Micropasta: That Which Kills the Cat

Micropasta: That Which Kills the Cat

 

You painted this picture

So beautifully

Weaving your words of fantasy

Into a web of misery

Breaking into every nerve

Making me realize what I deserve

But no matter how hard you try

I won't die

I won't die

I won't die

    -          Bullet of Reason, “Judas”

Bad things happen to good people, and while Herman Pallad may not have been a shining paragon of humanity, he still felt that he didn’t deserve this.

“I’m going home now” his coworker Iris said.

The pair of coworkers had been observing the test compartment via a combination of video feed and direct observation, just in case Heisenberg’s old uncertainty principle came into effect in regards to the cameras. Their monitoring station was protected from the strange painting and its attached pocket dimension via another recent innovation of the American government’s covert Supernatural Analysis Division. It was called a mass shadow generator, and it was meant specifically to prevent something locked in an extradimensional space from spilling out.

“I gotta stay” Herman replied numbly.

“Getting that overtime, eh? Just remember to make sure someone else is here to monitor the mass shadow generator when you leave. Having a black hole tear the heart out of the Earth would put a crimper on our funding.”

“Yeah…sure.”

“Something on your mind?” Iris asked.

“No.”

“Uh, okay.”

A few footsteps and the whistling from a pressurized mechanical airlock later, and Herman was now alone in the test lab. Alone with the painting.

In reality, his earlier assessment wasn’t entirely correct, actually. It wasn’t Herman himself that didn’t deserve what was going on in his life. It was Herman’s family that didn’t deserve this.

He’d heard that in the past things like suicide ran in families, since depression wasn’t acknowledged or treated back then. But this wasn’t a gradual, consistent thing. It had occurred exactly as sudden and horrific as any banshee’s wailing omen. His aunt Mary, found in her kitchen with a self-inflicted slit throat. And it didn’t stop there, with no fewer than twelve other relatives offing themselves in that last month.

Something was rotten. Such a horrific emerging pattern scared Herman. But what really scared Herman was that he could be next. He didn’t want to kill himself, but when he’d last heard from Mary four months back she seemed as chipper as chipper could be.

Had she known, as in, had she known she was on the brink? Had she been entertaining thoughts of death, even as life continued as it always had?

A cascade of antimatter from the painting’s pocket dimension brought him back to the task at hand. It was being dealt with as expected by the mass shadow, harmlessly diffusing it into some unlucky neighboring plane of existence. However, a chance glance at the screen to his side revealed something rather odd, quite literally being spelled out, too. The torrent of antimatter spoke a message in binary. It would have seemed to be background noise any other time, but this monitor just so happened to have been set up for the intended purpose of interpreting any message from this creature’s world.

“01001001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 01110100 01110101 01101110 01100101 00100000 01100110 01101111 01101100 01101100 01101111 01110111 01110011 00100000 01101101 01100101 00101110.”

Or in plain English, “Ill fortune follows me.”

The surface of the painting began to churn and bubble, as something made from ink and madness clawed its way through the canvas, heedless of the mass shadow. Its surface was pitted with some kind of opaque metallic plate, and its two crystalline eyes had tapered ends which curved back through the spot its brain would have otherwise occupied.

And those nails. Those fingernails, which were more like claws, bent down and stretched, the better to flay…

…wait. How did Herman know that this creature meant harm? How did he know it wasn’t just an alien from the portrait’s world?

Then it screamed. It bore the same expression as the man in the now-ruined painting, whose mouth always seemed just an iota away from taking on animation and howling in outrageous mocking laughter.

That was it. Herman slammed the literal kill-switch which simultaneously shut everything down and flooded the test chamber with radiation. He would die in a few hours from the massive dose of gamma rays, but so would….

It wasn’t stopping.

It wasn’t stopping.

It surged towards the observation deck and ripped open what looked like a hole in time and space, the spatial breach clearing its way through the protective shatterproof window. Herman began to feel pins and needles all over his body as the now utterly-unchecked 2,400,000 μSv dose of radiation began to eat its way through his skin and bones.

He waited for it to use those goddamned talons to excise his existence from this plane of existence. But it never did. Instead it spoke, plain English, albeit telepathically.

“I’m quite old, you know. A simple, senile old coot. A craven murderer who never lived an honest day. I should have stopped existing aeons ago. But you should have known better than to try doing away with me. But I won’t die. I won’t ever die.”

Tie me up and tear me down

(Tie me up)

Be my Judas and sell me out

(Sell me out)

Leave me to rot alone and forgotten

But I won't be the one you crucify

I won't die

    -          Bullet of Reason, “Judas”