DAY 14: Soul of Aegyptus

I started typing The Lady in Red as a possible title for this story (that’s another way of stating the name of the Egyptian cat goddess, Bastet or The Lady with the Red Clothes) but thought the figure which signifies the immortal nature of felines would be a more appropriate name. Cats are said to have nine lives, if this story roots for the hypothesis or not is what we are about to find out.

A young man who is half-human and half-something (due to some witty scientist’s creativity, of course) goes on a visit to the ancient city of Bubastis in Egypt. This man, who is a crossbreed of human genes and genetically modified (GM) genes of silverbacks, was a major cat-killer. He was cruel to cats around his childhood neighborhood. Maybe, (this is a draft, remember?) he hated cats as a child but the hatred morphed into chronic indifference in later years.

I’ll get better somewhere along the rewrite but let’s say, there’s this crippled kid’s cat this chap who I’d call Harris, saw off to a vicious annihilation. The cat was torn in different places or indifferent places-cut into so many tiny bits that Harris’ parents (who were stinking rich; who wanted a test tube baby cause they were too busy making money they didn’t have time-which is money- to produce their own baby) took him to the psychiatrist. For fear he might grow up and graduate into trying out his crude science on humans.

As he grew up, he bought cats and disposed of them in the most gruesome way, performing crude surgery on them.

All this actually started when Harris was an 8 year old. One day, one of the scientists who created him visited their house in the guise of a doctor, checking on the boy, was how he phrased it. He took him aside into one of the rooms and performed tests on him, injecting fluid and blasphemous stuff into him. Later that day, Harris performed his first operation; the neighbor’s cat was walking across Harris’ side of the backyard, that cold evening of December. (I might begin the story at this point in the rewrite.) Harris had on varied occasions played with the cat. So, he knew the cat’s name just as much as the cat knew him.

            “Hey, Dodge. Come here, boy.” The cat was a calico. The unsuspecting beast not aware of the evil presence lurking in the little boy who was once a friend, albeit a casual one, hopped off the picket fence and trudged to Harris the scary. Dodge the cat meowed as it reached out its paws to the boy who is about to snuff one (or all) of its nine lives. At first, Harris played with the animal, picked it up and tickled it behind the ears.

Then, there began a blurring of his mind. A kind of grayness overwhelmed him and he yielded to it (he couldn’t have successfully resisted it, anyway-it was within and therefore, beyond him.) Harris surrendered his will to the force of the Gray matter and it fed his mental repertoire with thoughts a child is not permitted to entertain. A joke is all it was to him when it first popped into his mind. The next time the thought returned, the violence of its intrusion in the child’s mind was a type of mental rape. Harris almost screamed, he bit down his lips to curb his enthusiasm.

Slowly but surely, he felt the hold of an evil genius subduing his control over his being. And that was probably, the human side of his personality. It’s dark on the inside of him. Had Harris asked the scientist who implanted it in him what it was called he would have told him; the shadow of the valley. It was the basest degree of the human emotion-an indifference to life, love and personal respect.

He squeezed the cat’s neck; his fingernails digging into meaty feline flesh. The cat, yet to comprehend the inevitable coming of its termination, let out a meowing yowl. Harris increased pressure on the squeeze and the cat’s meow was suppressed. It wrestled to free itself from Harris’ grasp and succeeded in extracting blood from the boy’s wrist. The blood did not discourage Harris instead, he squeezed harder and the cat’s eyes bulged and in one final quest for survival it lashed out with its paws and caught nothing in particular. And then, it stopped struggling and boarded the train of darkness to oblivion and beyond.

The entire business worked itself out in five minutes tops.

The scratch from the cat’s paw would have been a dead give-away when Dodge’s absence was discovered. (Harris had dumped the cat in the trash can under a heap of raccoon chow. Nobody would search for a cat in there, no matter how much they loved it.) Harris lied he got the bruise falling at the playground. The death toll had begun. Woe on all cats!

The next time we see Harris the scary he’s all grown up, out college and working. (What does Harris do for a living?) I need to put him in some job that requires him to travel a lot or maybe, he just loves pleasure.

Harris met this lady, a total stranger, at the airport and they got talking. The lady had an accent that Harris couldn’t quite place and which I’m really not prepared to write a library about. She had the tattoo of a cat on her left shoulder-an ancient looking simulacrum. But, Harris sensed something about her and even though, he couldn’t place it, he set it on the backburner of his mind to simmer until the right time.

Baset, as the lady was called told Harris her name was of ancient origin.

Okay, he got to the Land of the Ancient Pharaohs, and he and the lady struck some sort of acquaintance. Through the years, Harris thirst for cat-blood had traded places for female blood.

At a point, Bastet told him a story she called Soul of Antique Aegyptus about cats that took vengeance on two old townsfolk who hated cats and always killed any that came within an inch their gothic yard.

“When the people of the town came to the old fools cottage, they discovered their bones had been picked clean,” Baset finished, a smile played on her lips.

Come the day they get to visit the temple of Baset, the cat goddess in the ancient city of Bubastis. While tagging along with the little group of tourists, the two decided to get naughty and took a detour.

            “Let’s play cat and mouse,” Baset says.

Note to myself:

The plot deepens at this point. Harris tries to take advantage of Baset when he finds they are really all by themselves. He ain’t exactly the one doing it but Baset doesn’t know anything about the shadow of the valley or does she?

Sooner than later, Harris uncovers the truth for himself, Baset is the real cat-goddess incarnate. She came to avenge all the cats killed by Harris. But can her power open her eyes to the possibility that Harris is a product of corrupt science? A personality half human and half Something else?

There is a possibility of redemption for Harris, however. At a point where the battle between him and the cats called up by Baset grows fierce his human personality overwhelms the beastly nature within and somehow (as the revised version of the piece would reveal, Harris stops the fight and persuades the cats and Baset to come to terms with his own reality. He is not human in the complete sense of the word.

Do they (the cats) believe him? Even if they believe, how do they rescue him from the grip of the shadow of death? Do they kill him instead to forever free his damned soul?

*At what point does Harris find out he is under the influence of something beyond human?

Does he ever find out WHO put him through the ordeal?

This story is going to have a flare of science fiction, fantasy and of course, horror. I intend to make the three sub-genres move the plot forward-and especially, put the strobelight on Harris’ dilemma (the split personality dilemma).