“Rufus” by Abraxas (03-10-31)

“....for within each seed, there is a promise of a flower and within each death, no matter how small, there is always a new life, a new beginning....” – ‘Dillon’, Alien³

 dedicated to Demonprist

The old man did not enter into Rufus’s awareness until his school-age years.  Since his mother was not given to tell him much about anything as a cub he did not know who the lynx really was or why he even lived with them at all.  His mother did make a point to call him the ‘old man’ and so, to please her, he, too, used that terse derogatory.

All through those first, few tentative years they subsisted day to day in a state of constant adjustment.  Foremost among the social fine-tuning, the old man came to learn the hard way that ‘there were others in the tower who had to be respected,’ as his mother insisted.  Yes, Pumyra was always able – willing and able – to put the cat in his place.  Such as it was, it was left to Bengali to defend what the boy was taught was the indefensible.  Wedging himself between the lynx and the puma, he tried and tried to excuse whatever the eccentricity that caused the argument as little more than the bizarre the elderly were prone to.

Bizarre.

For months after the old man had retreated fulltime into his bedroom, Rufus would awaken in the middle of the night, alarmed by that which echoed out of the lynx’s chamber.  The sounds were never ever particularly loud – indeed, his mother and Bengali were quite unaware of the disturbances despite their greater proximity to the room – but one night, that one night, the noises, once no more than whispers, were now an intolerable maelstrom of growling, hissing and incanting.  It, that wild dissonance, had finally stirred him into action.

The watch read three in the morning when the cub crawled out of his lair into the tower’s corridor.  Along the floor of an otherwise darkened passage was a flood of light emerging from the crevice under the old man’s door, fading to the shadows amid the boy’s feet.  The sounds momentarily stifled but hastily returned louder and louder still.  The rhythmic symphony added a kind of occult melodrama to an already macabre and eerie scene but it itself was neither strange nor scary and more than anything, if he was afraid, it was by the distorted, time-swept memory – dim yet undeniable – of having heard it long ago.

Without warning, his mother stormed into the hall, shouting at the top of her lungs.  A very shaken, very sleepy tiger followed closely.  Startled, Rufus fled for cover, hiding within the stuffed closet of the room next to the cat’s – it was a bathroom and its lights flickered to life as he entered.  Pumyra pounded on the lynx’s bedroom door while Bengali desperately, vainly tried to restrain her – or so the cub thought as he listened through the muffled walls.  It was largely through sound that he pictured the events as they unfolded.

At sometime, somewhere along the course of the night’s unquiet episode, the old man opened his chamber door and accidentally put his face through the path of the puma’s clenched fists.  He screamed and yelled all the while she kindled anew her ravenous, insatiable ire.  With the blacksmith’s interference, however, he was freed from her grasp – he ran into the adjacent room and locked himself and the cub inside.

Again and without as much as a word, Pumyra returned to her den.

For several minutes Bengali tried to coax the lynx out of the bathroom but the old man did not respond.  All he could do – or all he could manage to do – was sob and mumble altogether incoherently.  The boy peaked through the cracks of the closet door, instinctively careful not to make a sound around the cat.  He had never before seen in such fullness the face of the figure his mother so incurably detested.  He was shocked and aghast not so much by the dead, pale face, the permanently shut eyes, the deep, weathered scars but by a nameless familiar quality that perhaps only children his age could recognize.

Rufus could not remember just how the whole ordeal came to pass.  Waiting as he was for the opportunity to escape, he fell asleep within the litter of the tiny antechamber.  When he did at last awake, he found that the lights had been turned off.  No doubt, he reasoned, the lynx had returned to his bedroom.  Still, he was a bit surprised to find that that the door was locked but he thought little of it as he stepped back into the corridor.

The old man’s chamber was open and the cub entered boldly, uncannily certain it was unoccupied.  The walls, distant and bare, were set aglow by the soft, dim incandescence of oil lamps.  Scarab beetles at various stages of abuse and decay – missing heads, torn wings, severed heads, crushed abdomens – scampered about the corners of vision, skirting, as it were, the murky line between light and dark, existence and oblivion.  Upon the bed – the pillow – the boy found a photograph of himself:  old and battered, the ‘features’ had been ‘raised’ with the aid of a pen.  Three, long violent gashes had been gored through the visual replication of his face.  Enraged, the tore the image and tossed the shreds to the floor.

The floor – only then did he notice.  Scattered about the scene were scraps of torn, moldy scrolls and piles of dotted, brittle parchments – the Braille translations of the picturesque texts of ancient Earth.  Long, wooden slabs upon which sat serrated implements, rusted needles and tangled bandages.  Tall, ceramic urns full of pungent essences.  Wide, shallow bowls brimming with encrusted salts.  And in one particular glass container of discolored fluids floated two white, wrinkled orbs.

As far as Rufus could remember, the old man shared at most five dinners with his mother and Bengali.  Often, during the course of the meal, he would be implored to tell stories – tedious to the cub’s ears – tales centered on a planet Thundera, an old, withered jaguar and other such fictions.  Impressions that there were other adults seated around the table were hard to confirm or dismiss, the memories were often too fragments, but every once in a while a Thundercat would ask a question, the lynx would distract himself trying to answer it and when he resumed he would begin a new narrative that, like the one before it, he would not finish.  Pumyra could only take so much – she and the boy uttered synchronized yawns together.  Even Bengali had to force himself awake to at least give the illusion of listening.

It was at the end of the last communal meal that Rufus, acting out of infinite boredom, hummed passages of that staggering rhythm he had heard so often echoing out of the old man’s bedroom into the dead of night.  Thoughtlessly, instinctively, the lynx followed suit and only caught himself too late mid-crescendo.  His mother and tiger looked on stupefied – if there had been other Thundercats in the room then they were gone by now – the cat paused and gasped, half-digested food dribbled out of his mouth.  A sort of whimper passed his lips – the very kind of low-pitched wail a child might make when caught in the act.

“Son,” he whispered his address of endearment.

“You, stupid, old man,” she seethed her terse familiar.

“Pumyra!” Bengali growled.

Rufus excused himself silently.

“What the hell came over you?  What the hell were you thinking?” his mother lamented.

Afterward, the old man’s nocturnal occultism returned at a feverish pace.  From sundown to sunup, it grew until it expanded beyond the midnight hours – it, whatever that nightmarish activity was, continued unabated even into high noon.  One change in behavior was followed by another oddity:  there a came a time when the tower grew utterly quiet and tension, like an oppressive fog, settled upon the day to day scene.  It was difficult to understand why until a piece of the puzzle came into Rufus’s attention:  it was that the lynx alternated between prolonged periods of activities and absences, absences that included Bengali.  The rest of the Thundercats kept their distances, too; indeed, if not for Nayda’s regular visits, the youth’s schooling would have suffered greatly.

But it was not until his mother took him into her bedroom that he realized she was – and in turn the situation was – severely distressed.  He was at the fifth grade level by then, old enough for her to explain:

“It wasn’t his fault, but he didn’t help the situation, either.  Sometimes I wonder, if he could just get over it, sometimes,” she paused and sighed.  Staring into the distance she continued:  “I wonder if he wouldn’t have made a good father.  He’ll be away, honey.”

“Are we going to be alone again?” he asked, rubbing the hem of the bed sheets.

“It’s always been you and me, kiddo,” she replied, snuggling her chin over his orange-black mane.  She petted the scars along the side of his cheek – her claws interlocked neatly into the gashes.  After all the years, she had not expected that.  “You won’t have to worry about that old man anymore.”

“Oh, him,” he said dryly, more of an exhale than a word.  “I think it’s good you don’t, I mean, he doesn’t come here anymore.”

“I know, sweetie, I know.”

She kissed him again and he understood they were alone.

Pumyra spent the night awake in bed.  Rufus also pretended to go to sleep.  He felt her hug him, just as he heard the garage many, many floors below open and a vehicle park inside.  He felt her kiss him, just as he heard the footsteps reverberate through the tower’s corridors and passages.  It was no doubt the very thing his mother feared – it was the old man coming back, coming back to get him.

One night she held him tight.  He opened his eyes; she brushed aside his mane and kissed his forehead unaware that the rigid closeness had stirred him awake.  He heard the footsteps advance and saw the door open.  His vision, especially his night vision, was never ever particularly sharp and at that early-morning hour, through the starlight, it was no better or worse than usual.  He could see the open frame but he could not see the form of the intruder.  Yet he knew someone, or something, lurked amid the ethereal darkness.  He forced himself to sleep despite the discomfort of the countless pin-pricks crawling up and down his fur.

Sunrise – and the day started with the great, dull thud that alarmed everyone within the tower.  Again his eyes opened – his mother, who was awake, sat up, covering her naked body with the sheets.  Irately, she stormed out of the bedroom and, when she entered the corridor, she called Bengali.  Haggard from spending the night in the control room, the sudden and unexpected disturbance had already drawn the tiger to the scene.

Rufus dressed himself and sneaked into the passage.  Pumyra, shocked and bloody, stammered a scream when she saw him and retreated into the bathroom.  Bengali stood transfixed under the doorway of the old man’s bedroom.  His brutal gaze fell violently at the cub – as if the onus of the tragedy rested entirely upon the boy’s shoulders.  Wordlessly, tactfully, he backtracked into his mother’s chamber, his eyes directed squarely at the tiger – the adult was bloody, too, but not shocked, almost as though he knew what he would find inside the lynx’s apartment.

The puma walked her son to the kitchen where Bengali was already on the radio with Cat’s Lair.  He thought it was odd that his mother was serving him breakfast since she hated cooking so early in the morning.  Usually he would pour himself a bowl of cereal – he was very independent that way – but that day was different, certainly different.  He could sense it in the words – so carefully chosen, so intimately weighed – and especially in the silences.

Outside the Tower of Omens, the solitary Bengali waited quietly.  Brewing storms and gusting winds announced with a sort of wicked irony the arrival of the Thunder Tank.  The garage doors opened, the mighty vehicle parked within – the tiger and the two Thundercats met along the main corridor.  Quick glances and jittery nods replaced customary greetings.  Shaky, hushed tones passed for casual conversations likewise missing from so bleak, so somber an occasion.

He led Liono and Panthro into the old man’s bedroom – shrieks of horror and realization passed the cats’ lips.  Minutes – endless, foreboding – minutes of deadened silence were followed by moments of frenzied activity.  At last the tiger and the panther emerged from the chamber carrying a green duffel bag between them.  They hurried past the kitchen so that neither Rufus nor his mother would see it.

But the cub was onto them all along; they could not hide their approach from his ears.  The boy positioned himself at the top of the cutting table and caught a glimpse of it as the adults rushed by:  dry, red stains; unctuous, malodorous globs of salt dribbled from the worn-through, leathery tarp to the shiny, tiled floor.  Across its shriveled length were horribly misshapen figures akin, in the warpest of ways, to the pictures he had seen drawn on fragmented parchments.

Moments later the lynx’s door was shut – slammed shut – and a voice, soft but bitter, uttered in vain the name of Jagga.

“It’s Liono,” Rufus said to his mother, as aware as always, it seemed, of everything happening within the outpost.

A very weary, very tired Liono nervously approached the kitchen, stepping out from the violent shadows into the calm light.

“It’s a kind of blind torment,” he said, coming to the side of the cub.  “I don’t know how he did it alone.  I don’t know what to say.  The guilt of it, I suppose, I,” he paused to recollect his thoughts.  He pet the boy’s orange-black mane and sighed as he looked upon his mother.  “It must have been the only form of hell he understood.  Simple death was insubstantial.  Pumyra, if we had known.  I’m sorry – I’m sorry – I should have known.”

He clutched the studded hilt of his mystical weapon and left without a word.

Pumyra laughed for the first time in a long time and he smiled for she was happy.

Life returned to a relative state of normalcy.  Tygra and Nayda taught him regularly and even Bengali was nice to him from time to time.  He slept in his own room once again.  With the old man gone forever – so he surmised – the footsteps that clamored through the night would never again return to upset his mother.

But then the nature of the lynx’s bedroom began to change.

It was kept permanently shut after what happened when Pumyra entered one morning.  She screamed but by the time he came to her aid the tiger was already within the chamber.  He tried to listen to their whispers, but it was too little, too late.  His mother left crying, clinging onto Bengali’s arm.  Nothing was ever said about it, that incident, the adults simply carried on, it seemed, as if the old man’s room and its terrible secret did not exist.

It was later that Rufus began to hear the sounds.  It was like a sort of breathing, soft and unfocused – almost random.  He was bothered.  His mother was uneasy.  Only Bengali escaped unaffected, unaware of any disturbance.  But it grew louder and louder – surely the others must have heard it – and above all distinct.

One afternoon he stepped out of the shower and found his mother pressing her ear against what had been the cat’s bedroom door.  Muted panic painted her face.  She was aware, at the very least superficially, of what dreadful workings manifested within.  With one hand she rubbed her teary eye, with the other she grabbed him by the towel and kissed him, his parallel scars.

The noises evolved like a kind of morbid symphony.  He heard it by night, by day and now he understood that she heard it too.  And that was enough to drive him to find out what it was and if it could be stopped.

The opportunity to get into that sealed chamber finally came one day while Pumyra worked the control room.  The cub needed to find the key.  Cautiously, he snuck into his mother’s bedroom.  A search of her drawers yielded nothing – and when he reached what appeared to be Bengali’s belongings he stopped looking all together.  The boy knew something so important would not be found among the tiger’s possessions.  He was about ready to retreat disappointed when he realized there was one place he had not riffled through.  He slid a chair next to a tall, wooden chest and climbed its height.  From above he located the shiny, metal object at once:  it was lodged within a crevice over the open doorframe.

Rufus unlocked the bedroom and was greeted at once by a wide, dust-encrusted spider web.  Its spinner – a red, oblong creature – was dead but living scarabs were still caught along the trap’s sticky threads.  His senses, too, were assaulted by the creepy sounds, the hideous noises.  Now unmuffled, the rhythmic cacophony bellowed up from deep within the chamber.

Little had changed – but much had changed – since the last time he had seen the room’s interior.  The oil lamps were warm but unlit – their frayed wicks were damp and burnt.  Only the gray, hazy light that filtered through the bare, open window illuminated the scene.  The ancient scrolls remained scattered about the floor but the Braille translations were gone.  The immense urns were sealed tightly with crimson wax; the wide bowls were thinly lathered by viscous layers of blackened fluids.  Knives were no where to be seen – the missing implements were replaced by a very different set of tools:  a clawless hammer, a rusty nail and a long, thin rod with a hook at one end.

On the bed he found that old, battered photograph of himself.  That one, that very one had had torn asunder, it had been pieced together with adhesive tape.  He also discovered a book:  open to an obscure chapter, one page was blank, the other was written on in an ink that was still moist, still wet.  Flipping through the leaves it was clear that who or what was writing was only slowly mastering the art:  it was either an inexperienced youngster or someone who had not picked up a pen in ages.  The language itself was both familiar and beyond his grasp.  Yet the narrative seemed well-ordered, artificially ordered into lists that centered on his mother and events predating his lifetime.

But something was different, very different.  It was a macabre, doll-like figure, three feet tall and grotesquely out of proportion.  Formed from blue, rotted flesh loosely wrapped by linens – tufts of orange-black fur poked through the bandages – it was the eerie focus of the disquiet.  Its head turned, its dead, pale face angled toward him – the cub inched away when he realized the ancient intonations were coming from the doll – it was the lynx’s spirit, kept alive by the occult methods of Egypt.

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