Estimated reading time — 11 minutes

The scene was gruesome. As if I had walked not inside an apartment in Pune, but a Hollywood horror movie set. The plain white floor tiles were drenched in blood, and the peach walls streaked with red. Shards of broken mirror lay dispersed on the floor intermixed with round dull coins. The couch had deep, trailing scratch marks, revealing its spongy entrails.

A bunch of papers gathered near the decapitated top of the desk they seemed to have been originally sitting on. Utensils had left their usual places on the kitchen counter, and now spread disproportionately on the red tainted floor. The entire apartment was invaded by a tide of sunlight rushing past the gravely torn curtains which used to guard the large windows at the front of the drawing room.

I took a snap in my camera, capturing this vile essence inside the device. Treading on this blood-soaked floor almost felt sinful. But I had to in order to get to the first corpse. It belonged to a seemingly elderly man, with ragged stumps for hands and feet and dark crimson pits for eyes and mouth. Snap.

Moving forward, I presumed the next one belonged to a woman, judging by the build of the torso and hips. Because the head had been totally disfigured and nearly separated. The trachea and food-pipe protruded out from the gaping neck, as if the head had been violently ripped. Another snap.

A little further away, slumped by the drawing room windows, was the corpse of a teenage boy, clutching onto the torn parts of the navy blue curtains. His torso was sliced open in the middle, with his organs disgustingly disembowelled. I had to repeatedly swallow the bile regurgitating in the back of my mouth at the sight of tangled intestines and brown liver springing out. Still, I managed to take another click.

But that was not all. There was one more corpse left. Splayed in the far corner of the room was the body of an orange feline. It did not have any particular visible wounds, but black gooey blood oozed out of its abnormally wide open mouth. I could swear I saw the cat’s pupils constrict, but maybe it was some post-death phenomena.

I don’t know. All I knew was that I was to photograph this crime scene with a dead family. Surely the cops must’ve checked it for life. When I captured its image on my camera, I had an ominous chill run up my spine.

The stench of the bodies was so strong that the mask could barely hold it off. I had to excuse myself to the balcony to catch some fresh air. The balcony seemed to be the only part of the apartment to not have been affected. It was neat and spacious, allowing enough breeze to splatter across my face.

Two policemen stood on the other side of the ledge, supporting their backs against the low parapet. They looked like they had come here to chatter instead of investigating.

“The girl is either actually bonkers or putting up a pretence in order to avoid harsher punishment,” one of them uttered.

“Of course! Why else would someone standing in the middle of a massacre with a bloody cleaver in her hands make claims that ‘the cat did it’?”

“Yeah sure, it must’ve slaughtered the people wielding the cleaver in between its teeth, before handing it to the girl and puking to death in some corner of the room.”

The other cop chuckled at his companion’s remark. I didn’t like this casual, jolly attitude towards something this dreadful. Never had I ever come across a case this eerie in my career as a Crime Scene Investigator.

Shaking my head, I went back inside that hellhole to finish my job. Clicked several pictures of the aforementioned details, the SD card of the camera rotting with each image.

When I reached the bedroom, I discovered a particularly strange occurrence. A set of bloody paw-prints ran along the top half of one of the walls, right onto the rose ceiling overhead. I wondered if a cat could achieve something like this. After all, they are exceptional climbers. I snapped another picture of these marks.

Even after I had retired to my place, I couldn’t get the odious case out of my mind. I was hooked to it quite unusually than I ever am. Although I doubt my roommates noticed it. They hardly ever looked outside of their phones.

In spite of trying to watch a comic movie to lighten my mood, I couldn’t really focus on it. Something or the other always brought back the case to my mind.

I’m not sure when sleep took me over, because when I woke up, the movie was still going on in the mobile sitting on top of my chest.

I checked the time. It was 2:03. I never awoke at such a time naturally. But only this time, something had caused my peace to be disrupted. A shrill, distant mewing continuously pierced my eardrums.

It was greatly annoying. I knew one of my roommates living in the outer room liked to have animals over of all sorts. So I climbed out of my bed to go and tell him to send the cat out. My room was pitch dark, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust. That was odd, because I distinctly remembered leaving the lights on before I seemingly dozed off.

I realised why it was so; because the power was out. The switch still lied in the on position. I slid the latch on my door to open it and sprayed the corridor with the faint flashlight of my mobile phone.

Carefully stepping only in the illuminated portion of the floor, I navigated my way towards the outer room. There was an uncanny silence throughout, except for the irritating mewing that seemed to grow with every step of mine.

Just as I was about to enter, the mewing was at its loudest intensity. But when I stepped in, it suddenly disappeared. As if it hadn’t even existed. Only the uncanny silence seeped into my ears.

I turned my flashlight around for any signs of a cat or my roommate. But the guy was merely sprawled over on his cot, in a deep slumber. He usually left all the pets he had brought inside out of the apartment before bedtime. Maybe he forgot this time, or maybe the cat sneaked in.

I swerved the torchlight in every nook and cranny of the room, to spot the cat wherever it had hidden. But even after checking under the furniture, I was unsuccessful. Maybe it had fled upon sensing my approaching footsteps. A yawn left my mouth, drooping my eyelids.

I turned around and retreated back into my room. As I relaxed in my bed, I noticed that my battery was insanely low from playing the movie I had barely been able to watch. And unfortunately I had somehow forgotten to charge my power bank since the last usage.

Setting the phone aside, I closed my eyes, trying to lose myself into the arms of sleep. But something jolted me right back up. That annoying mewing had restarted. Judging by my previous venture, I assumed that the cat was actually somewhere outside, and it would be better for me to make my own compromises instead. So I took a pair of silicon ear plugs out of the cuboid case and pushed them inside each of my ears.

I pressed onto their round bases to ensure that they wouldn’t fall out of their place and worked to their maximum efficiency. I could still hear the mewing, albeit a lot fainter. Enough for me to doze off.

But as every second went by, I could feel the sound growing larger and larger. Until a point came, where the ear plugs no longer worked, and the noise was just as irksome as it was before.

My patience was up. I could withstand this trouble no longer. But after I pulled the plugs out of my ears, the sound appeared to grow even louder, finally becoming so great that I had to cover my ears. I had to get rid of this cat wherever the fuck it was.

I got back up from my bed, my eyes now perfectly accustomed to the dark. Trudging down the corridor, I had originally intended to go out of the apartment in search of this despicable cat, but the sound now heavily suggested that it was certainly in the outer room itself.

And this time, the sound didn’t come to a halt when I arrived. I immediately traced it, and my light fell onto my very companion asleep on his bed. I couldn’t understand at first, thinking that maybe the cat was actually in his lap. At this point, the mewing was quite literally deafening.

I rushed over to my roommate, pulling his limbs away in search of the ominous feline, but to no avail. And that was the horrific moment when I realised that it was no cat making this sound.

The sound came from inside my friend’s mouth. I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. His mouth was ajar only to the tiniest extent, yet the sound that it emitted was enough to make me go mad. I jerked him with my knee, unable to use my hands and uncover my ears, in order to wake him up and stop this nonsense. But he wouldn’t arouse. I shook him intensely, and when that didn’t work, I repeatedly kicked him, even in the most sensitive areas of his body.

Still he wouldn’t budge. The mewing kept growing. It was now unbearable. I could feel my ear drums starting to yield to this sharp and painful sound. I mustered up the courage to bring my hands and close shut his mouth, however already little it was open. But the mewing didn’t stop even then. I tried lodging whatever came to my hand into his mouth, including my mobile, a bottle and even a hair trimmer.

But nothing. Nothing worked. And it felt like I would die any second if the sound continued to emit.

By this moment my hands had started moving subconsciously, and they reached inside the guy’s mouth. The lips and gums felt slimy, in contrast to the sharp teeth. A fleshy, bulging body poked from further inside which I presumed to be his tongue. And before I could even realise what I was doing, I had ripped open my roommate’s jaw.

And the sound finally stopped. The mewing finally ceased, as blood gushed out of my companion’s broken mouth. He choked and gasped, and was dead in a matter of seconds. My heart beat wildly like a rock and roll drum. I couldn’t, wouldn’t believe I had just killed my roommate in such a horrific manner. I felt my extremities grow cold with terror and fright.

But before I could experience or think anything else, my attention was drawn by the pair of tiny gleaming eyes shrouded by the blanket of darkness in the middle of the corridor. The eyes of a cat. My heart froze in fright. The malevolent gaze felt as if it bore right into my vulnerable soul.

With my hands violently trembling, I managed to pull my mobile out of my dead friend’s mouth and aimed it towards the sinister glowing orbs.

But when the torch lit up the corridor, there were neither any glowing pair of eyes, nor an evil monstrous cat waiting to maim me. Instead, the door to my second roommate’s room stayed open.

It appeared to me that the sinister entity must have slipped in there just as I threw light on it. As if it was afraid of it. Always lurking in the dark. It gave me a tiny bit of confidence, enough to make me go forward and check my other friend’s safety.

But it was a trap carefully laid by whatever this thing was. When I reached the doorway, my phone torch naturally illuminated the floor first. The same bloody paw prints that I had witnessed at the crime scene now lay in front of me. I followed them with shaky hands.

The trail went all the way to my friend’s bed. And what I saw next made my eyes almost pop out with horror. The cat, the same orange cat that I had seen dead at the crime scene, now stood on top of my friend with more life than a sunlit plant.

And it “grinned” at me. I don’t even know if this was possible for a cat. Below its paws, my friend reclined as if comatose. Not having the slightest sensation that anything was wrong.

I would’ve thought he was already dead, if not for his faint snoring radiating in the uncanny silence alongside my drumming heart. I couldn’t get the hang of how the fuck he was not aroused by that deafening sound or the monstrosity sitting on him.

And as if on cue, the cat began moving, and to my shock, put its head inside my friend’s gaping mouth. Even though I wanted to do something to help him, the vines of fear had tightly squeezed my whole body, rendering me limp.

Slowly and slickly, the cat one-by-one slid all four of its paws, orange-furred torso and finally its snake-like slithering tail inside of my friend’s mouth. Until it was fully out of sight. And that was the moment when my friend’s eyes shot open. But they weren’t remotely human. They clearly resembled a cat’s, with those vertical pupils, and gleamed in the flashlight just as the cat’s had a mere moments earlier.

As my friend moved to rise from the bed, his appendages began to contort. His arms and legs began twisting as his joints cracked with horrendous pops. As if the bones broke and rearranged on their own. And when he finally left the bed, he was no longer standing like a human on two legs. He was poised on all fours just like a feline.

A carnivorous predator ready to hunt. When he let out a threatening hiss, my legs started to move on their own and rushed towards the main door. My trembling hands found their way to the latch and slid it out of its fastened position. But when I attempted to pull the door open, it didn’t move an inch.

As if something else held it from the other side. I tried and tried and tried, but the door wouldn’t move. The entity had me trapped in here. It wouldn’t let me out at any costs.

The hissing told me that the thing was in the outer room besides me. I slowly turned around, making my best efforts to keep all my sphincters closed and not let any fluids escape. That thing was standing only a few metres away, hissing and staring at me violently.

I had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The only thing that remained was to retaliate. I instantly scanned my surroundings for any usable items. A 10 kg dumbbell laid at the foot of my previous roommate’s bed. I dived for it, the cold rough tiles rubbing against my equally cold skin.

Nevertheless, I quickly secured the dumbbell and lifted it up as a weapon. The thing hissed at me once again, before charging towards me like a ferocious tiger. As much as I wanted to abandon the dumbbell and just run for my life, I stood my ground, waiting for the right opportunity.

It seemed to be somewhat stupid, because it made no attempts to change its course or intercept me with its limbs even though I clearly had the heavy metallic object ready to strike. And when it had finally neared enough, I brought the dumbbell crashing down on the top of its skull.

It let out a painful shriek. Not of a human, but of a cat. I plummeted the dumbbell once again, and it cried louder. And I didn’t stop until I was certain that it was no more. At the end, that thing was left with a heavily dented cranium, drenched in blood and brain matter like some pasta.

My knees gave in, and I sat there catching my breath. My heart was still racing like some hamster in a running wheel. I had just butchered both of my roommates. The cat had made me butcher both of my roommates.

I didn’t even realise how much time had passed, when suddenly a pool of light flowed in from behind. I looked around my shoulder to see the main door open, with a bunch of silhouettes creeping in.

“Drop your weapon!” someone commanded, leading me to instinctively let go of the bloody dumbbell.

I stood up shivering, my hands raised in submission. The apartment lights were suddenly switched on, as if the power had never gone out in the first place. A team of policemen, donned in their khaki uniforms and a threatening demeanour, had their guns drawn on me. Behind them stood a few neighbours, their faces pale with dread from the sight in front of them.

Swiftly, the cops seized me against a wall and began cuffing me.

“Wait, stop! It wasn’t me! It was the cat! The cat did it! The cat did it!” I cried.

“What the fuck are you blabbering, you psycho?! You just brutally murdered these people with the murder weapon right in your hands!” one of the policemen reprimanded.

“No, no, no. You don’t understand! It’s not how it seems! The cat is behind all of this!”

But my cries fell on deaf ears. None of them believed me, or even cared to listen. As they dragged me out of the apartment, I saw the orange cat, lying dead in the corner. Black gooey blood oozed out of its wide agape mouth. And I could swear I saw its pupils constrict.

Credit: Prose36