When Daniel Shaw came out of the hospital that afternoon, he was already in a black mood.

The whole day had gone rotten in stages.

First, his broker had called to tell him the stocks he’d foolishly bought on margin were sinking fast. Then his father rang to say his mother had been admitted to the hospital back home and that he ought to come visit if he still had a conscience. And to top it all off, he’d been clawed by that damned cat—the fat one that kept sneaking into his kitchen and stealing whatever he forgot to refrigerate.

A yellow-and-white tom, broad-backed and glossy, smug as a landlord.

Daniel had been tolerating it for weeks. A slab of pork left on the counter, gone. Fish wrapped for dinner, vanished. The thing had no fear of him at all.

That afternoon he’d come home with a packet of braised beef, dropped it on the kitchen table, and rushed to the bathroom. By the time he stepped back out, the cat had already torn into the plastic and was yanking meat from the bag with sharp, greedy little jerks of its head.

Daniel had grabbed a broom.

Then stopped himself. The broom would ruin the food.

So instead he swung with his bare hand.

The cat sprang aside with insulting ease and raked his forearm as it passed.

Four neat lines opened across his skin.

By the time he swore and stumbled back, the animal had shot through the kitchen window and disappeared.

He’d spent the afternoon in urgent care getting disinfected, bandaged, and jabbed with enough shots to make both hips ache.

All because of that thieving animal.

By the time he got home again, he was still fantasizing about how he’d kill it if he ever caught it.

Not just kill it.

Cook it.

He’d had snake-and-cat stew once in a back-alley restaurant in another city, one of those places that served dishes with names meant to sound poetic and savage. He remembered the rich broth, the silk of the meat, the thrill of eating something he probably shouldn’t.

Daniel had always had that kind of appetite.

If it was unusual, expensive, cruel, or forbidden, he wanted to taste it.

That night he fell asleep thinking about stew.

⸻

He woke sometime after midnight needing to piss.

The apartment was dark and close with old heat. He shuffled to the bathroom, relieved himself, and was halfway back to bed when he froze.

Something smelled incredible.

Not faintly good.

Not vaguely pleasant.

The kind of smell that seized you by the throat and dragged you toward it—the kind that told the body food was near before the mind had even caught up.

It was coming from the kitchen.

Still half asleep, Daniel followed it.

The gas burner was lit. On the stove sat his two-handled clay soup pot, gently rattling with a low, wet simmer. Steam drifted from the vent in the lid, carrying with it a fragrance so rich and savory that his stomach clenched painfully with hunger.

He frowned.

He did not remember putting anything on the stove.

He turned on the light.

The broth was at a rolling bubble, pale and creamy, with large chunks of meat rising and sinking beneath the surface.

He lifted the lid with a dish towel.

A cloud of fragrant steam hit him full in the face.

For a moment he closed his eyes and just inhaled.

Then, almost unconsciously, he reached for the ladle hanging nearby, dipped it into the pot, blew once or twice across the surface, and sipped.

The flavor was extraordinary.

Fat, marrow, pepper, something wild underneath it.

It slid hot down his throat and seemed to bloom in his stomach.

He went back for another spoonful.

This time the ladle struck something solid.

He stirred once, gently.

A round shape floated up through the broth.

At first his sleepy mind failed to understand what he was looking at.

Then it did.

A cat’s head.

Still furred.

Still intact.

Daniel jerked backward, nauseated and furious at the same time.

Who the hell boiled an animal without skinning the head first?

He reached forward with the ladle to fish it out—

and the cat opened its eyes.

They were bright and wet and fixed directly on him.

Its mouth pulled back just enough to show its tiny teeth.

It looked like it was smiling.

Daniel stumbled away from the stove.

Then the rest of it rose out of the soup.

The body followed the head, slick and pink and completely skinned, veined with red, as if the flesh had only just been stripped bare. It hauled itself over the rim of the pot, landed on the counter with a wet slap, and stared at him.

A skinned cat, wearing only its face.

Daniel’s knees gave out.

He hit the floor hard and stayed there.

⸻

The next morning he tried to laugh it off.

A dream, he told himself.

Nothing more than a nasty little nightmare brought on by anger and bad ideas. He’d gone to sleep thinking about turning the cat into dinner, so naturally his brain had cooked up something grotesque.

Still, as he washed up and got dressed, he couldn’t quite shake the discomfort in his gut.

On his way out, he noticed the kitchen light was on.

He was sure he hadn’t left it that way.

A bead of sweat broke at the back of his neck.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, then forced himself inside.

The kitchen was spotless.

No pot. No broth. No blood. No cat.

Only the ordinary stale smell of tile and detergent.

He went to work anyway.

That afternoon he returned to the hospital to have the scratches redressed.

The nurse peeled back the bandage and stopped.

Daniel saw her face change before he looked down.

The marks were no longer four thin claw lines.

They had widened into a raw patch, slick and red, as if the skin between them had somehow melted away overnight. Worse, the shape no longer looked like scratches at all. It looked diseased.

“What the hell is that?” Daniel snapped.

The nurse frowned. “Please hold still.”

“Yesterday it was just cuts.”

She glanced at him, irritated, but not irritated enough to ignore what she was seeing. “Wait here.”

When the doctor came in, he examined the wound, asked a string of routine questions, then spoke in a careful, measured voice that only made Daniel more afraid.

The doctor said it could be infection.

The tests said otherwise.

They cleaned the wound, rebandaged it, and told him to come back.

By the following day the flesh had worsened again. The center of the wound had sunk inward like wet ash collapsing in on itself. The outer edge had begun to darken. It didn’t hurt anymore, which frightened him more than pain would have.

He went back to the hospital.

They ran more tests.

Bloodwork, cultures, anything they could think of.

Everything came back normal.

Normal.

That word nearly drove him mad.

The doctors gathered around his arm, keeping just enough distance to protect themselves, staring the way people stare at an animal that might be sick with something they don’t have a name for.

Daniel finally lost his temper, shouted at them, and stormed out before anyone could stop him.

He ran through the city like a man already dead and not yet willing to admit it.

By dusk, exhausted and filthy, he found himself in a part of town he didn’t recognize, sitting by the curb among trash and wilted paper cartons, staring at his own sleeve where black fluid had begun to seep through the cloth.

That was when he noticed the old man.

He sat a few feet away, half asleep on an overturned crate, a cracked blue porcelain bowl tucked under one arm.

At first glance he looked like a beggar.

At second glance, Daniel wasn’t sure what he was looking at.

The old man’s clothes were filthy, but his eyes were clear—too clear. Bright in the deepening dark.

Daniel had money in his pocket and the certainty, for the first time in his life, that he might not live another week.

So he stood, looked at the old man, and said, “You hungry? I’ll buy you dinner.”

The old man looked up once and rose without answering.

They went to a little roadside food stall at the corner. Daniel ordered recklessly—plate after plate, two bottles of grain liquor, enough food for six men. The old man tucked in without ceremony, drinking hard, tearing into chicken legs with his hands, eating with the appetite of someone who had spent years beyond ordinary shame.

Daniel ate too.

If he was going to die, he thought, he might as well die full.

When they’d finished, the old man wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist and nodded toward Daniel’s sleeve.

“What happened to your arm?”

Something in Daniel broke open at that. He told him everything.

The cat.

The wound.

The dream.

The hospital.

The rot.

The old man listened in silence, then leaned forward and said, “Show me.”

Daniel rolled up his sleeve.

Even the stall owner hissed under his breath at the sight of it.

The old man grabbed Daniel’s forearm and bent close to inspect the wound. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t recoil. He merely studied it with grave concentration.

Then he said, “You’ve been hexed.”

Daniel stared.

“The cat carried it,” the old man said. “It wasn’t just an animal. Somebody raised it for this. Fed it, worked on it, loaded it with filth. The thing passes through blood, saliva, scratches. That cat gave it to you.”

Daniel felt a spark of hope so sudden it hurt.

“You can fix it?”

The old man nodded once.

“Yes. That part is easy.”

⸻

But whatever happened after that did not save him as neatly as he had hoped.

The fever passed.

The rot seemed to slow.

Then the dreams began changing.

In one of them, Daniel found himself walking through a red-light district that seemed to exist outside time—half memory, half nightmare. Women stood beneath dim bulbs in glitter and cheap perfume, smiling with the patient hunger of people selling survival one night at a time.

His gaze moved over them until it landed on a woman in black.

She was pale, dark-haired, striking. Her eyes glittered like a cat’s in a doorway. Something about her was familiar in the worst possible way, though he couldn’t say why.

She came to him without speaking and slipped her arm through his.

The women nearby cursed under their breath as she led him away.

Daniel took her home.

In the dream, the sex was feverish, almost ecstatic. He woke from it with the heavy, shameful confusion of a man who had drifted back through years he didn’t like to remember.

But the dream didn’t stop there.

Another night she came again.

This time he was lying in bed, half paralyzed, while she climbed onto him and asked in a low, intimate voice:

“Don’t you remember me?”

He tried to answer.

He couldn’t move.

Then the light came on.

And Daniel saw her clearly.

The left side of her chest had rotted away.

Not scarred.

Not cut.

Rotten—sunken, blackened, slick at the edges like meat gone bad. The wound looked horribly like his own arm, only deeper, wider, closer to the organs underneath.

She smiled at his horror.

“You were my first client,” she said. “The first night we were together, you scratched me here.”

Her fingers tapped the ruined flesh where a breast should have been.

“It never healed.”

Daniel tried to speak and could not.

“I went everywhere,” she whispered. “Doctors. Clinics. Anyone who would look at me. Nobody could cure it.”

Her smile sharpened.

“Then I met a woman who told me exactly what I needed.”

She leaned close, close enough for him to smell something sweet and rotten on her breath.

“She said if I flayed the skin from your body and laid it over my wound, I’d be beautiful again by morning.”

_________________________

When I got this submission, man, I gotta admit it scared the crap out of me. I couldn’t keep this terror to myself—I had to post it for you all to read.

Thank you, Danny