The Folly of Cats: Prologue

Prologue....

There was a story passed house to house in the swamp before any of us were born. It was a brief warning.

“ Don’t brush your hair with a drawn window or you’ll tempt the Devil.”

That was it.

In the 1960s, the state’s mainland real estate brokers began developing the area; they took full advantage of the city's recent developments to incorporate it. The company was Atwood & Hamilton LLC. They were less dubious than the energy company and the lumber mill. BlytheSouth, the telephone company, was paying people for their pieces of property. Some were all too happy to take the money and move somewhere more desirable than the swamp. It wasn’t that some people didn’t find it to be a fair offer, which was still true… many found it offensive to offer such a measly amount for land that had been attached to their name since the beginning of their time. Some households didn’t receive the offer at all. They simply skipped those homes and dared not even wander in those sullen marshes framed by ancient weeping willows. To those that stayed, regardless of rhyme or reason, BlytheSouth was going to build around them, and kindly let the remaining residents of the swamp know that.

The earth was disturbed; willow trees twice as wide as a horse were uprooted and used as timber for new construction. The marshes became a slick and oily iron wasteland. Radio towers and phone lines were erected right over cemeteries and graveyards; The ground was soiled and the earth undone. The wildlife suffered, if not mourned, their sudden new existence with their ailing human neighbors. Thankfully, the rest of the river’s waterways weren’t affected by the waste of the latest developments in the swamp. Or maybe it was to their damnation, furthering their isolation, making their ruin invisible to sympathetic eyes.

The construction workers had a hard time getting in and out of the swamp; they also had to travel long distances and for long hours. When there was a need, and there were the vultures, Atwood & Hamilton LLC. They swooped in and re-cultivated land that the power company couldn’t use. They scavenged and poured perfume on piss and created housing for their counterparts’ employees. With housing came the need for recreation and respite from the cruel labor. Bars and trade stations were built. Trouble typically had a way of brewing when alcohol was involved.

“ Don’t brush your hair with a drawn window or you’ll tempt the Devil.”

There wasn’t too much left to the imagination when it came to how the elders came about such a quick omen, given the new developments disturbing and outright destroying the natural order of the swamp. The old faith was unsettled. The plentiful last suppers are now scant. Where the old faith prevailed, it was now under fire from outside challengers.

There were strangers in the quagmire, and their presence wasn’t appreciated or needed. There wasn’t an actual devil or demon that the elders warned bout. It was the unwelcome and the unwanted that they were warning of. That was all of the logic the mainland sheriff’s marshals could begin to entertain. However, the first report would lead them to believe otherwise.

Early morning, Samatha Waterston, 18 years old, was presumed dead by her 19th birthday. April 1965. The Riviere d'Erbane Port Authority, Michael Clayton, reported in his assessment that Samatha Waterston was abducted by a drunken BlytheSouth electrician and wireframer, Beauregard Willis, after his nightshift. Mr. Clayton arrested Willis on the docks during a gulf storm and in a drunken stupor on the pier.

The official report filed stated that Mr. Willis had admitted to the abduction of the young Ms. Waterson from the early morning of the 20th of July 1964. As to the manner in which the confession was received, he did so willingly. Mr. Clayton described Willis as sobbing into the storm, unburdening himself from the torment.

“Aye, I took the young thing! I took her! It wasn’t me, though! My mind wasn’t my own. It was shaded and mute to the world. To this WORLD, you see, my mind was taken to a place unseen by our own. It took me behind the eyes of the swamp. Where the Bellow brews with its black heart, where sound cannot be made, a place where dreams go to die, and the soul is transformed. It was there at the edge of Beyond, the Devil with his spiked wings that scraped the ground and luscious lips, took me! And it made me take that girl.”

Willis then attempted to leap off the pier into the Gulf Coast storm, but Michael Clayton subdued him. The two men were not alone on the dock. A fellow fisherman, Jeremiah Watkins, overheard the conversation despite the raging storm. Jeremiah ran through the swamp, knocking on every door along the way to the Waterston’s stilted house. By the time the eldest of the Waterstons’ women came to the door, there was already a mob behind Jeremiah that could smell blood through the downpouring rain.

The mob marched ahead of Samatha's mother and grandmother, while her father and grandfather led the march down to the piers. There wasn’t any hope that backup from the local sheriff’s office would come in time, as the storm had taken down trees and power lines up the road. The swamp was completely blocked off from the mainland. Michael Clayton wanted to return to his family and would rather suffer at the hands of the storm than at the hands of an angry mob. He would later recount that someone needed to be sound enough to retell the facts of what happened, so Clayton stepped aside as Reverend and Junior Waterston, Samatha’s Grandfather and father, respectively, approached. Junior held a shotgun while the Reverend had the black book.

“You ought better come with us, stranger.” The Reverend raised his voice through the thunder and the rain and over the sneers of the swamp people behind him.

“Handle your business here! FOR THE GODS TO SEE! It was the demons-” Willis shouted out as his back was up against the railing of the pier. It was the only thing between him and the raging sea coiling at the whims of the storm.

“Is that your excuse? Demons? The Devil made you do it?” crossed Junior, snarling in the storm. His father stretched out his hand to keep him and his shotgun from advancing further on the culprit. “The Devil made you take my little girl?!” The storm’s fury carried on. The smaller ships were rocking closer to the dock. One high surge of the waves and the kayaks and row boats would be shattered against the pier.

“And that same Devil will make you take ME! But he won't let you. They won’t let you have me, not you. Not the Reverend there, and not that mob of folk. I'm already gone! THEY GOT ME, AHHHHH!”

Willis bellowed into the night, shrieking, and he started to punch himself repeatedly. Junior went on the advance on the man responsible for his daughter’s disappearance, when suddenly, from the dark sky above, one slick, silent, spear-like spike came. The crowd fell silent as the rain continued to pour down. No one said a word except for the small gasp uttered by a young child with a torch of her own... The spike landed just before Mr. Willis, separating him from Junior.

This is where the report and the story begin to veer into fantasy, and why Michael Clayton was discharged from duty even though the mob collaborated on his story.

Mr. Willis continued to scream out in fear and delirium. He stared up into the void sky and saw nothing but rain and flashes of lightning overhead. In rapid succession, one after the other, spikes rained down on Mr. Willis, skewing his flesh and core; effectively nailing him down to the wooden planks of the pier. The blackened spears shot through his body haphazardly; one struck his wrist, severing his hand clean off. Willis howled like a wounded animal, begging and writhing in the rain to be put out of his misery.

Mr. Clayton stated that when the lightning struck, a man could be seen from 20 to 30 yards away. Standing on stilts in the water in the madness of the storm. The man in the water was standing on multiple stilts at once, hoisting himself above the water. When lightning struck again, Clayton saw a pale, ghastly face staring at them all with a smile. A grin impossibly ear-to-ear, his smile was bright and pearly white, just like the con men who had been ravaging the swamp for months prior. Mr. Clayton, along with those who gathered to detain Mr. Willis, all reported that there was a cacophony of whispers that grew louder just before a large claw descended. A hand, the devil’s hand, came down from the storm and tore Beauregard Willis from the pier along with the spikes and planks, then processed to yeet the shrieking man into the gulf. With the next lightning strike, the devil jolted into the night sky, disappearing from view.

There was no recovery of Mr. Willis’s body; the storm later that night ravaged the pier, destroying any evidence that there was an altercation, let alone a supernatural event that had taken place. After the outlandish report from Mr. Clayton, he was duly put on indefinite administrative leave.