Billy

I weaved my way between her legs as she carried a tray with hot tea, cheese and crackers out to the front porch.  She lurched, almost tipping the tray over.  "Uugh," she lets out a groan as she steadies the tray.  "Meshach!"  I, being a cat, ignored her and proceeded to saunter back into the kitchen.  She gave me a sour look and continued onto the porch.  I jumped up on the rickety kitchen table to look at the mail that she had picked up from the leaning, rusty mailbox at the road.  The three letters were addressed to her, Elyce M. Courtman.  She'd come to my house yesterday.  I say my house because I grew up here. The owner and sole resident, Miss Rhea Mizell, had died and left the house to Elyce.  She came back in and shooed me off the table.

"Shoo, cat! Those days of having a free run are over. " she said in a nervous, breathless voice.  I jumped down and ran under the dingy sofa, a good place to hide and observe.  The woman, Elyce, was alone, no family and no husband.

"I guess I'll have to get used to having a cat around." she said aloud. "and why would anyone name a cat after one of those three boys that survived the fiery oven In Babylon is beyond me?"

Yes, she will have to get used to it, I thought as I watched her sweeping and moving the dust around to small effect. It's been my name the whole time I lived with Miss Rhea. Miss Rhea had used just three rooms and kept the rest of the house closed.  It is a big old farmhouse almost a hundred years old. 

Elyce, the new owner, chose an upstairs bedroom for herself.  I know because while on the prowl in the moonlight, I had seen the light streaming through her window.  As I watched from under the sofa, Elyce kept pushing the dust bunnies around on the hundred year-old planks that Pa and Uncle William had put down and finished.  I know about this  for I was there, can still smell the fresh cut sawdust, still can see Pa in his denim bib overalls.  The way he looked... before.

"Mmeeeyow!," the sound just came out of me as Elyce hit me with the broom, trying to clean under the sofa.  I took off for the reopened stairwell to her choice of a bedroom.  A choice she may regret for she chose my old bedroom. I could hear her downstairs calling, "Meshach, come kitty, I didn't mean to hit you." her voice quivered as if she might cry.  "Here kitty, here Meshach, I'm sorry. "

Miss Rhea had died on a Friday afternoon.  She was 102 years old and was my little sister.  My full name is William Mizell and if I was alive, I would be 104 years old. I was 8 and Rhea was 6 when Pa and Uncle William (my namesake) built the house. We lived in Pawnee territory with Pa hacking out a homestead of 60 acres.  One late October afternoon, Pawnees went on a rampage.  When they attacked, Pa was in the fields working, and he didn't have a chance.  I watched from this same bedroom window as he was scalped, defenseless.  Ma had scooped up Rhea and ran down to the basement closing the trap door in the floor of the kitchen behind her.  I could hear the Indians rummaging through the house, fearful that they would find Ma and my sister.  My heart was pounding as I took refuge under the bed.  I could hear the pounding of steps on the stairs, the war cries echoing through the house.  Three of them burst into my room and one immediately found me under the bed.  With loud whoops and yells, he jerked me out from under the bed, and then I felt the cold steel of his scalping knife slicing through the thin skin of my forehead as blood ran down into my eyes.  As he was finishing, one of the others drove a tomahawk through my skull. 

Somehow, since my passing, my spirit is not free to move away but inhabits the farm's cat. Ageless, I stayed with my sister ever since my death, unable to speak to her. It was like Rhea knew her brother was close. Rhea knew as I did that the evil that had occurred remained also.

Being a cat, I naturally did not respond and go to Elyce as she called me.  Besides, it was late October and time for a full moon.  I could hear Elyce moving around downstairs.  She had inherited this farmhouse from Miss Rhea because Miss Rhea had no children of her own.  Miss Rhea was a great aunt to Elyce.  Elyce Mizell Courtman was a stressed out, divorced, overworked bank loan officer who had been on the verge of a mental and emotional breakdown.  I would listen while Miss Rhea would speak to  Elyce, trying to counsel her and guide her.  I guess that's why she left the house to Elyce when she died. Elyce had always told Miss Rhea how quiet and peaceful it would be to live in this old farmhouse.
 
In the warmth of the sun streaming in through the second story bedroom window, I stretched out on the hand-braided rug to enjoy the warmth. When I woke from my cat nap, the shadows were already lengthening as the daylight grew shorter with each passing day of October.  Soon, the moon would be rising, full, filling the lower night sky and bringing with it the specter of an October almost 100 years before.  I knew that because with each passing October I had witnessed it while in the form of this cat.
With the moonrise, so would evil rise, unsated spirits bent on death and destruction. Rhea knew this too. That's why she used only 3 rooms, one being the kitchen which had been her sanctuary.

I wanted to tell Elyce as the new owner, to warn her, but as a cat I could not speak.  There was a reason why Miss Rhea barricaded herself in only three rooms of the house.  All I knew was that I cannot stay in the house on an October night with a full moon.  As dusk began to overshadow the landscape, I padded down the stairs silently and eased quietly out the back door.  I could hear Elyce rattling dishes, preparing for dinner.  There is no time for that now. 

I began my usual rounds as a cat is wont to do, prowling through my favorite places on the farm. I trot down to the old pond, long overgrown and unseen from the house, where my sister and I would swim on hot afternoons.  Then, over to where the remnants of the old barn stood, I climb up on what was left of the one remaining wall, remembering playing in the hayloft.  And then back to the farthest corner of the homestead and a small stand of trees where our forgotten family cemetery was placed.  Just like the rest of the place, it was overgrown and neglected, and in the shade and coolness of the trees, there was a musty, earthy smell.  The sun had set by now and already a faint moonglow in the east foretold of the night to come.

I went to my favorite place in the evening, the big oak, whose branches hung over the one lane road.  I climbed up the tree as the moon rose until, perched on a leafless tree limb, I was facing east with the full moon and the farmhouse filling my view.  The road moved from beneath me up the slight rise to the house, the neglected fields open on either side.  I watched with the quiet patience of a cat waiting for its prey, like a statue, an occasional flick of my tail the only sign of life. 

And then, in the descending darkness, the light in the upstairs bedroom came on.  It was like a beacon and would serve as one tonight, guiding the evil as it is released from its energy vortex. Then I could hear it, beginning as a low moan, rising in volume and intensity, until it echoed the war cries of the century before.  Hideous howls and unearthly cries rose up, seemingly from the bowels of hell, straight from Dante's inferno.

I don't know why I'm trapped in the body of this cat, still the 10 year-old boy. I don't understand why I can't leave this farmhouse.  My cat name, Meshach, comes from the Biblical story of the three brothers who survived King Nebuchadnezzer's fiery oven. A fire as hot as the inferno that unleashed these gruesome ghouls. The cries from the house grew louder still and now intermingled with the shrieks of a woman.I wnat to do something but then again, there was no one to help me. I'm Billy, and I want my Ma and Pa.