"There!"

By RD Rivero

April 30, 2000

Dear RD,

You can't understand and I don't blame you. Do you think that I'm crazy? Well, I have gone off my head, maybe I have a little -- but not for the reasons you're thinking of right now.

Yes. I am getting married.

No. I haven't changed my ideas on that subject. I still believe that it's stupid to get hitched. More than ever I feel incapable of loving only one woman since I will always be too much in love with all the rest.

But I'm getting married.

I will say that I know the woman very well. I have been with her on many occasions. Nayda doesn't displease me in the least and for the present purpose that's enough.

"Why, Panthro, why get married?" you'll ask.

I'm doing it so that I won't be alone.

I don't know exactly how to put it but I do know how to make you understand. But in so doing you will no doubt feel sorry for me, pity me. I don't want to be alone at night anymore. I need to feel another being near me, next to me, beside me, someone who can speak, someone who can say something, anything. I want to be able to wake her up, I want to be able to ask her a question out of the blue -- a question of mere idiocy -- if only to hear the sound of a different voice, a voice other than my own.

I am afraid to be alone.

Damn it, RD, you still don't understand -- oh, thickheaded oaf! If I were there in the room I'd slap you upside the head! If I could somehow write my fist into these words I'd knock some sense into you!

I'm sorry, I didn't mean that.

I'm not afraid of any danger. If a man was to break in I would kill him without ruffling a hair and I'm certainly not afraid of the dead either. What I am afraid of is of myself -- I am afraid of fear, the spasms of my frenzy, the horrible sense of incomprehensible terror.

Laugh. Laugh, go on, laugh if you want. It's awful. I am afraid of the walls, of the furniture, of familiar, inanimate objects that to me are infused with degenerate animal life. Above all I am afraid of the terrible mess that my mind is in.

It begins with a trembling disquiet that sends chills throughout my skin. I look around and of course I find nothing. Yet I want there to be something? What? Something I could comprehend for the only reason that I am afraid is because I do not understand my fear. I speak and I am afraid of my own voice. I walk and I am afraid of what's behind the doors, behind the curtains, in the cabinets, under the bed. I shake. I feel my terror grow and I shut myself in my room. I get into the mattress and I hide under the blanket. Crouched, rolled up into a ball, I close my eyes in despair and I remain there for eternity.

Had you or had anyone else told me of the morbid fears that would one day enslave me -- incredible, ridiculous and terrifying -- I would have laughed. I never used to have these problems. Every night I would go to my room without a second thought. I would come and go through Cat's Lair with impunity. I would open doors in the dark.

In the most unusual way it all began a few months ago, one stuffy evening in autumn after Lynxo's funeral. Dinner had finished and I wondered what I should do. For a while I walked around the garage tired, depressed, unable to work. I was sad, the sadness of a sort that comes for no reason. Well, perhaps, there was a reason. Lynxo was a good friend, a close friend and then the whole deal with Snarf on top of that, but, then, you know about all that already.

I felt alone. My room was empty in a way I had never noticed it was empty before. An infinite solitude surrounded me. What was I to do? I sat down and then a nervous impatience ran through my legs. I stood up and began to walk around. A fine drizzle misted the windows and a shiver of cold ran down my back. It occurred to me then that the dampness was getting into my room and I thought I should turn the heat up a little. I did so -- it was the first time that year. Still, though I tried to sit down again my inability to keep quiet had me on my feet. I thought I should go and find one of my friends.

I went out and searched through Cat's Lair. Tygra and Cheetara were at the Tower of Omens, I suddenly remembered and Pumyra and Bengali had not yet arrived. Liono was up north visiting the Snowmen. The kittens were asleep and I was not about to disturb them. Having nothing else, having no other recourse of action, I made it to the front doors and walked out into the darkened countryside determined to track down someone I knew.

Sadness was everywhere. The wet grass was shiny in the moonlight. The foliage of the tall trees was coated in dampness. I walked at a gentle pace, I repeated to myself that I would find no one to talk to. I managed to get to a village of some sort but by then it was already so late, so late that I had to return home.

Back in Cat's Lair I lumbered through the winding halls back to my bedroom. I have always made sure to lock the my door when ever I leave so I was surprised to find that it was not even shut completely. I assumed one of the kittens had pried their way in to pull a prank on me.

Inside the lamp was still on but there was painfully little light, dismally little light. My eyes hurt, my temples throbbed. In the daze of that nauseating confusion I thought I saw someone sitting in my armchair, his back toward me, his feet atop an ottoman.

It was Bengali -- there, I was not afraid anymore. Wait, did I say I was afraid to begin with? No, no, quite reasonable explanations came to mind. My friend, of whom I could only see his mane, must have fallen asleep while waiting for me. I approached. I stepped across to wake him. I could see him perfectly: his right arm hung down, his legs crossed, his head bowed a little against the left side of the armchair.

I reached out my hand to touch his shoulder.

It came to rest on the wood of the armchair.

I recoiled though some fearful danger had materialized before me. I spun around feeling that there was someone behind me but an overwhelming need to see the chair again impelled me to turn once more. Scarcely breathing, I was ready to drop.

"No," I said, "No! I've only had a hallucination."

A hallucination, I had had a hallucination, that was all. That was all -- but that was not all.

Immediately I heard a voice call from the distance -- it was WileyKat. Yes, it was WileyKat and it was coming from elsewhere, from elsewhere deep within Cat's Lair. He sounded, terrified and while I ran out of my room to where I perceived the sounds of his screaming and of his pounding came from I wondered why none of the other Thundercats had been aroused by the feverish din.

I burst into the kitchen ready to pounce -- but I stopped cold dead in my tracks, frozen in terror by what I stumbled into. Snarf, but he was dead, I myself had kicked his battered body into the lime pit. None the less there he was -- on a cobblestone floor.

I know what you're going to say -- there's no stone floor anywhere in Cat's Lair but there indeed it was. In the time that I had been away there had been a material change in the kitchen: the metal appliances had been replaced by primitive stone and mortar equivalents except for the stove that then had transformed into nothing more than a small fire over which a deep, iron kettle boiled its top off.

Snarf looked at me with electrically bright red eyes then dashed to the side to stand before the only modern device left in that place -- a microwave oven. I followed right behind him, I saw him wringing his small, little hands together in a show of perverse pleasure that was missing only that hideous, vile laughter.

The microwave was grossly exaggerated -- its door was six feet by six feet and constructed of a heavy, of a thick plastic that was virtually unbreakable. Inside were white, smooth walls, shiny and clean. At the back, where the bright light shone from, were holes, large holes. The air all around was warm and inundated with a low, dull hum.

WileyKat didn't see me but nonetheless he banged his fists against the clear door in total and in complete desperation. I ran toward him, I yelled at him that I was going to free him. I looked around the edges of the door but to my horror there were no edges, the door blended, melted seamlessly into the stone stucco of the remolded kitchen. I could not find buttons, I could not find levers, not even a plug.

I could not help but see what happened helplessly.

At first WileyKat's skin began to bubble, not noticeably, not violently, in fact it was almost imperceptible. Until his temperature became so extreme that the effect was undeniable. Around his fingers, his hands, arms, face, huge bubbles would expand and then contract, randomly, chaotically. Several that had grown around his fingers burst, blood in both liquid and steam form, splattered out onto the walls. The flesh of his hands and upper arms wrinkled and charred black, burnt black though there was no fire, no flame. His feet and his lower legs had suffered similar effects. In mere, trifling seconds more of those flesh bubbles burst along his head and his face.

He jumped up and down, he banged against the wall more and more violently. He screamed and blood came out from his lungs. The inside of his mouth steamed in the intense pressure of his boiling saliva. His eyes, that he tried to cover with what was left of his hands, exploded in a mess of yellow pus. Then at last, then at the end when all was said and done, a large, a very large bubble, a bubble more massive than any that had come before formed along the bulk of his lower abdomen but unlike the rest that one did not contract. It expanded and it expanded until at last it popped in a great -- No! -- WileyKat had blown up clearly in half.

All the while I yelled, I screamed but no one came. No one. I turned around. Snarf was gone. The stone motif of the kitchen had reversed and everything was normal again. I turned around once more, the gigantic microwave was no more -- my fists were up against the doors of a cabinet that my pounding had grossly deformed.

I don't know exactly what followed but I do remember that next I was in my room again. The whole of Cat's Lair was deadly silent except for the sounds of my breathing that seemed to echo loudly, oppressively loudly everywhere. I got into bed and turned off the lamp. That was the end of that, I told myself, I had a fever or an illness. In any case I felt stupid.

At daybreak I found myself in an unusually good mood. I lunched with the others in the mess hall. WileyKat was there, safe, I don't know why but I hugged him firmly for no apparent reason. Everything seemed at first to have started out right but by the time I went down to garage I was afraid of seeing that 'Bengali.' I wasn't afraid of the real Bengali, by no means, but of that of the 'Bengali' that my eyes would deceive me with again, of the terror that it would seize me with again.

For more than an hour I paced, I went left and I went right, up, down until I was so breathless that I could barely climb stairs. I stayed on a landing for a while, for a good ten minutes. I had no choice, I had to go back to where it had all begun. Back in my room what relief, what joy I felt was cruelly momentary. I was not reassured. The shadows everywhere but especially those on the corners made me uneasy.

The rest of the day meandered seemingly without end and I was more than unusually nervous around the real Bengali -- I wondered if perhaps that did not give the wrong impression.

That night I slept poorly. I heard WileyKat struggle again in the microwave and though it pained me beyond belief I stayed back, I did not leave to see -- for I already knew what awaited me in the kitchen. I needed to see that only once and no more. The image of Bengali returned to the armchair but thankfully I had moved the offending piece of furniture away to an unseen corner where I knew I could keep my eyes from.

Since then I have been afraid to be alone at night. I feel it there, close to me, around me -- the visions. It bothers me because I think about it all the time. The right hand hanging down, the head leaning to the left. The horrific visual of that boy's death.

Enough.

I don't what to think about it anymore. What is this obsession? RD? Why does it persist? I'm haunted -- it's crazy but it's true -- it haunts me. Who? Bengali? WileyKat? Snarf? I know very well that nothing of the sort exists but there's no use reasoning with myself, telling myself that everything is all right.

I can't live on my own because those visions are there. At night, even though invisible, even though out of sight, I know that WileyKat is in that oven, I know Snarf roams around the hall, basking the darkness in that red light from his eyes, searching, conniving against me.

There! There! Always, forever there! There, behind doors. There, under beds. There, in dark corners. There, in shadows.

There! There! There! There!

Ha. Haha! Hahahahahahahaha! Mwahahahahaha! Ha! Ha, ha! Ha. Ha.

What am I to do? RD! What am I to do?

Hahaha, haha, ha, haha, ha, haha! Ha!

But if, but if there -- but if there were two of us in my room, I think -- no! -- I am know that the visions would have to go away. Snarf would return to the grave, to the hell where he belongs. The kitchen would surely never transform, or greet me with such horrors if by chance I were hungry in the middle of the night and stepped in for food. And I am more than certain that Bengali, his image at the least, would not be in my armchair anymore. Those things happen because I'm all alone, purely and simply, because I'm all alone.

Yours Eternally,

Panthro

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