
The gray skies rumbled with the blustery approach of a gathering storm.
"You, normal people, speak of dreams because you will never attain what I have achieved." The language was forced; its dry formalism suggested it was translated from an arcane idiom. "Soon I will be with my fellows again, forever, eternally."
"Attain – is that your power, Uncanny WileyKat?" I asked half-heartedly but I received no reply for at that moment he slumped and fell onto my lap fast asleep.
I carried him to his room and secured him to his bed. I wrapped him with his guilt for it was shaping up to be a cool night. Certain the situation was amiss and certain, too, that I would never be told explicitly what was wrong, I perused the chamber's sparse contents to quiet the uneasy machinations of my upset mind. The fright that overwhelmed me instead was – and continued to be – indescribable. I discovered a new pair of claw-gloves: its black, leathery hide worn through by active use, its blades acutely sharp. I discovered yellow uniforms as equally tattered and disheveled as the talon-clad gloves. And I also discovered the secret of WileyKat's prolonged slumber: he had stolen bottles of sleeping pills all but one of which was thoroughly exhausted.
Aghast and disturbed by the boy's midnight transgressions, I gathered my nerves and resolved my determination. I had had enough and one way or another I was determined to bring him back from the brink. I gathered the evidence and removed it from his room to my office. I did not destroy it; I kept it for the express purposes of confronting him with it as soon as he awoke.
That night, alone in my room, I dreamt of the queerest sorts of things. I saw the placid, tranquil locale transform as it had been once many, innumerable ages ago. I saw the city, its tunnels and edifices restored from oblivion to splendor and its people. I dwelt among the denizens aware of an indefinable sense of dread for although I was human I was not so.
I awoke with a start and impulsively left the bed. I turned to the window – the skies were moonless and eerily painted with stars. Standing there, trying to catch my breath, I heard the clear and distinct sounds of items falling. Alarmed, I turned on the lights and saw to my horror that my bedroom door had been breached, my office had been vandalized. My belongings had been torn, my works had been destroyed – the accursed picture-books shredded – but of WileyKat's belongings I found no trace. And then I screamed aloud for I remembered that among the evidence I confiscated from the boy's room was a single bottle half-full of sleeping pills.
I rushed to his chamber – the padlock had been smashed, its mangled portions had been the very objects I had heard fall. Scratches, deep and surgical, were carved into the doorway – I had seen the very like in my own bedroom. Within, the clawed-gloves lay neatly folded atop his chest, the empty bottle next to his head. But he was dead, dead and strapped to the bed exactly as I had left him.