Chapter 2 : Role Call (dream sequence)

The car door swung open with an ominous creak, revealing his sister already buckled into the rear driver's-side seat. The driver's seat was empty, but the steering wheel rotated lazily, as if guided by ghostly hands. Daniel slid in next to his sister, the door snapping shut belligerently behind him with a metallic thunk.

In the same moment, his sister abruptly offered him an entire steaming-hot pizza: artisanal crust, glistening mozzarella, and herbs that seemed to shimmer in the bewildering, unforgiving sunlight. The scent of oregano and burnt dough filled his nostrils as he reached for a slice.

Toppings slid off in a greasy avalanche, pattering onto his lap. Looking down, he realized he was naked, the sloppy cheese burning his genitals, the leather seat cold against his bare ass. His sister's giggle was high-pitched and manic, inducing a ripple of trepidation as she held up her own slice in front of her face like a mask.

"Don't tell anyone!" Daniel nearly whispered in a panic, looking around to see if anyone had noticed as he scrambled into the driver's seat to get behind the wheel.

"And clean up my mess," he added in a low growl, his voice petulant and menacing.

For a moment, he glared at his sister through the rearview mirror, attempting to assert his dominance, only to notice that her hair was neatly tied with ribbons, her body miniature, swallowed by the blue-and-white fabric of one of the heirloom dresses she had worn as a child.

Then he looked up and noticed the road: asphalt twisting and doubling back on itself in a seemingly endless succession of hellish hairpin turns along an unnervingly treacherous mountain pass. With each tortuous bend in the serpentine highway, the car surged forward, gaining momentum as rapidly as the road gained altitude.

His sister began crying in the back seat. Daniel chanced another glance at her as his hands white-knuckled the steering wheel to no avail. She was in hysterics, kicking the back of his seat while the Raggedy Ann doll she now held spun its head grotesquely, tunelessly singing a warped rendition of "Turkey in the Straw."

Daniel's eyes snapped back to the road, but the world outside his windshield began to blur. The car seat started to feel more familiar, more comforting somehow. His heart rate slowed as the steering wheel became more rectangular, more utilitarian, and he noticed he was white-knuckling a computer mouse!

His fingers trembled with hedonistic joy as he logged in, password keys clacking away in rhythmic urgency. The windshield was gone, now replaced by a computer screen. A little splash of premonitory dread sloshed in his stomach like a swerving wheel, but only for a split second before a wave of euphoria rushed in. The screen flickered to life, a loading wheel spinning like a hypnotist's pendulum. Liquid-electric delight flooded Daniel's brain.

A video popped up of a black-and-white tuxedo cat running around, playing in the grass. It was just an ordinary cat, but Daniel couldn't help immediately feeling there was something uncanny about it. He tried to get up and walk away from his computer, but the car swerved around another severe switchback, and Danny was buckled in.

The cat on the screen seemed to know it was being watched as it rolled around, splaying itself out, all sinuous, supple, sacrilegious . . .

As it writhed and played and hopped around in grass that pulsated with a vibrancy that sickened him, Daniel watched the camera slowly pull back to reveal a lush, green yard of overgrown emerald grass, surrounded by a nest of tightly packed brick buildings.

Tail raised in the air, innocently and purely naïve, the cat's haunches twitched transgressively as it flattened itself to the ground, eyes wide and ears flat. The premonitory dread came flooding back like a bucket of ice water as the cat stealthily darted, sleek and savage, toward the buildings.

The camera followed suit.

A sudden, acute paranoia gripped Daniel as his hands panickily fumbled for the seat belt's release, but the car roared violently forward as the cat haughtily stepped into one of the buildings. The camera rounded a corner in pursuit, revealing cells upon cells in an endless, Escher-esque prison. Stairs leading up and up, cells extending as far as the eye could see, the cat darting here and there, even sideways along walls where there shouldn't have been any stairs.

Everywhere, prison cells and stairs and cats in a disoriented, tumbling vertigo as the car plunged violently over the railing, turning recklessly over and over again in the air in an orgasm of despair.

Daniel's heart seized as the cat pounced through the computer screen, demonic claws searing into his hands, pinning them to the steering wheel like white-hot razor blades. His own screams filled his ears as the cat's face stretched into a Cheshire grin, its eyes glowing red in the rearview mirror, now barred like a cell door.

His sister's voice echoed in a whisper:

"I told you so."

But she was gone.

All that remained was a singular, pointing hand dripping with blood . . .

. . . Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin!