Chapter 1:

 

They Know Something We Do Not

 

If The Garden must live, The Garden must take.

It will take you if you’re not awake.

And if you wake, with fear in your heart,

that gruesome knowledge will tear you apart:

you’ll be in bondage to its grasp

and its hands you will gladly clasp.

     The cats had been acting strangely, lately. As cats are wont to do, they spent much of their time yowling, scurrying up trees, knocking fragile items off counters and darting about senselessly–average cat happenings. But, in each of these common occurrences, there was something singularly and vaguely peculiar, something strange–a component of their felinity was missing, or had been inexplicably altered. For example, the neighbor’s cat had, prior to the drought, been a verifiable acrobat. Now, he could not run the length of the fence without falling at least once. Small details, but small children tend to notice the small details that lurk in between the bigger pieces of reality more apparent to adults. Eve noticed her grandmother’s cat repeatedly running into walls. This could not be normal.

     The town of Elysium was insular and isolated, with a massive Garden flourishing in the center. Previous felines had openly roamed The Garden, as it was full of rodents. The Garden was a cat’s paradise, but, towards the beginning of the drought, something had changed. Cats no longer went near The Garden, openly avoiding it; many of those living nearby had run away, or disappeared. There was no way to tell.

     In the midst of this misty strangeness, Eve asked her grandmother the most innocent, and, paradoxically, damning, question of her life.

     “What’s going on with the cats?”

     Grandma replied, “They know something we don’t.”

     They know something we do not. The thought had never occurred to Eve. It was beyond the realm of impossibility– she had simply never considered it. How very strange.

     In youthful awe, Eve trounced on out of the house, into the street, into the world; out of innocence and into the willingness to hold knowledge. Knowledge comes with the implicit surprise of lasting pain, but the highs are so sweet, the sorrows so meaningful, that it always seems worth it. It is easy to shroud oneself in ignorance, though, and those who choose to do so really cannot be blamed for their decisions–it is their right, and it is certainly a more comfortable path.

     Comfort for the price of knowledge, to me, is death, but I am so biased. I want to make you aware now that I am not a reliable author. I have an agenda, and I have a point to prove. If I have brought you into this story so far, please continue with me on this journey. I cannot promise you will agree with my every word, but we will at least go somewhere interesting and strangely, darkly beautiful.

     Knowledge is painful, but it is certainly not empty. Maybe its weight is what causes its difficulty.

     It was early morning as Eve walked down the street, the sun still contemplating its daily ascent to glory. Thinking, hoping, grasping at the faint scent of this sacred feline knowledge, Eve wandered towards The Garden. The sun slowly rose to meet the heat of the day and accepted its glamorous fate.

     Eve’s eyes beheld the sight of the light feebly slinking through the thick foliage of The Garden, at first darting through in thin little lines, wispy ideations of what the sun could really be, dangling from the morning sky and linking Heaven to Earth. Eventually, though, with increasing vigor, the lines gained enough ground to march in formation through the sleepy town. The day was nigh.

     Innocence enveloped Eve. It permeated the town like a mist that the sun attempted to burn away, but was scorned in its attempts at revelation. This mist calmed souls and deluded minds. The townspeople were oblivious, ignorant.

     The cats know something we do not.

     Soon, Eve approached the square at the center of the town, which surrounded the vast expanse of The Garden. No one knew how big The Garden was, or what was housed at its center. Still, some sense of foreboding drifted out from its inky darkness like a song.

     If The Garden must live,

     The Garden must take.

     A pack of rough boys caught Eve’s eye. They held a cat up towards the might of The Garden, as if in unholy sacrifice to an angry god. The cat screamed and twisted and clawed until it got free and fell to the ground, scampering away as soon as its feet touched the surface. Such an image of desperation tattooed itself with force in Eve’s mind.

     No one minded the cats disappearing. Then, the poor started to disappear.

     The average concern for human life tends to dwindle when that life has no home. Sure, wealthy townsfolk would trot out the pedantic trope that they were doing all they could, but their thoughts and prayers had little effect when the whole world seemed beholden to the market.

     Though the adult mind in Elysium, on average, had adapted to the point of accepting these occurrences as normal, Eve’s mind boggled.

     People are missing. Cats are missing. Why are we not in uproar? Why do we not demand answers from our God?

     Many folks do not bother themselves with matters that do not concern them. Those unfortunate souls dissipating between the branches of The Garden were inherently unable to advocate for themselves; even if, by some miracle of the universe, they were able to communicate from beyond The Garden’s gates, they were not beings who really had voices. Cats, and the poor? Frankly, no one cared.

          ***********************************************************

     “MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCES CONTINUE; COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE FORMED,” was the headline spattered across the front yards of Elysium as the next sleepy Sunday morning rubbed its eyes and prepared for the day.

     Eve awoke in panic. She did not know from whence it came, but it was a new, foreign sense of foreboding she had never before encountered. Thinking to herself, Well, if this is what it means to grow up, I guess I’m an adult now, Eve sat up and brushed the hair out of her face. She had thick, curly hair, a product of her feral heritage, maritime warriors and adventurers who sailed the seas in search of new places, and of the glory and damnation of discovery. Sometimes, Eve thought