My dearest Linette,
You've always teased me for my curiosity. "Wren," you'd say, "you'll drown in questions one day." But it wasn't water that nearly took me—it was the silence. The silence of the man downstairs.
I'd grown accustomed to his nightly ritual: the high, fluting whistle at 9:30 sharp, the jingle of cat bells swarming beneath my window like wind chimes in a storm. Then nothing. Just the creak of his sash lifting, the soft thuds of paws landing on hardwood. Night after night, this symphony played—until it didn't.
The absence was worse than the noise.
At first, I relished it. No yowling, no reek of patchouli and clove cigarettes seeping through the floorboards. But by the third night, the quiet curdled into something thick and sour. A smell crept up—not the old man's herbal musk, but something metallic, like wet pennies left in a dish.
I tried to ignore it. I buried myself in equations, in the scratch of pen on paper. But my mind kept circling back to him: the way his beard had hung in frayed ropes, the way his cats had been described to me—gray, all gray, like ashes after a fire.
Then, the mewing began.
Not the usual chorus. This was different—a single, plaintive cry, then another, then a dozen. Not outside. Not anywhere real. Inside the walls, maybe. Or inside my head.
I went to the window. The alley below was empty. No cats. No man. Just the moon, pale as a pill on a tongue.
That's when I saw the door.
It hadn't been there before, I was sure of it. Wedged between Apartment 4 and 5, a narrow slab of warped oak, no handle, just a keyhole black as a pupil. The wood was blistered, as if something had pressed against it from the other side.
Linette, you know I couldn't resist.
The man's actual door was unlocked. Inside, the air was a living thing—hot, furred with dander. My eyes watered instantly. The hallway stretched too far, the walls breathing in and out like ribs. And at the end, a foot. Bare. Toenails yellow as old piano keys.
"Hello?" My voice was a moth batting against glass.
The foot twitched.
A sound answered—not from the room, but from behind me. A purr, low and wet, vibrating in my molars. I turned.
The cats were there. Dozens. Gray as storm clouds, gray as the man's beard had been. They wove between my ankles, their tails lashing like fuse wires. Their eyes—
Linette, their eyes were wrong. Too wide. Too knowing.
The foot tapped. "Come... inside..."
The voice wasn't human. It was the sound of a record played backward, of a throat learning to shape words around a tongue that wasn't there.
I stepped forward.
The room was a nest of wires—copper veins ripped from walls, braided into a cradle. And in it, the man. Or what had been the man. His skin was parchment, his mouth slack where a cable burrowed into his throat. His eyes rolled toward me, glassy but awake. Awake in a way nothing should be.
Beside him, the creature.
It was a cat, but not. Larger. Its fur the same gray, but its ribs visible beneath, pulsing like bellows. Wires fed into its spine, branching into the ceiling, the floor, the spaces between.
The man's jaw unhinged. A sound poured out—not a scream, but a purr, deep enough to shake my bones. The cats echoed it, a hundred throats humming in unison.
I ran. Or tried to. The cats were a tide, tripping me, their claws catching in my pajamas. The man—no, the thing wearing the man—lurched up. His limbs bent wrong, folding like a spider's.
The last thing I remember is the wire. Cold. Slipping into my ear like a whisper.
They found me screaming in the alley. The EMTs said I'd broken into an abandoned apartment, that the old man had moved out weeks ago. They said the cats were strays. That the wires were just… wires.
But Linette, my hair smells like burnt copper. My dreams are full of purring. And sometimes, when I wake, my mouth tastes like cigarettes.
I think I understand now. The man didn't leave. He's still downstairs. And he's teaching me how to whistle.
Yours, always,
Wren