Part 3

Scratch the Death Cat

Miss Tinsy worked night shifts at a small hospital in a small town and during her years there, she had seen every mysterious thing. She knew about the quaking metallic bed at the corner whose patients never made it back home. She had seen a ghostly figure leave a woman’s chest on a rainy night when the moon was bloody from the window facing the morgue. All the years she had worked there, she had witnessed something absurd but never shared it with anyone probably because she had no one to share it with. 

Or perhaps she knew that people were just not ready to believe the kind of things that transpired in the hospital ward when the sun went hiding its face. Of all the inexplicable things Miss Tinsy had seen, Scratch was the scariest of them all. Scratch was an estranged cat that always jumped into the ward number five through an opening on the ceiling. Tinsy never knew where Scratch came from or why she came around just once in a month, at the same time of the night every visit. She had named her scratch because she had the annoying habit of scratching on the ceiling before taking a leap and landing on the cold hard floor of the ward with a thud. 

When she first saw Scratch, she didn’t have a name. She was just a mystery cat that had eyes burning with fury or sometimes swollen with sadness. She had coal-black fur and breathed like an old man. She had appeared first outside the window, clawing hard against the slippery pane, and made eye contact with a scared Tinsy. She was barely 30 and had been moved to night shift for the first time when Scratch visited. It was impossible to scare someone like Miss Tinsy whose previous jobs had been more dreading than facing a stray cat on a cold July night in a hospital ward.  

She had been a morgue attendant on night shift too. She had seen a man that had been brought in dead come back to life just because he wasn’t dead enough. She had calmly talked the man back to sleep, a sleep he never woke up from. In the wards, Miss Tinsy had her spot on a table with wheels that she used to move the bodies. When there was no body to move between the wards and the morgue, she sat on the table herself, lit a cigarette and watched the starless night turn inside out agonizingly. She sat on the table and drank the pale tea she had carried from home, all the while staring into the eyes of the man who had suicide marks across his neck. But even that did not scare Tinsy as much as Scratch did. 

Something was wild about that little beast the moment she saw her. Other patients had seen her too and Tinsy noticed a sudden look of hopelessness in their eyes when they saw Scratch. Only a few patients were awake when she arrived and each of them pulled their old bedsheets over their faces as if to avoid seeing the cat. She noticed it. 

She would soon discover the reason for the patient’s reaction. Sitting there musing over the cat, Scratch appeared from the space in the ceiling and Tinsy thought she heard a hopeless gasp from one of the patients. The cat paced across the ward, under the beds, between the cabins and climbed bed number 19.  Next to bed 19 was bed 18 whose patients never left the hospital alive. Scratch took a moment of what seemed like a dilemma between the two beds, letting out a humanly cry. Tinsy had never seen something like that before. She unfurled her hair, made a hump on her back, and scratched on the sagging sheets of bed 19. 

On the bed, lay a woman who had been there for close to three months. She had been cleared for discharge after a successful operation on swelling on her throat, but the family couldn’t raise the money. Tinsy had never seen someone pray so hard all her life. She prayed and cried to God to save her life and other patients knew it. They hid their faces deep in their beddings and took in the scratching and praying without trying to move. 

That night, Scratch coiled herself next to the woman on bed 19 and left just before dawn as Tinsy did her morning rounds to check if anyone had passed. On the bed where Scratch had slept, the woman was lifeless, much to Tinsy’s dismay. 

Tinsy noticed that Scratch visited every new moon when the moon was bloody and the sky was lifelessly blank and each time, she visited, she chose a bed and a victim. The following morning, there was a body to be moved from the wards to the morgue. Scratch was the reaper in form of a fearless old Cat whose eyes were as intimidating as they were gruelingly fierce. With time, Tinsy had learnt that Scratch didn’t care if someone was around. She went around her business unmoved and picked their victim after taking all the time she needed. The patients didn’t talk about her. 

The day Tinsy asked a patient about Scratch, she appeared out of her regular schedule and took the patient in the middle of the night. Tinsy learnt something else, no one was supposed to discuss the cat and the patients knew it. They had this fear inside them that talking about her made her strike. And the more they believed she would, the more she did strike. 

And one day during the night shift, Scratch came unannounced. There were no usual scratches on the window, no moon or dark sky. It hadn’t drizzled in a while but it did that night. Tinsy first felt Scratch’s tail wagging against her knees. The whole of that night, Scratch wouldn’t leave Tinsy’s side. She was worried. The cat held the helm of her scrub so stubbornly and playfully. She never left even when Tinsy kicked hard against the cold cemented floor hoping it would scare her away. Scratch had never stopped a minute to look at Tinsy all the while that she had been visiting the ward. She passed by her as though she never noticed her scrubbing the floors or trolleying drugs and food leftovers back and forth. But today, here was Scratch, doing nothing but follow Tinsy around every step she made.

That was the longest night in the nurse’s career. When she sat on the empty wheeled table in the usual corner, Scratch looked her straight in the eye and let out a cry. She cried like a choking baby and her eyes didn’t look like those of a pet. To Tinsy, it was almost as if something inside the cat was wearing her body, something so fierce and beastly. Something too big to belong inside the body of a tiny black cat. Each time Scratch looked Tinsy in the eyes, she broke a sweat and felt shaken. Breathing became harder, and she held her heart inside her chest with both hands. And Scratch seemed to be enjoying that. 

“I need not to be afraid, it could be the fear in me killing me”

She mumbled to herself in a noticeably shaky voice. Tinsy had never been scared all her life. At home she lived alone in an isolated penthouse just by the road and she saw all manner of mysterious things through her window. Why would a cat scare her? Before she started her night shifts, Tinsy went home late after a few drinks in the local pub then proceeded home to sit by her window. 

She would swear that there was a day she saw two ghostly creatures floating like low clouds just outside her window and it excited so much she went outside to see them. She had lost them the moment she stepped out but still heard ghostly chatters in her head. She had had a little to drink on her way home that night.

 Another night she woke up from a deep sleep to the sound of rainfall hitting furiously on her roof. It was a dry season and there had not been any signs of rain all before. She walked out with two drums held against her waist to harvest the rain water falling off her gutter only to notice that there wasn’t rain anywhere else apart from the roof of her house. It was raining hard over her roof but there wasn’t anything on the neighbors’, or the entire small town she lived in. 

She had seen all that but only Scratch scared her. And when the cat got nagging and clingy Tinsy knew her days were numbered. She sat down to eat from the bowl of rice she had carried from home and Scratch joined, rubbing her body against Tinsy’s bowl and sticking out her tail to touch her face. The cat wasn’t drawn to the food. She took her time with Tinsy, stopping to take in the fear she was eliciting from the old lady. 

For the first time, with all the fear inside her and her whole body shaking and breaking sweat, she reached for the fierce cat. The time her hands took to grab the cat gently with the belly felt like eternity. She was excepting everything, but mostly, a violent fight back that could end up waking all the sleeping patients. She was ready for anything. Then she held Scratch and the cat coiled into something docile and needy. 

She lost the aggression and fire, almost as if an embracing touch was all she needed. She closed her eyes and moved into Tinsy’s palms. She freed herself every time Tinsy stroked her fur and fell asleep. She took the cat to the table where she slept most nights, laid Scratch on an unused napkin then sat across on the edge on bed 5 watching the cat breath, he furs rising and falling into a rhythm. 

Tinsy fell asleep soon afterwards and when she woke up the following morning to do her rounds on the patients, Scratch was lifeless. Her small paws stretched out and body lay flat and rigid on the table. The first patient to wake up saw Tinsy wrap the cat into something warm. How was Tinsy supposed to explain that just a little love killed the dreaded mystery cat?