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Act III

Should you a Rat to madness tease

Why ev'n a Rat may plague you... _________ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Recantation"

Dark as it was, he was sure it was him... ...the thick-rimmed glasses set in the owl-like face, eyebrows meeting over his nose in profound puzzlement as to what he was seeing, what he was smelling - yes, that was him, Hampton, that was his room-mate, his best friend since Fourth Grade, that stupid son of a bitch that was always choosing girls over him, bros before hoes, worthless fucking kissass. "Hey - Hampton." "C-Cam? Is that--?" "Shut the door - Hampton." It hurt his throat to talk, some dire malfunction in his vocal cords made his new voice come out strained and strangled, and he saw that the noise that carried Hampton's name on it, alien and threatening, startled him - the bag already in the door, his hand over his mouth and nose, Hampton jerked backward, slightly, just slightly enough to slam the door shut behind him, and Cameron knew what his eyes would be focusing on, the single gleaming eye that radiated phosphorescently in the fading light of the evening, there in their foyer. "F-fuck - fuck what the fuck is--" "Hampton..." He said that word again, that word that had curious, barely tangible meaning that was evaporating from his brain, the memories they shared dying relentlessly. "Hampton." "C-Cameron? What - what the fuck is that smell?!" Lucidity returned to him in a shallow wave: "Shut the fuck up,Hampton." The bag fell off Hampton's shoulder with a thud, and there was an angry shifting of feet as he drew nearer away from the door - cautiously, in the dim light, the greyness that Cameron could now see perfectly in. "God dammit Cam, I'm not playing, turn on a fucking light! What the hell are you doing?" Cameron wanted to answer - his mouth hung open like he was going to answer, his brain nominally firing along the necessary neurons to answer... ...but he did not. In the time it took for him to become this, now - in the time it took for little fucking rodent Cameron to become a rat - something was shook loose, something was remembered. His life had been a sliver of nothing in humanity, nothing long and certainly nothing profound - yet who was there always to make it seem like it was? "I..." He could not find the words, not yet - for one, and only one, pressed against the mess of thought. "Hampton." "Yeah that's my name Cam - what the fuck is wrong with you?" A question: Who had meant so much to him because everyone who used to was dead, or a piece of who, now, was always evasive and always elusive because he was constantly plowing some bitch he didn't love, and who - who had left him alone, like this, to suffer, to die, and be reborn yes but still, still so much pain, still so much loneliness but who would never, ever, let him cling, like he wanted to, in the dreams he told nobody about, the two of them, perfect,Cam and Ham like the old days? An answer: "Hamp...ton..." He heard a futile flicking of the light-switch, and the exasperated yell: "Man, fuck you Cam, okay? Fuck you, fucking house smells like something died in here and you're playing games? Where the fuck - are you? You know how many times Jimmy John's called me looking for your punkass? Cam - Cam?!" Cameron made a noise - an animal noise, something closer to his heart, his new heart, and his old heart too, all of which, at Hampton's words, set off an unrestricted, unexpected chain reaction...and broke it. They were mere yards apart and Hampton could not see him though he could certainly smell him, the nauseating zombified miasmatic cataclysm of every foul stench the Earth should keep hid - they were mere yards apart and Hampton could not see him and so it was easy, so easy, for Cameron to rush at him, knock him down, in rage, rage he had never felt in his life, rage that completed his entire_life, the life he had though he and Hampton shared together, accidentally, incidentally, two boys who should have never have ended up like this. It was easy - it was too easy. All Cameron had to do was slash Hampton's throat with his claws, right through the flesh, a knife through warm butter, once, twice, it was like swatting at a fly, the way a cat plays with a toy, a cat, _a pussy, pussy, kitty cat, and the ribbons of skin, blood, cartilage, sinew, it all flew away, left and right and right and left there on the floor of their foyer, it splattered the walls where he had feasted on his own rancid semen, it pooled beneath where he had lain earlier that night, and the smell, the iron-bitter smell of blood, briefly, with each dig, shot into his nose, overpowered his own stink, the stink of his home, again, again, again... It was over so soon - it was over too soon. He looked down at what he had done - the lifeless eyes that stared into nothing, the faint gurgling death-rattle of wind breathing into a ruined respiratory system, the throat dug into like a fresh predator's kill. He blinked. For a second there was real fear, real regret, behind the coruscating phosphorescence of his animal eyeshine. He retreated back, off of the body, the still-warm corpse, the body of his best friend, Brett Hampton - his clawed hand went to its cheek and lifted the head, lifeless, unresponsive, the eyes staring ahead, unblinkling. With a cry he dropped it - Hampton's head - back to the floor. What had he done? His humanity was still there, still barely there, an oil that floated atop the water of the animal, creature, monster that he was now, the skimming froth that crusted over his existence - his humanity demanded to be made known, his humanity reminded him that he had done something so unutterably terrible there was no escaping his new fate. Hampton was dead. He had killed him. This was it, the break, the final outrage, what would divorce him from the world he was birthed into against his will and ripped from the same way - the livid murder of his only friend left, the only human left to care for and about him, even if it was begrudging, even if was the casual way straight boys are defined to express compassion for one another. Cameron's breath became ragged as he stood up - his tail stiffened, twitched, fell to the floor with a dull thump, his penis firm inside the obtrusively sheath he had developed, the far-too-plump testicles wobbling in place with the sudden movement. He looked down at the mangled thing that had been Hampton, Brett Hampton, his best friend, a human, just as he was, once. He stared - and stared, and stared. And then he bolted away. What happened next passed like the memory one has of a dream that occurs unexpectedly in mid-day, when the light hits the eye in such a way that some peculiar recollection is made - only, instead of a waking lucidity, Cameron could not break the fugue-state he had entered, the crawling chaos of his dying human self, coming off in pieces and breaking off in bits of broken reality. There was the throwing open of the closet door where was kept the lighter fluid for his Zippo - the orgasmic, ejaculatory motions of it leaving the plastic bottle, up, a liquescent arc, like cum fired from a cock, because in the crash and ruin of Cameron's brain all he could think about, relate to, was semen, slime, sexual fluid. It moved in slow-motion and then no motion at all, a blurred greyness, a waking dream that begged him in a language his brain could no longer tolerate to awake, awake, but he could not, no, and he would not - and so the bottle shook, and so the bottle moved, until it was empty, a wet mass of flammability on the ground beneath him. He stopped what he was doing - the memory, the suggestion, it had become too much for him, that salient idea of fluid, liquid, sex, simply being reminded of it and now he had to act on it, he had to open his mouth and bare those sharpened incisors that he was not born with to the darkness, take his clawed hands...and grip the unyielding pillar of moist meat that passed for his penis. The bottle of lighter fluid dropped to his feet and made a small splash - he did not see it. He used both hands, both hands now around his penis, larger, far larger and more rigid than what it had been in the days that he had been fully human, days that were passing into oblivion so rapidly it was as though he had never been one at all - that, with each stroke in the slick surface that swelled, as though delighted, in his hand, each high-pitched grunt as pleasure shot to his deforming brain, his very existence was being destroyed. He had been born, Cameron Oliver. And then this... ...and then the rest of his life. Nothing else mattered. The last truly cogent words that he spoke, other than snippets of slurred, reedy speech that barely counted as communication, for the rest of life, were so pithy, so perfect, it almost - given any other situation than this. "N-nothing - fucking - matters - cuz I'm a fucking--" Then was the final word, the new baptism, the new régime, alpha and omega for who he now was: "--rat." His blind orgasm made him lose balance - and he convulsed backwards - his cum shot like a geyser, went up, up and over, an arc, splattered down to his face and he held his mouth open to catch it, magical elixir, water-of-life... The darkness was still around him. It was so quiet. He sat on his tail, dazed, the letdown and the afterglow, the soft descent to being a junkie - all, finished. He was not lucid - he was not well - he was sick, and he had nowhere to go... He stood up, although even in his own house, he still had nowhere to go - before crying out, doubling over, a hand shooting to his stomach. It seized his belly - his slender frame suddenly, violently, seizing, inverting, a searing pang of hunger accompanying it, and he opened his mouth, the ivory-like teeth that he had grown, the rat's jaws that he now possessed, in a vain motion, like vomiting, that came from an extreme famishment that he was sure would kill him were it not sated. A desperate look over his shoulder - Hampton? Meat? Human--? He groaned, his new, reedy, nasal-inflected voice piercing the night air. No - not raw flesh - his stomach would not tolerate it, nothing solid, nothing he would need to chew...liquid - liquid. He knew he would go now. He knew how to make the hunger_stop_. He knew where he was wanted - a rat like him. He found his Zippo, he lit it, he ripped open the door, threw it off its hinges, and shot across the road, no cars to illuminate him, no lights to cast a shadow - he dove into the darkness and merged with it, it was as though he never existed in the real world at all. And although that part of Tampa is still Tampa - still the endless yawn of suburbia where one can get lost and very feasibly never return, swallowed by the sprawl - it is still a community, a neighborhood, and people talk. The gossip at the local gas stations over mediocre coffee and the dreary November mornings outside the elementary school with darling children dropped off from SUVs was abuzz with hushed, swapped secrets and raised eyebrows at hearsay and tall tales. People talked. People talked for months about the duplex that burnt to the ground in an ashen heap that was made a black, smoldering mess with the uncharacteristically chilly November rains. They talked about how the fire was set deliberately, so the arson forensics found, and they talked about how it was started without question by the vanished Cameron Oliver, age eighteen, a loner whose Millennial teenage sanity finally snapped somewhere, somehow. They talked about how he killed his best friend, Brett Hampton, whose bored face with the big eyes and thick hipster glasses was paired with the cute, sincere, innocent-looking Cameron on every major area paper and repeated obnoxiously on BayNews9. People talked plenty. Was it really all that it seemed to be? An unhappy kid from a broken home suddenly gone crazy, a murderous rampage, arson, a clever disappearance, a massive police search? It was haunting, it was tragic, but regrettably in modern America, not at all shocking. And it shook the community, it shook Tampa, in ways few crimes had. The names of Cameron Oliver and Brett Hampton were echoed endless on television, in the press - for a time, little else was talked about, how it seemed to have shown a horrid ray of light on the saddest, most dismal pits of what was happening to Tampa, to its youth. But the question comes back, again, periodically - was it really all it seemed to be? There were, and are, mass guesses in the places on the Internet where searchers after the weird and unexplainable like to gather - like the death of Elisa Lam in Los Angeles some years later, there are far too many unanswered questions, passed off into the stuff of whispered neighborhood rumor, spectral gossip...what never made the papers, never made the segments on the local news, but which cancelled Halloween for little trick-or-treaters for years to come, and made the children tremble with a new, scarier, realer boogeyman hushed at them by overbearing parents. Some people had it on their own good authority that they saw, loping across the road, a strange, misshapen, near-human thing - something that walked, limped, on two legs but had a tail, something that tore out of the burning duplex, and vanished into the nature reserve that provided a tasteful oasis and ratcheted land value. Something strange, something...monstrous. They said the police didn't search hard enough - they should have looked in there, where the jungle was too thick and the shrubbery too bunched together, where the trees were too tall. Though they did not say it, they did not like unmastered Florida, Florida as it used to be even in a small dose and were probably, actually, afraid of it: Florida, the real Florida, the Florida that the Spaniards mistook in religious ecstasy for Eden, the Florida that Crackers settled and fought and loved and died in...they did not want that, they wanted the convenient, breezy, balmy Florida, eruptively paved over with bitumen vomited from belching steel machines, and lit with a parade of Starbucks signs. Good for them. They did not want - and who would? - the truth, the truth behind the rumor, the curtain pulled back, just this once. For Cameron Oliver was sating his hunger - for Cameron Oliver had found his place. He was kneeling, in the darkness he could see perfectly in, the moonlight that was brighter now, boosted from the feeble crescent it had been however many nights it had been before catching his new eyes and making them shine, making them burn, ghostly fire amidst the enrobing canopy - kneeling for the penis of the great rat-like thing that had brought him to this point, genuflecting, worshipping, sipping the inconsequent squirts of arousal that splashed his tongue as ichor from the bleeding vein of a god, ambrosia at the table of a deity. It reeked, it stunk, this masterpiece of monstrous evolution, damp but warm, fertile and virile, full of preternatural vigor - a penis much larger than his, belonging to the beast that had turned him. He smeared it, the cock that dwarfed even his, around his face, the parts that had fur on them and the parts that would always be cursed by paltry human flesh, and he reveled in it, intoxicated by it, the stink, the everlasting stench that never died but smelled like death, like what humans knew to be death and yet for his kind, his endangered kind that comprised only himself and the thing that had turned him, it was life. He knew who it was in the same breath that he knew who he was - and he knew what the old stories meant, he knew what the shadows that had crawled across him all these years meant, why his mother hated him, why his father disappeared. Looking up at the beast, the wan moonlight, the eyeshine down at him, he grinned, slowly, dementedly, devoid of all things but bestial drive - and mated love, reunited after so many lost years. Came the voice that had caused him so much trauma all those nights ago, drifting on the November air: "Welcome - my son." And then Cameron's voice to answer: "I missed you - daddy."