The Tiger House
October 5, 1871
It was to my own consternation that I could see my intestines spilling free out onto the floor like some macabre party favor, now freshly painted by my own blood. Egad, the bastard had cut me near in half. Unthinking and well beyond desperate, I reached out and gargled a final request to the Scarlet Queen as my limbs grew cold. Even now I do not know if what transpired then was a product of my fevered and wounded imagination, or something…. terrifyingly real. Nevertheless I shall attempt to transcribe my memories of it here, illusion or no. It is important to me. It is important to her.
As my former colleague- one Dr. O’Connors- advanced ever closer to me, brandishing the wet razor that had proven my undoing, I in my morbid delirium perceived some otherworldly shadow twist and bend without any change in the lighting to cause such a thing. Silently and in great pain, I nevertheless saw it reach out from the small shrine I had painstakingly erected in the Red Lady’s honor next to my bedside table, during my brief time in the empty manse. Though my guest had not yet noticed it, I saw I saw I tell you! I saw something, I know not what. It swam through placid lacquered water that should not have been there, towards myself and my would-be assassin with all the pregnant malevolence of an approaching predator. And by the time the esteemed sir standing over me sensed its presence, by the time I had held up an emaciated hand in some instinctive effort to ward off our encroaching doom, the tiger had pounced.
Rapidly was my visage filled to the brim with its inhuman grin. Had I not already been very near the abyss, I would likely have cried out as I became conscious of its rain slick tendrils worming their way inside of me through the cut on my face. Like some unholy mockery of birth I felt my skull widen to accommodate the thing, until at last the totality of her black mass thrust itself into me through the length of my bisection, from nose to groin. I trembled with something. Perhaps it was fear, perhaps ecstasy or pain or perhaps I do not desire to remember. Closing my eyes even now I can feel it wriggling amongst my insides, leering out at the world from underneath the mask that is my flesh do you not see? The good doctor retreated back as the enormous gash along my sternum and face closed rapidly, and cords upon cords of thick muscle rippled into being underneath my hairy hide. I stood again as I felt my teeth metamorphosis into the incisors they are now, more at home in the mouth of a great cat than that of a man. My fingers bled as I reached up to feel them. I heard no, felt someone whisper into that place in our mind where only we are permitted to go, that I was closer to understanding the matter than I realized. I had petitioned the Lady of the manor for assistance you see, and seeing as she as yet had none, she deigned to make me her pet. I hungered.
Thusly transformed, I fell upon my ex-comrade turned assailant, tearing into his comparatively fragile form with my newly developed arsenal as naturally as if I truly were some wild beast. The esteemed Dr. O’Connors howled and in his panic tried to hollow out my insides with his razor once more, only to compound his distress upon seeing every last wound close up with a bubbling of gnarled flesh and corrupted matter. Once again I heard a whisper pour into my brain like a burning jetty of poison dripping from fine china. A young woman, a voice as sweet as lead, giggled girlishly somewhere off in the distance as I felt Mr. O’Connor’s soul leave him due to my ministrations.
It was then in awed revulsion of my new and grotesque existence that I proceeded to heed an unfamiliar and abominable instinct, apparently coming part and parcel with my new form. I growled, rutted and gulped, wolfing down the remains of my kill in abject bliss so that not even a drop of sanguine blood remained.
As I withdrew from my gruesome work I felt the savage hunger retreat from me, sated for now. Yet the changes to my once-human frame proved consistent. I do not know how long I hunched stupefied in the corner of that room, eyes darting occasionally to the tiny homage of my new patron, then back around the room for whatever horrid thing could have done something such as this. Then I would look to the shuttered window, half-expecting legions of police to immediately storm the premises. Yet God, as he so often does, refused to say a word. And when I roused myself from my daze the crescent moon sliced through night clouds to greet me.
Nothing remained of the late doctor, save for a red smear across the floor, which I cured easily enough with the pulling of a nearby rug. I resolved to leave the manor then, perhaps forever I knew not. All I knew was I wanted to cleanse my gory palate with the evening air.
The late autumn mist curdled around my now-undersized bowler and coalesced into the glycolic skinned pools draining into nearby street gutters, as I tramped through a meaningless and endless string of ignominious Boston alleys and walkways. With the enlarged lungs of a brute I heaved in and out until my breath was no longer hot on my throat, to the point where any soul mad enough to keep me company would think me an asthmatic. It was, of course, to no avail. The tastes of flesh and torn cloth remained inescapably on my tongue, as they remain stained onto my hapless brain this very day. Regardless I continued walking, perhaps out of some forlorn determination to rebel against my nightmarish situation. At times, even at that late hour, I came across people. Whores mostly, peddlers and tinkerers, outcroppings of the city’s night market that oozed into existence with the setting of every sun. The glow from the occasional bar window cast a long shadow on me as I crept passed, and occasionally I would hear the songs and stamping feet of drunken revelry which I- like the legendary Grendel- would now be shunned from. I did not see then, as I do in retrospect now, how the styles of both the pedestrian’s clothing and of the houses I stalked amongst began to slowly grow farther and farther divorced from custom and decency the more I walked. Roof shingles, and then bits of loose brick floated away as if suspended in water. One woman on a street corner wore a gown folding in on itself at an impossible angle. Yet another displayed her bare legs encased to the hip in only thin wire like that of ship’s rigging. Here and there were tiny ornaments strung up under street lamps, dolls and baubles of wood and sack cloth stained either red or gold.
Perhaps it was the new sensorium that blinded me to these changes. Pulled from the ambient urban stench of those who did happen to catch sight of me, I could discern the pungent fear that spurted off of them as easily as any slavering beast likely could. Although I had not bothered to examine myself in a mirror since the events at the manor, I could tell from the sheer alien feel of the flesh that now enclosed my skull what a dreadful thing I had become. Once-stolid features and a rectangular head were now ruptured by new folds of muscle and excessive hair, morphed into something more resembling a cone or pyramid than any human face. My once diminutive and thin mouth was now a pouting serrated maw crowned with a great snout, which heaved the stinging cold air in and out like bellows.
Eventually, invariably, I found myself back in front of Rose Manor. Its thin frame, wedged between neighboring domiciles, betrayed in no way its true scope. For a moment I considered re-entering, if only to ensure any remaining evidence of my crime had not gone untended to. Had I been my old self, I may have wanted to burn the house and the shrine along with it, but even then I knew I could not. What cat could possibly do such injury to its master? Yet my disgust overmatched my pragmatism, and furious with self-revulsion I turned from the house as one would turn from the prostitute that had taken them in. Once again I tramped down the frigid shifting cobblestones, and yet again I ended my journey where it had begun.
Abandoning my restraint, I bounded away from that wretched den, sometimes stooping to all fours like a true animal as I tore through the night. Using the old clock tower a reference point since there was no moon, I took care in my rage to never once head the same direction I had originated from. Though I suppose in my soul I knew what ultimately awaited me, and that Boston had no old clock tower. Soon I reentered my room panting and defeated, tears streaming down my twisted face. I knew then this particular nightmare had no method for escape, as surly as if I had been tethered to it by a velvet chain.
I knelt at what I deemed to be the source of my affliction and beseeched the Queen to rescind her gift. Or if she would not, then to grant me the release of oblivion, before I further brought disaster to myself or another. In later months I would sit there for hours at a time, rewarded with no more than the ethereal scent of roses. Rats and other small creatures I did not recognize would occasionally wander inside, and I would hunt them for nourishment and sport. But the vast majority of my time was spent either at the altar or the window, watching the city beneath grow dark and the sky above fill with one unfamiliar body after another. And yet once, fairly recently, I felt an almost imperceptible stirring in the void that lay on the other side of whatever gossamer wall between planes this wretched manor lay brazenly on top of. My breath caught itself in my throat as the smell of man filled my lungs once more. Outside my room and down the steps, someone soaked to the bone had opened the front door- I could hear the water dripping from him. What’s more I could sense the precious essence ooze through a crack in his skin, and feel the slight vibrations in the floor boards as he took his uneasy steps. Though I neither heard nor saw a soul, my derby shifted position as I felt a hand like silk caress my head. For months on end I had uttered a cry for help through the halls of that desolate place, and in response had only been petted encouragingly and offered a further meal.
I rose from the shrine, caught in the silent scream of expended air only found in those gripped by truly impotent rage. My flight from my dimly lit quarters necessitated traveling over the rug I had used to shield from the world my bloody work, multiplying my wrath by leaps and bounds. Knowing I could not damage the house itself or its furnishings, I retreated to the deepest confines I could locate in the darkened maze, its many twists and turns now more familiar to me than they had been in my former life. I was no longer a guest but rather a resident. In baleful silence I sequestered myself in defiance of what I was being asked to do. Surly my carrying on would have frightened away any wounded stranger from this place. Surly they could see what lay in store for them.
But they did not. Neither this one nor the next nor the next after that would heed my warnings. All the claw marks I left in the walls would heal as surely as if they had been cut into my transformed flesh. I would growl and cry out as the emptiness in my stomach urged me to approach, and it was as if the manor itself endeavored to muffle my desperate song. Only when at last the tiger pounced would the floor suddenly creak and the furniture rattle in witness to the bloody cacophony I would then play. The rats stopped coming soon enough, but by then they no longer needed to.
I see you.
