Caterwauler

Eventually, when it got late enough, and when most everyone has scattered back home, the subway station become the haunting grounds of only the most faraway souls. Night-workers slugging home before daylight hits; castaways and runaways milling about, scared and directionless; mid-week partygoers drunk and drug-fogged, grateful for the quiet stations but peripherally apprehensive of any next-day responsibilities; late-night rebels finally calling it quits with their nocturnal fun—or moving on to their next target.

A businessman trudged out among them. From this latest train coming from work, only a smattering of others emerged alongside him, and they were all quick to scurry up the stairs, desperate to get home before it got any darker. He, however, paused to check his watch. He still needed to catch another train home, and he mourned, as often as he did, for living so far from the heart of the city.

He had a few minutes to spare, and the tunnel was empty, so he didn’t rush to the next platform. Instead, he took refuge in this private freedom, letting his feet drag and his posture sag under the weight of exhaustion. It was just him, the scrape-tap of his dress shoes lazing across the tiles, and the occasional mechanical fanfare of another approaching train, hardly muffled by the walls. He went to the stairs and, when he made it to the top, he took a moment to recollect his bearings. Lethargy diffused his senses, but despite the emptiness, he knew he couldn’t let himself fall into an lull. Others still milled around, somewhere in the recesses of this station. Nasty undesirables that he worked very, very hard to be nothing alike. 

The businessman took in a great breath that pulled him back together, and then made his way to the other side of the station. His next train was scheduled to arrive in a few minutes. He picked up the pace, hurrying by some layabout sleeping at the bottom of the next set of stairs he descended. The businessman made it to his platform, comfortably far from that staircase, and fully alone in that cavernous tunnel. He checked the times on the electronic timetable hanging above. Any minute now.

Something shifted and clattered behind him. Someone dropping a water bottle, or kicking a can, or whatever else in some other dingy end of the tunnel. Not as alone as he had hoped. He heard the steady patter of footsteps pace along the dirty tile. The fluorescence flickered briefly. There was a distant rumble, the promise of his train. The businessman tensed his grip around his briefcase in preparation, and, as he did, someone screamed.

A painful, guttural wail of cacophonous volume, overtaking the growing roar of the train. The businessman spun around, heart and mind super-shocked, and he came face-to-face with a something so horrifying, so undeniably monstrous, that he had to scream, too.

His train pulled up. It opened its doors to an empty platform. A smattering of people filed out. There was no businessman to board the train. No sign he was ever even there at all. Everyone dispersed noticing nothing, seeing nothing horrifying, hearing nothing alarming. The train rumbled away, empty, and left the platform as it was.

–

The wanderer woke from his sleep at the bottom of the stairs. He had been nodding off in inconsistent intervals, with all the noise and the moving parts of the station—both mechanical and organic—keeping him from somnolent stasis. This was also compounded by the chewing paranoia of any patrolling cops coming by. So, eventually, he decided to give up on sleep and be hungry instead.

He got up, collected his backpack and caught his phone as it tried to escape through the hole in his pocket, and went up the stairs. He figured he’d head back to downtown, where the all-night bars and corner stores were numerous and the people less nosy. The wanderer trudged to the end of the tunnel that led to the turnstiles. They, alongside the scant security guards, were the barrier to the other side of the station—exactly where he needed to be to catch the right train. But what cash he had left meant a decision had to be made between food and fare. If it were daytime, he’d wait for a large crowd to smuggle himself through, jumping the turnstile in between the throng of rushing bodies, often too fast and jumbled enough to either hide him or at least make his crime difficult to properly discern.

But it was empty, too late as the last minimal crowd had already dispersed. The wanderer cursed not getting up sooner, tagging along the tail-end of that last crowd. Now it was just him and the two security guards on the other side. 

He could wait. Multiple different trains ran downtown, and he did not currently live a life where he could be picky. He just had to work with generalities. Get to the other side of the station, of those turnstiles, and he’d find himself somewhere downtown, somewhere with cheap food or charity or familiarity. Deciding on food instead of fare, he would wait in the tunnel for whatever came first: a guard going off to do one thing or another, or the next crowd of night-goers for him to slide through. 

The wanderer thus sidled back down the tunnel, just enough to avoid being spotted, but still close enough to keep an eye out. Who knows how long he’d have to loiter around for the next opportunity. After getting situated, the wanderer pulled off his backpack, looking for his dirt-frosted wallet so that he could double-check his cash. As he did, he heard something from the other end of the tunnel, back the way he had come.

It wasn’t an approaching crowd or screaming train—in fact, it was quite small, barely there. Its delicacy is what made it so noticeable; so thin and concerning in the loud and busy manmade beast of the subway. The wanderer moved back down the tunnel, listened for it again. 

And it came: a meow. The wanderer hurried further to the stairs. He liked cats, even more since he’d taken to the streets. They were similar creatures to him—small lives in this grand, terrifying world, with its seething apathy, where cats and urchins alike survived companionably in the cracks. As he came to the top of the stairs, he paused to listen again. He couldn’t tell where it was, exactly. 

Another train roared by, screeched to a stop, spat out its remaining crowd of the night, who all passed by him; him, who was pressed against the curve of the tunnel. The train left. The people disappeared. It was quiet again. Then another meow, more frantic, maybe pained. A caterwaul. The wanderer could locate it now: bottom of the stairs, to the left, where the train had just skirted by. He hurried down as the cries quickened, and swung himself around the bend into the empty tunnel.

There was no cat. Just hell with a face, waiting for him, its horrid yowl doing nothing to hide its deceit and violent hunger. It swallowed the scream out of him.

The wanderer never came back up those stairs again.

–

It might’ve been the last train from downtown, she wasn’t sure. But it was so late now that it might as well have been. The station’s population was anemic, and so she was free to make any sort of winding path she wanted. To stick her arms out straight on either side, go on the tips of her worn Converse, and teeter like a baby fawn to the nearby steps. The self-induced precarity was made fun because of her loneliness. To intentionally take up more space because it was all hers now, anyway, so she could be as silly as she wanted. To turn her music up very, very high, rock and roll howling through those cans because it was the only way others could hear it. She didn’t want to be approached by anyone who might still be along her path home.

The girl took the steps two at a time, bounding to the top with alacrity. When she reached the landing with the turnstiles, she saw only one security guard. He was working on a puzzle book, but looked up when she got closer to him and the turnstiles. She waved enthusiastically at him. He blinked blearily before slowly raising his hand in return. He continued to watch her as she paid her fare and moved on to the next tunnel. 

Near the end of the empty tunnel, she stopped to graffiti a poster advertising an upcoming comedian set to devastate the stage nearest to her. She blacked out his face entirely, a warped black hole, and wrote an arrow pointing at it, asking WHAT DOES HE KNOW? She got further distracted and started drawing fanciful swirls and curlicues alongside the corners, of flowers with eyeballs and vines with human teeth for thorns. Swarming behind him was a dark mass of cats with evil eyes and a dog with three sad heads.

As the girl doodled, something appeared behind her. She did not notice it. No breath on the back of her neck, no shift of the space or matter around her, no light touches to the trim of her hair. The Caterwauler was simply there, waiting. It could not touch her, or place itself in front of her, or make any other sort of independent actions that would bring her attention unto itself. 

Instead, it stood behind her and opened its great big mouth—because it ought to have one—and said: “Excuse me, miss, can you help me?”

The girl didn’t notice. She finished dotting the eyes of her cats and the shading of her vines before finally capping the marker. Listening, the Caterwauler can hear the muffled blare of music from the girl’s cans. So, the Caterwauler raised its voice: “Help! Help me! Please!”

The girl moved, but didn’t turn to the Caterwauler. Instead, she pivoted to the side and went on down the tunnel and stairs, not once glancing behind her. 

The Caterwauler was pressed to follow, before noticing the shuffle of footsteps back from where the girl came from. The security guard muttered around the corner, looking ill-tempered at being pulled from his post. Perhaps he was expecting, or hoping, to find no one, or a prankster girl looking for a quick lecture, maybe even a ticket that would look good on his record. But it did not matter. He only saw the Caterwauler. And the Caterwauler saw him. And it descended, from one end of the tunnel to the other, faster than he could yell, and picked his existence clean. 

When finished, the Caterwauler resumed on the girl, following her footsteps down the tunnel and stairs. The girl had squirreled herself into one of the last empty train cars heading off to the city’s outskirts. Since she was sitting, the Caterwauler could not resume its usual manner of stalking. So it seethed close, in another car, out of sight of the girl, but able to still pinpoint her sounds. The deafening screech of her music, the shuffle of her jacket, the chewing on her lip. It could not let her go, even if it meant surpassing the boundaries of its hunting grounds, sliding out of its car as soon as she did.

They traversed this last station—farther from the city than any other, so it was small, with no other souls in sight, and quick to release its travelers into that broad, black night. Skyscrapers long weeded out for plain, flat buildings, webs of telephone poles, and gravel-cut parking lots. Everything and everyone had more breathing room, except for the stars, still choked out by the light pollution this far out.

From streetlight to streetlight, jaywalking across empty roads, cutting across an ominous park lit only by her phone flashlight, the Caterwauler followed the girl. And it talked. It barked. It meowed. It yelled, cried, screamed, sung, roared, howled, and beeped. All so close to her back that, if it could breath, she would’ve felt it hot on her neck long ago. But she didn’t, and just walked, watching her shoes kick up gravel and skip over cracks in the sidewalk. Moving on and on without a care for the world, suicidally obtuse to all the dark corners and lone cars driving by. Even once the fluorescence of nearby stores and signs began to die and the moonlight thrived, trees growing dense and the roads thinning, did she continue as she was. Soon it was just houses, broadly separated from each other, most dark and quiet, not even a sidewalk to link them together.

The Caterwauler killed a few animals that looked its way. Never in front of the girl, though. It couldn’t do that. Wasn’t allowed. But the world was silenced behind her, leaving only the Caterwauler to fill the night with its mimicry.

The girl finally cut down an unpaved driveway, to a house nestled in a bowl of trees, the windows unlit and the doors locked. She went up the creaky stairs to the white front door, still unresponsive to the Caterwauler expunging a sound of breaking wood, as though the steps behind her were collapsing from rot and age. The girl fumbled with her backpack, sliding it off and fishing out a key to unlock the door and slip inside, closing it behind her without a single acknowledgement.

The Caterwauler stood so close to the door as to feel the very grain of its wood, as though it could see right through and at the oblivious girl. And it called, one last time, a horrified wail that was no longer frightening nor angry but just upset. Then it waited. But the door did not open, and no face peeked through the windows. So it finally, finally, surrendered, and fell back from the house and into the dark, dissolving into the night to return to its usual hunting grounds.

And no sooner when it disappeared did the lock unfasten and the door creep open, and there the girl peered out. After replacing the dead batteries of her hearing aids, she thought she heard the tail-end of a sad cry, like a cat’s whine or a child’s terror. But upon seeing nothing at all in that vast night, she shrugged and closed the door, locking it tight.

END.