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The Mysterious Journal: Episode 2 - Cat and Mouse

After the ordeal at Wainright Manor, Isaiah Higgs has another unexpected encounter.

By Daniel CoatesPublished 3 years ago 11 min read
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The Mysterious Journal: Episode 2 - Cat and Mouse
Photo by Dominic Brügger on Unsplash

Isaiah arrived in town early in the morning after following the road for a day. He used a little of his inheritance to eat some food and rent a room at the local Inn. After a bath and washing his clothes, he laid in bed and quickly fell asleep.

He awoke to the feeling of something moving in his mouth. Sensations began flooding into his consciousness in a confusing jumble. He opened his eyes but could see only darkness. Rising above the rest was the strong feeling of needing to breathe. He tried to breathe in, but no relief came. In fact, the feeling of suffocation intensified. Terror gripped him as he reached to his mouth to remove what was smothering him. His fingers touched a metal surface completely filling his mouth. Attached to it seemed to be a cord that was almost avoiding his hands. Just as his head began to pound and he started to feel faint, he finally gripped the cord. He pulled as hard as he could and yanked the mass of metal painfully out of his mouth, accompanied by a loud squelch.

Immediately, air flowed into his throat to his lungs again; which he gulped down greedily. He propped himself up on his elbow and opened his eyes, but still saw nothing. He tried to rub his eyes but another metal thing was over them. He sat fully up and gripped the vaguely pear-shaped lumps of metal and pulled them off. Setting them down on the bed, he groped the top of his bedstand until he found a lamp, which he lit. He rubbed his eyes in disbelief. Scurrying down his bed and away from him were three little metal mice.

Anyone else might be paralyzed by fear or confusion but Isaiah had encountered unbelievable things recently. He jumped out of bed and chased the mice, wrenching out a dresser drawer as he went. The mice scurried towards the half-open window, but Isaiah was gaining on them. The first one scaled the curtain and looked back at him briefly before hopping out into the dark street. Just as the second and third reached the base of the wall, the upside-down drawer slammed down over them. Isaiah held it down, watching and waiting. Eventually satisfied that they were trapped, he reached out one foot and hooked it through the handle of the briefcase under the bed. He pulled it to closer, then set it on the drawer.

He sat for a moment, a connection forming in his head while he considered the mice creatures. Based on previous experience with independently moving metal creatures, and the fact they had seemingly been trying to kill him, he wondered if they had anything to do with his grandfather. He walked over to the end table and pulled its drawer open, revealing a little black notebook. He opened it up and flipped through the mostly blank pages. He passed over the personal note and the entry for the landscaper, his suspicions were confirmed: a new entry had appeared:

Crumb Collectors. These adorable enchanted mice are meant to clean both wide open rooms and the tiny, hard-to-reach nooks and crannies of a household. Each one has a little vacuum instead of their mouth that sucks debris up into the storage cavity that is most of their bodies. On their own they are entirely harmless and docile, but pair them with my disastrous attempt at a trash bin and they can be...highly destructive. For this reason, I was forced to build in a stopping mechanism and separate the mice from their trash repository. Stroke their spines nose to tail and they will become dormant. Reverse stroke reanimates them.

The implications of the existence of these mice swarmed about in his head. Did they somehow escape before the manor was destroyed? Did the fire perhaps have no effect on them? What were they doing on his face? He realized that he would need more information before he could answer any of these. He slipped into clothes and threw on a coat. Carefully, he removed the briefcase and lifted the drawer just a little. Immediately one of the mice scurried out and he dropped the drawer back down. The mouse started scurrying up the wall, but Isaiah was quick and snatched it up. The thing squirmed silently in his hand until he stroked its spine. It shuddered once and its eyes closed while the tail and legs retracted into its body.

He inspected the dormant mouse, turning it over and over in his hands. As it appeared to be fully inert, he put it in a pocket and grabbed the lantern from the end table. He opened the window fully and set the lantern onto the grass outside. Then he lifted the drawer again. The mouse quickly ran up the wall and out the window, but this time Isaiah followed it, scrambling out the window too and scooping up his lantern before running after it. The mouse kept to the grass making it difficult to follow. If it wasn’t for the lantern reflecting off its metal body, Isaiah surely would have lost it.

He chased the mouse through yards and alleys, across streets and over fences until they came to an old brewery near the end of main street. It ran right up to the cellar door and went through a gap in the corner of the door. Isaiah reached the door and pulled it open. Raising the lantern, he could just barely see the bottom of the stairs and a doorway that opened into pitch-black. Unease rose in him as he began descending, but forced himself to keep walking. Every step sounded louder than the last and he felt as though he was submerging himself as damp, cool air seemed to cling to him the further down he went.

Feeling very vulnerable indeed, he at last reached the bottom. He dared not tear his eyes from the darkness in the room in front of him to look back at the way out. In the dim lantern light, he could only see part of an abandoned brewery basement. Dusty machines with large wheels and funnels as well as cobweb-covered kegs lay about somewhat haphazardly. He could smell the faint scent of alcohol mixed with musty air. He took a step forward and immediately felt as though he was being watched. His stomach churned and he could taste bile at the back of his throat.

He mustered his courage and walked into the room, holding his lantern high. The shadows cast by the machines were menacing, but a pair of glowing red eyes from the dark froze Isaiah in place. A hissing sound emanated from the eye’s direction as a thin glowing red line appeared and widened. An impossibly wide smile grew under the eyes and with it came a sound like distant screaming. Shaking in fear, Isaiah held the lantern out and was not relieved to see that the eyes and mouth were on a barrel-sized, grotesquely fat, cat statue.

Suddenly scraping and shuffling sounded from all around Isaiah as hundreds of metal mice poured out from behind the machines and kegs in the basement. Carried by a number of them on their backs was a very dead woman in a night gown. He watched in horror as the wave of mice brought her up to the cat and scurried on top of each other to convey her up to the open cat’s mouth. The corpse fell in and the cat’s eyes closed as if savoring its horrifying meal. The mouth snapped shut and the eyes opened again, focusing on Isaiah.

The mice turned all at once and looked at him. He tried to run but his legs would not move. The mice ran at him, sprinting across the floor and scrambling over one another as though waves from a metal sea. He broke free of his paralysis in the face of immediate danger and ran. The mice pushed each other forward as they ran, catching up to him well before he could reach the stairs. They swarmed around his ankles and he was quickly knee deep in them, wading more than walking. Despite wading as fast as he could, he realized he was moving further away from the stairs. He looked down at the mice and saw that he was in fact walking on them, not the floor. And they were taking him back towards the cat while mobbing all around him so he could do nothing to stop it.

He panicked and lunged forward, trying to jump free, but he only managed to drop his lantern which shattered. He looked back and saw the cat’s maw start to open and the distant screaming resumed. Terrified beyond reason, he clawed at the mice around him, trying to grab the floor, or slow himself in any way. As the mice started to form a ramp to the cat’s mouth, He grabbed a mouse, and chucked it into the fiery glowing maw. The mouse flailed as it flew and disappeared into the mouth. For just a moment, the mouse wave hesitated, stopping entirely. The cat’s eyes flashed and the mouse wave resumed hauling Isaiah closer to death.

He grabbed another mouse by its tail and threw it in too. The mouse wave hesitated again but he didn’t wait for the cat to make them go again. He kept grabbing mouse after mouse and throwing them into the cat’s mouth. The cat was frowning now and in spite of its eyes flashing repeatedly, the mice scattered out from under Isaiah, desperate to avoid being grabbed. Soon Isaiah found he was on the ground again. He stood and faced the cat statue. Its eyes darted between each of the retreating mice, flashing so fast it might as well be strobing.

A loud crackle drew Isaiah’s attention back towards the stairs where the lantern had started a fire on the old wooden beam supporting the ceiling. As he watched, the flames caught on a barrel sitting against the beam. The mice had completely scattered and Isaiah knew it was time to go. He started to run but glanced back over his shoulder at the cat. It was staring right at him. Its red eyes seemed to grow impossibly huge, sucking him into their depths.

Suddenly he seemed to be floating in air and he could see the room and the cat as well as... himself. His body walked towards the cat, slack-jawed and clumsily. He tried to resist but found he could not. He tried to yell or make any noise at all but nothing happened. The fire was spreading very quickly throughout the room. Though he could feel nothing in the weird out-of-body state, he saw his skin reddening from the heat. Nearly the entire ceiling was in flames and the barrels apparently still had something in them as they had started exploding when engulfed in fire. He tried again to scream as his body reached the cat which opened its mouth. His body lifted its leg to step inside just as a flaming crossbeam broke and slammed into the cat, cracking it.

Isaiah blinked and was back in his body, his leg still raised. The cat thing was oozing red liquid, not unlike blood, from the cracks running down it’s body. Another beam crashed down not more than five feet from him, bringing a part of the floor above with it. Isaiah ran for the back stairs, dodging exploding booze barrels and pieces of ceiling raining down. He barely made it when the entire building started to collapse. Rushing up the stairs, he could hear the shouts of the fire brigade on the other side of the collapsing building. He ran back towards the Inn, his mind racing. He needed answers: he needed to return to Wainright Manor.

Bonus Entry:

Horace the Trash Receptacle. After I got the Crumb Collectors working, I realized that, due to their small size, they could not clean very much on their own before becoming full and useless. My first ‘solution’ if you could call it that, was to create hundreds of the things. As you could imagine that only meant that my home, while clean, was covered in little mice full of dirt. Finally, a real solution came to me: I would create a place for the mice to empty themselves so they could work again! I decided to make a portal since just making a regular bin would effectively create the same outcome as making more mice. I took a big statue of my old cat, Horace, that I had commissioned previously. I think I was originally going for some sort of poetic cat and mouse thing, but I don’t know that it really came through. Anyways, I hollowed him out and installed a mouth that opened and closed. Then I created a portal. It was supposed to be to a pocket dimension but instead I think it ended up being a bit…south. As soon as I was finished the thing’s eyes lit up like fire and it opened its mouth and tried to make me jump inside! Thankfully tricks of that nature have little effect on me so I hid it away and introduced it to the mice. It worked excellently for awhile but I quickly discovered it was controlling the mice and making them kill my household pets via suffocation! Then it would have the mice basically feed them to it! So I took a week and locked up Horace as well as rounded up and deactivated all of the mice. Shame, the mice at least really worked.

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About the Creator

Daniel Coates

Hello! I am a huge D&D nerd with a massive love of all things fantasy, sci-fi, and historical.

I upload short stories fairly often and love feedback! Follow me at https://www.facebook.com/DramaAndDrakesWriting

Come join me for an adventure!

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