THE CAT'S MAW

CHAPTER I (Part 3)

The moments that followed were an insane blur. Shock and agony. Blood and breathlessness. Waves of sheer terror, not all of them Billy’s. His mind flashed, and his parents stood over him. They were shaking, and crying, and waving traffic through as they called for help. 

As he laid there, crumpled and bloody on the ribbon of asphalt, the boy remembered running out to help a cat for some reason. And when he heard his mother’s wail over the hushed chatter of those who stopped to gawk, Billy tried very hard to convince himself that it was all just a terrible dream. 

When the ambulance arrived, he was loaded onto a stretcher with a sickening jolt. He thought he heard someone say that he had slid across the road so fast that the soles of his new shoes had melted. His wristwatch was smashed, and his best jeans were beyond the help of any seamstress or commercial cleanser.

But those were just things. Far worse were the shattered bones and dangling tendons poking through the side of his shin, the flesh failing at its job of keeping them all in place. 

Siren blaring, the ambulance sped north. Darkness was quick to descend, transforming the vehicle into a wheeled firefly that darted and flashed as it steered through the night.

Inside, the red lights set an eerie scene. The attendant’s face was shadowed and grim as he steadied the boy’s stretcher. Stanley Brahm crouched in silence beside him. Through a pained haze, the boy thought he saw tears running down the man’s cheeks.

It must’ve been a dream, for Billy had never seen his father cry.

It took 45 minutes to reach the Middleton emergency room. The driver had radioed ahead and the on-call doctor met them at the door – a pasty man with thinning hair, a wide jaw, and small, precise eyes. His voice was steady as he directed everyone inside, and remained calm when he saw the extent of Billy’s injuries. 

As a nurse dabbed stinging liquid at the wounds on Billy’s face, the doctor removed the boy’s melted shoe and cut through the blood-soaked denim on his leg. Billy screamed as the jeans peeled away from his shin, and the pale man whitened another shade.

He shouted something at the nurse, and Billy moaned as a large needle jabbed into his hip. There was a muddle of voices as a numbing relief swept through his body. The boy tried to thank them, but the words wouldn’t come and the room went black.

Another burst of pain, and Billy slid from the wooden carry-board and onto a cold, stiff bed. Two hours had passed, and he had been taken to the children’s hospital all the way up in Bridgetown.

The attending physician had an angled face and shaggy hair, and seemed flustered by all the screaming. He asked the boy’s father for some details, shook his hand, and had him sent from the room. 

Thus began Billy’s week in the hospital.

There was the initial operation to set his leg. Then there was a late-night corrective procedure to fix problems with the first one. Billy would later swear this to his parents, who merely chalked it up to ‘traumatic delusion’ – because those in authority had no reason to lie. 

The rest was a fuzzy, melted jumble of memories.

Painkiller drips and soiled bed-sheets.

Dry meat and warm Jell-O.

Bedside rounds of cribbage, where the boy would skunk his mother with a miraculous 29-hand.

Then came physio.

The nurses wrapped his cast in plastic, and had Billy swim in a too-blue pool that stung his eyes. They gave him a pair of creaky wooden crutches, and had him practice moving in the halls between meals. They massaged his face with sticky liquids, and used tweezers to pull off the crusty scabs from his cheeks, chin, and forehead. 

The hospital staff all gave the kindest smiles, used the gentlest touches, and spoke in the friendliest voices. They were nice when Billy cried, or when he was lazy, or even when he had a tantrum.

This confused the boy, even more than the painkillers did. Each day, his black-brown stare searched their faces for clues. Probed for secrets. Scanned for lies.

Something’s wrong, he thought.    

It was a long drive south on that rainy morning in early July. Little was said, as Billy had been given a sedative before they departed. When the Brahms finally arrived home, Stanley carried his son inside. Elizabeth went straight to the kitchen, poured a glass of milk, and filled a plate with chocolate chip cookies.

Billy’s heart would sink when he awoke, finding himself on the musty cot downstairs. It was too far away from his comics, and his toys, and his wallpaper adorned with pirate ships and treasure maps. It was too far from his bedroom window, which looked out upon the rolling fields and weeping willow trees. It was too far from the view of his favourite place in the world.

This was a nightmare.

—- 

Another jolt brought Billy back to the present.

He had been home for several days now, and things didn’t feel much better. He was still downstairs. The cot was still lumpy. The cast was still heavy, and scratched his thighs raw.

Then there was the horrible tingling — the maddening itch where the bones had pushed through the flesh — that he was unable to scratch. The more he thought about it, the more upset he became, and the more the itch spread.

It was creeping up his leg, moving higher every second. It finally made camp in his ears and went to work in his brain. Billy’s eyes welled with tears, and the low groan that was born in his belly grew to a howl in his lungs. 

“It’s okay, Billy, I’ll be there in a second. I’ve got your favourite!” his mother shouted from the kitchen.

She shuffled across the linoleum and onto the living room carpet, carrying a tray of food that was piping hot. He was soothed a little as the smells worked their magic — tomato soup, a grilled cheese sandwich, and a glass of chocolate milk.

She propped up the cot and tilted the glass of milk into her son’s mouth. She couldn’t help but sigh as much of it ran down his chin, splashed on his chest, and soaked into the sheets.

“Drink it down,” his mother said. “It will all be better soon.”

“No, it won’t,” the boy said.

Billy met his mother’s gaze as he drank. He watched her pupils dilate and contract. He drank more and saw her nostrils flare, and tiny beads of sweat glisten on her upper lip. He swallowed the rest, and was suddenly aware of a bitter, metallic taste that lingered on the back of his tongue.

A sound grew in Billy’s head then, distant at first, yet strangely familiar. It was something he hadn’t heard since that terrible day, just before the accident. 

A voice.

As the milk swam through his belly and into his veins, it grew louder. Billy’s vision blurred. The sights and smells and pains of the waking world drifted away in the drugged ether, until only the voice remained. 

‘No…’ it hissed.

‘No more…’ it cried in the darkness.

‘WE SLEEP NO MORE!’    

And that’s when the real nightmare began.