Chapter 3: The Demon in the Drainpipe

For the rest of the day Violet stayed well away from the drainpipe. It seemed that the entire area, formerly normal and nondescript, had suddenly fallen beneath the influence of some malign fog. Even thinking about going back there squeezed the breath from Violet’s lungs and made her feel newly afraid.

How had the cat been able to look directly into it with no ill effect? Why had the demon been so afraid?

The questions reverberated within Violet’s mind, intensifying until she was secluded inside of her room. She didn’t think she could bear to be around other people, not even her mother. Something about simply feigning normalcy felt impossibly wrong.

So instead she sat on the floor at the foot of her bed, beneath a glass window that faced due north, and watched the light begin to drain out of the sky. Though Violet had started her day having never seen a demon before, she still knew enough about such creatures to know that they held sunlight to be an offense. Only in darkness could they truly thrive.

In the back of her mind Violet knew that it wasn’t too late to go out and tell somebody about the demon, that way they could maybe brick up the drainpipe or even try to burn the demon out…but she couldn’t imagine how to tell her story. Somehow, though she knew it made no logical sense, Violet was absolutely certain that if she told the adults about the demon then they would find out about the cat as well. And if they knew about the correspondence she’d started…

Violet shivered in place and sniffled, feeling very sorry for herself. It seemed certain now that something very bad was going to happen.

“Dear?” Her mother called from beyond the door.

Violet said nothing. Her mother sounded busy, there was a distracted edge to her voice and Violet could hear things being shifted around. Furniture legs grated over the floorboards.

“Violet?” Her mother asked again, more insistently.

This time Violet got up and shuffled to her door, opening it just wide enough to poke her head out through the gap.

Her mother was in the parlor, which was what she called the entire front half of the house. Violet didn’t truthfully know what a parlor was, but supposed that it helped make the house seem posher. The dining table had been shifted out of position and stood at a crooked angle, one corner touching the far wall. As Violet watched, her mother knelt to examine the floorboards, a strangely keen expression on her face.

“Mum?” Violet asked.

For a moment it seemed as though her mother had entirely forgotten she was there, then she glanced back. The shadows beneath her eyes were very dark.

“I’ve lost a tooth,” she said. “Could you be a good girl and make sure it hasn’t gone between the floorboards?”

Violet hunched her shoulders a little bit. Now that she looked closer there was a tiny smear of blood at one corner of her mother’s mouth, almost in the shape of a comma. It stood out dramatically against her waxy skin.

“Which tooth was it?” Violet asked. She didn’t really want to know, but her mother seemed terribly fixated, so…

No answer came. Her mother got onto her hands and knees, laid one cheek against the floorboards and began to crawl along, searching for enamel debris.

Violet shut the door to her room and went back to where she’d been sitting. The horizon had gone an ever deepening shade of gold now. Normally Violet enjoyed watching sunsets, but the advent of this one only deepened the restless dread gnawing at her stomach.

Her eyes went to the floor.

A moment later something tapped at her window, rapid and impatient. Violet jumped in place, looking to where a pair of big silvery eyes were staring through the glass.

It was the cat, perched on the outside of her windowsill, holding a stick of pink chalk in its mouth. For a moment Violet stayed where she was, entirely unsure how to react. Before, the cat had come to her in the outdoors and maintained a fairly strict distance. Now it was barely a meter away, shifting impatiently in place. Again it raised one front paw and tapped insistently.

Violet opened the window before she could think better of it and the cat leapt onto her bed, spitting the chalk out with a pronounced mutter of distaste.

“What are you doing here?” Violet whispered as she shut the window, one eye kept to her bedroom door. Beyond it she could hear the muted rumble of her mother moving the dining table somewhere else. She seemed to be absorbed in her fixation but Violet still felt uneasy. Nothing good would happen if she was discovered to have let a cat into her home.

The cat stuck out its tongue, not seeming to have heard her.

“Look at me,” it complained. “I have chalk on my whiskers.” Indeed, there were little pink crumbs riming its mouth.

Violet stared. The cat rolled its eyes and nudged the stick of chalk towards her with one front paw. She picked it up, rolling it uncertainly between her fingers. The chalk, slightly damp with cat saliva, printed little wedges of pink across her hand.

“I don’t….” She trailed off. “…Where did you get this?”

“I stole it from a little sunburnt child. The color is a tribute to her alarming floridity.”

“You stole it?” Violet asked, and was faintly surprised despite herself, before deciding that theft probably wasn’t beyond the purview of an only slightly demonic talking cat.

“I was thinking,” the cat continued, completely unruffled by Violet’s alarm. “Since you are small and completely unsuited to dealing with demons as I do, you should learn how to protect yourself.”

Slowly, Violet sank back down to the floor. This time, however, she faced the bed, the cat settling into an almost Sphinx like pose before her. It kneaded its claws into her bedspread but Violet didn’t quite have the heart to tell it to stop. There were simply too many questions clouding her mind.

“There aren’t supposed to be demons here.” She said, feeling helpless. That same frightened, impotent thought had been pounding against the forefront of her mind all day, but it was only now that she managed to put it into words.

“And?” The cat asked.

“We’re on an island,” Violet said, as though that fact could erase the terrible thing lurking in the drainpipe outside. “There’s a half mile of running water on all sides of us.”

The cat stared blankly for a long moment, then stretched and yawned, offering her a flash of sharp white teeth. It said nothing.

Violet sighed and shuffled back a few feet, until she had a stretch of blank wood between her and the cat. Then she began to draw. The floorboards were slightly uneven and the chalk stuttered over them, its tip grinding and splintering as it hit each new seam. Violet kept going, making squiggling lines meant to symbolize the gulf of a river, then a roughly diamond shaped space in the center. That was the island her village sat on. Across the stretches of land on either side of the river Violet scrawled skulls. Skulls meant death, so her mother had explained when Violet had gone poking around in the garden shed and uncovered a collection of old glass bottles with menacing skeletal iconography drawn across their labels.

“This is us.” She said, labeling the island on her creation, realizing too late that the text would be upside down from where the cat sat. Still, that hardly seemed to bother it.

“I’ve always considered the concept of islands to be limiting.” The cat said, then dropped down on top of her crude map and began sweeping it into blurred nothingness with broad strokes of its tail. Violet watched this, caught between outrage and a growing sense of….

Wait.

How had the demon ended up across the river? Demons were repelled by running water just as they were by sunlight, she knew this. Yet that fact, powerful as it was, made the creature in her drainpipe no less real.

“I don’t understand.” She said.

“I want you to draw something,” the cat said, ignoring her distress. “Follow my directions very carefully and do not deviate.”

“On the floor?” Violet asked.

The cat gave her an exasperated look.

“Draw a circle big enough to fit your outstretched hand,” it said. “Then add four ovals, each with pointed ends. They should meet—but not intersect—in the center of the circle.”

Violet hesitantly drew, the cat looking over her shaky attempt with a wince.

“That might do the trick if you’re looking to tickle it.” It sniffed.

“I don’t even know what we’re doing.” Violet protested, confusion and dread and fear boiling over all at once.

The cat sighed, as though it was about to make a great sacrifice.

“Give me the chalk.” It said.

Violet held it out and the cat took one end of the stick into its mouth, backing a few steps away before laboriously redrawing the same symbol. The cat’s attempt was much more evenly done and it looked rather proud of itself even as it spat the chalk back out, dappled from head to tail with pink dust.

“What is it?” Violet asked. “What did we just draw?”

“What I drew,” the cat paused for dramatic effect. “Is a protection sigil.”

Violet scrutinized the symbol on her floor, unconvinced.

“It’s just chalk in a funny shape.” She said.

“My perception of you is just light in a funny shape,” the cat retorted. “It all depends upon the arrangement…and this arrangement has power.” There was such conviction behind the cat’s words that Violet completely forgot her skepticism. Again she remembered the demon cowering before the cat, pleading for it to go away.

“Okay….” She mumbled. “Now what?”

“Find something portable to draw this symbol on, we’re going outside.”

Violet’s eyes flashed to the dying sunset beyond her window. The horizon had gone a deep, rich orange above the inky black silhouette of the forest. From within her rose an icy tide of fear.

Of all the many rules in life, the only one that Violet had never contemplated breaking was the curfew. Nobody ever went outside after dark for any reason. Even the thought of taking a trip around the side of the house felt impossible, as though the cat had suggested going to the moon.

“No.” Violet gasped, fearfully shaking her head.

The cat began to puff up, clearly miffed, then huffed and turned away, hopping back onto Violet’s bed and settling upon her pillow. The pillow was rather small and to fit the cat had to bunch itself up, pink streaked tail wound tightly around its entire body.

“I figured you for more than a sheep.” It muttered.

“What’s a sheep?” Violet asked before she could stop herself. Despite her ignorance she could tell by the cat’s tone that it couldn’t be anything good.

“Listen,” the cat sighed, seeming to deflate a little bit. “What you saw in the drainpipe probably couldn’t have killed you even I hadn’t come along. It’s not very dangerous so long as it’s bottled up like that.”

Violet said nothing. The cat shifted uncomfortably. It seemed to find being conciliatory almost unbearably strange. Finally it got up and traipsed to the edge of the bed.

“If it makes you feel any better,” the cat continued with obvious reluctance. “I can’t do this next part without you.”

For a long while Violet didn’t know what to say or how to process the cat’s words. It…needed her help? Somehow that statement didn’t seem to mesh with its earlier assurance that the demon wasn’t very dangerous, but maybe she was missing something. The whole situation felt unfamiliar in the worst, most surreal way. Yet, bubbling up through the cracks was a warm glow of satisfaction.

“…Can’t you deal with the demon by yourself?” She asked, and was surprised to find herself hoping that the answer would be no.

The cat blew out a breath and looked to the window, the last orangey light of the fading sunset reflecting off its eyes.

“We don’t have much time. The shadows are deepening,” it said. “Now find something to draw that sigil on.”

The cat was right, before too long the sun would be entirely behind the trees. There would still be light in the sky, but none of it would reach the low places around the drainpipe. If the demon slipped out past the grate….

Violet had to suppress an anxious shiver and searched around. The cat seemed to want to bring the sigil with them when they went outside, so she needed something light. Yet when she went for her desk and the notebook sitting there the cat huffed and leapt ahead of her, shaking its head as it pinned the notebook down with both front paws.

“Something sturdy,” it emphasized. “You put it on paper and the whole thing might blow away.”

Violet looked past the cat, to the dying sunset outside, then sighed and tugged the notebook out from under its feet. The cat executed an only slightly inelegant stumble, tail puffing up with indignation.

“What did I just…?” It trailed off halfway through its own unhappy question and looked away, clearly upset.

Violet’s notebook was old and had a rigid, bleached canvas cover. Her mother had given it as a gift some years before, when Violet had been very small, and the first thirty or so pages were covered with childish scrawling and scribbles. She’d since become more dedicated to conserving the remaining pages. Things like notebooks and even chalk were not easily available in the village.

“I don’t have anything else.” She said stubbornly, hugging the notebook to her chest. Though she didn’t want to admit it, having the notebook close made her feel a bit safer all on its own.

There was an old name written on the inside of the front cover, blurred beyond all legibility, and Violet sometimes liked to imagine that it was her father’s.

“Very well,” the cat said, a bit sharply. “Start drawing.”

Considering what the cat had said about sturdiness, Violet drew the sigil upon her notebook’s front cover. The chalk stuttered over the canvas and the resulting shape was somewhat uneven, but this time the cat had nothing bad to say about her effort. Instead, it looked pointedly to the outside.

Violet took a deep breath, tucked the notebook under one arm, and opened her window. A trickle of chilly evening air wafted past her, raising lines of gooseflesh along her arms. The cat leapt out, landing soundlessly in the grass below, and turned to stare expectantly back up at her, silvery eyes luminous in the gathering dim.

The light wasn’t quite gone yet, Violet could see spindly shadows cast across her back garden, but the spaces between them were slowly losing cohesion. She shuffled herself onto her windowsill, ducking beneath the raised window, then hesitated for a long moment, paralyzed by a yawning sense of dread.

It was just her back garden, she told herself, but even the inner voice she used came out trembly and frightened. Below her, the cat rose onto its hind legs and smacked her dangling ankle with one front paw. Violet just barely bit back a yelp, for the cat had stung her with the very tips of its claws, and then reluctantly slipped off of the windowsill and into the garden below.

There had once been rosebushes beneath Violet’s window but they were shriveled and all but gone now, a few listless loops of thorny vines sagging into the dirt. Violet picked her way carefully around them and stepped uncertainly away from her house.

The evening silence was so absolute that all Violet could hear was the anxious pulse of her own heart.

She turned a quick circle but of course the garden remained quiet and still. On the far northern horizon Violet could see the faintest hint of the Glow becoming visible, threads and thin panes of blue light piercing the fading sunset. They radiated out from some far off central source, almost too faint to be visible, at least so early in the evening.

Normally Violet liked seeing the Glow, it was a beacon shining up from the middle of an inky, night drenched forest. Now, however, it seemed very small and far away.

Around her, Violet could see lights coming on. The village was bracketed with a small network of lamp posts, each festooned with big rubber coated wires that she’d been forever warned never to touch. They came on at night, casting flickery yellow pools of light around themselves.

Her mother had once said that there had been more lamps long ago, when she was Violet’s age, but Violet had been distracted trying to picture her mother as a young girl and had given the anecdote little thought.

The little gravel alleyway where the drainpipe lay was not caught in the glow of an electric lamp and the ever deepening darkness forced a little groan from between Violet’s lips. She was trembling, still clutching her notebook tight to her chest, though now it did nothing to make her feel even slightly safer.

Instead she looked to the cat, which paused at the corner of her house, staring into the alleyway. Violet didn’t have a direct line of sight on the drainpipe from where she was, but though the thought of what could be lurking around that corner gnawed at her nerves, she didn’t dare move any closer.

Finally, the cat glanced back to her and made a small ‘come hither’ gesture with its muzzle. Violet reluctantly advanced, certain that the demon could hear her heart pounding clear through her chest and blouse.

“Go to the drainpipe,” the cat said, voice low. “And make sure you’re holding the sigil out in front of you.”

Violet looked down at the notebook. The chalk was slightly blurred where she’d hugged the notebook’s cover against her chest but the symbol itself remained clear enough. She could see the circle and its bouquet of pointed ovals, all drawn in clear, bright pink.

Then, before she could convince herself not to, she stepped around the corner.

The first thing she realized was that the drainpipe was no longer there. For a half second Violet’s mind whirred frictionlessly in place, trying to make sense of that little burst of input, but there was no other apparent interpretation. A small, irregular section of the space in front of her had fallen to nonsense. It reminded her a bit of a time she’d accidentally looked into the sun. Whole sections of sight had seemed to turn off entirely, there was no describing the color or visual texture that remained.

Then the nothing where the drainpipe had been began to swirl, and Violet suddenly understood what she was looking at.

It was the demon. And it was out of the drainpipe.

Violet froze, a ragged, squeaky gasp shuddering past her lips. She wanted badly to turn and run back around the corner, but it felt as though her mind and body had become entirely separated. And again there was the numbness and the noise.

The swirling wasn’t quite as smooth now, it seemed like the demon was cringing away from those places in the air where the light was still too intense, but that wasn’t enough of a deterrent to keep it locked within the confines of the drainpipe. At the center of its inky vortex shone a flat and terrible color.

Once again the noise became words.

o h w h y

h u r t s

y o u

a g a i n ? ? ¿

s o r r y p l e a s e s o s o r r y

n o t . ∆ .I d o n ‘ t w a n t . . —

s t a y s t i l l

p l e a s e

Violet shuffled back, the breath catching in her throat. It was somehow even worse now, the dimness around her seeming to enhance the demon’s terrible effect. Her thoughts felt ragged and barely connected, each strand of awareness somehow isolated from the surrounding context of her situation.

From the midst of the gathering numbness Violet wondered why the demon wasn’t scared of her. She had her notebook, she had the sigil…had the cat been wrong? Had it lied to her?

Her eyes drifted down just a bit, to where her arms suddenly weren’t up in front of her. She still had her notebook but it was lowered, her arms gone all but limp, fingers slowly relaxing. In a moment she’d drop it onto the grass and that would be it.

The realization felt isolated, like a message meant for some distant version of herself. In front of her the demon’s swirl expanded until it seemed to consume the entire alley, vision beyond that shorted out, context erased but for the pits and speckles of emerging cobalt and the ever increasing clamor of the voices.

There was nothing.

what could she

possibly do

to fight

this

?

¿

Beneath the ever growing numbness, the confused tangle of voices and pleas and demands she stay still Violet could feel the cover of her notebook, the canvas rough and worn, the firmness of it under her fingers. She thought about the name written on the inside of the front cover and the chalk dust coloring her fingers. Those thoughts bounced discordant and free but they gathered context as they went. The notebook was there to protect her. The sigil was there to protect her.

She made herself gather its component parts, the circle and the pointed ovals assembled like petals in a flower, and when she envisioned it put together she thought there was a stutter in the voices.

Violet made herself take a deep breath, the action coming from a thousand miles away. The demon was closer now, though distance could not be comprehended. There was texture to its mass, a differentiation from the blinding nothing, the seams where its swirls met seemed to drag some of the world with them and Violet tore her eyes from the color to look at that instead. With desperate fingers she held tight to her notebook and forced her arms up, movements strange and sluggish. They felt delayed, surely she wasn’t moving fast enough, but then, suddenly, the world before her eyes had become bleached canvas and she was stumbling back, hitting the wall of her house with a thud. Violet’s legs buckled, the influence of the demon splintering as a reflexive surge of terror rushed through her.

From around the edges of the notebook she could see the demon’s swirling interrupted, the mass of its form seeming to fold into itself, fracturing along unpleasantly organic lines. Those coils closest to the colors writhed and stretched flat like panes of purest night, but Violet could see clear through them now. The demon was evaporating, as though she’d caught it in the beam of a floodlight.

S T O P

__h o w

h e lp plea se s t op p p p ppp pp

h u r t s h u r t s h u r t s h u r t s h u r t s

k i l l

s t o p w h y ¿ ¿ ¿

w — ∆ ¿ ∆

s t o p s t o p k i l l s t o p p l e a s e k i l l y o u s t o p k i l l y o u r i p y o u r s k i n k il k l i l l i k

∆ h e l p -° i d o n t —

∆ ¶ ¿

¢ ∆

p le ase ho w hw h o w w h o w

h u r tts sur ri

pl a es e k;;ll

don ; t

h elp

a l 0 n e e

h e l p

s c å ® e ∂

p l —§

: ; . . ‘ ;

..

º

It took a long time for the demon to go silent. Longer after that for Violet to gather the courage to peek around the edge of her notebook. It had gone warm in her hands and felt strange, like the material was no longer completely canvas, but wasn’t not canvas either.

Then that feeling passed and Violet was suddenly aware that there were crickets singing. She lowered the notebook maybe an inch and looked ahead of herself.

There was the drainpipe and the grate blocking it off, the gravel alleyway running above. No sign of the demon.

“Is…is it gone?” She asked, and was alarmed by how hollow her voice sounded.

For a moment there was silence, but just as Violet was debating whether or not it would be safe to turn her gaze away from the grate, she felt a soft, furry something brush by one of her knees.

The cat stepped up to the drainpipe and examined the space beyond for a silent, serious moment before shaking its head and chuckling. Violet blinked. How on earth could the cat laugh at such a grim, terrible time?

She huffed and picked herself back up, doing her best to ignore just how rubbery her legs felt beneath her.

“You surprised the hell out of it,” the cat snickered, glancing at her, clearly well amused by whatever it saw in the depths of the drainpipe. “I can hear it moping down there.”

Violet froze and her face, already chalky, lost another shade of color.

“It’s still alive?” She asked, horrified.

The cat rolled its eyes at her, as though she’d said something stupid.

“Come here,” it said. “I bet you could make it flinch.”

Violet didn’t move. All she could do was stare at both the cat and the drainpipe. This hadn’t played out at all how’d she’d imagined it would. Just then, something occurred to her.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “…You looked around the corner before sending me out. You knew it had left the drainpipe.”

The cat glanced back at her, expression unchanged.

“So?”

“It almost got me,” Violet cried, too upset to care about being quiet. “And you didn’t lift a finger to help!”

“I thought you did fine on your own,” the cat said, clearly uninterested in her dismay. “Besides, I wouldn’t have let it touch you.”

Violet wanted to continue being angry, it felt much better than being afraid, but though the cat was certainly being callous she couldn’t say it was wrong. It had, after all, been waiting only a few meters away. And, beyond that, she’d driven the demon back into the drainpipe without assistance. She hadn’t needed its help.

“…Oh.” Violet said quietly.

The cat nodded decisively.

“Really, you didn’t need me here at all,” it said. “Even if you’d failed utterly, that little thing in the drain couldn’t kill you all by itself.”

Violet glanced uncertainly to the darkness past the grate. The cat had said something like that before, when it was trying to cheer her up after her first encounter with the demon, but she still couldn’t say she believed it.

That being said….

“What…happens when a demon attacks a person?” Violet asked hesitantly. She wasn’t sure she really wanted to know the answer, but now that it was in her head the curiosity was impossible to dissuade.

“Nothing too bad,” the cat said. “I understand it’s relatively painless. If you’d succumbed to that one and I’d…I don’t know, died of embarrassment rather than gone to help you, it would have gone straight through your eyes to get at your soul. A little like a crow, come to think of it.”

Violet hugged her notebook tight to her chest. The cat sounded so completely casual that it took a moment for the true horror of what it had just said to fully sink in. She touched the corner of her left eye, then turned around and was sick.

The cat turned politely away and went back to watching the drainpipe. It seemed to find the sight of the defeated demon especially interesting.

Violet tended to get teary when she vomited and this was no exception. She sniffled and wiped her mouth, feeling uniquely miserable.

“That’s horrible.” She mumbled, voice shaky.

“It’s not all that bad,” the cat said. “This one’s too small to take an entire soul, so there’d be some of you left afterwards, though what parts I cannot say. Still, you’d have your hearing and both hands left over. That’s something.”

Violet said nothing, just spat and let a full body shiver roll through her. Taking a deep breath, she looked to the sigil on the cover of her notebook and ran one thumb gently along an oval’s curve.

“What will we do now?” She asked. “It’s still down there.”

The cat considered for a moment.

“We have some options,” it said. “Now come over here.”

“No.” Violet said reflexively.

The cat gave her a sour look.

“You’re too easily frightened. That’s not a good trait even for someone so small and disobedient.” It said.

“I was almost eaten by a demon.” Violet protested.

“Don’t be dramatic. Remember, you still have the sigil.”

Violet’s eyes flashed down to her notebook once more and she reluctantly stepped over, kneeling next to the cat. From where she was she could see a few feet into the drainpipe, though the whole expanse was mired in an inky murk. Even as she settled into place Violet realized that the demon’s noise was back, nesting in the front of her mind. She tensed and shook her head as though she could physically throw its voice away, but the cat laid a paw on her knee.

“The demon can’t do anything to you.” It said, and sounded almost soothing.

Violet took a deep breath and did her best to ignore the demon's voice. She couldn’t see the horrible creature, not in the midst of darkness so thick, but it had to be close, lurking off in some corner.

Even though she knew the cat was right, the thought of being so close to the thing made her chest feel constricted. She kept the sigil aimed at the grate, fingernails digging into the canvas cover of her notebook.

“Does it have to be chalk?” She asked.

“Hmm?”

“The…the symbol. Could I do it in ink so it doesn’t wash away?”

“You could,” the cat said. “But chalk can be applied to more surfaces.”

For a moment longer they were silent, Violet fidgeting in place. Slowly, the noise began to refine itself once more, but, mercifully, it came accompanied by none of the demon’s numbing mental influence.

g i r l

h u r t s h u r t s h u r t s . ∆ . .

g o a w a y

p l e a s e

k i l l y o u

k i l l e v e r y o n e h e l p

s t o p

s o s o r r y s o s o s o r r y p l e a s e . -º-

Violet shut her eyes and shook her head again, like a horse scaring flies.

“Why does it keep apologizing?” She asked.

“You have two options,” the cat said, ignoring her question. “You can seal the drainpipe off, or you can fill it with something flammable and light a match. Which one works best for you?”

There was something undeniably cathartic about the thought of burning the demon out, but Violet knew that it would attract attention if she did so. And the last thing she wanted was to be caught sprinkling coal oil around.

Instead, Violet’s thoughts went to the garden shed, which contained a great many old and interesting things. There were shears and saws, clay pots and seed packets, and, in one back corner, a small stack of reddish brown bricks apparently leftover from lining the ash-pit.

“Will you keep an eye on the demon?” Violet asked.

“It’s not going anywhere.” The cat said, and Violet took the opportunity to get up and put some distance between herself and the drainpipe. The demon’s words slackened and then crumbled into meaningless noise before being lost altogether. It was like listening to a radio frequency fall apart.

Violet was not meant to be in the garden shed, since it contained a great many rusty and dangerous objects, but she knew where her mother kept the spare key, and was inside in barely any time at all.

She had to pause in the doorway, momentarily caught off guard by just how different things appeared in the dark. She was used to venturing into the shed during the daytime, but now, even though it wasn’t yet full night, she couldn’t quite get her bearings.

“It’s fine.” Violet mumbled to herself, but she could feel her heart picking up once more as her darkness-baffled eyes invented a new and sinister topography from the shadows ahead of her.

She edged in sideways, arms held out so she wouldn’t knock anything over. There were jars filled with nails and containers of rat poison here and there, she knew that much. The idea of accidentally breaking one and subsequently suffocating in a haze of strychnine was distinctly unpleasant.

Finally, after some cautious creeping, Violet made it to the far corner of the shed and knelt down, the musty floorboards creaking under her. Squinting into the dark, she could just barely recognize the stack of bricks that was her goal. For a moment she wondered if she ought to look for the makings of mortar too, but she had no desire to spend even more time poking around the shed and so gathered an armload of bricks before edging her way back out.

She returned to the cat and dropped her bricks, panting. The demon’s voice shivered at the sound of the bricks thumping and clattering into the grass and Violet took some pleasure in that as she settled back down.

“Don’t leave any gaps.” The cat said, then began to groom itself, one eye never leaving the drainpipe.

Violet began stacking the bricks, edging them carefully into place, never letting her fingers get too close to the grate. For a long few moments the demon was silent, not seeming to understand what she was doing, but as the little holes in the grate began to go dark the voices started up again, quick and desperate.

s t o p

s t o p p l ∆ a s e

s † o p

w e ‘ l l .. k i l l y o u

i t h u r t s

p l œ s e s o s o ® r ¥

c o ld

“Ignore it.” The cat said, voice firm.

Violet hunched her shoulders and continued stacking the bricks, until the grate was obscured and she could see no sign of any gaps or seams in her construction. Still the demon clamored and begged, cajoled and threatened, words high and stuttering on the edge of nonsense.

It knew it was trapped, and it was scared.

s † a r √ e

§ o å l ø n e

k i l l

p l e a s e

m u r d e r e r

l e t u s o u t l e t u s o u t l e t u s o u t

p l ∑ a s e

h e l p p l e a s e

c a n t l e a v e

Violet stood up and took a step back. The demon’s voice faded a bit, its noise shivering in and out of cohesion. The demon seemed to know she was leaving, she could feel it trying to maintain purchase on her mind.

d o n ’ t .. g o

Another step.

h e l p .. u s

The voice trembled on the edge of complete dissolution, like the thread of a spider’s web buffeted by a gale.

s t u p i d g i r l

c a n t l e a v e u s c a n t c a n t c a n t

k i l l y o u

s t a r v e i n h e r e

h e l p

k i l l

w e ‘ l l g e t o u t

f i n d y o u

† a k e y o u r e y e s

k i -º-

w ai t

p l e a se

p l ee

-º . ; .

º

And it was gone.