Chapter 22: Small Mercies

Violet awoke to the crimson of a gathering sunset, and a definite fogginess in the back of her mind. Compounding this was a persistent throb running beneath her temples and curling into the backs of her eyes. It took a moment for her sleep baffled mind to recognize it as a headache, but as the world clarified before her Violet realized that she didn’t feel very good. Her mouth was dry as well and the sensation only abated reluctantly, after she’d had a good drink of water.

The sky above her was clear and pale, almost papery with sunlight. She’d slept a bit later than she’d expected, yet felt strangely unrested. Lying beneath her rumpled blankets, the faint chill of the morning prickling along her nose and fingers, Violet let out a faint groan.

The cat, which had been patrolling along the lip of the roof, looked over to her.

“You were making funny noises all night.” It said, with the air of a scientist noting an interesting development.

“My head hurts.” Violet mumbled, and made herself sit up. The pain behind her eyes didn’t seem to react to this sudden movement, only stayed dull and constant, like a pot of water kept just short of boiling.

The cat dropped down from the ledge it was on and padded over to Violet’s side.

“Drink some water,” it advised. “And stay put, I’ll be right back.”

Before Violet could even begin to ask what the cat’s errand might be, her companion had evaporated, leaving her alone on the rooftop. She sighed, the noise slightly sour, and glanced around herself. The roof was unchanged from how she’d seen it the previous evening, sagging concrete blanketed with matrixes of moss and flowery lichen. The tiny lakes of rainwater glittered with morning sunlight and Violet had to look away from their needle sharp reflections.

Suddenly the cat was beside her again, holding a strip of pale, knobby willow bark in its mouth. The cat set the bark onto the blanket covering Violet’s left knee and then shivered from head to tail, tongue stuck out in an expression of overt disgust.

“Never say I don’t sacrifice for you.” It said, and then was gone again.

As Violet watched, her companion repeated its errand another three times and then turned a small circle in place, looking bedraggled and slightly haunted, like a soldier fresh back from some dangerous mission. It had scraps of bark caught in its whiskers but hadn’t seemed to notice yet.

“I can’t think of a single medicine that’s not awful on the palate.” The cat complained, tongue still sticking from between its teeth. Violet had a sudden urge to reach out and give it a gentle tug but figured that doing so probably wasn’t a good idea.

“Still,” the cat continued, sounding slightly more cheerful. “My part is done. You’re the one who has to drink it.”

Right. Willow bark was certainly good for headaches and fevers and all sorts of things, but it had to be boiled into a tea before it could have any real effect. Violet looked around herself, across the length of the roof, but knew already that she had no makings for a fire; no wood or tinder or even stones to form a ring.

“I’ll have to go down,” she said, a little reluctantly. “…Nothing came into the building while I was sleeping, right?”

The cat shook its head.

“Of course not,” it assured her, as though this should have been obvious. “I’d have woken you and told ghost stories.”

Violet managed a tired smirk at this and then turned her attention to packing everything back up. It was growing easier now that she’d had some time to practice and determine a natural place for every last piece of equipment she was carrying. Indeed, Violet couldn’t help but feel a small sense of accomplishment and pride at how neatly and easily all of her things were tucked away.

She drank a little more water, then hefted her pack and went to the roof door.

It didn’t open.

Frowning, Violet tried to tug at it once more but though the leading edge of the door scraped and ground against the concrete, it remained stubbornly in place, refusing to open.

“Oh….” She murmured quietly, almost under her breath.

The door was jammed, and she was stuck.

Of all the things that could have gone wrong on her journey, Violet had never given even a moment’s thought to this eventuality. She’d worried about demons and wild animals and poisonous plants instead. More recently her attentions had been on blank eyed deer and the annihilating parasites within them.

Yet, as silly as it seemed at face value, the fact that the roof door wouldn’t open was just as serious a threat as any of the ones she’d ever faced. If she couldn’t find a way to get past it then she’d remain on the roof until her food ran out and….

Violet took a step back, a very real prickle of fear rolling through her, borne by a realization that this was serious and could not be fixed by anyone other than herself. It wasn’t like she could scratch a gateway sigil into the floor and simply phase through the concrete, down to the office below. She couldn’t rappel off of the roof either, or climb down the half collapsed pile of rubble that made up one corner of the building. It was all too steep and unstable. If she made even one mistake then she could be seriously hurt or even killed.

“I think I’m stuck.” Violet blurted, and felt even worse for having said that.

The cat looked up from where it was grooming itself, purging the last of the bitter willow from its tongue.

“You can’t open a door?” It asked, then laughed.

The noise rankled Violet. Her companion knew perfectly well what was going on but, just like almost everything else, was very deliberately not taking it seriously. While Violet knew this probably meant the situation was fixable, she couldn’t stop a groundswell of anger from rising within her. Looking very deliberately away from the cat, she folded her arms tightly and stared hard at the door.

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She was going to solve this. She was going to get off of the roof without asking for help even once.

The door was steel and very heavy, held against the doorframe by three rusty old hinges. They’d all gone slightly crooked since being installed, dragged down by the door’s weight. It was this which had caused the jam, Violet realized, she could see the leading edge of the door’s steel digging into the concrete, preventing it from being opened.

Rubbing her hands together, Violet took off her rucksack and tried to lift the door sideways into its hinges. There would be slack there, and if she could find it then the door would swing open and she could pass through. But the door was solid steel, and though she felt the ghost of a shiver pass through one edge, it sat silent and still, unmoved.

It was then that she looked to the hinges again and noticed something. They were held in place by screws. She’d glanced right over them before, not least because they were so corroded as to be nearly invisible, but now she could see that each one was a flathead, worn and ground down by time and the elements.

Violet did not have a screwdriver, but she did have a pocketknife and she went for it immediately. The blade was small and rather dull, but it had been constructed sturdily and she held it like a sword as she approached the door, silently hoping that what she was about to do would work.

She had to stand on the tips of her toes in order to reach the highest screw in the topmost hinge, but the blade of her knife slotted neatly into place after a small eternity of fumbling, and Violet twisted her wrist, forced into an awkward position, one cheek pressed against grimy steel.

The screw was canted slightly to the side and in any other situation might not have budged at all, but the same deterioration that had trapped Violet now worked to her advantage. Somewhere within the mechanism seating the screw to the concrete, corroded steel snapped and the screw sheared away, its head and a quarter inch of jagged metal bouncing across the ground.

The cat nodded to itself and curled up atop Violet’s rucksack, settling in to watch the show.

Violet paid her companion no mind, focusing instead on dismantling the rest of the hinges. She’d need to be careful upon removing the last screw, for then the door would fall over, but that was still a while away. Each hinge was held in place by four large screws, not all as cooperative as the first one. Once or twice the knife jerked free and scraped against concrete or steel. The noise set Violet’s teeth on edge and she had to take a moment to swallow her frustration before getting back to work.

Still, progress was being made and, after what felt like an hour, she tossed her eighth screw over the side of the building and stared down at the bottommost hinge, which was now the only one still remaining.

Violet knelt and flexed her fingers. Her left arm was rather tired now and she couldn’t help but look forward to the comparatively easy task of starting a fire and making some tea. Even if she’d be alone with her poor, aching head, it would still be better than this.

As she went to slot the tip of her blade (now very much chipped and even duller than before) into the first screw, the hinge itself began to flex and all four screws popped completely out of the wall like corks from a brace of champagne bottles. The door, once so completely immovable, slid neatly from its jamb and began to fall forward, silent and heavy as the blade of a guillotine.

There was no time for conscious thought, only a great flare of alarm, bright as a supernova. Violet threw herself back and then, with a great concussive boom and a hard puff of rust tinged air, the door crashed down like a mountain collapsing.

The silence that followed seemed to echo.

Violet sat very still for a long while, eyes wide and knees drawn tightly against her chest. The door lay perfectly flat where it had fallen, barely an inch short of her toes. She still had her pocketknife held tightly in one fist and the blade, streaked orange with flakes of rust, shivered in the air.

The cat stared at her from the other side of the little calamity, fur beginning to settle as it realized that she was alright. It let out a slow breath, then stepped off of her rucksack and onto the door, paws clicking against grimy metal.

“I almost died.” Violet said wonderingly, and though she expected a great shiver of terror to overtake her, none came. Now that the initial danger of the moment was past and none seemed poised to return, the whole scene suddenly felt absurd beyond belief.

“Yes,” the cat agreed, and seemed genuinely shaken beyond its present facade of cool reserve. “Almost.”

Violet couldn’t stop staring at the fallen door.

“You spent all this time talking about demons and spirits and wolves, and…when it comes down to it I’ve only ever nearly been killed by inanimate objects. I almost drowned in the river, and just now I was an inch away from being squashed flat by this door.” Violet said and, suddenly, incomprehensibly, the whole macabre scene seemed immensely funny.

She began to laugh. It was the only thing left to do.

The cat sat back, perfectly bemused.

“Squashed flat.” It echoed, then shook its head and smiled faintly.

In the middle of the flat, open space in front of the building, Violet settled in the shadow of a black metal lamppost and began to gather material for a fire ring. It wasn’t difficult, for there were chunks and lumps of cracked pavement nearly everywhere, and while she worked the cat zipped back and forth across un-space, fetching firewood. Most of what it produced was twigs and tinier branches, anything small enough to easily fit into its mouth, but soon enough the fruits of each trip had piled into an appreciable heap. The cat sat back, now very much streaked with sap, and picked fussily at its fur while Violet arranged tinder.

She showered the beginnings of her campfire with sparks, enough that smoke was immediate. From there producing a flame and then a blaze was easy enough. The cat had a nose for dry wood and none of what it had brought her was soggy in the slightest.

Violet heated water in a small cooking pot, sitting cross legged as she waited for it to boil. Through curls of rising steam she could see a troop of small gray rabbits moving cautiously along the very edge of the woods, grazing as they went. Next to her, the cat’s tail set to twitching.

“Rabbit stew is very tasty.” It said, pale eyes locked upon the rearmost rabbit, which looked to be much younger and plumper than the others.

Violet sighed and began to add willow bark into the water.

“Tastier than willow tea.” The cat pressed, giving her a nudge.

“I’m not gonna stop you if you want to go hunting…and you don’t have to share your rabbit either.” She said.

The cat gave her a sidelong glance, looking faintly wounded.

“I may be a gourmand, but that does not make me a glutton. A rabbit might be a meal for a human, but for a cat it’s a commitment.”

“So?”

“So I was thinking we could split it,” the cat said. “Besides, I think it would be useful for you to know how to skin and dress an animal. All I ask is for the choice bits, like the liver and the heart and…if you’d be so kind as to crack the skull for me.”

Violet blinked, overwhelmed.

“The…skull?” She asked, not sure if she really wanted an explanation.

“I’d do it myself, but it’s difficult. I’d have to get the whole circumference of the parietal bone into my mouth and then punch my teeth through. It’s a little bit like taking the top off of a boiled egg, but—”

“Cat!” Violet protested, horrified.

Her companion cocked its head, fixing her with an impatient look.

“Okay, alright, I’d do that part out of eyeshot. As for the rest, you do agree, don’t you?” It stared, openly insistent.

Violet chewed the inside of one cheek. She supposed the cat was right, it would be useful for her to know how to prepare wild game, but at the same time there lingered a strange sense of guilt. It seemed wrong to kill something so normal, especially when she didn’t need to. There was still quite a lot of food in her rucksack and the idea of ending the rabbit’s life simply as a learning opportunity felt ghoulish.

“Maybe another time.” She mumbled, eyes dropping to the first tiny bubbles rising from the bottom of her pot.

The cat grumbled but let the rabbits go. Violet watched them disappear into a stand of lilacs, one by one, and couldn’t help but feel quietly relieved.