Guardians

She didn’t like it. It smelled…wrong. It didn’t belong here, certainly not on the ceiling. This was her house.
A small rumble escaped her throat, her white fur started to lift and stand up on her back like a mountain ridge.

“Cleo, what are you doing up on the table again?”
Stephen, her human, came up and briefly touched her on the head.
She didn’t move, just kept staring at the ceiling.
“What do you see, what is it?” Stephen asked, also looking in the general direction of the…intruder.
“Well, there’s nothing but you are scaring me.” He sighed and then turned, going to the room with the loud water, where the rain was. He called it the “bathroom”.

It wasn’t moving. Just sticking there to the ceiling, like a cat that was hanging on to the curtains by her claws. Only It was certainly no cat. Its long limbs were twisted in directions that didn’t make sense to her, the resemblance to humans barely there. No fur and no snout, white eyes. Like the fish that Stephen had brought home one time, that she nibbled on when he wasn’t looking – dead eyes.

When Stephen came out of the bathroom and went into his sleeping place, he shouted “Good night Cleo, don’t wake me for food in the morning, please!”
Yeah, right.
But Cleo wasn’t thinking about her empty bowl or the sweet-smelling cans of tuna that she loved. She was still looking at the ceiling, her tail twitching slowly. Ready to defend her territory.

The second the light out of the bedroom went out, It started creeping forward. Cleo didn’t need light – her eyes worked perfectly fine without it. She followed It, down the hall, It moved like a spider. Only with fewer legs and a lot slower. It made no sound, but the head suddenly turned towards her, unnaturally far, like an owl. Cleo kept walking fearlessly behind. Tail up high, never looking away.

The bedroom. Slowly the limbs climbed inside the door, the rest following. Thankfully the door was ajar, so Cleo slipped silently inside, never leaving the thing out of her sight. It moved until It was right above Stephen. Still sticking to the ceiling, it swiveled its head and began sucking air in. Or at least that’s what it looked like. Stephen, who had already been asleep, suddenly started to moan. Tossing and turning, he seemed in distress.

Cleo didn’t like that. She jumped on the bed and his chest. Turning to the thing, she gathered all her courage and hissed. Very loudly, but Stephen didn’t wake. However, the thing on the ceiling stopped sucking and recoiled away. It crawled into a corner and sat there looking with its empty eyes at Cleo. She wasn’t budging away from her human. She kept guard all night, and when the sun came up, the thing disappeared and Cleo fell asleep at some point.

The next morning she didn’t wake Stephen for food. But she did wake up determined to go get help. Now – where does a cat get help? Cleo knew a place. When she was let out for her daily roam, she turned straight into a familiar road, avoiding the metal death things, following her feline sense of direction. She came to the old town church. Now she of course didn’t know that it was a church. All she knew was, it smelled funny and there were things out on the field at night. Misty things. But also there was help.

She neared the ancient building, but instead of going inside, she climbed the stones and grooves of the outside walls. Leaping from outcropping to ledges, soon she stood in front of an unusual face. It sat on its four legs with wings and pointy ears, almost like a mixture of cat, monkey, and bat. To us, a stone figure, a gargoyle. To her – a warden. Help.

It was looking at her, listening to her plea. Visibly unmoving stone. Cleo however, saw the slight nod. The sparkle in the eyes. She would have let out a sigh of relief if she hadn’t been a cat. But since she was, all she did was turn around and jump. It wasn’t too high for a nimble cat like her. Relieved, she made her way back home.

And when Stephen came home in the evening, nothing was waiting for him on the ceiling. Only his purring friend, sitting in her favorite warm spot next to the radiator. He looked outside, scratching her ears, but didn’t notice the grotesque-looking stone figure in the bushes.

The following day, she woke him up by meowing in his face and demanding her well-deserved tuna.