Excerpt: Lest We Fall

[From Chapter three: The Rain Storm]

Fry purred under Stephan’s hand. The grey and black striped cat looked up to him with a curious tilted head as if to say, “Isn’t it about time you feed me?” The cat was at least twelve years old. The amount of table scraps and cat food Stephan’s father usually fed the cat had made him grow plump and lazy. Although, Stephan was sure most cats were generally lazy. Stephan closed his textbook and took off his glasses. He looked at Fry with a sarcastic smile.

“You fat cat, I fed you an hour ago.” But, Fry, like most cats, was oblivious to time or papers that were due in five hours. “This paper on Gilgamesh won’t write itself and I don’t think Samford will accept a paper written by a cat.” Although, Stephan did ponder the possibility of handing in a paper filled with “ksaskjliernhnc” and “sksdaln dksl;a’w’[[kda[”. Stephan pinched his forehead; he had been staring at the bright screen for two hours. “Okay, one cup of coffee and I’m back to writing. But, no more distractions!”

He said the last part to Fry who languidly blinked as if to say, “I will keep bothering until you stop ignoring me.” Fry was a very sarcastic old grump.

Stephan was used to being in the big hard wood floored house alone. His father would often bury himself in The Tick Tock, a clock shop that was started by his grandmother a devout clock collector and tinkerer. So far Stephan had shown no interest in his father’s obsession. There were clocks in every room in the house, each one ticking in unison. It used to keep Stephan up at night, but these days the noise felt soothing… it felt like home.

The house had also been his grandmother’s. A relic of the past, just like everything in his family. It was the house his father had grown up in. Something his grandmother and grandfather built when they first came here. They had scraped up enough money from odd end jobs and watch repairs to buy a large stretch of isolated land to call their own. Now the land was worth up to what Stephan could guess half a million dollars. It was more of a get away than an investment. Stephan’s father had once considered selling part of the land to the nearby developers of shopping centers and gas stations when The Tick Tock hit some financial problems. However, Stephan had begged him to reconsider. He had walked that land so many times. He fell asleep on the porch to strange birds he never saw in the city. He left food out for the foxes and raccoons. He threw rocks at the squirrels that rattled their tails. And one day he hoped to raise his children here.

He dragged himself to the kitchen and looked at the coffee pot with a daunting grimace. He blew the idea of coffee out of his head and opened the fridge, reaching for a bottle of soda. He was really supposed to be in class right now. He decided to skip his morning Biology class to finish this English paper that he had procrastinated to write.
Fry began to meow incessantly as he paced back and forth the front door.

“Oh, is that what you want?” Stephan shouted to the cat as he gulped down the fizzy beverage. Stephan stole a glimpse out the window. “I don’t know, buddy. It looks like it’s about to rain. There won’t be any lizards out there for you to drag to the front door, you macabre little bastard.” Fry didn’t seem to care for Stephan’s insults. He rubbed up against Stephan’s legs meowing louder and staring up at him with pleading eyes.

“Ugh, fine!” Stephan cracked the door and Fry squeezed his fat body out of it.

“But if you get wet, I’m not drying you off!” He shouted after the cat. However, Fry’s eye had already been caught by a phantom flicker of a lizard’s tail behind a flowerpot and the cat was in no mood to listen today.

Stephan’s arm was covered with drool. His ear buds had somehow been ripped from his ears and blared some obscure and very loud band music. Thunder shook the windowpanes of the empty house and he gasped awake with a throaty snore. He looked around dazed. He had been dreaming about Alison, the wide-eyed girl in his English class. The red head that never said anything except to volunteer to read poetry aloud. The one who sat by the sparkling fountain in the middle of the quad with her eyes half opened and her legs crossed. What was she whispering to him with a sheepish grin just now? It seemed so very important just now.

Stephan rolled his eyes. It was just a dream, firing of neurotransmitters or something that his psychology professor kept blathering about. He banged his head against the table. He had tried to talk to Allison a few times. Each time his voice fell flat, the conversation grew dull, and he ended up looking out the window blushing. He could imagine her soft voice reading Yeats… that’s what it was; she was reading Yeats in his dream.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Before he could savor her voice in his head he heard some strange noise outside as the hard rain beat against the window. At first he thought it may be the storm, but now that he was crashing back into reality it sounded more like inhuman screaming.
“Fry!” he jumped up quickly, running into his own bedroom door.

He rushed to the front door and ripped it open. The biting cold wind hit his face as he yelled out the door.

“Fry! Kitty, kitty, kitty! Come in!” He kept hearing the cat’s hisses and screams mixed with the booming thunder that loomed right over his head. He was worried to death, if anything happened to Fry it would break his and his father’s heart. That cat was a part of his family. He could imagine this is the panic a mother would feel if she lost her child in a mall.

Stephan was about to reach for his hoodie, but he heard the cat again and dashed out the door. The sharp knives of rain stung his scalp. He could barely see through the shroud of sparkling white rain. He bolted through the trees trying to figure out where Fry was. Stephan had often seen dogs the towns people let loose in these parts out of negligence that turned wild and would harass Fry, which is why he was mostly an inside cat. It was so foolish of Stephan to have let him out! What had he done?

Although he knew this land like the back of his hand he had ran so fast and was so disoriented by the pounding rain that he was a bit turned around. He had stumbled to a somewhat familiar opening of woods and Fry’s yelps had grown so faint that he wasn’t even sure if he still heard them.

“Fry! Kitty, kitty!” Stephan screamed. He was shivering, his chest wanted to explode. Lightening struck over his head and he tried to remember what his gym teacher once told him about lightening and soccer fields in high school.

He saw a giant tree or some sort of building in the middle of the opening that was obscured by the downpour. He covered the rain from his eyes and squinted. What… was that?

From behind him he heard a dog growl, like the ripping of a shirt. He spun around but was not quick enough to dodge the massive thing with matted black hair, which now smothered him. Stephan shrieked in surprise and horror as it chomped down on his neck, paralyzing him. Whatever it was it was big, it had sharp teeth that tore into his flesh, and it was heavy. The damp fur was all he could see or smell. Stephan blindly flailed his limbs punching the beast, yet he was unsure what he was punching… ribs? Face? Arm?

The beast let go of Stephan’s neck and found his forearm. Stephan screamed in sharp agony as the creature’s razor teeth pierced his skin all the way down to his bone and bent his arm until he heard a snap. The pain was unimaginable, yet so real. He could already feel the loss of blood and the lightheaded dizziness that always accompanies fainting and vomiting.

He was slung up into the air and landed on his stomach. A rock that jutted from the muddy ground smashed his skull and made him limp. His head turned to what he thought had been a giant tree. The animal had let go of his arm and Stephan thought it must have lost interest once he had stopped moving. The rain was slowly ceasing. Mud and blood was smeared across his face. He could finally make out what the figure was. It wasn’t a tree it was a monolithic clock tower. Stephan was so dazed from the wrestle that he wasn’t sure if he was even conscious at this point.

Suddenly something grabbed his leg. Stephan burst into tears as his body began to slowly slide into the grips of a bear or lion or something even more terrible. He was pretty sure his arm was broken.

The last thing Stephan thought: Is this how I die?

And the last thing he heard was the deafening strike of a clock bell that he had never seen before.