Chapter 8: "Disturbed"

Time seemed to slow down.

Something in Kitties brain said, "This is not real, this is too disturbing to be real."

Something else in her brain countered "Disturbing? Is that really the word you're going to use her? 'Disturbing?' Not 'Horrifying', not 'Tragic', not 'Sick?' But, 'disturbing?' Because the worst part of this is that 'the position or arrangement of the room has been altered by these inconvenient bodies and as such upset the tranquility of the space?"

Then another thing in her brain admonished, "Don't be so damn literal!" and "Is that really the most pertinent element to be criticising right now, the TERM you're using to interperate the situation?"

Then another thing, entirely outside her brain hit her.

The external time-line went something more like this:

Katheryn pride walked in on the 'disturbing' scene of a man and a woman eviscerated, mutilated and garnished upon a love-seat. The most 'disturbing' aspect of this was that both individuals seemed to be entirely alive. Their heads were tilted back and upside down where they'd been slung over the furniture. Their eyes were wide, mouths open, and they were making a sort of rasping/hoarse noise as though they were trying to scream but couldn't seem to get enough air-pressure through their throats (this was probably due to the fact that their stomachs and part of their chests were ripped open, their intestines and other organs strung out to the chandelier above them, draped like some sort of morbid garlands).

Kitty halted, surveying the scene, she couldn't seem to speak and she was frantically trying to gather and organize her thoughts, fighting off paralyzing horror with deconstruction when she heard something move behind her.

Instinctively she phased, whoever her assailant was she or he would touch nothing but air, or so her instincts told her.

Wham!

She fell to... or rather through, the floor and heard a howl of shock and pain that wasn't hers and wasn't entirely human either.

She managed to orient her bearings just in time to stop herself from falling through the basement floor as well. She phased in, trying to breath both heavily and quietly at the same time, listening for any sound of...

She wasn't alone. Someone or something had fallen into the basement with her, she was sure of it, she could hear it breathing. A rattling noise gathered behind her and she turned a second too late to see it, but she distinctly heard it scuttling upstairs.

... upstairs... the people, rather the victims were still up there.

She had to call an ambulance, she had to do something or they were going to die like that, or maybe worse, they were going to get stuck like that. Those poor norman rockwanabes with their white track home and their two point five ki...

"Oh my god." she said alloud. And any thought of fear or disorientation or 'disturbing' scenes immediately vanished from conscious thought. The children were probably still here, upstairs, and if it had... if they were...

Kitty shut her eyes, feeling anxiety, and desperation, and horror... and... rage.

She turned to face upward, crouched on the basement floor like a cat, and leapt. Altering her phase quickly so she was less dense than oxygen, she shot upward through the basement, through the first floor ceiling and into the hallway of the second story.

She shifted her density quickly, feeling a bit of a g-force effect, but kept her head, landing cat-like on the carpeted floor and listening intently.

For a minute all was quiet, then she heard someone very small, crying.

She turned and ran through the wall and found herself in a small room where two children sat in a corner near a twin bed with a wooden unicorn-shaped frame. The couples' daughter (who looked to be about seven years old, had short black hair and wore a baseball-uniform styled pajama-outfit) was holding her younger brother trying to sooth him. The boy was about four and had sandy brown hair, he wore a one-piece pajama suit with a unicorn on the front.

Both children were stuck in the corner. Covered in a strange glowing white glueish sludge that covered their feet up to their shoulders.

The girl looked up at Kitty and her red/swollen eyes told that they had cried out long ago.

Kitty put a finger to her lips to keep the girl from yelling in shock. She moved to the children cautiously, listening around her and making as little sound as possible. When she reached them, she knelt down, reached out hesitantly and tried to move the adhesive material surrounding them, but her unphased hand stuck to it.

Katheryn roled her eyes at herself and phased her hand. "Ouch!"

There was a bright spark as the white strands fell away from the children's shoulders. She looked down at her hand resisting the urge to suck her fingers, there were clear burn marks. She looked at the children afraid she might have hurt them, but they seemed completely uneffected. Well, that was something.

The boy had stopped crying. That was something else.

The girl pointed, eyes wide, over Kitties shoulder. She started to mouth the words "Behind you!" but only got as far as "Behi..." before something hit Kitty on the right and knocked her like a rag doll up against the wall to her left.

She was dazed for a moment as she slumpt back toward the ground, but she got a glimpse of what had hit her.

It was crouched over, clearly too tall for the ceiling. It had a humanoid body, but the limbs were elongated and the legs bent backward. It was hard to see in detail as it seemed to be emitting a dark cloud of smoke around itself, and what she could see of it was semi-translucent. The skin was pale white, the mouth seemed to be too large for the jaw and hung down as though it were unhinged, barring rows of oddly flexible teeth that moved like sea anemones.

But the eyes were the most disturbing element of it's visage. They were human. Utterly human. They looked compassionate, caring, inviting. They were not translucent at all and if she hadn't known better she'd have thought they looked regretful.

It was the eyes that made her hessitate, just long enough for the creature to raise it's elongated arm and slash down at the girl, cutting her hard accross the shoulder.

The girl screamed. And kitty moved.

It seemed as though contact with her in phased form hurt this creature as much as her, almost like their molecules were opposingly polarized but on opposite spectrum's which made them both intangible to regular matter. She contemplated leaping through it to see what would happen and then decided on one better..

The creature raised it's arm again, it's mouth learing, it's eyes sorrowful, and kitty lept to the wall, grabbing the unicorn-twin bed.

She phased and shoved the bed forward into the creature.

There was a deafening explosion, half the bed was gone. Kitty turned in the force of the blast, not looking back. She jumped for the children, phasing through their bindings which sparked and seared her skin. She grabbed one in each arm and spun with them through the wall of the second story, away from the explosion, the horror, and the cries of pain, out into open air.