The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

The walls are giving in like lungs collapsing. Plaster falls in chunks from the ceiling. Windows explode inwards in a hail of icy splinters. I run to hide under the couch, but the couch is gone, instead there is a great wet mouth with broken teeth. Through the portholes there falls thunderlight. Black hands reach up from the floor. The cord is tight around my neck. It is transparent, now, the colour of death. There is no scent at all, and perhaps it is that which makes me understand that I am going to die.

I think about fish, and how I will never know its taste, and I think about my beautiful tabby, and how I will never see her again. Then I think about Ted and what I did to him and I am really crying, now. I know, in the way I know my own tail, that the others are already gone. For the first time I am all alone. And soon I will be gone too.

I can feel it all, now, the body. The heart, the bones, the delicate clouds of nerve endings, the fingernails. What a moving thing a fingernail is. I see that it doesn’t matter what shape the body is, that it doesn’t have fur or a tail. It still belongs to us.

Time to stop being a kitten, I say to myself. Come on, cat. Maybe if I help the body, the others can come back.

But when I look there is a seething mass of shining blades where the front door should be. They whir and snick through the air. There is no way out there.

I’ll try up, then. At the top of the stairs, the landing and the bedroom and roof are gone. The house is open to a raging sky, the storm which beats and whirls overhead. It is made of tar and lightning. There are brouhahas with great saggy jaws, baying. They tumble and race through the clouds, eyes like points of fire.

My fur is on end, my heart pounds. Every fibre of me wants to turn, to run and hide somewhere quiet, and wait to die. But if I do that it’s over.

Be brave, cat. I put my paws on the first step, and then the second. Maybe this will be OK!

The staircase caves in with a great sound. Rubble lands all around me, and there is choking dust and ropes of the sticky black tar that burn and blind me. When the dust clears, I can only see rubble, brick. The walls are caved in, closing off the stairs. Everything is quiet. I am sealed in.

No, I whisper, tail lashing. No, no, no! But I am trapped, the crumbling house my tomb. I am finished, we are all finished.

I call on the lord. He does not answer.

There is a deep stirring somewhere and I start, tail bristling. In the darkest corner of the living room Night-time groans. He raises his head. His ears are ragged and there are deep slashes along his flanks, as if made by a knife. Dying, yes. But not dead. Not yet.

I think furiously. I can’t go up or out, but perhaps there is somewhere left to go, after all.

Hurt, he says, in a deep growl.

I know, I say. I am sorry. But I need your help. We all do. Can you take me down, to your place?

He hisses, a sound as deep as a geyser. I can’t blame him. He tried to warn me about Lauren.

Please, I say. Now, more than ever – now it is your time.

Night-time comes forward, no longer graceful, but limping and painfully slow. He stands over me and I hear his breath sawing in and out. He opens his jaws wide and I think, This is it, he will finish me. Part of me is glad. But instead he closes his mouth about my scruff and picks me up, gentle as a mamacat.

My time, he says, and the house is gone. We hurtle down, down through the dark. Something hits me with a terrible blow and now we are somewhere else entirely.

Night-time’s place is worse than I could have imagined. There is nothing but old, old dark. Great plains and expanses and canyons of black nothing. I understand that there is no such thing as distance here – it all goes on for ever. This world is not round and you never come back to yourself.

Here, he says, putting me down.

I gasp, my lungs almost crushed by loneliness. Or maybe it is the last life draining from us.

No, I say. We have to go further down.

He says nothing, but I feel his fear. There are deep places even Night-time cannot go.

Do it, I say.

He snarls and bites me, deep in the throat. Blood gushes forth, freezes in a stony spray in the cold dead air. Bodies don’t work the same way down here.

I snarl and bite him back, my small teeth puncturing him in the cheek. He starts in surprise. We die if we go down, he says.

We have to go down, I say. Or we will certainly die.

He shakes his head and grabs me by the scruff and we sink into the black earth.

It is like sinking to the very depths of a dark ocean. The pressure becomes unbearable. Night-time forces us deeper into the dark ground, rasping in distress at my side. We are pressed together so tightly that our bodies and our bones begin to break and our eyes explode. Our blood is frozen to sludge and bursts out of our veins. We are crushed, bodies mangled to jagged ends of bone. The weight of everything obliterates us. We are crushed until we are no more than particles, dust. There is no more Olivia, and no more Night-time. Please, I think, it must be over now. The agony cannot go on. We must be dead. I can’t feel him any more. But somehow I am still