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Jonah Magnus had put a lot of work into the Apocalypse.
He had planned and schemed and scheduled; he had manipulated and threatened and wheedled; he had suffered the indignity of prison; he had very nearly put his back out, by putting a heavy pipe to its best possible use.
And everything had worked out according to plan.
Almost.
What Jonah hadn’t taken into account, were these three things:
That the Fears worked according to their own, rather skewed, version of dream logic.
That their manifestation would, therefore, be shaped by whoever brought them into the world, however reluctantly.
That Jonathan Sims’ subconscious had taken what he knew of the Fears - perpetually hungry, capricious, inclined to playing with their food and with a tendency to adopt humans, and bend them to their imperious demands - and translated that into its nearest earthly equivalent.
In retrospect, it was probably just as well that Jon had moved on from the vague notion of ‘like colours, but if colours hated me’ or the culmination of two centuries’ worth of hopes and dreams, would have been the baffling infliction on the world of one seriously angry rainbow.
~~~
Martin returned from his walk, full of fresh, bracing air and the even more bracing experience of meeting some quite exceptional cows, which he was bursting to share with Jon. Sure, there had also been that one, odd little moment, when his heart had felt as if it had sunk deep below the earth with the weight of dread and the very air seemed to ripple with creeping, tangible horror; but that had passed quickly enough and he’d had the company of the cutest, fluffiest cattle imaginable to help him get over it; so there was no need to worry Jon with his overly dramatic fancies.
But, as it turned out, Jon was dealing with his own infestation of fluffiness.
“You really have to come with me next time, there was this one really sweet cow who …” Martin stopped abruptly, the words slapped right out of his mouth by the sight before him.
Jon was lying on the floor, pinned down by a sea of ferocious beasts, who stared at Martin with eyes of furious flame; and emitted a questioning ‘Mrrp’?
“Martin.” Jon’s speech was measured and careful and occasionally muffled by the lashing of wayward tails. “I suppose we don’t have anything in the way of cat food, do we?”
~~~
The story was told over several cups of nerve-steadying tea, while Jon extracted himself from the cats and adjusted to the recent revelations of how almost his entire life and, in particular, the last few years of it, had been carefully arranged to shape and sculpt him into becoming a key for the Fears and the bringer of the end times.
“I couldn’t stop reading. It was terrible, I could feel the power rushing through me and it hurt like nothing I’ve ever felt, but it was also so horribly intoxicating that I … I can’t describe it. The outside was pushing and pushing … overwhelming, inexorable … the Fears were all bunching together, ready to come in … I could feel myself opening the door … but there was this weird part of me which was thinking, I bet they’ll just want to go straight back outside again afterwards.
“And then there was a fracture in reality and the next thing I knew, I was lying in a heap of cats. Which was … rather unexpected.”
Jon reached out to absently stroke the aforementioned animals, which were currently perched all over him. Beholding, a Bengal, spotted with eye-like markings, was slung possessively around his neck like a scarf; the Stranger (such a mixed bag of cat, that it looked like a couple of dozen different breeds had run into each other) and the Dark (a deep, black, light-sucking void) had laid claim to his shoulders; and there were so many on his lap that they seemed to blend into one giant and disturbing amalgamation of cat (unless that was just the Flesh, all by itself; but, no, that one was just a particularly large beast with excessive toes, blinking out belligerently from the mass).
Fortunately, a few of the the bolder ones - the Hunt, the Slaughter, the Vast - had begun some tentative exploring, thus saving him from being compressed into a small, dense ball of concentrated Jon, by the sheer weight of supernatural felines.
Martin found that a pale grey cat was sniffing curiously at his fingers and he encouraged it over to him, in order to ease Jon’s burden a little more. It faded contentedly into his lap and purred.
“So … are they like, evil cats? Because, well … they seem really adorable?”
“I don’t think the word evil really applies to them? They don’t have the complexity of thought that we do, nor the same sense of morality. Mostly, they just want to satisfy their hunger and then have a nice sleep, somewhere warm and familiar. Though, I suspect that the Spiral, at least, will be rather prone to zoomies.”
A wildly patterned tortoiseshell, which gave an impression of having far too many claws, stretched out on Jon and yawned, as if in agreement; though it didn’t seem inclined to move just yet.
“Well … so, do they have their powers still? Are they going to hurt people?”
Are we going to need to stop them, Martin didn’t say out loud, in case they could understand him. He looked down helplessly at the bundle of comfortable fur on his lap, wondering how he could possibly steel himself to kill it, if that turned out to be necessary.
“They won’t be that easy to destroy, Martin.” Jon winced and looked guilty. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry, you were just … thinking very loudly. The short answer is, that, yes, they do still have powers, though they’ll be a little different in this form. It’s hard to tell how yet, they’re just sort of settling in to themselves. And I think they’re still a little tired right now from the transition from vast formless Entities in the void between worlds to … well. House cats. So it’s hard to tell how much trouble they’re going to cause. But …”
Jon frowned, his face undergoing some form of struggle with itself, as if - as Martin belatedly realised - it was trying valiantly to convey the emotion ‘hopeful’; but had quite forgotten the sequence of movements required.
“I think that the act of bringing them through in this form, instead of spreading them out across the world and bringing reality, as we know it, to an end, has somehow concentrated their powers entirely into themselves … and, to an extent, me, as we’re inextricably connected … so that, the moment they came through, all of the other avatars became completely human again.”
Jon smiled, a slow, delighted smile.
“Including Jonah Magnus.”
Martin was struck by a vision - which he had a feeling was Jon’s, accidentally shared - of Jonah’s eyeless, aged body waking up in the Panopticon, for just long enough to realise that things had really not worked out for him, before expiring; leaving everyone else unharmed, their metaphysical bondings snapped and dissolved into nothing.
The cats, as if sensing Jon’s satisfaction, snuggled up even closer and purred in loud and contented unison; and, honestly, Martin could very easily have joined them.
~~~
There were a lot of phone calls, a lot of confusion and a lot of discussion over how many litter trays you needed for fourteen eldritch kitties.
Daisy had lost the Hunt and come back to herself (and to Basira); a little shaky and weak, but free at last from the loud and nagging pull of the Blood. She had told Jon and Martin they were more than welcome to the cottage; it held no happy memories for her and, besides, she and Basira had a new life to build.
Georgie and Melanie were happy together and Melanie was recovering, slowly. Though initially resistant to the idea of the Entities still existing, in any form, they were gradually won over by Martin’s dedicated campaign of appallingly cute pictures and accompanying descriptions. Beholding staring fixedly at birds, mid-chirrup; the Hunt intently pursuing a clockwork mouse; the Desolation, belly up and banana-shaped, blissfully enjoying the log fire; best of all, to his mind at least, all fourteen of them and Jon, all tangled up and asleep on the couch.
(Martin, in fact, had found that he could get quite a lot more, non-stiffly awkward, Jon pictures, by pretending he was just trying to get the cats and that Jon’s presence in the pictures - dangling string, snuggling an armful of beasts or just generally being soft and adorable - was purely incidental.)
Elias Bouchard was dealing remarkably well with his decades of possession (which he was rather inclined to believe was a very long trip) and any wobbliness in his slightly different management style was smoothed over by the general weirdness of everything. Fortunately for him, the police had lost all interest in the Institute - focusing, instead, on some very peculiar stories, such as an old man plummeting out of the sky from nowhere and making quite a splash, both figuratively and literally; and a large number of missing people suddenly showing up, mostly traumatised and confused, but alive.
There was a general worldwide feeling that Something had happened; but, as nobody could quite work out what, the whole thing was put aside as a curiosity, and humanity got back to being just its usual, garden variety of being unpleasant to each other, without any supernatural assistance.
As for the Entities, Jon found that, in these highly concentrated forms, they could survive pretty well on terrorising the local wildlife, with a side order of scaring the heck out of people by dropping on them from trees like miniature leopards or sneaking up behind them for a loud and perfectly timed ‘Meow!’
Jon himself didn’t need statements any more. He considered it his duty to guard the cats, both from harming themselves and others, and that seemed to be enough.
There were issues, of course - Corruption’s fleas were an ongoing problem, the Buried had a tendency to hog all the boxes, the Vast had a way with a flying leap, that could take Jon down like a small felled tree - but, they were coping. There was finally some time and space to process the years of misery and physical and mental torture and, while this wasn’t exactly comfortable to go through, it was helping; and bringing them closer together than they’d ever been.
Jon had never realised that his ideal of happiness was a remote location, with the person he loved, and a frankly unsettling amount of cats; but so it proved to be.
And, a year later, with their friends surrounding them, Jon and Martin toasted the first anniversary of the Apurrcalypse - “Really, Martin? That’s what you’re going with?” - with a glass of champagne (and just the slightest sprinkling of fur).