Eyesight is deceitful. With these Twins D might have to gauge his eyes out to be able to see the truth.

Foreword: Another Pet Shop of Horrors. I know… I'm obsessive, but at least I'm consistent. This one is blameless. Well, not really, but I can't drop the guilt on anyone's lap other than mine.
Warning: 1) the T rating is here for a reason but so are you, and the title does mention horror. 2) I'm aware Matsuri Akino is the rightful owner of this puppy, this is meant as homage. Enjoy.

Pet Shop of Horrors

Deceptive

"Anything with scales counts as a fish." Malayan Proverb

"All around the mulberry bush,
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey stopped to scratch his nose
Pop! goes the weasel." Anonymous nursery rhyme.

Twin drops separated at birth, that's a sorry cliché if you've ever heard one. But the reason some phrases become clichés is because they are often true. In the Rüzgârin sister's case that was eerily so.

One couldn't think about Tab –Tabitha- without Hab –Habibi- or the other way around. That one had decided to come to the world with two bodies. That might seem wasteful, but souls work in mysterious ways and efficiency is not part of that equation.

Physically there was no way of telling them apart, not even their mother could. In all fairness, the women barely had a chance to know them. She was hit by a bus when the girls turned one. It might have been an accident.

Their father was always away and the coming of the twins had given him no reason to change that. He had married his high school sweetheart to spite his overbearing mother and the sole act of rebellion of his life had backfired. The sweet little wallpaper flower he'd married turned into a pathologically jealous bitch that dug her claws hard in a man who was already tired of having a dominant woman in his life. Still, the twins' father was too stubborn to admit defeat –he had inherited that from the mother he hated- so the man had been trapped for seven years in an unhappy marriage by the time the twins were born. Giving him an heir was the last desperate attempt of his wife to tie him down. But when instead of the promised heir, two defective girls were born; the man saw no reason to change his habits. And hence, he had seen the twins just a couple of times when his plane had crashed.

The twins didn't notice any difference when they became orphans. They were being raised by their elderly grandmother. Not even in her youth had Madame Rüzgârin been mother material and time had done nothing to change that. When she was raising her only child she had been distant; now she was unapproachable, good thing the girls didn't seem to be in want of a mom.

From the very beginning Tab and Hab had only needed each other. They were spit out by their cursing mother in such a tangle that they had been thought to be siamese. That hadn't been the case, they were almost perfect. Their parents were recovering from the lie an eager young doctor had cried out before fainting when the real blow had fallen. The girls were blind. While the eminence, that had been deemed the only one worthy of attending the delivery of a Rüzgârin baby, was trying to cover the faux pas of one of the toady residents in his retinue and sooth the susceptibilities of the son of one of the greatest contributors to the hospital's funds; the pediatrician, who was too young to be an eminence but was a competent physician, had examined the girls and discovered they had no eyeballs whatsoever.

Their mother was still getting use to the idea when they went and gave her the final rejection: they wouldn't suckle from her. You might think it's impossible to feel unwanted by two pieces of meat barely one day old. You'd be wrong. The message was loud and clear we don't need or want you. So by the time the woman was run by the bus all that was dragged for a couple of blocks, was a shell that'd been empty for almost a year. Nobody believed the driver that he hadn't seen the woman pushing the stroller –which miraculously survived the accident intact. The doubts were justified since the accident had occurred in broad daylight. But anyone who knew the twins' mom could have said that since her daughters were born, the woman had been almost invisible.

Nevertheless, we shouldn't judge the Rüzgârin sisters too harshly. The destruction of their father's hopes and the rejection of their mother hadn't been an act of conscious cruelty. It was just the way they were made. Together they made something perfect and whole. The only thing they could not face was been separated. That's why they had been born without eyes, the outside world had little to offer compared to the wonders of their inner world. That's also why they had refused their mother's breast. It wasn't personal, they were almost self-sufficient. Almost is the key word here. They had been starving till a crafty nurse came up with a way of bottle-feeding them simultaneously. They learnt to take in what they needed from the outside world, gorging while holding hands and feet.

There's no doubt that the nurse was crafty and smarter than the bunch of doctors that had come to try to decipher the twins. She had further improved their life by suggesting they were kept in a single cradle. And they grew stronger and stronger, sleeping in a bundle in which you couldn't distinguish whose extremity belonged to whom. The girls felt no need to figure that out until the day their mother died.

Probably from her lack of experience in the matter, Madame Rüzgârin felt such closeness was not healthy. So she had picked up Hab and taken her to what had been her father's cradle. The girls wailed in stereo non-stop for the next eight hours.

Rezza Rüzgârin was a strong-headed woman that had survived through a couple of wars and two loveless marriages. She wasn't going to let those defective rugrats dictate what she could or couldn't do in her home. She would have kept then apart till they had died crying out if she hadn't broken her hip after menacing the girls with throwing them out the window if they kept wailing like that.

It was a bad break, even with nails and bolts she could never hope to walk again. The terrified doctors stalled as much as they could but in the end they delivered the bad news and sent Rezza home. She wasn't one to cave in even in that situation. Stubbornness ran in the genes. But after three days of crying and bad mojo, she was ready to reconsider. A cook had lost three teeth after spitting on the babies bottles cursing the little rats for refusing to eat. The chauffer had driven the Mercedes into the pool and nearly drowned after telling the maid -with whom he cheated his wife- that someone ought to drown the annoying kids in a bucket. What had tilted the scale as far as Rezza was concerned, was that one of the maids had gone missing.

That maid was not only an unrepentant adulter, she was also a cold-hearted bitch who had left two babies freezing in their stroller so she could go fornicate with the chauffer behind the bushes. If the butler hadn't found them, the girls might have died. Anyway, before the search party Rezza had organized as soon as she came back from the hospital could find the maid almost dead cold, locked inside the meat freezer which was a memory of the days when Madame Rüzgârin still received company; Rezza had given up. She couldn't admit this to anyone, not even to herself, so she came up with a compromise solution that left everybody unhappy.

The Twins were the ones responsible for everything that had happened. They were the ones who had bedridden her. She knew this with her innermost heart, which she had inherited from a gipsy relative she never mentioned. And, since they liked best to be left alone, she was going to let the little pest keep her company. Of course that meant she had to put up with them, she would cope as long as the Twins couldn't.

It had been into the midst of this Cold War that the first nanny had arrived. She was a seasoned soldier in the rearing up war, so it only took her two days to turn her tail and flee from that mad house. That had been the precise moment the nanny counterdance had begun.


Like most children, the Twins grew up fast the first few years. They left behind clothes, shoes and useless caretakers. But when they reached the age of eight, they seemed to stop. It was odd and it wasn't, looking at a 4'43'' adult was unsettling, especially since she had four empty eyes that probed you from two faces. But somehow that seemed about right. That's what they were supposed to be. As an eerie twosome they could still be swallowed. Had they merged into one they would have been horrifying.

Hab had started talking with whole sentences and proper pronunciation when she was two. Her fluty voice explaining complex thoughts and concepts that were light years beyond her age, was like hearing ghoul's nails on a blackboard. Tab was nearly mute; she only commented or highlighted what her sister said, usually with monosyllables, and yet, she hummed and singed in perfect key. Tab devoured books one after another until her little fingertips turned into spatulas. Hab had never learnt to read but she could sculpt what her hands told her about the world her blind eyes couldn't see. They filled each other's holes like a jigsaw puzzle. The only thing they both did was play the piano. And even that they did after their own fashion. Tab was the right hand and Hab was the left, they used the spares to hold each other while playing.

The idea of teaching them Braille had come from an entrepreneuring nanny that had actually stayed for a whole month back when the girls were three and a half. She had thought they were older and didn't attended school because of their "especial needs". And she had offered to teach both of them to read. Hab had declined politely saying only her sister needed to learn. When the nanny had tried to impose her viewpoints forcibly, a chandelier fell on her head.

Even with Rezza's resilience those two were too much to handle, the poor woman had picked up the bottle after the Twin's fourth birthday party. Back then, Madame Rüzgârin was still trying to convince herself (and the few social contacts she still cared for) that things could be normal. Every year on the Twin's birthday she had filled the house with rent-a-day playmates, mostly the children of the employees from her second husband's factory. The day the Twins turned four, the illusion of normalcy seemed to be working. That is, until a little brute had started picking on Tab. Hab had tried reasoning with the foul child, but that requires that both parties are actually capable of reason. The little brute lacked that ability and, by the end of the day, he was also missing an eye. He had stumbled on the same branch he had used to hit Hab.

Of course the Twins were not to blame -all the grownups agreed on that. It had been a sad accident, but from that day on, no kid could be persuaded to come back to play. The Twins didn't seem to mind. They did preferred solitude, or rather being alone together. That's why forcing them to live in Rezza's room had been a stroke of genius. They deeply resented the situation. But what little satisfaction Madame Rüzgârin could have gotten out of it was dampened by the fact she was forced to live with them in close quarters. The rest of the dampening came courtesy of six years old Cognac.

She had feared for her liver, oddly enough her liver held; what was killing her was a kidney condition. Drowning in your own filth does nothing for a person's good spirits. As the sickness progressed Rezza Rüzgârin turned more and more bitter.

One evening at dinner, Madame Rüzgârin had stopped trying to eat and picked up the meat knife from her tray, her own smell nauseated her. While she held it to the light of her bed lamp, turning it with her pudgy fingers and trying to find the spot she thought she had seen, a thought came to her head. Tab and Hab dropped their spoons in unison and decided it was time to leave.

The Twins didn't need the light so they waited until Rezza had started snoring the bedtime booze. They didn't need to pack either, all that they wanted they took with them. They didn't leave a note; they saw no reason to do that, they knew they weren't going to be missed. So they left the house without a backwards glance though they had nowhere else to go. That took care of itself when a truck almost ran them over.

The truck had skid and hit a gas station blowing up half a block. It was a small block, filled with warehouse, so there were barely no human casualties. Still, the property damages were enough to bring the firesquad . But, by the time the firemen arrived, the Twins had already been spotted by the first officer on the scene. He was a homicide detective and had been there following the trail of a bank robber who had upgraded to murdered by killing a cashier in his latest job. The guy had rushed to try to save the truck driver and had noticed the girls because he was attuned to the bizarre. His name was Leon Orcot.


"Why me? I'm with homicides and I already have to take care of my little bro," protested Leo. No good action goes unpunished. He had gotten involved trying to save a guy's life. There was still not way of knowing if the truck driver was going to make it and he had got stuck with two eerie looking kids, who -in all probability- had caused the accident in the first place.

"At this hour we can't contact the child protection services and they can't stay in the precinct." Even if they could the Chief wouldn't want them to. Those kids gave him the creeps and he had been a cop in Chinatown for thirty years.

"Why not Jill? She's a girl… sort of."

"What do you mean with "sort of", Orcot? I'm a girl. And why should being female matter?" said Jill throwing Leo a warning look that said: you'd better think carefully before you answer.

Leo, as usual, missed the look and, scratching his chin, he said: "Uh… you know… you are like programmed for that. And you, being such a big tomboy, should grab at the chance of having some practice."

Jill did, kick box practice. But before she could kick Leo's butt, the chief yelled and ordered her to go back to filing the reports that were pilling up in her desk. He then ordered Leon to leave.


When Leo had gone to pick up Chris from D's he wasn't alone, the Twins were with him. He could have dealt with the ride to Chinatown if they had been completely silent, but one of them was humming and whispering a punch line that sounded awfully like "right back at you" to the tune of Pop said the Weasel. The other just tapped her fingers and Leo could have sworn she was watching him from her vacated sockets.

"Where have you been? It's awfully late. I had to sent Chris to bed. He was so worried. May I remind you that my shop is not a daycare center. If you intend to raise this child properly, you have to learn to be more responsible..."

It was bad enough that he had an ambiguous relationship with the owner of a Pet Shop that was almost certainly the cover of all sort of illegal activities, but when D started acting like this Leo just didn't know how to feel about it. He blinked confuse and interrupted D's diatribe: "Uh…I… actually there are these two girls…"

Count D looked disgusted: "Detective, please spare me the tale of your…roof runs."

"No... It's not like that at all. They are still in the car."

D flinched in surprised horror and then pushed Leo towards the door: "Then you shouldn't keep them waiting."

"Is this where we are staying?" Hab's piccolo sang behind Leo's back.

"How did you get out? I left the child lock on." As soon as he said that the fender fell from his car. "What the…?"

"Detective! Don't curse in front of a lady." He was looking at Hab and Tab with his mismatched eyes. Then he said in the tone he reserved for his premium clientele: "Come in, please," as he shoved Leo out of the way.

Hab and Tab nodded gracefully and Hab said: "Thank you for receiving us in your…?"

"Pet Shop," said D finishing her sentence.

Hab smiled sweetly: "Of course, Pet Shop." The Twin's looked each other and giggled. That giggle made Leo want to run for the hills.

As an afterthought D remembered him: "You might as well stay too. It's almost dawn. You can sleep in the couch."

"No blankie?" Leo shouted, but D and the Twins were already gone.

Leo looked at his watch, quarter past three; he could still catch a couple of hours of sleep before having to go to work. To add injury to insult, Leo had to sleep on the carpet, T-chan was using the couch.

He was woken by the noise of breakfast being served. Chris was at the coffee table, laughing good-heartedly with the spooky pair and an assortment of pups. Leo was about to protest about having animals around while eating when D's coo-coo chimed eight o'clock. Christ! He was running late. He nodded a reluctant good morning at D, grabbed a muffin, messed up Chris' hair and ran out. He was out of Chinatown when it hit him. How on earth could a mute boy make himself understood by a couple of blind girls?


Pon-chan was usually very protective of Chris, some may even say jealous, but this time she kept her distance.

"Not as dumb as I thought you were, kiddo," T-chan sniggered.

"Don't worry, this people can seem weird but they are really swell," said Chris giving the Twins an encouraging smile.

Hab and Tab looked at the small crowd around the table and then at Chris: "People?"

"Yeah, is just like a family," said Chris with a big smile while reaching for the same cookie Tab wanted. He touched Tab's hand and blushed. He tried to pull it away but Tab held his hand and looked intently at his palm. Then she whispered in her sister's ear something about new souls in the Karma wheel.

Both girls laughed and Hab asked: "How old are you?"

He went purple and blurted: "Six."

The silence had gone on for a while when Pon-chan butted in: "Let's play hide and seek. You two can hide." 'Maybe we'll get lucky and you'll get lost', the little badger thought.

T-chan, who -like any self-respecting Totetsu- couldn't be fooled by appearances, muttered shaking his head: "Nope, my first impression was right. That badger is dumb."

Hab and Tab stood up smiling sweetly: "It's not fair. We are newcomers. Let Chris play in our team."

Pon-chan couldn't think of a good reason to say no.

Chris, Tab and Hab ran in a quail line down the Pet Shop's endless hallways. Chris was between the Twins. How could Hab run like that without seen? Before he could figure it out, a wall was coming at them with terrifying speed. Chris could only shut his eyes close, push Habibi out of harm's way and brace himself for the impact. The girls grabbed him by his t-shirt and made him jump. They had somehow missed the wall. And they were someplace dark, warm and a bit smelly, like the inside of a pocket. Chris opened his eyes and asked: "Where are we?"

"Inside," answered Hab. He wanted to ask some more but Tab put a finger over his lips. She began humming. Chris knew the song but couldn't remember the name. He felt sleepy and blacked out lulled by the girl's voice.

When he woke up they were out in the hallway, Hab explained to him it was time to go back. They walked leasurely and still made it in time to the safe point. There was no sign of Pon-chan or T-chan. They didn't appear until tea time. Pon-chan's white dress was covered in mud and her hair was a rat's nest.

"What happened?" Chris asked.

Pon-chan glared resentfully at the Twins but just said: "We got lost," before going for her biscuits and dipping them in her milk. From then on, she was very careful of staying out of the Twin's way.


In the Rüzgârin manor the Twin's absence had been noticed and received with a certain amount of relief. Until someone felt compelled to point out they should probably call the police. I mean, the kids where Madame's heirs and they were underaged. But no one dared do it without their Mistress' compliance. And that meant they needed to wake her up.

Rezza was not an early bird and her hangovers were legendary, so the servants draw sticks among the lowest ranks and a propitiatory lamb was chosen. After Madame Rüzgârin had finished picking her teeth on the poor sap; she said there was no need to involve the police. They had to think of the family's good name. She said she would call an old friend.

The friend was actually a former lover. She had started seeing him when her first marriage took a turn for the worst. Her husband had the nasty habit of raising his hand at her. The friend had been initially employed to take care of that. Madame had been interested in more than a professional relationship. At first he had refused her advances, but it turns out that he was just zealous. He lived by his own coda, but when the job was done, he felt happy to oblige. They found out they were both predators and sort of soulmates, what little soul they had. They kept it up while Rezza married her second. The friend had cleared the field when she got pregnant of the boy she needed to secure her position as Mistress of the household.

He was old and had retired, but his boy, the pride and joy of his old age, would be happy to take the job. He was even willing to give her a discount price for old times sake. They were a continent away so it would take his boy a day to get there, and he needed to rest so make that two. Rezza would wait, you can't rush the Reaper. He always arrives on the dot.


"So there's no missing child report which fits the girl's description?" Leo was at the phone, tappig his fingers impatiently while the voice on the other side of the line confirmed what it had just said.

Either no one had noticed or the girls were being abandoned purposefully, seeing them you couldn't very well blame the family. Even the government seemed to agree. After a brief interview with the social worker the woman remembered a prior appointment. She left saying that since the girls seemed so well adjusted to the Pet Shop they could stay there for the time being. Then she had thought that the little horrors fitted right into that Chinaman's freak show. The woman couldn't wait to run to her car. Her nerves had been in such a mess she had driven it right into a hydrant.

The only one who was enjoying Tab and Hab's company was Chris. And Leo was beginning to wonder if D was a good influence and if his little brother actually needed to attend a special school. What was really odd was that the Twins were enjoying Chris' company too. Pon-chan was moody and T-chan was having a ball.


Hab was pummeling Chris on the chessboard. He had trouble understanding the rules: "Is that allowed Tab?"

The Twins loved that he could tell them apart, still Tab had a deeply ingrained sense of fairness, so she nodded while her sister said: "Check mate."

Chris looked at the board, down-hearted, trying to figure out how he had managed to lose in two movements.

Tab tugged at her sister's sleeve and Hab sighed: "How about we play checkers?"

Chris lighted up and they played, they even let him win a couple of games just to see him smile.

After lunch, they were sent out to buy Chinese bellflower, Silver Needles and Lung Chi tea. Hab was explaining Chris how different brands of tea were made from the same plant with different processing when Tab stopped cold.

Hab looked at her sister, she sniffed and whispered: "Mixed blood."

Tab nodded.

"What?" Chris was looking inquiringly at them.

A car stopped nearby and a man in black clothes and dark glasses descended. There was nothing they could do with the boy around. He could get hurt, their power was a loose canon.

Chris wasn't stupid, he felt the danger coming from the guy too, so when Hab cried out: "Run!" He did.

They ran as fast as they could but they ended up in a dead ally. The steps of the hitman sounded behind them. There was no time for kindness, Tab banged Chris' head against a dumpster and Hab shoved him through it and hid him under the garbage. Then the Twins went inside the brick wall holding hands.

"Where are those brats?" the man in black growled under his breath.

Shrilly laughter came from the walls: "So she has sent forth a hunter and now you have to bring her back our heart? There's no point in pleading for mercy, is there? Mixed bloods feel no compassion."

The voice came from the left but the song was coming from the right. He stood there looking from one side to the other, pointing his gun at thin air. A trash can's lid fell down and the man fired his gun at it. While he was distracted, the Twins jumped out from the wall and joined hands through the man's neck. They went solid and the man hit the floor with a loud tud, gasping for the air his crushed throat could not longer let in. While the hitman was lying on the floor, the Twins pulled out their claws with a sinister smile on their faces. When they began feeding, the man didn't even have a chance to scream.

Yet Rezza could swear she had heard him. She knew he had failed and that he was dead. For a moment she feared what her old friend might do to her when he found out. Then she laughed, thinking that she was kidding herself. She was going to be dead way before the man could get on a plane. She heard them singing: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" while she lost her grip on the world.


D and Leo found Chris underneath a heap of banana peels, eggshells and assorted garbage. He was blessedly unconscious, lying meters away from what could have once been human remains and was now a bloody mass not even a mother would recognize.

Leo had lied to his brother and told him the Twins had gone home and were fine. Who knows? It might not have been a lie at all. And, until the CSI lab said otherwise, he was sticking to that story. Only prob was that Chris wasn't buying. Leo had taken him to the movies and back at the apartment he bought pizza and ice-cream. All the while the kid had tried to appear calmed, but, as soon as he thought Leon had fallen asleep, he had started crying, pressing his face to his pillow so as not to make a sound. Leo was pretending too, he wasn't asleep. Actually, he passed a sleepless night, impotently listening to his little brother crying, with his hands balled up in fists, right until his knuckles turned white.


The next night D was woken up by a knock on his door. He let them in smiling: "So you came back."

Hab let out a bitter laugh: "Your zoo is as good as any other, we have nowhere else to go."

"Oh, but Miss Rüzgârin, you have it all wrong."

"So you know."

"Nights can be long, sometimes I read the obituaries."

"Shall we leave?" Hab stood up but Tab remained sited.

"Your sister knows, Habibi, that this is not a zoo. It has never been. I've aspired to make it a safe haven and, with a little good will, it can become a home."

If Hab had tears, she would have cried. The Twins followed him down the hallways until they reached a door. They entered a barren landscape of gold and white, mounts of red-golden hair were raising from the sand. Twosomes, threesomes and even some quintuplets rised up to salute them; their voices carried by the gale force wind. They were kin, sib. The Twins were home.


Leo looked carefully over his shoulder towards the garden where Chris was playing with Pon-chan and T-chan. Who knows what D had told him to calm him down. But it had worked and Leo didn't want to mess it up, so he said to D in voice barely above a whisper: "There's no trace of them. The… uh… leftovers were the tug's. And their grandma is dead; forensics says that she died from natural causes. The old lady's corpse was in a fairly advanced state of decomposition, though the servants swear they had just seen her yesterday morning. The chief suspects that they hid the old lady's dead and tried to get rid of the kids so they could cash in on the inheritance. There's no way of proving it, but I sort of agree with him. When that kind of dough is involved, people are willing to do all sorts of nasty stuff. Still, who puts a hit on an eight year old?"

"There are some very wicked people out there, Detective." D shrugged and poured him some more tea.

Leo had found out that right after leaving the police academy, but that was not something he liked to dwell in. He looked away from D's piercing eyes and noticed a leathery snout coming out from the soft soil under the begonias. To change the subject he said: "You have a mole problem, D."

"Those are not moles, Detective, those are very rare carnivorous marsupials," D neglected to say they were an endangered species. Even in his current state, Leo wouldn't pass on a chance for closing his shop. Poor Detective Orcot had a single-track mind.

"Well, they sure look like regular moles to me," Leo pointed out stubbornly. And, as if to prove him wrong, the thing came out in plain sunlight, grabbed a lizard from the garden's wall and started munching on it while the creature still kicked.

No, wait, I have it. I do have someone to blame for this story: Mishima's "Confessions of a Mask" the whole growing up with a dying granny in a single room gave me the creeps. Hope it does the same for you.
Silver Needles is a pricy Chinese white tea and Lung Chi is a green tea which were once considered fit for the Imperial family. They are made after a lengthy manual process from the first blooms of the tea plant in the Fujian and Zhejiang region in China. They are especially good for taking them with desserts and I think those would be D's favorites.
I th
ink Rezza has dingo blood. Oh, and the girls surname is Turkish and means wind force. And, just in case you wonder what marsupial is D holding in his bag: they are marsupial moles. These odd Australian desert marsupials are basically indistinguishable from placental moles from the outside and are often quoted as an example of convergent evolution. But by now you should know better than to let that deceive you. They are not even the same species. They are also endangered; guess that's where the jinx thing comes from (unlucky becomes something that gives bad luck, endangered becomes dangerous) so look it up in UNEP WCMC, awareness may eventually lead to action.

Mercurial Weather.
Curses or Comments? Critic helps improve ppl, and I do believe I'm not hopeless