Mat

Jackson was a handsome two-year old tabby house cat who had gotten his name not from a historic or artistic figure, such as Andrew Jackson or Jackson Pollock, but rather from the deceased entertainer Michael Jackson. He had been saddled with this somewhat dubious moniker due to his habit of springing lightly backwards on his toes whenever he was alarmed at something. His mistress invariably found this motion funny and referred to it as “the Jackson moonwalk.” The cat bore this, as he bore other strange terms of affection, with wry tolerance. After all, he was always retreating from danger, wasn’t he, and why did flight from danger amuse humans so?

But what could you expect, he would have said, had he the power of speech. They see everything and nothing at the same time.

And so he sat and watched. Although quite domesticated, he was descended from predators. Therefore, he knew a killer when he saw one.

And he was looking at one right then.

He wouldn’t sit or look for too terribly long, though. Again, he was a house cat, and consequentially his courage only ran so deep.

He sat.

He watched.

The killer before him didn’t move one iota.

But Jackson wasn’t fooled. The threat was there and very real. When his nerve inevitably broke, he would do the Jackson moonwalk until he felt safely out of range. He loved his mistress but was also intelligent enough to know that he could in no way protect her should the target of his attention decide to make a threatening move her way.

He half-wished, strange for his kind and for him personally, that his household also kept a dog. Dogs, while stupid and smelly, were loyal to the death. It would have been able to suss out the threat at once, and take brutal, bloody action should the occasion call for it.

As it was, Jackson, slim and fragile, had but one means of defense, and that was retreat to higher ground.

He was bound to his mistress, though, and so he returned again and again to this spot, to watch the invader carefully, ready to flee at a moment’s notice. The best he could do was to hope that such displays were enough to rouse his mistress’s suspicions enough for her to raise her own guard. Humans sometimes eventually got the message that something was wrong, and his could defend herself far better than Jackson himself could. For that, though, she would have to be aware of the danger waiting for her in the bathroom.

She would have to see as Jackson saw, smell as he smelled, intuit as he intuited. It would require a kind of primal understanding that was sadly absent in humans these days.

So he sat.

He watched.

The killer, for its own part, sat, or rather lay. Jackson didn’t know if it also watched, but he could sense that it was waiting for his mistress.

Please, he would have said, you have to see! You have to understand!

***

“I don’t understand what he’s looking at,” Jordan said into her phone as she regarded Jackson, who had taken up the post he had been manning more or less faithfully for a week now. The cat was sitting Sphinxlike by the doorway leading from the apartment’s short hallway into the bathroom. His front paws were on the exact edge where the carpeting stopped and the tile floor began, as though he was loathe to cross the threshold.

“He just sits there and stares,” she went on, shrugging and going about the business of getting ready for work. She laughed, and added, “I think maybe my bathroom’s haunted.”

“Maybe,” said Carpenter on the other end of the line. “Although I doubt it. Bathroom ghosts in this country are pretty rare.”

“I was joking,” Jordan said.

“They say dogs can see ghosts, too,” he went on. “Supposedly, if you stand behind a dog and look over its head and in between its ears, you can see the same ghost it’s looking at.” He paused. “I don’t know if the same trick works with cats, though.”

“I have no intention of finding out,” Jordan said, stepping into her shoes. “He’s just being a cat, which is to say he’s just being weird.”

“Mmm,” Carpenter replied. “The thing is, he’s being weird for a reason.”

Jordan was about to say something more when Jackson abruptly lept to his feet and danced backwards away from the open bathroom door. He back-ran out of the hallway and into the kitchen, whereupon he executed a series of feline springs until he came to rest atop the refrigerator.

Jordan laughed again. That crazy moonwalk got her every time.

She was on the verge of walking out the door when a thought struck her. Feeling silly, she walked back up the hall, into the bathroom and turned on the light.

She was right; she had forgotten to close the shower curtain earlier. She did so now, stepping squarely onto the killer for the third time that morning. She didn’t notice the contact, and the killer itself gave no sign, seemingly as insensate as all the other times she had trod across it.

It didn’t thrill to her touch as it had the day’s previous two occasions, though. It found the pressure of her shoes on its back to be disagreeable. It much preferred the feel of her bare flesh. Each time that had happened, it had grown stronger. Soon it would be able to do more than just lie there, docile, and still.

If the damned cat didn’t give it away, that was.

When the time came, it would likely have to take care of the cat first, and the woman shortly thereafter. That was all right.

When the time came, the killer was fairly sure it would be able to move quickly enough to accomplish both tasks with ease.

***

Jackson was in what Jordan was coming to think of as his usual spot when she got home that evening, crouched by the open bathroom door, looking into the darkness.

“Hey, Jackson,” she said. “Whatcha looking at?”

Jackson, naturally, didn’t answer, but neither did he look around at the sound of her voice, only continued to stare into the bathroom.

Jordan frowned. This was getting creepy.

Maybe he was watching for a mouse, she decided, striding to the bathroom and snapping on the light.

No mouse. Nothing out of place. So what was the cat looking at so intently?

He was looking, Jordan realized at last, at the bathmat on the floor in front of the shower.

Jordan looked at it for a long moment herself. Aside from its iridescent green and blue colors, it was a perfectly normal bathmat, maybe two feet wide by three feet long. She had chosen it for its beautiful color quality that went so well with the peacock feather pattern that was on her shower curtain, that blue that refused to stay blue and kept wandering to green and vice versa. No Wal-Mart purchase here – she had bought it a month ago off Etsy. Her slight pang of guilt at spending the extra money for a handmade bathmat had disappeared entirely when the item had arrived. She loved the look of it, and took pleasure in scrunching her toes in its shimmering fibers on her way into and out of the shower.

It occurred to her then that Jackson hadn’t entered the bathroom itself in some time. There were cat toys in there, having been batted into the room by an errant paw, but he hadn’t ventured in to retrieve them, despite the fact that they were only a few paces over the threshold.

Jackson also had the habit of playing with the toilet paper, unspooling it with his claws until a small drift had formed on the floor. Jordan realized he hadn’t done that either in…how long?

Yes, she decided that he was most definitely staking out the bathroom shower mat. It was getting creepy all over again.

Suddenly, Jackson lept to his feet and toe-danced backwards away from the threshold. For some reason, this time Jordan only managed a small chuckle as he moonwalked out of range of some oddity she couldn’t see for the life of her. Once he was a sufficient distance up the hall, he turned around and fled in forward gear, disappearing into the kitchen.

Feeling a queer mix of stupidity and unease, she entered the bathroom and regarded the mat. It lay there, matlike.

She prodded it with her toe. The corner curled up, then when she withdrew, it flopped back down again.

What did you expect to happen? She asked herself. She didn’t know, but it dawned on her that, ridiculous as the notion was, she had expected for something to happen.

“Crazy cat,” she muttered, turning off the light and going out.

She whirled, flicked on the light, and looked. The mat continued to lay spread out on the floor, flat and unthreatening.

“Crazy me,” Jordan said, leaving this time for real.

***

Long showers were one of Jordan’s few luxuries she allowed herself, and she treated herself to one tonight. When the cascade of water threatened to run to cold, she sighed, turned it off and exited the shower. She hesitated for only the briefest of moments before stepping onto the blue and green mat.

As always, the bathroom accessory softly welcomed her damp feet, its long fibers both drying and caressing her skin. She scrubbed one foot across it, then the other, then was about to step to the towel bar when a small form in the doorway caught her eye.

It was Jackson, back on watch, and he was definitely scoping out the bathmat.

“You are beginning to seriously weird me out,” Jordan declared, turning back in the direction of the towel bar.

She made to step towards it, but her foot didn’t rise from the surface of the mat. Instead, the mat came up as though glued to the bottom of her foot. She stumbled, off-balance, and nearly fell over.

That would be priceless, she thought wildly, to knock myself out and wake up naked on the bathroom floor.

Luckily, she was able to put out a hand and steady herself on the edge of the bathroom counter.

“What the hell?” she asked no one in particular. She tried experimentally lifting her other foot and found it similarly stuck fast.

No, not stuck. She bent and squinted, looking closer. The fibers of the mat were tangled around her toes and around her heels.

“How the hell did that happen?” she said, reaching down. She had expected to have to work her way out of the tangles holding the mat to her feet, but all at once…she would swear to it, the tangles had relaxed somehow, and her feet slipped easily free.

She stepped onto the tile floor, her feet appreciably dry by this point. The countertop pressed into her backside, and she realized that she was sidling around the mat so as not to go near it.

She glanced at the doorway and saw that Jackson had vacated his spot. Too weird for him, too, it seemed.

Jordan retrieved a towel from the bar on the wall, wrapped it around herself and sidled back around the mat to the doorway. As silly as it was, she couldn’t bring herself to just step over the thing on her path to exit the bathroom.

This time, when she left, she closed the door behind her.

***

“I really think my bathroom is haunted,” Jordan said.

Carpenter looked at her across the table at Henry’s, the microbrewery where they often met for a post-workday beer.

“You need to get over this notion of your bathroom as spook central,” he replied. “No one died in there, so – no ghosts.”

She spread her hands helplessly. “Well, then, possessed. My bathroom’s possessed.”

Carpenter shook his head. “Rooms don’t get possessed, only living things and sometimes inanimate objects.”

Jordan made a disgusted noise. “Well, something’s in there!” she insisted. “Even Jackson knows it!”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not. Cats can tell. Cats, dogs and birds.”

“Not snakes, lizards or turtles?”

Carpenter accepted this absurd notion with perfect seriousness. “No, reptiles are almost as imperceptive of the supernatural as human beings are.”

“I’m serious, Carpenter,” Jordan said, and was embarrassed at the plaintive note in her voice. “Something really weird is going on with my bathroom floor mat and I don’t know what to do.” She paused. “God, it sounds even stupider when I say it out loud.”

“Not really,” Carpenter assured her. “In Japan, they have more bathroom demons than you can wave a roll of Charmin at. For instance, there’s a creature called the Akaname, the ‘filth licker.’ It’s this grotesque, goblin-like monster that feeds on the grime in dirty bathrooms.”

“My bathroom’s not filthy!” Jordan said indignantly. “And even if it was, how would a…a filth-licker have found its way into it from Japan?”

“I didn’t say one had. I just wanted to point out that there’s strange things out there in the world. Who’s to say the Japanese are wrong?”

Jordan tapped the table, still nettled. “Well, if it isn’t a ghost and it for damned sure isn’t an Akaname, then what’s going on? How do I know the bathmat’s not possessed?”

Carpenter made an “ehh” motion with his head, scrunching up his eyebrows. “Somehow I don’t think it’s a possession. Possessed objects usually end up that way because they have a personal connection with someone and are thus more susceptible to supernatural invasion. You don’t have a deeply personal attachment to the bathmat, do you?”

Jordan scoffed. “I mean, I like it, it goes with the rest of the décor in the bathroom, but I’ve never sat on it and cried over a sad memory or anything.”

Carpenter nodded. “So probably not a possession. Maybe it’s a point of entry.”

“A what?”

“Like a doorway.”

She blinked at him. “From where?”

He shrugged and sipped his beer. “Impossible to say. Maybe another point in time and/or space. Maybe another dimension. Who knows?”

“Not me, that’s for sure,” huffed Jordan.

“So what are you going to do?”

Jordan gave him a hard look. “What I should have done already. I’m going to throw the thing the hell out.”

“You want to be careful,” Carpenter warned.

“Careful?”

“Yeah. What that thing is may not jibe with our conceptualization of what a door is. I mean, it’s not likely to be just a rectangular-shaped portal in the floor. It could be more like the filter over an air vent, with air or vibrations or whatever moving between your side and the other.”

“So?”

“So, it could be changing the structure of the bathmat over time. Whatever it’s becoming may also be getting stronger.”

“That’s it,” Jordan announced, downing the last of her beer in one long swallow and banging down her glass. “I’m going home and tossing it into the dumpster.”

Carpenter regarded her. “You want help?”

She smiled. “I think I’ll be okay to roll up a bathmat and put it out into the trash.”

“All right. Just remember what I said: be careful.”

“I will.”

“Because while you may want it gone, it might not want to go.”

***

Jordan took hold of the edge of the bathmat and pulled. Nothing happened. The mat budged not a centimeter. She tried again, taking hold of it by the corners. Still nothing. It was as though it was just another part of the floor.

She had come into the bathroom a few minutes before, armed with nothing but a cup of tea and her resolve that this sinister ridiculousness ended tonight.

“You have got to go, my friend,” she informed it. “I’ll be right back.”

She left the room, going to the closet in the back of her apartment, where she kept her toolbox. A few moment’s rummaging turned up the tool she had been looking for. Jiggling the putty knife in her hand, she walked back to the bathroom.

The mat was gone. The area of floor in front of the shower was bare.

“The hell?” Jordan said weakly. She pushed aside the shower curtain and looked into the bathtub. Nothing there.

Where did it go? She thought. Then, on the heels of that, it didn’t go anywhere! It’s a floor mat for god’s sake! It’s about as mobile as a sofa!

But her mind couldn’t argue with the bathmat’s absence from the room. That meant it had to be somewhere else.

Not out in the hallway. She would have seen it. A quick search of the living room turned up nothing. That left the kitchen and the bedroom.

Okay, the kitchen first.

She gripped the handle of the putty knife harder as she surveyed the small kitchen, looking under the cabinets and chairs and in the pantry. Nothing.

She did make a discovery under the kitchen table – Jackson. He was crouched there, with his ears laid back and hissing, but not at her.

If he’s so upset, she thought, why isn’t he on top of the fridge? That’s his go-to safe spot, so why isn’t he up –

There was a rustling, flapping sound, and a large, loose form fell down from the top of the refrigerator to land over her head and shoulders.

The pain was immediate and intense. It was like being covered by a wet blanket filled with angry wasps. Bursts of agony flared across her cheeks, her forehead, her neck, her upper back.

Screaming, she clawed at the mat, trying to yank it free. As soon as she laid her hands on its fuzzy outer layer, though, the iridescent blue and green fibers swelled and lengthened, snarling around her fingers.

She jerked against it with all of her strength. If anything, the creature only clung to her more tightly.

Her vision had been restricted to a single, small peephole among the folds of the thing. Through this gap, she saw her kitchen wavering wildly as she violently shook her head back and forth.

It was also through this gap that she saw the orange light on the stovetop’s bank of burner dials, the one that indicated that the surface was still hot.

With as much accuracy as she could muster, Jordan leaned over the stove and pressed her swaddled head against the largest burner.

The effect was terrible. The mat squealed and spasmed, immediately loosening its hold on her. There was the stink of frying fabric as its shaggy pelt began to smolder.

Jordan found her hands freed. She grabbed the edges of the mat and pulled convulsively. It came away from her with a ripping sound. With more effort, she disengaged herself entirely from the thing and held it, squirming furiously, at arm’s length.

The underside of the mat was lined with small, circular mouths, each one ringed with yellow, hooked teeth like that of a sea lamprey. The mouths worked and gnashed as the mat twisted in her grasp.

No wonder she had been in such agony, she realized sickly. She had been bitten in better than a dozen places.

The mat rippled suddenly, its free end lunging for her. She screamed again, jumping back as best she could.

Somewhere, Jackson was hissing and yowling. Jordan’s eyes stung from the blood that was dripping across them.

There was a wooden cutting board beside the sink. She slammed the monstrosity onto its nicked and grooved surface with one hand and snatched the carving knife out of the sink with the other.

The mat writhed and heaved. It was quickly wriggling free from her one-handed grip.

With a yell, she brought down the knife in the bunched-up center of the mat. She felt the blade penetrate the folds of material to bury itself in the cutting board beneath.

The mat gave a screech and began flopping around more than ever, blackish goo spraying from its wound in heavy gouts. Some of the droplets splashed across Jordan’s front and she gagged, nearly to the point of vomiting.

The thing was pinned to the cutting board by the knife, though. At least for the moment.

Wiping at her eyes, Jordan lurched out of the kitchen, across the hall and into the bedroom.

“Please, please, please,” she repeated over and over as she dove for the beside table, yanking open the drawer with such force that it skipped off its tracks, spilling its contents to the floor.

She fell to her knees among the loose change, hair ties and crumpled receipts and snatched up the 9mm Sig Saur whose hour for home defense had finally come. Bringing it up to eye level, she headed back to the kitchen.

Except for a viscid black smear, the cutting board was vacant. The carving knife lay on the floor, similarly coated with grue.

Jordan looked around wildly. There was a trail of the slimy black stuff leading out of the kitchen and back to –

“The bathroom,” she breathed. She moved quickly, sideways up the short hallway.

The light was off in the bathroom. Jordan slapped at the wall inside the doorway and clicked it on. As she did so, there was a wet, chittering noise.

She peeped around the corner. The mat was pulling itself along the white tile floor like a flat, hairy worm.

Jordan stepped through the doorway, bringing up the pistol. She gritted her teeth and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked in her hands as the bullets flew.

The mat jumped as the shots tore into it. Iridescent fluff, bits of ceramic tile and black gunk flew from the ragged holes. It gave a warbling, angry cry, then slumped to the floor and was still.

Jordan advanced slowly, cautiously. She poked the mat with her toe again. The effect was the same as it had been the day before – the edge of the mat rose at her prodding, then fell back, limp, when she pulled her foot back. The thing, whatever it was, whatever it had become or was becoming, appeared to be dead.

She hesitantly reached down and flipped it over. The mouths were open but slack. It didn’t have much mass, but what it did have was deadweight.

Yes, she decided, the mat had definitely departed from this mortal coil.

She stood and turned to the door, her mind already a million miles away, mostly on what she was going to say when the police turned up.

Which was why she completely missed seeing the shower curtain twitch.