Chapter 32: Etiquette

When Violet awoke, it was to a small rustle of plastic, then an icy trickle of water down the back of her neck.

She sat quickly up, eyes slitted against the platinum glow of a half risen sun, and realized that her tarp had collapsed during the night, those parts of it not already wrapped around herself glimmering with a silvery sheet of morning dew.

“Good morning,” the cat said brightly from right behind her, its tail tracing a path along the length of her spine. “You should get up, it’s going to rain soon.”

Violet blinked and delicately worked a kink from her neck. The headache still endured, solid and present as anything; when she tried to swallow, the impulse was blocked by a coppery metallic taste, like she’d bitten into a pad of tinfoil. Above her, the sky had gone a strange shade of cottony white, clouds beginning to blend together into a low lying haze. The air itself felt damp.

The cat, seeing her grogginess, gently nudged her canteen closer and remained silent until Violet had drained the whole thing. It didn’t cut the dryness much.

“Is the beast back yet?” She asked.

Her companion's ears fluttered and it made a show of glancing around the emptiness of the living room.

“No…I guess not,” the cat said with a tiny shrug. “Sure would be a pity if it just drifted off, never to return.”

Violet rolled her eyes and shuffled closer to the fire ring, which still held a few glowing embers. Taking a slender willow stick, she poked them back into brightness and rekindled a little blaze, enough to boil water with.

“Willow bark?” The cat asked, picking up on her intentions.

Violet nodded tiredly. She’d only just woken up, but already there was a very real fatigue curling behind her every motion.

The cat hesitated, as though it might be about to say something, then reconsidered and was gone, subsumed by those shadows that still endured. Violet tended to the fire while the cat made its trips, offering theatrically exaggerated complaints as to the horrors of the willow bark. While steam rose from the water and the bark itself rested comfortably atop a growing pad of tiny bubbles, the cat picked a place directly next to her and sat down.

“You’ve had that headache for a while now,” it noted. “Is it getting any better?”

Violet shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

“I hope you’re not getting sick.”

“I’m not.” Violet said, but wasn’t sure if she believed herself.

“Feverfew is good for headaches. Should I get you some?” The cat offered.

To Violet feverfew didn’t sound like it was meant to cure headaches, but she still nodded. It couldn’t hurt.

“I’ll be better when I’m moving around.” She said.

“Roger that.”

“What does…?” Violet began to ask, but it was too late, her companion had already vanished.

When the cat eventually returned it had a bouquet of small white flowers in its mouth, each with a pronounced yellow center. To Violet they looked almost like daisies, though with broader, rounder petals.

“Do I just…boil these?” She asked.

“Only the leaves,” the cat said. “The rest of the plant isn’t hugely useful.”

Violet carefully poured herself a big cup of willow tea before preparing fresh water for the feverfew leaves…which she hoped would taste better. As she gingerly sipped at the willow mixture, which proved no less acrid and bitter than before, she found her thoughts drifting.

“What do you think that machine was for?” She asked.

The cat shrugged, disinterested.

“Distracting little girls from important lessons, perhaps.” It said.

Violet ignored her companion.

“Maud said it might be for recording things, but that can’t be right. Nobody would want to listen to that kind of noise.”

“Perhaps it was a warning.” The cat said ominously.

“A warning for what?” Violet asked.

“Not to skip out on night walking next time.”

Violet dipped a finger into her willow tea and flicked a few beads of bitter liquid at her companion, which laughed and dodged away.

“Are you ever going to let that go?” She asked.

“You haven’t been making many mistakes lately, how else am I supposed to tease you?” The cat chuckled.

Violet took another sip of her tea, grimacing against the taste. The feverfew potion had already begun to simmer, leaves twirling amidst rising columns of bubbles.

“Even if I am sick, we’re still going to the Glow.” She said.

“Onwards and upwards.” The cat agreed.

Once she was finished with the last of the willow, Violet stirred her feverfew tea until it had steeped into a satisfyingly dark amber color. It smelled herbal in the same way the willow had, but still Violet held out some hope as for the taste.

Shutting her eyes, she took a tiny, experimental sip…and immediately reeled back with a grimace, trickles of tea leaking from the corners of her mouth.

Violet shook her head and spat into the fire with a hiss and a little plume of bitter steam.

“It’s….” She stuck out her tongue, finding no other way to express her displeasure.

“Horrible?” The cat asked, grinning like a hyena.

“It’s even worse than the willow bark,” Violet complained. “Are you sure you got the right plant?”

“La soeur,” the cat breathed, eyes huge with mock offense. “Do you doubt my guidance so? Have I failed as a teacher and a friend?” One of her companion’s front paws had traveled up to grasp at its own chest, as though it had been physically wounded by her words.

Violet shook her head and looked pointedly away from the cat’s theatrics. Sure enough, within moments it had miraculously recovered.

“Most medicinals taste awful,” the cat said, looking itself over to make sure its fur had remained straight. “I could fetch you some peppermint instead. It won’t do much for the headache, but it’s still soothing at very least.”

“No, I’m….” Violet eyed the feverfew as she imagined one might an enemy. “I’m fine.” She took another sip and managed to swallow it this time. Now that she knew what was coming, it wasn’t quite as bad.

Next to her, the cat yawned, its teeth still lightly speckled with foliage. Casually, it began to groom one front paw.

Violet found herself watching the roofless walls of the living room as she drank her tea, half expecting the beast to glide in unannounced at any moment. But though she remained alert, the only flying things that showed themselves were bees and a few manically fluttering hummingbirds.

It was reassuring to see such normalcy amidst the ruins, even if none of it was at all concerned with her.

Or….

Perhaps that was the wrong perspective to take. The bees and birds and countless other living creatures were all busy with their own errands, just as she was with hers. If they wanted to talk to her then they’d make an attempt. Otherwise, they simply wouldn’t.

There existed no obligation towards conversation within nature.

The nearest hummingbirds were ornate little creatures, entirely green but for a bloom of red at their throat. As she watched, Violet found her mind beginning to drift, in the same curious way it had when she’d listened to the butterflies and the bees; tiny, subconscious rhythms taking greater precedence as she picked up on all of the small things that made a hummingbird unique. The franticness of its motions, the thrum of wingbeats and a deep yearning to be continually in motion, for stillness was death.

With it came a knife sharp hunger so intense as to be frightening, but the world was bright and dripping with sweetness, and clusters of flowers grew everywhere the sun had ever touched. The hunger was joyous in a way, for it meant that life was still ongoing, as long as the wings could beat and the heart could hammer away.

Violet opened her mouth, the motion slow and somehow distant. To form words was an abstraction.

“What do hummingbirds like to talk about?” She asked, and the whole process of speaking, from breath exhaled to the patterns printed across its carefully timed bursts, suddenly felt impossibly vague and inefficient.

Her words stretched out across entire great swathes of time, a hundred wingbeats from one syllable to the next.

The cat followed her gaze to the tiny, crimson throated bird hovering in midair. It shrugged.

“I’ve always found them to be very brisk,” her companion said. “Not so interested in the likes of you and me.”

Violet began to frown, then figured it didn’t matter. She would say hello, or something equivalent. That would be enough.

But…how did speaking work? It was a bizarre thing to wonder, but this wasn’t communication as she knew it. All this time she’d been observing, appreciating reality as an animal saw it. To actually make herself known was another thing entirely.

She took a deep breath.

And reached out.

It was all at a distance, the observation, the listening. Perhaps not a physical one, for mental boundaries could not be measured that way, but rather like one person observing another from behind a window of dark glass.

Violet extended something that felt like a part of herself, and contacted what she perceived as the hummingbird.

In front of her, the bird did a tiny, frightened skip in midair, wings momentarily losing cohesion, then it skittered away and out of sight. The connection broke with a snap, like a thread of elastic, and Violet felt a cold, unpleasant jitter roll through her. Warm runnels of tea sloshed over the top of her mug and soaked her hands.

For what felt like a very long time all she could do was blink, her senses reordering themselves, reality scrambled and not altogether convincing.

“Breathe.” The cat reminded her, settling one paw atop her left knee.

Violet obeyed, taking a deep, shivery breath, then slowly exhaled. By the time she’d done this five or six more times the world had settled back into a more familiar orbit and the singular nature of reality was once again unquestionable.

“I think I scared it.” Violet said, and couldn’t decide whether to laugh or feel very bad.

The cat nodded sagely, still patting her knee with ginger, feline comfort.

“Of course you did,” it said. “You’re a huge fleshy abstraction to a hummingbird. That, and they have very poor peripheral vision. It might not have noticed you before you tried to say hi.”

Violet decided to ignore the first part of what her companion had said.

“How do you?” She asked.

“Say hello?” The cat asked, settling back into a primmer, more formal position.

“Or…anything, really. I want to know how not to scare things when I’m trying to talk.”

The cat chuckled to itself.

“The same way you do when using human talk. Imagine you’re walking behind someone through a dark alleyway. They haven’t noticed you yet and still think they’re alone. What do you do?”

“I say hi.”

“No.” The cat shook its head.

“Why not?”

“Imagine you’re the person in front. You’re walking down a dark, narrow alleyway when someone comes up right behind you and shouts ‘hello!’ in your ear.”

“I wasn’t shouting.” Violet protested.

“All the same,” the cat said. “You’ll want to gently get the other person’s attention before you commence with conversation. Otherwise you’ll spook them.”

“Why would anyone be scared of me?” Violet asked, spreading her arms, accidentally spilling more tea.

“Don’t undersell yourself,” the cat chided, taking a quick step back from the spilt feverfew. “You are very, very frightening at heart.”

“No I’m not.”

“Au contraire….” The cat clicked its tongue disapprovingly.

“I don’t know what that means.” Violet sighed.

“You have thumbs. You can use tools and light fires,” the cat pressed onwards, ignoring her words. “And now you’re reaching into the minds of other creatures. To those not properly acclimated, I expect your very existence would be deeply troubling.”

Violet dropped her gaze into the amber depths of her tea.

“And,” the cat quickly added before she could say anything. “And you’re quite large compared to a great many forest creatures. The skin too…I suppose the fact that you’re almost completely bald but for very specific parts of your head could be considered horrifying…but I’m not here to judge.”

“But….” Violet sighed and trailed off, knowing she had nothing with which to counter the cat. It wasn’t like fear could be held to such a thing as logic.

“Everything is frightening to something else.” The cat concluded, then tapped the bottom of Violet’s mug with the tip of its tail, compelling her to drink the rest of the feverfew.

She did, grimacing profusely.

“So….” Violet had to pause to spit into the fire once again. “Before I say hello to anything I should make sure it knows I’m there.” She looked to the cat for approval.

Her companion nodded.

“As a start, yes.”

“A start?”

“You still need to refine how you talk. Even if you were face to face with another person and well outside of our hypothetical alleyway, you’d still terrify them if you started the conversation with a shout.”

“But I didn’t shout.” Violet insisted.

The cat ignored her.

“We’re going to try something.” It said, and then was very suddenly not itself.

Violet had to fight an urge to recoil, for once again the cat, her cat, had been replaced by a stranger. Its posture was different, eyes flat and unexpressive, comportment low and stealthy. It rose and walked very deliberately to the other side of the fire ring, then sat and stared expectantly.

“I don’t like this.” Violet said.

Though she’d seen it before, and not very long ago either, Violet could only feel discomforted, a pervasive wrongness creeping through her like a bloom of ice.

“Cat.” She insisted, and on the other side of the fire ring her companion shook its head and shot her an irritated look. The whole thing was entirely, mercifully familiar.

“You didn’t even try.” The cat complained.

Violet took a deep breath.

“I don’t like it when you’re…not you.” She said.

“But I am,” the cat countered. “This is just the part you don’t see most of the time.”

Violet was quiet for a long moment, feeling foolish. The cat was right, of course. Really, it probably lived the vast majority of its life in the guise of what she considered a discomforting other. Who was she to insist what it was or wasn’t?

“Is…this what all cats are like?” She asked.

The cat smiled faintly.

“Only the ones that don’t talk to you,” it said, then sat straight once more. “Are you ready to try again?”

Violet set her tea mug aside and took a deep breath.

“Yes.” She said, as firmly as she could, and watched as the cat shed its familiarity.

This time the unease came only as a tiny chatter that she contained between her back teeth. Then, balling her hands, Violet made herself stare at the creature sitting opposite, her hold on the world coming undone as she fell into the cat’s orbit.

Curling before her was a sense of slowness, like that of a gradually unwinding mainspring. It felt patient, like careful movements through grass and along blades of darkness so intense that even the keenest eyes would fail if placed within.

Beyond that, deeper and more central still, Violet could sense an omnipresent tension, a kinesis that could lead to anything, for the world was not so big that it could not be held in an embrace.

She reached out, or thought she did, and—

The cat sprang into the air with a sudden, startled hiss, eyes gone wide and round. Once again the connection was immediately severed, all the noise and chaos of the world pouring in to fill the space left vacant.

Violet jolted back, nearly tumbling over, confused and frightened all at once.

From across the fire ring the cat gave her a shocked look.

“Goodness, girl,” it exclaimed. “That was much too rough! Like you reached out and grabbed me behind the ears….”

Violet, still not entirely back to the familiarity of the world, glanced uncertainly down at her hands.

The cat shook its head, outrage beginning to fade. Its fur had gone ruffled, patches standing straight up.

“No, not literally.” It sighed. “…Was that what you did to the hummingbird?”

Violet nodded uncertainly. The cat tried not to grimace but failed.

“I thought….” Violet had to force herself to continue. To try and explain. “I thought I was opening a connection…you know, to talk through.”

The cat stared, absorbing this for a long moment, and then suddenly, bizarrely, it began to laugh.

“Really….” It said aloud, then fell onto its haunches, overcome by mirth.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“You already had a connection,” the cat said in lieu of an answer. “Why did you think you needed anything more?”

Violet shrugged helplessly.

“Isn’t it like a window?” She asked, hoping her words were making sense. “I wanted to make a door instead. Or…a cable, like a telephone line.”

“We are not machines,” the cat said, still wearing the edges of a smile. “Nor do we require explicit contact in order to communicate. Look at us right now, talking to each other over a bed of red hot embers.”

“…Contact?” Violet asked.

The cat gave her a look that might have been amazement or pity.

“You poor thing.” It sighed.

Violet furrowed her brows, trying to work out what the cat seemed to be getting at. It had said she’d grabbed it behind the ears, though not literally…and now there was this.

“I don’t see how I could have done anything to you,” she said. “This is all….” Unsure what more to say, she made a swirling gesture around one ear.

“In our heads?” The cat ventured a guess.

“Yes.” Violet said

Her companion slipped around the edge of the fire ring and settled next to her.

“You really ought to know better,” it said. “Seeing as how something tried to grab your head only the other night.”

Violet blinked, an unwelcome realization beginning to bloom within her.

“That’s not the same.” She said reflexively.

“With regards to intention, no, not even slightly. Beyond that, though, it’s the same basic act.”

Violet shuffled, suddenly uncomfortable. To even consider that the monster and her operated within the same basic framework was deeply unsettling.

“But I didn’t try to take you over,” Violet insisted, the words coming as a disordered tumble. “It can’t be the same thing. Not even a little bit.”

“Do you remember what I told you about demons? How, at the very base of their being, they’re constructed from the same stuff as you?” The cat asked.

The question itself was entirely rhetorical, but somehow Violet knew her companion wouldn’t move on until it received an answer.

“…Yes.” She mumbled.

“At the base of many possibilities lies this thing that you just did. You used it in one way, I might use it in another. Just because it is capable of harm does not mean that it is harmful in of itself…in the same way that you having a human soul does not make you a demon.”

“But the influence, the monster. What about it?”

The cat shifted, still made visibly uncomfortable by actively discussing their unseen adversary.

“I will admit,” it said at last. “How it operates is unusual. To reach out and touch another person like you did, that’s most typically a terror tactic. I might do that if I want a bird to fall out of the sky or a mouse to freeze up. Using it to hold another person in place and entirely subvert their will is something I cannot begin to understand.”

“I’m sorry.” Violet said quietly.

“For what?” The cat asked. “You didn’t know what you were doing.”

“I must’ve scared you.”

The cat made a face.

“You startled me,” it corrected, looking self conscious. “And in any case I recovered with unprecedented speed.”

Violet smiled faintly, feeling a little bit better.

“Are we gonna try again?” She asked, picking up her mug and eyeing the lukewarm dregs within.

The cat considered the sky, where the clouds had begun to stir and shift in uneasy motion.

“When we set camp this evening,” it decided, then stroked its tail underneath Violet’s chin, setting her gaze straight. “Don’t worry about any of this, it all takes practice.”

“I know.” Violet said, then emptied the last bits of her tea into the dying fire with a hiss and a gout of hot steam.

Together they watched it rise and dissipate, until the last lingering shreds had been swallowed by the paleness of the clouds above.

Violet, with the cat right beside her, headed back towards the main street fairly late into the morning. Her various aches and pains weren’t quite as troubling now that she was in motion.

She found herself watching the houses as they went, eyes tracing the buckled spines of rooftop after identical rooftop. The beast was nowhere to be seen.

Had it really, truly left?

Violet forced the thought from her mind.

“Why did they build everything the same?” She asked instead, looking around herself once more, at the endless ranks of crumbling houses.

“A lack of imagination,” the cat said. “…And because it was probably easier.”

Violet said nothing, only sighed quietly and kept walking.

“I was slightly worried you’d find this sort of thing appealing.” The cat remarked.

“The ruins?” Violet asked, caught off guard.

Her companion shrugged delicately.

“What they represent. What they were.” It said.

In full daylight the neighborhood had lost the ominous sense of mystery bestowed upon it by the previous evening’’s gloom. Now it just looked shabby and somehow false, as though if she approached any one house from an angle she’d find it to be nothing more than a facade.

“I don’t know.” Violet said.

“You’ve come a long way.” The cat purred, offering her a sly, unmistakably pleased smile.

“I still want to know why all of this happened.”

“You do know. If I recall, we had a great big conversation about it last night.”

“Specifically,” Violet stressed. “What happened to make the demons and the spirits and…all of this? What happened to make the monster?”

“I’m still not convinced ‘monster’ is the most appropriate label.” The cat said lightly.

Violet sighed, ignoring her companion.

“There must’ve been a terrible disaster, or…or God or something. Some reason the world is this way.”

“God….” The cat echoed, faintly amused. “I thought your whole big thing was the Glow.”

It had never occurred to Violet, the concept of the Glow being involved, and she shook her head sharply, banishing the notion before it could take root.

Watching this, the cat shrugged.

“I’ve never understood the desire for big, singular causes, as though this makes problems or tragedies easier to process.” It said.

“Then what do you think happened?” Violet asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it does.”

Her companion was silent for a long while, nearly until they’d reached the edge of the neighborhood.

“I think it all caught up to everybody,” the cat said. “Everything. All at once.”

“…Everything?” Violet asked uncertainly.

“The blindness, mostly. The ignorance and unwillingness for people to see beyond themselves. I see no reason why a contradiction like that couldn’t eventually splinter the souls of everyone deepest into it. After all, when you view the world in such a blinkered way then you cease to be a human or an animal or anything.”

“And then you become a demon, or a spirit?” Violet asked, a little hesitantly. She wasn’t sure if the cat’s theory made any sense to her.

The cat smiled very, very broadly, showing all of its teeth. There wasn’t much humor in the expression.

“A demon, or a spirit…or something worse.” It agreed.

Violet decided not to say anything back.