The first thing he did was check all of the closets and cabinets. They were all relatively dust free now, and he had been opening and shutting them all day. However, no cat was forthcoming. All the doors and windows to the outside were shut, so escape seemed unlikely.

There was a little bit of an attic in the peak of the roof- perhaps the cat had made it up there somehow? Amir grabbed one of the dining room chairs, and stood on it to poke his head through the trapdoor. There was certainly a lot of dust, and the skeleton of a mouse crumbling in a corner, but even a sweep with a flashlight found not one shred of orange, or the glint of a chartreuse eye.

Where on earth could he be? He had to be hiding somewhere obvious. Amir went through all of the rooms, moving objects large enough for a cat to hide behind, opening boxes. No Gingerbread.

He went back into the bedroom, and looked carefully. Nothing. Then he moved methodically out into the hall. No cat. He went into the other bedroom. Nothing was there. He came out into the hall again, where there was absolutely nothing except for a closet that he’d already cleaned and checked. He opened the door anyway. A box full of the collected works of Rousseau sat near the back, and otherwise the whole closet was empty. Amir stuck his foot in and shoved the box, just in case. There was no cat behind it. There was, however, a very large rat hole. He had noticed it before, when cleaning- it was what had made him worry about possibly cat-ensnaring rat traps- but didn’t have any way of fixing it. Now, it looked at him balefully. It was dark, it was scary, and it was certainly large enough for even a large, shaggy cat to fit into.

He pulled the box of books out and got on his hands and knees to shine his flashlight into the hole. He expected to find that cat wedged into a small space, or perhaps asleep in his new hidey hole. Instead, he found what seemed to be steps, leading down into darkness. This struck Amir as singularly odd- if the house had a basement, why were the steps walled off? It had to be a crawl space or something to do with pipes. A faintly awful odor wafted through the opening- maybe a septic system?

Still, as he looked more closely, he saw that there was a bit of orange fluff caught on a roughly gnawed fragment of the opening. Gingerbread must be down there, somewhere, and Amir suddenly remembered the horrible rat poisons people used to use. Crap.

He stood up and looked at the walls. Now that he was looking more carefully, he could see where the walls of the stairway had been converted into closet- there was a slight difference between the wood of the sides and that of the back. The back seemed to be old-fashioned plywood, cut to the correct size and fitted in, with quarter round and trim used to hide the seams. Very odd indeed.

Odder still was the fact that there seemed to be even more caulk than usual around the seams here- there were positively globs of it. Why would someone worry about water in their stairs-closet? Amir was starting to have positively murderous thoughts towards the previous inhabitants of the house. Especially if there was any rat poison or other nasty surprise down there with his cat.

---

There was no handle and no hinge on the far wall, so there seemed to be no way to open it. Amir, using the resourcefulness found in all young males, thought deeply for a whole second, and then rammed the back wall with his shoulder. It shook and creaked, and one more blow split part of the ceiling seam and rather a lot of the side. Flakes of paint and wood particles floated down. He pushed carefully on the weakened side, and with a snap and a loud booming noise, it burst out of place and against the left hand wall, the groan of nails pulling out of wood and the crack of breaking board making a short cacophony in the darkness.

Caught off balance, Amir tumbled on his side down half the flight of steps before he managed to catch himself. He slid to a stop, his fingers scratching at damp, powdery cement as he caught himself.

He took a breath to steady himself, feeling about a dozen soon-to-be-bruises registering all over his body. He stopped mid-breath, though; something smelled awful down here. For the most part it was bog water and decaying cement, the tang of lyme fighting through algae, but there was something more. It was rank and animal, like stray dog and rotten meat, or a long-decayed animal in an alley. It was foul, but it didn’t seem fresh- it seemed to be pervading the walls as much as the air. Even the crumbled dust on his hands seemed to smell of it.

He thought about calling again, but it was very dark in the basement, and he didn’t feel like breathing more than he had to. Basement it was, too- much larger than he had anticipated. It was quite deep, and the dim light filtering in from the door at the top of the stairs lit a space that was almost as wide as the house; the basement must run under most of the building.

Curiouser and curiouser.

The flashlight had fallen to the very bottom, and gone out. Amir picked it up, and with a shake it flickered back into brightness. He swept the beam across the floor in front of him, wall to wall, and found a couple of old metal tables, bracketed to the sides of the basement, and an expanse of crumbling cement floor with a large drain in the middle. Amir suspected the drain of the mysterious smell. He shone the light further back.

It lit on a couple of old bones, yellowed and lined with brown rot. A little further back, there was a lazy curve of rusting chain, a tumbleweed of orange fur, and against the far wall-

Eyes flashed a moment before the light hit the farthest corner, and Amir started. “Ginger?”

He took a step forward and shone the light into the shadows.

A sound like tearing thunder rattled through the dark room, shaking the air in Amir’s lungs. Teeth, long and yellow, snapped, and a hulking block of dark, matted fur pressed itself further into the corner. The snarl rose and then fell into a gravelly, deafening growl. Huge eyes, dark, narrowed, and almond shaped above the curled muzzle, bored him through.

From the bunched claws of the creature hung a limp, disjointed thing that swung sickeningly. Orange fur floated down, drifting to rest on a slick puddle of dark blood.