Vicious little kitty... (freewrite fiction #7)

Careful steps cross the hard wood floor, in the quiet. Once a minute, a resounding creak. The steps beneath them, older than time itself. Inside the House of Shadows, nothing but the beckoning dark.
Why have you come? The voices seemed to ask of them, the things in the corners already circling like vultures toying with their prey.
The man of lights stepped nimbly around the squeaky boards, but Noah couldn’t, much as he tried, so that after only a few steps into the House of Shadows, he’d made enough noise for a lifetime and it felt as if the house in its entirety listened to him and him alone. He felt much like an intruder and would have liked to vanish, to turn on his heels and run back to the car. But then what?
The man of lights would understand, or perhaps not. Noah felt a sudden closeness to him, but this was still the man in the alley who had killed his little sister. Or at least, made living bearable no longer for her. He hadn’t been her friend, just like he wasn’t Noah’s. The man of lights wouldn’t give a damn about him, might as well abandon him here, to the mercy of the serpent-tongue Queen of Shadows.
‘Don’t worry, Mister Mermont,’ the honey queen said just then, as if reading his thoughts, almost. ‘The house is merely welcoming you. It’s learning you, tracing your soul as it can. Don’t mind the sounds, you’ll grow oblivious to them eventually.’
‘But they won’t go away,’ Noah said, his voice only half a question, rising suddenly bold out of a chest full of nothing but fear.
The Queen leaned her head, regarded him in that playful gaze of her that shot daggers in the dark. ‘They won’t go away,’ she agreed, a soft smile on her lips. ‘Unless your song goes with them also.’
She spoke in riddles, it seemed, or perhaps that’s just what she wanted guests to think. Perhaps she wasn’t as dangerous as she liked to think, perhaps all that was to her magic was an old name, leftover from a time long gone, and a tone of voice. Yeah, keep telling yourself that, Mermont.
‘How did you get that name?’ she asked, turning round and disappearing into one of the seemingly endless rooms. ‘Was it your father called you that?’
‘No,’ Noah said, without so much as blinking or raising his voice. He’d realized, since stepping into the house, why the Queen of Shadows seemed so familiar, why her ever-winding patterns and willful dances failed to phase him. He’d seen them before, not once, but many times. For years in his youth, he’d watched his mother spin much the same dances. His mother, the spurned little kitty, the pouting princess on her mountain of filth. Because in the end, his mother had come to die, like his sister, in nothing but garbage, in the wreck of a house her no-good husband had left her. Left them, never to return and good riddance it was. Poor little Mermont, with his one glass eye.

The thought of her, chased away as swiftly as it had come. He would’ve much liked to put his fist through the wall of this witch’s house, but he told himself that would accomplish nothing. That, and the man of lights, his hand gripped firmly over Noah’s shoulder, managed to quench his anger for the moment.
‘She spies on me,’ he hissed. ‘She was…’
‘She spies on all her guests,’ the man of lights shot back. ‘Be quiet like I told you or I will let you to make your way back alone.’
They said no more about it, for there was little else to say. Despite the man of lights’ icy tone, Noah couldn’t help but be grateful to the bastard. At least he hadn’t threatened to leave him here. The two men stepped around the sharp corner, to find the Queen lounging on a moth-eaten divan. Forgotten in her palace, Noah wondered how long she’d waited here, wasting away, longing to hear footsteps outside her door again.
‘Long before you were born, my son,’ she said, her smiling face not so much as flinching. If anything, her grin seemed to grow even more mocking with this.
The faintest voice inside Noah’s mind whispered words of violence, that told this witch that he was not her son and never would be, but he quickly muffled them under bland pleasantries and thoughts of fear and upset. He thought of cars and all the good hiding spots in this immense house. He thought thoughts that would not allow her to listen to the innermost council he kept behind his ears.

‘If we are to carry out this discussion in peace, my queen, I would ask you to lay such tricks aside, at least for the time being.’
‘Tricks, you say, you driver of death? Tricks… It was these tricks that built me my empire. It is my so called tricks that afford you your beloved ride through the world of the living, it is I that keep you from becoming a ghost in the realm of the forgotten.’
‘And I appreciate this, but we do not come for games, I’m afraid we have no time.’
The purring cat, purring low inside her mountain of taffeta, grinned even wider. ‘No time for games?’ she challenged. ‘What a shame, you know I get so few visitors here, my beloved pet. You honestly mean to deprive me of my fun? I’m afraid I cannot have that. I’ve grown tired now with your serious tone. We shall speak again in two hours’ time.’
‘My queen, I have important business to attend on earth.’
She shot up from her seat like a viper, lashing her long nails an inch from their faces. ‘Oh relax, I’m sure the sinners can go another day without their medicine. After all, I’ve lived surrounded by their lechery and their lies for thousands of years and I turned out alright, didn’t I?’ She narrowed her eyes, until her face looked exactly like that of a cat and ran her sharp tongue over her teeth.
‘Vex me again and I will make you a prisoner inside my house for all eternity. And what will your poor damned souls do without their savior then?’

They spoke no words as they trudged up the narrow, winding stairs. They didn’t have to. The Queen of Shadows had made her message heard clearer than anything – play by my rules or not at all. And the more they stayed here, the more Noah came to think that ‘not at all’ was not an option.
They had been ascribed two identical rooms on the first floor, next to each other, though when the old door closed shut, Noah felt more alone than ever. He pressed his palm to the wall and came away with the impression it was made of steel, so that no sound, thought or hope could break through.

The room he’d been assigned was simple, like something out of an old period piece. Heavy bed and long, white curtains, just as decayed and fraying as the furniture below. Everything in this house seemed to be dying, fading away, and Good Eye Mermont understood in the silence and the dark that it was all just an act.
She meant for the furniture to look this way, for the house to come across as old and decayed. It showed weakness. It gave her time enough to hook her nimble foot around her opponent’s leg and take him crashing down like the snake she was.
And perhaps she thrived on the disrepair and the mold. After all, she lived in memories, where people were but shadows of their former selves. It would only stand to reason that the house itself would follow suit.

On the other side of the wall, the man of lights closed his eyes, let out a deep groan. He worried about more than the curtains – after all, he’d been here many times and the curtains were, in truth, beginning to grow on him. He worried he’d been wrong. When he’d first heard the boy’s story, he’d assumed he was wrong, or that if anything, the lights hadn’t worked on the girl. Cami, whose face he still couldn’t identify in his ocean of sinners. She’d gone home that night still haunted by her monsters and she’d then decided she could no longer hold on. Like millions in this universe, she’d let go. Of her life, of her crimes, of the self she once was.
But as he drove, he found this theory full of holes and much more lackluster than he’d initially thought.
She’d remembered him, she’d told her brother about him, so his idea didn’t hold water, so something had gone wrong. And on the drive over, he’d questioned himself, the girl, even the car itself, trying to pin the blame for the girl’s unfortunate demise somewhere, but he’d never thought it might lie with the Queen herself.

She was a vile creature, one couldn’t live through all she’d lived through and not be, and she was vicious, but not like this. She wouldn’t play with the life of a human in such a way, or perhaps she would. Perhaps she’d finally snapped under the pressure of her spiders and tried her hand at killing. Maybe she’d been curious to see what happened when you buried someone under the guilt and the pain.
And what would happen if it had been her? What would happen if she’d watched that girl – Cami – suffocate under the weight, reach up only to crumble into the pile once again? What if her hands were stained with blood? Well, he knew what then, but he didn’t want to acknowledge it. If she had indeed snapped, then a council would be called, the queen would be put away and he would become king. He’d always known this was a possibility and for the longest time, he’d known that something was not quite right on his drives. With each soul he’ d freed, he’d felt that much weaker. Himself, like the furniture in the House of Shadows, fraying at the edges.

‘Get out,’ he snarled, swiftly reaching above his head and throwing a pillow at the furthermost corner.
‘Mermont was right, you have grown to be a real witch. Stop dripping your poison in my head, I won’t bite.’
His eyes only half-open, he thought he glimpsed thin, long legs retreating in the shadow. Then, almost as an afterthought, ‘That boy will never take my place.’

to be continued