8 Welcome Home
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
The ticking of a clock reverberated throughout the house. Occasionally, a subtle sound like meat being tenderized comes out from a dark corner of the house. It seemed like nothing would ever come to end this ambience.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
A key slid into the door lock.
“I'm home, dad.”
Click.
The door shut echoed. The silence returns and the clock ticking settles in.
Hikaru stands frozen, waiting for a response.
'He's gone off again' he thought.
Soon enough, he sees a letter written by his dad stuck to the fridge. A little fork and knife magnets on the top corners held it.
'Will be back late. Don't worry about me! I got your dinner! Your favorite.'
He opens the fridge. Sure enough, there's a take-away box sitting in the center. It looks like a miniature farmhouse with white fences around it.
He closed the fridge and as if on cue,
“MeowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwWWW!”
A cat eerily calls out.
'Neko?'
That was his cat Neko.
'That's strange…' he thought.
He had never heard of any cats that meowed for that long and that loud. Neko certainly never did that before.
'Sounded like he's in the bedroom.'
The stairs he was familiar with suddenly looked ominous with all the shadows as there was no window by the staircase and the sun was setting. The shadow themselves being an ordinary thing. It was just that he suddenly had a distinct impression of the stairs.
Hikaru had a strange feeling that he's never felt before, but he shook it off as wariness born from irrational fear caused by a creepy cat sound.
He never heard the cat call out again while he walked up the stairs.
'Maybe Neko is being squashed underneath something he tipped over.'
It surprised him when he opened the door. Neko can't be seen and nothing seems out of place.
A bizarre feeling assaulted his chest.
Bang!
Something smacked against the wardrobe door from the inside. Unable to imagine why Neko would do that, his adrenaline levels skyrocket.
He went over the wardrobe and slid it open.
His eyes snapped open as wide as saucers. His cat looked mangled as if a car ran it over. The skin on its face was falling off like a piece of skinned ham. The skin around the eyes hung down revealing a pink flap. It looked like a corpse.
“Hiss”
*Swoosh*
He ducked just in time to avoid the lunge. It smacked into the wall behind him, and he ran towards the stairs.
He looked back while he ran down the stairs and saw the mangled cat at the door in a pounce position. Its hair stood up spiky.
He pulled onto the handrail on his right and leapt over the stairs.
The rabid feline soared through the air and smashed into the wall at the bottom of the stairs but like a zombie, the impact didn't bother it.
Seeing this, he knew he wouldn't be able to outrun it. There was only one thing he could do.
Kill it.
He dashed towards the kitchen. As he slid on the kitchen tiles, he caught a knife from a wooden block on the kitchen bench and did a 180 spin as he came to a stop.
By the end of his spin, he had entered a lower-level Kendo posture called Gedan. He had his left foot slightly behind the right. Instead of a practice sword, he held the knife in front of the waist and pointed downwards.
His mutilated cat walked up to him warily noticing that the prey wasn't trying to flee but was in battle mode.
It paused a few meters from his feet and entered its lunge mode.
'It can reach me from there without doing a run-up?' He thought as a sweat bead rolled down his temple.
Hikaru knew he wasn't as fast as the cat, so he wouldn't survive a long battle. His only shot is to end it in one move.
Thinking that he'll probably be mauled to death by his abomination of a cat if he misses, he swallowed loudly.
He held his knife steady at 75 cm above the floor. Gedan left his entire upper body exposed, making the lunge attack the most enticing.
He had effectively made himself bait like flesh dangled on a cotton string.
Sure enough, it lunged at him.
Before the cat connected with him at the height of its jump, he simply pointed the knife at the center of the cat's chest.
The cat's momentum delivered the knife into its chest cavity, piercing through the heart like butter.
The cat hung limp at the end of the knife which was raised at a 30-degree angle. Now, it truly looked like roadkill.
'Hmmm, what caused this…' Hikaru thought as he looked for an injection site or portal of entry in which a drug or microorganism could have entered.
“Meoooooooooow!'
The mangled corpse came back to life as if a jolt of electricity went through it, and it started thrashing.
'What! It's still alive!'
He quickly recovered as he had expected that stabbing in the heart might not kill it. It was not an ordinary cat after all.
There are two sure kill methods, the heart, and the brain.
A dark look came over his eyes. He let go of the knife and the cat started falling in mid-air. He pulled out another knife from the block in one hand and caught the cat's head with another.
Then he swung in one smooth motion across its neckline. It was decapitated.
In the instant he cleaved its head, he saw something bulging from its stomach. It retracted back inside before it burst out and flew towards his face.
He tried to take a swipe at the gray squid-like creature, but it was too late, his knife arm was still recoiling from the decapitation strike.
'Checkmate'.
He knew this feeling too well because he always won in chess. Now he's at the receiving end. The tentacles that were joined like a single blade pointing at him opened like an umbrella.
'Is it going to hurt?' the thought struck him.
Before he could think anything else, it clasped over his head like a gas mask.
Small gray tendrils spread out from the tentacles wrapped around his head and snaked underneath his eyeballs. It crawled on the optic nerve behind the eyes to the brain. The roots grew all over the brain, disabling his body.
Like a lifeless dummy, he dropped his knife and fell backwards.
Tendrils slithered into his nostrils, mouth, and ears. Its body disassembled into snakes that entered his orifices.
