Patches

Susan was seventy-three and lived alone in the red-brick house she had once shared with her husband, Harold.

The house sat halfway down Hurst Street, where rows of identical homes lined the road like a scene from a suburban postcard. Their green lawns were spotted with patches of yellow grass from years of summer droughts, and most still had the same flower beds their owners had planted decades ago.

Susan fit right in.

She was short and stout, with silvering curls that framed her round face. A pair of spectacles rested permanently on the bridge of her button nose, forever sliding downward no matter how often she pushed them back into place. Most days she could be found in her crocheted cardigan and slippers, moving quietly through the house with a cup of tea in one hand and her latest sewing project in the other.

After Harold died, four years earlier, the house became too quiet. Too still.

The television stayed on longer than it used to. The kitchen light burned late into the night. Silence had weight in the house now. The inside hadn't changed much since they'd moved in during the fifties. Floral wallpaper decorated the walls. Lace curtains hung over the windows.

A grandfather clock ticked softly from the corner. Sturdy and reliable, it had seen them through all their ups and downs. Crocheted blankets hung over the backs of chairs. Ceramic figurines gathered dust on bookshelves. Family photographs filled every shelf and tabletop, documenting their life together.

Harold smiled in most of them.

Tall and broad-shouldered, he looked like a retired lumberjack despite having spent most of his life making shoes. His hands had been large and calloused from decades of work. He wore thick glasses that magnified his soulful amber eyes, and every photograph showed him in the same red plaid shirt and faded blue jeans.

At the end of the hallway sat Harold's old workshop. His tools still hung neatly on pegboards exactly where he'd left them. Half-finished shoes remained on the workbench beneath a layer of dust no one had disturbed in years. Sometimes Susan still caught herself expecting to see him sitting in that old workshop, tinkering away on a pair of shoes.

What kept Susan going were the animals.

Pierre, Harold's tan French bulldog, still slept curled against her side every night beneath the blankets. His black muzzle looked permanently dusted with soot, and his large buggy eyes seemed capable of expressing every emotion imaginable. Then there was Patches, a white cat mottled with gray spots and yellow eyes who sat stoic in the windowsill most mornings. Susan had found her half-starved in the street three years before. Patches tolerated affection more than she welcomed it, but she followed Susan from room to room all the same. The three of them settled into a strange little rhythm together, and, for them, that was enough.

Then the house changed.

It began with small things. A flower vase appeared in the kitchen when it had been in the hallway. Cabinet doors stood open on random mornings. Susan blamed herself. Grief fogged the mind. Everyone said so.

But the animals knew better.

Pierre would sometimes stop dead in the middle of the hallway and stare into empty rooms, whining low in his throat. Patches hissed at corners. Both animals refused to enter Harold’s old workshop after sunset. And though she always closed it at night, Susan sometimes found the door standing open in the morning.

The grandfather clock had begun acting strangely as well. Every night, without fail, it chimed at 3 a.m. Susan chalked it up to age. After all, even reliable things eventually wear out.

And there were the smells.

Rotting meat. Damp soil. Something sour and old. The odor never lasted long. A minute or two at most. Then it vanished. Cold spots appeared too, sudden pockets of freezing air drifted through otherwise warm rooms. Susan told herself it was Harold. It comforted her to believe that. The alternative was harder to live with.

---

Monday afternoon arrived gray and rainy. Susan sat at the sewing machine in the kitchen repairing one of Harold’s old sweatshirts. It was an old habit she didn't have the heart to break. The steady hum of the needle filled the house while Pierre and Patches relaxed in the living room. Then came the sound.

“Mrrroooow.”

Low. Irritated. Susan barely looked up. Pierre was probably chewing on the cat’s tail again. A moment later came a small whimper from the other room. Then silence. The sewing machine buzzed on. Suddenly Pierre screeched.

It wasn’t a bark or a yelp. It was high-pitched, raw, and terrified enough to freeze Susan where she sat. Patches exploded into frantic hissing. Furniture scraped violently across the floor. Susan shoved back from the table and ran into the living room.

The smell hit her first. Blood and something else underneath it. Something rotten. She noticed small crimson droplets on the floor. In the center of the living room lay Patches and Pierre.

For one impossible second Susan couldn’t understand what she was seeing. The cat’s body twitched weakly beside a shattered end table, paws scraping uselessly against the floorboards.

Her head—

Susan gagged. One of Harold's thick, glass whiskey bottles had been forced over the cat’s skull. The glass distorted everything beneath it. Bone had folded inward. One cloudy eye bulged against the inside of the bottle while blood slowly trickled down the neck of it.

Patches' body had been bent and wrung into an impossible angle, her rib cage partly exposed as bones jutted out from her open chest cavity. Next to her lay Pierre. Still alive, but barely. The dog wheezed, his own head trapped inside another, much larger whiskey bottle. His breathing came in horrible, wet whistles.

Susan screamed.

---

She didn’t remember grabbing them. Didn’t remember the drive. Only fragments stayed with her afterward, like clips of film jumping through the reel:

Pierre twitching in her lap, blood soaking into her sweatshirt, Patches unmoving beside him.

The veterinary staff rushed the two animals through the doors the second they saw them. Even the technicians looked shaken. The veterinarian stared at the bottles for a long moment before saying quietly:

“I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Patches and Pierre were taken to the exam rooms and surgical suites. Susan sat trembling in the waiting room while machines hummed somewhere behind the walls.

The clinic occupied a long gray building beside the highway. A red neon OPEN sign buzzed beneath the main sign, Rapid Vet.

The air smelled of disinfectant and wet fur. The waiting room walls were covered in photographs of pets, some decades old and slightly faded. Hundreds of them. Smiling dogs, sleepy cats, parrots, rabbits, snakes, hamsters. Any other day Susan would have delighted at seeing them, but all she could think was,

"Most of these animals are dead now."

Hours blurred together.

X-rays showed skull fractures. Swelling in the brain. Damage to the jaw. The bottle had compressed Pierre’s face so tightly the bones no longer looked natural. During the CT scan, one of the technicians paused.

“There,” she whispered.

The vet leaned toward the monitor. A shape stood in the corner of the image.

Small.

Cloudy.

Catlike.

The next scan showed nothing. Neither did the one after that. The vet shrugged it off as artifact distortion from the machine.

---

Susan rubbed her hands together nervously.

"What could've done something like this?" she asked.

The veterinarian sighed.

"I honestly don't know." She stroked her hand through her short, wavy hair.

Susan stared at the double doors leading deeper into the clinic.

"Will Pierre make it?"

Dr. Calargian hesitated.

"He's alive. That's more than I expected when he came through the door."

That wasn't the answer Susan wanted. The vet continued.

"He has significant swelling, multiple fractures, and his airway is compressed. But we have him on a breathing apparatus, and he is sedated. We're doing everything we can."

Susan nodded weakly.

"And Patches?" she asked weakly, tears welling in her eyes again.

"She'll be cremated, as per your request. We'll make a cast of her paw print for you to keep..." Dr. Calargian's words trailed off into the distance as Susan's mind began to wander, too overwhelmed by the day’s ordeal.

---

Beyond the double doors, the morgue sat cold and silent. Metal drawers lined one wall. Water dripped from a leaky sink in the corner. Tools prepared for autopsy rested beside Patches' covered body, only a tuft of blood-matted fur protruding from beneath the mint-colored sheet.

The lights flickered.

Once.

Twice.

Darkness swallowed the room.

When the lights returned, the table sat empty.

No Patches.

No sheet.

No sign she had ever been there at all.

---

Back in the waiting room, Susan stared into a paper cup of stale coffee.

"What happens after surgery?"

"If he survives, he'll stay in recovery for several days," the veterinarian said. "Maybe longer."

Susan nodded, trying to steady the ache in her heart as she struggled to get the words out.

"And if he doesn't?"

Dr. Calargian was silent for a moment.

"We'll call you." She gathered Pierre's chart and stood.

"I should get started."

Susan managed a weak nod.

Dr. Calargian pushed through the double doors and headed toward surgery. Halfway down the hallway she stopped, realizing she had left her pen in the morgue. Turning around, she pushed through the door with her back, eyes on Pierre's chart as she entered. The door slowly closed behind her as she walked past the metal table.

The lights flickered.

Once.

Twice.

Then the room plunged into darkness, returning to light just as quickly.

Dr. Calargian looked up, startled. The humming of machines vanished. The fluorescent lights stopped buzzing. Even the faucet had gone silent. The room felt unnaturally still. She shivered, the hair on her arms standing on end as she scanned the room.

Patches lay on the table, exactly where she had been. The white sheet covered her body, a tuft of blood-matted fur still protruding from beneath it. Taking a deep breath, Dr. Calargian grabbed the pen and left.

---

By the time surgery ended, Pierre barely resembled himself, looking more like Frankenstein's dog than the Pierre Susan knew. His head was swollen and stitched heavily around the muzzle and neck. Tubes snaked from his throat to help him breathe. One eye remained swollen shut. The veterinarian warned Susan he might not survive the night.

Susan sat beside the kennel for nearly an hour before finally driving home sometime after midnight. Rain tapped softly against the windshield the entire way back. The house felt wrong the moment she stepped inside. Not empty.

Occupied.

The smell returned almost immediately. Rot. Wet earth. Susan stood frozen in the darkened house. The living room clock ticked softly in the darkness. Then the grandfather clock suddenly came to life.

DONG.

DONG.

DONG.

The heavy chimes rolled through the house, each one vibrating through the floorboards.

3 a.m.

Susan jumped at the sudden disturbance. The walls began to creak as if under strain. Susan could feel it like thick air pressing against the skin.

“Harold?” she whispered.

Something moved in the hallway. Not a figure. More like a shadow shifting where no shadow should have been. Susan flinched violently.

"I...I understand if you're upset, Harold. Today was hard."

The food bowl clanged as it flew across the floor. Susan flinched again.

"I-I...I miss them too."

The coat rack behind her next to the front door tipped over, clattering violently to the floor.

"Harold, stop it! You're scaring me!" she shouted.

The walls groaned as though something enormous had shifted inside them. Susan pulled her cardigan tighter. Then the grandfather clock stopped ticking. The distant traffic vanished. The house fell into a silence so complete it felt alive.

A drop landed on her shoulder. Then another. Thick. Warm. Susan touched it with trembling fingers. Black slime stretched between them. Slowly, she looked upward. A black, tarry figure stood upon the ceiling.

Not hanging.

Standing.

As though the ceiling were its floor, and the room had somehow forgotten which way was down. Tar dripped steadily from its long, thin body, pattering onto the floor below. The thing tilted its head in her direction. Susan's breath caught in her throat as she took a step back, unable to tear her eyes away.

The figure took a step in response. It phased in and out of view, somehow closer each time it appeared.

"Harold?" she whispered in terror.

---

At the veterinary clinic, Pierre drifted awake sometime after two in the morning. Pain flooded through him. He tried to lift his head but couldn’t. The sedatives kept his body heavy and useless. Then came the sound. A soft meow. A familiar meow from better times. Pierre’s eye rolled toward the corner of the kennel. Patches sat there staring at him.

Blood matted the fur around her crushed skull. One side of her face sagged inward, exposing shattered bone and torn flesh. With each breath, a wet bubble swelled and collapsed inside what remained of her nose while her eye remained fixed on him.

Blood-filled.

Unblinking.

The other animals in the kennel room began to panic. Dogs whined fearfully, as if afraid to release a full sound as the other kenneled pets pushed themselves against the back walls of their kennels. Something slammed against metal cages farther down the room.

The light above flickered. Her paws made no sound as she glitched closer and closer. Patches appeared, menacingly, outside the cage. She lifted a broken, twisted paw and set it gently on the floor inside the kennel. Her body followed suit.

With the consistency of a dense, malleable putty, Patches pressed her broken self against the bars. Her body made grinding sounds and heavy thuds as bones splintered around the bars while she squeezed through. Then, with a series of pops, her body expanded back into its morbid shape with a final, resonant snap.

Pierre whimpered through the tube in his throat, unable to move.

Patches stood before him, blood-filled eye staring down at Pierre. His eyes widened. She leaned close enough to touch Pierre's nose; the scent of blood and decay was nauseating. Pierre let out a choking cry.

Then—

CRACK.

Pierre's head, as if by itself, twisted violently around. The sound echoed through the room like a snapping branch. Pierre’s body went limp. For a moment, everything went still. Even the other animals stayed silent.

Patches remained motionless beside the kennel.

The lights continued flickering.

A black shape appeared behind her.

Tall.

Thin.

Its limbs too long.

Tar dripped from its body onto the white tile floor below in thick, bubbling drops. The room plunged into darkness for a moment before returning to normal. The kennel room suddenly erupted into chaos. Dogs barked. Cats screamed. Metal cages rattled violently as terrified animals threw themselves against their kennel doors.

A veterinary technician rushed into the room to see the French Bulldog lying motionless on the floor of the kennel, his head twisted completely backward. For just a moment, she thought she saw a cat sitting in the corner of the room. Watching her. It disappeared with the flickering lights.

The clock overhead read 3 a.m.

The paramedics arrived at Susan's house at 3:10 a.m., pronouncing her dead at the scene. They suspected she had died of a massive heart attack and must have stumbled and grabbed the closest thing to her, the coat rack, which was found lying upon her dead body after neighbors had reported screaming from her house.

The house sat empty after that. Neighbors claimed strange things still happened there. Lights turning on by themselves. Animal sounds coming from inside despite the house being vacant. A smell drifting through the neighborhood late at night.

Rotting meat.

Wet soil.

Something old.

And sometimes, if someone passed the house after midnight, they swore they could see two small shapes sitting motionless in the front window. A little dog. And a cat sitting perfectly still beside it. Its head tilted at an angle no living thing could hold.