The Man
Downstairs

Up until a few nights ago, I’d never actually seen one, but I’d been told they were gray as cold embers. No tabbies, or ginger toms or tan-colored Siamese. Just a uniform ashen fur. I’d always been more of a dog person, really. He was a cat person. We didn’t get on.

 

The man was old. An ageing hippie. I had no idea if he was partying in the 60s, but the waft of Woodstock swam up through the pipes and into my bathroom, a penetrating, acrid smoke. I’d sometimes picture him sitting in that room, tie-dye bandana around his forehead, tobacco crumbs working their way down his long, greying beard. Soaking into the bath and staining the water there.

 

A few nights ago, I noticed the whistling had stopped. And the bells. The cats seemed to have gone. And the dank smell from downstairs was replaced with something sour, pungent. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. I was glad of the welcome relief from their nighttime yowls and that uncanny, heavy trilling he’d used to summon them. But as the silence and the smell grew, I began to become concerned for the man downstairs.

 

I had complained on more than one occasion about the noise, but it was now the silence that bothered me. That kept me wide-eyed in my bed, ruminating on what might have become of the man downstairs. My restless brain dredged up images of him, sitting in his bathroom, enjoying one final smoke before… Before what?

 

It was then that I heard it. A solitary mew outside my window. It was soon taken up by another. And then another. It wasn’t the noise – I want to be clear – but the uncertainty of it that forced me out of my bed and to the window.

 

I felt sure that if I looked down, I would see the man downstairs open the window just in time, would see him thrust inviting arms out through its frame and a cacophony of cats would assault him. Almost as though my act of checking on him was enough to resurrect his surly, reclusive self. That it not what happened.

 

When I stuck out my head to investigate, the mewing stopped altogether. There must have been a dozen animals – gray as described to me; gray as the old man’s beard. Shifting down there as one rolling mass, stepping over and under each other. They looked themselves a little like a long, gray beard caught in some unseen wind. When they saw me they stopped. Their heads titled up towards me as one, their eyes accusing me: a glaring of cats.

 

It was in that moment that I decided I had to investigate. This man’s cats were his life. He wouldn’t just abandon them to the night. After all, he was a cat person. I hauled my jacket on over my pajamas, grabbed my keys from the nightstand, and resolved to discover the fate of the man downstairs.

 

​

 

Part II

 

The building in which I live is one of those strange, but increasingly common sights. An uncomfortable, ill-fitting attempt to repurpose 1930s opulence with 1990s practicality. The main upshot of this is that all the apartments are smaller and more cramped than originally intended.

 

I’d never been to the apartment of the man downstairs before, but I’d assumed that every floor was divided – as mine was – into eight apartments running along in the place of the original six. But when I got downstairs to the old man’s apartment, I discovered that his floor somehow had nine doors, not eight. Had the ninth door always been there?

 

Nestled next to the door that I assumed was his, was this other door: smaller in its wooden frame and older. It had no handle, and ran into an apartment with only one window, which I could see – peering through the grime on its exterior – was boarded up from the inside. I ignored this extra room for now and grasped the handle of the old man’s front door. Unexpectedly, it turned and I stepped cautiously inside.

 

I have allergies. It’s one of the reasons that I’ve always been a dog person. The air was heavy with the presence of ‘cat’. My eyes watered at it. But there was something else, something beneath the stale smell of cat pee and the remaining echo of his magic cigarettes that seemed to be exuded from every surface like sweat from pores. An awful, meaty smell.

 

The hallway was dark. But beyond it I could see through into the dimly-lit living room, to a bare foot sticking out past the wall at an unwelcoming angle.

 

“Hello?” I cried, stepping slowly toward the foot. “I’m from upstairs. Your cats were trying to get in.” At the far end of the room, I could see the window beneath which the cats had congregated. It was closed and fastened from the inside. The cats were no longer there. The foot did not move. Neither did I.

 

After an age, I spoke again. “I just wanted to check that everything was all right…?” I said, treating the words as a question.

I started at the gravelly reply that came from inside the room.

“Everything… was… all… right…”

There was something strange about the voice. Something forced and not-quite-there.

 

I took a tentative step towards the disembodied foot and its hidden owner. Immediately, a screeching and wailing took up from behind me and I barely had time to press myself flat against the wall as an army of gray cats swept into the room through the open front door. They made straight for the darkened room and sat looking up obeisantly at the owner of the foot.

 

“I’m sorry,” I offered at length, not really knowing what to say. “I thought you might be… I mean I would never normally come inside someone else’s place.”

The foot began to tap up and down mechanically as the strange voice spoke again.

“Come… inside…” it offered.

 

I took another step towards the tapping foot and the strange, church-like congregation of cats that sat around it. There was light moving somewhere further inside the room, and the shadows it cast lurched on the walls like specters. 

 

I passed around the corner and gasped with shock. My keys, which I had been wielding like some defensive weapon, dropped to the floor. I didn't even notice them fall. Stepping into full view of the room, I saw with horror what it was that the cats were looking reverently up at. What it was that sat in the old man’s chair…

 

 

​

Part III

 

The man downstairs had wires coming out of him. Not the sleek, sanitized plastics of hospital wires, but raw, exposed copper wiring. It looked to have been ripped from the wall. Whoever had done this to him had split open old electrical wires and wound the ends together to create a cradle of sorts in which the old man sat. I wondered if he’d done it to himself!

 

Though glazed eyes moved mechanically in his head, they were not-quite vacant. Something stirred behind them, inhuman but curious. But it wasn’t the eyes that made me turn away, nor the slack jaw, nor the hole in his throat through which more wires crawled. It was what lay in the smaller-but-identical cradle beside him.

 

A huge cat-like creature, gray as cinders, hung with its feet suspended above the floor. It was twice the size of any other cat in the room. Its eyes were open. Its ribs swelled and contracted with each breath. It was alive!

 

It had been hooked into a similar cradle whose wires extended through the walls, floors and ceiling at impossible angles, and seemingly disappeared into impossible spaces that lay just beyond perception. It was like there was another room, overlaid onto this room, that extended into an infinity of nothingness. I now knew where the cats had been for the past few days, and how a ninth door had suddenly appeared where no door was before. But to say I understood it would be to welcome madness.

 

The creature in the cradle stirred. And where gray cat-creature looked, the man looked too. I could see now that it was not the stripped, broken shell of man – this bare husk – that the army of cats revered, but the oversized creature beside it. The cat-like creature that connected to it. The creature that – even as I looked – began to move its padded feet.

 

In abject terror I tried to move my own, but I found myself at once surrounded by cats on all sides. Tripping, harrying, preventing my escape. Then to my horror the old man moved! Awkwardly, unsurely – as though not used to moving on two legs – he first stood and then began to walk.

 

Wires ripped from his body as he did so, tearing out great gouts of flesh as this unholy thing birthed itself into being. It was a cat-person. A real cat-person! But there was no blood, no effluent coming from the holes the wires had made; no scream coming from his mouth, just a maddening, throat-seizing purring.

 

I tried to run. I heard the low guttural loll as that chorus of beasts picked up the uncanny purring sound. The air became thick with it, and I felt my eyes water at it, my ears wax up, the very breath in my lungs frothing out of them. I tried to back away. It was then that the old man came for me.

 

Dropping prone to all fours, the man’s gangly limbs began to move in directions that I did not think possible, casting about and finding purchase on the thick air that issued from that purring, gripping at things in the room I couldn’t see, that couldn’t be there. I felt impossible, invisible barriers at my back.

 

And then he came for me. The creature – whatever it was that had been put into the man downstairs – crawled all over me, sniffing, nipping, pressing his naked flesh up against my own. I tried to scream, but an ejection of wiring poured from his mouth and flailed like creepers in the sun, casting around for a way into my own.

 

Panicked, I grabbed the only thing I could find. I grabbed my keys from the floor where I had dropped them, and began slashing at the wires, the man and the army of cats!

 

*

 

That’s where they found me. The EMTs. Somebody had heard my screaming and called 911. They said I was screaming and swiping at the air, at nothing. They said I had broken into the abandoned apartment downstairs and had some kind of stroke. But I know better. I know what I saw in the apartment of the man downstairs.

 

At night, I’ve been sleeping with my windows closed. But I can still hear them. The cats. Mewing from the places beyond perception. And the call of something larger. Teaching me. Explaining to me how to build a thing of wires. How to whistle in just the right way to call it back.

 

My allergies have cleared up too since that night. And I now find dogs churlish and slow. I can feel myself changing. Wanting to change. Wanting to fling open the windows and let out that low, heavy trilling. Wanting to become a cat person.

 

So, I will wind a thing out of wires and enjoy one final smoke before…