PA 3.5: End of a Tail

Chapter IV Part I

He slid comfortably into the master bedroom, laughing maniacally at his success in getting around Angel's attempts at locking him out of his own house.

When his lungs expelled the last fresh air in them, Patches slipped his tongue past his teeth, biting down on it in the moment he started coughing out dirt and dust. The mottled dog had rolled over then, and spat it onto the floor, rising up and patting his knees.

He caught his reflection moving atop the dresser, and paused to reach behind himself. His pawpads felt soot, and he cursed at the idea of it caking his hair. Malice suffocated by disgust.

The former student stumbled forward, moving across the room and toward the door out into the 2nd-floor hall. When his plush paws wrapped around the contours of the wood, he smiled and let them find their way to the cold iron handle. 

The door had been locked ever since Patches was 11. Strangely, it felt as if it wasn't too long ago.

Seeing the half-made queen-sized bed now empty and riddled with craters of dust. The dresser drawers filled with clothes, so old and petrified the moths couldn't even eat them anymore. It was boring.

Indeed, Patches' thoughts quickly shifted to that of the adults of Kemonotown, and if it would be better served if they died sooner or later. "In due time..." he swooned, that old habit eating at his thoughts.

He tugged his attention towards the door, wiggling the knob, trying to test the knob for weaknesses. A tornado of debris pelted at his eyes again, making him spit after his scowl. Patches wanted to curse at how ridiculous the amount of filth was, but only coughed as he tried speaking.

Patches cracked open an eye, the one which still had a streak of dried blood running from top to bottom, and looked at what he was dealing with. The lock was jammed in place and falling apart from so many years of disuse. The door itself was off by an angle of three or four degrees after the hinges wiggled their nails out of the frame and got lodged in place.

The handle wouldn't turn, but another stiff tug and the screws holding in the lock gave way just a little bit. 

It was stuck now. 

"Damn you!" Patches tried to lob the handle away from himself, it's old musculature clanking with the force as he paced away, so desperate for some rest that he pressed his back against the rotting carcass of a bed that still smelled like perfume. 

He wiped at his eyes, sitting up to try and keep his back at least remotely clean before he got into the shower. Greeting him was a worn glass square, filthy and concealing a picture of his reflection at 6 years old, his mouth caked with bits of treats and his fur disgusting with mud.

His wet muzzle scoffed, accidentally inhaling another lungful of muck. He was at least able to turn the photo over before the coughing started.

"Dog-damned-" he spat, throwing himself off of the bed, and lunging towards the door. His shoulder cracked with the splitting of a joint, and the pain which came after. Each shout took a little bit of the pain away, until confidence wrapped his paws around a lamp and bashed the base of it against the handle.

"Let me into my-" a nail popped free, "my house you piece of shit!"

The tumorous bulb warped and drooled bits of itself now. Held together by a screw, Patches grimaced and admired the hole visible right through the locking mechanism. His desk, room, and the bathroom door were all but Infront of him now.

"Why me?" he cursed, "Why do I have to spend all damn night kicking my own door down!"

His pout saw the bulb crashing against the floor as it ricocheted off of the mouth of the doorway. The glass hardly served to deter his pacing.

"I mean- what thing in particular? Ugh. Stupid. I should have never trusted that thing, or its friends. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be in here with-"

He clenched his paws taut, the firm padding being carved by his claws. His foot reeled back on instinct, and he made a motion unfamiliar but effective. 

"- With YOU!"

He pounded his foot into the lock, bouncing its metal framework into the hall. The wood snapped at its hinges, allowing every fiber keeping it in place to fail. Patches took no time cracking his shoulder against it again. It swung open, revealing the hall, and after a few rubs of his shoulder, he rotated it and took his first few steps into clean air.

He shut the door behind him, noting how the lock barely stuck to the door, and the thing took extra coaxing to fully close. Dust from the room wafted around like ghosts in the 2nd-floor foyer. His old desk was placed just adjacent to the stairs leading down, and next to it was his impressive bookshelf full of novels he had gotten bored of.

"Non-fiction really is just far more interesting," Patches took a second to look over the books on the shelves; "A Tale of Two Kitties," "Brave New Whoodle," and "Heart of Barkness" were among the first few works that caught his eye. He hadn't opened most of these things in years, and the whole house stunk of old book smell.

Patches briefly wondered if he smelt of books or blood if you considered his hobbies, which reminded him that he desperately needed a shower. He took one look at his desk, admiring the bevy of small, stabby pencils he kept honed to a razor's edge.

However, as the dog looked over the thick oak furnishing, he felt something was missing from its surface. He cast his glance back to the perfectly sharpened pencils to distract himself from the feeling of something being off. The writing implements made him remember he still had the rat terrier's drawing booklet.

"Perhaps that's what I was thinking of," he said to himself.

Out of curiosity, he took it out from his pockets, setting aside his messy knife and the pins. He started preparing for a shower while reading through the booklet; it had very... engaging illustrations in it, not all of which were anatomically correct or even very good, but most of which contained either landscape drawings or somewhat disturbingly accurate depictions of bones, flesh, ghosts, crying dogs, and the like. Well, she was a resident of Infurno before he had convinced Ginger to let the dogs re-inhabit their old bodies. No doubt these were the first thing drawn when she had come back to life.

Patches' thoughts instinctively drifted back to the landscape of pulped flesh and bone. It was supposed to be intimidating, but it wasn't anything Patches hadn't vividly imagined before when he was bored and alone.

Honestly, he got a kick out of poking apart a pile of flesh and telling the bits of muscle apart from one another from memory. Patches entered the adjacent bathroom with its french door and began fiddling with the knobs on the shower.

He recalled finding Ginger amongst the sea of his peers crying for help, in mental and physical anguish from the magical fires and millennia-old corpses rotting underfoot, though most of them were far more confused than they were suffering.

The bloodhound wasn't crying much at all; it was the sound of a portal being summoned that had drawn his attention to the dog. Being ghosts, none of the dogs had gotten a good grasp on their new abilities, and many of the pups had let Infurno's grasp torment them with their lack of understanding.

The dogs had been torn and twisted into hellish versions of themselves. Everyone had seemed convinced of their fate, yet there she stood, her school uniform on after hours of squatting mid-air over a pile of burning arms and legs.

He forced himself to think about something else as the thoughts drifted closer to her betrayal of him and the words exchanged between the two in Hachiko's gym.