I used to clean an old cat lady's house

About five years ago I was living in a gated rural community with my wife. It was a nice little location, but it cost an arm and a leg to live there, so the two of us decided to start our own little freelance housecleaning company to work for on the side of our real, low-paying jobs. Since the community was mostly made up of older folks in their late 60’s or so, we booked ourselves a lot of clients who were too tired to clean their houses themselves. We’d come in, vacuum, wash the windows, sweep the kitchen floors, and tend to any other small jobs they wanted us to do.

One of these clients I will never forget. She was a widowed, 70-year-old woman named Marge, and she lived in a small but beautiful house that she kept spotless. She’d hire us to come in and clean whatever she thought she herself had missed, which honestly was not much. I think she was just lonely and wanted some company; her husband had recently passed at the time from some sort of illness. So my wife and I would just come in, chat with Marge, and clean up things that were never really that dirty to begin with. We'd often give her an extremely low rate in return. This went on for a couple weeks.

That was until my wife started breaking out in hives and getting watery eyes whenever she was in Marge’s house. It was then that we discovered Marge had six cats, who all hid around the house while we had cleaned. My wife is horribly allergic to those cute little fluffballs, so she stopped working at Marge’s house permanently. I kept going because, hey, it was some money, and I honestly didn’t mind giving the little old lady some company.

I cleaned her house for about a year, and over that time we started to get along tremendously. I’d come in and she’d have a delicious cup of coffee waiting for me with whatever homemade cake or pie she had cooked that week. We’d chat as I washed the windows and vacuumed the floors. I also got to know her cats: Tiger, Shadow, Spike, Cupcake, Wilfred and Paws. They became so accustomed to my presence that they’d come right out of their usual hiding places and try and get some scratches from me whenever I’d walk through the front door.

Although I never saw him, Marge apparently had one other cat that would frequent the basement that she called Widget. Once in a while I’d hear a bang from downstairs. I’d ask what it was and Marge would just laugh softly and say it was ol’ Widget jumping around and causing a ruckus.

One day, Marge called me and told me she was going to California to visit her younger sisters. She asked me if I could clean up her house and feed the cats while she was gone for the next two nights, and she’d leave me some directions for taking care of the cats and an envelope of money on the kitchen table. I was more than happy to.

I got to the house and found the directions on the table. It was pretty basic stuff – fill each cat’s bowl with some canned food, fill their water bowls, clean any gross hairballs off the floor, the usual.

However, there were specific directions for taking care of Widget. The note said that Widget’s eating habits were not like a typical cat’s, and that he needed to be given a larger bowl of water and a bag of food that was left in the fridge. The note also said Widget never comes out to eat, and to just leave the food by the catflap built into the basement door. The directions also explicitly stated not to go into the basement under any circumstances, as Widget was a territorial cat and not very social. As Marge had put it in her note: “he’s shy”.

A little weird, yeah? I thought so, too. But I complied nonetheless and brought the food and water down to the closed basement door. I turned to go up the stairs and then heard a noise from behind me.

I turned around and the food and water bowl were both just gone. The catflap in the door was slowly waving back and forth as if something had just gone through it. Apparently, Widget had just jumped out of the flap and taken the food and water bowl back into the basement with him in a matter of seconds...right?
Weird, but whatever. I got back to work cleaning and then left for the day.

The following morning, I went into Marge’s house to find that Spike, one of the cats I had come to know, was on the ground with three huge gashes on his belly. He bled profusely all over the carpet. Freaking out, I called a local vet and I was directed to bring him in immediately.

I used the money that was left for me to pay for Spike’s sedation and stitches. The vets told me that it was definitely another animal that had attacked him, but they were unable to determine what. They did, however, patch him up good. I thanked them and brought little Spike back to his home. I gave him a little cat treat and put him up on the couch to rest. Through this entire ordeal, Spike was still: the ride to the vet, the ride back, even the visit itself. He looked totally out of it.

As I filled the cats’ bowls, I wondered how long it would take to clean Spike’s blood up. I examined the stain and noticed that there was a trail of it that lead all the way down to the basement door catflap. Obviously, Spike had gone downstairs and the territorial Widget had attacked him, then Spike had crawled upstairs and stayed there until I had found him.

What an asshole cat. I figured then I might as well see if he was okay, too.

I walked downstairs and opened the cellar door.

The basement was pitch dark and smelled old and musty. I flicked on the light switch next to the door, and one dim lightbulb in the middle of the basement lit up. Small towers of boxes and various other old curiosities crowded the room. However, my eyes were drawn to the center, on the floor right underneath the grimy lightbulb.

Right there in the middle of the basement was a huge chalk circle with melted candles scattered all around it. All around this symbol were photos of Marge and her late husband from throughout their marriage, and photos of a cat. Dead in the center of the symbol were two silver wedding rings. I picked up one of the cat photos and saw it had the word “Widget” scribbled on it.

As if this wasn’t freaky enough, something started to move among the boxes. I could make out tufts of red fur moving in the shadows where the tiny light of the sole lightbulb couldn't reach.

“Widget?” I called out. I had a very uneasy feeling about all of this. Something was not right about what I was seeing moving between the boxes. It didn’t look like an average-sized cat, it looked…bigger. Much bigger.

“…Widget?” I called again, much quieter. My heart started racing. What the hell was going on?

Then the figure spoke.

“Maaarge,” croaked a deep, raspy male voice.

I yelled and jumped back into the doorframe.

“Who's there?!” I cried. Upstairs, the other six cats began hissing and screeching in unison. It sounded like a choir straight out of hell. My heart was beating so fast I thought I was going to have a stroke.

“Maaaarge,” the voice said again as the figure among the boxes started to move forward and crawled into the light.

I don’t know how to describe what I saw without seeming like a complete lunatic, but I’m going to try. Although the figure was only partly illuminated by the light, I could make out two large paws covered in red fur sticking at the ends of the pink arms of a person. Its face was an abomination, a mix of human facial features, fur, whiskers, and horrendous sharp teeth that twisted the thing’s mouth into a permanent grimace. Behind the figure wagged a tail that had to be at least three feet. It looked at me with these huge, yellow eyes and started to move forward.

This thing was not an animal, and it wasn't a man. It was something that shouldn't have existed. I heard a low growl come from its throat before it again said in the voice of a man, a bit more questioningly, “Maaaarge?”

Yep. That was enough for me. In half a second I was hauling ass up the stairs and out of the house. I shut the front door behind me, cutting off the choir of cats and the abomination calling at me from the basement. I got into my car, started it, and locked the doors. I looked through the front window of the house and could see the tiny silhouette of the cats hopping crazily around on the furniture, as if in a panic. Then, I saw that thing come to front window, and press its face up against it. Its two yellow, orb-like eyes went right to mine observantly, almost questioningly.

I backed the fuck out of there and sped my car home. When I got inside, I vomited my guts out and called my wife’s job and told her to take the day off. She got back and I started crying uncontrollably. I know, not very macho, but I couldn’t help it, I had just seen a literal nightmare. I explained everything to her and while at first she looked at me like I was crazy, she saw how seriously I was taking this. She grabbed the car keys and asked me to drive us back to Marge’s house.

I know what you’re thinking – “fuck that!”. But, honestly, when you see something so impossible, no matter how horrific, you have to let someone else see it so you’re not alone with it burned into your mind. I drove my wife and I back to Marge’s house, but I refused to get out of the car or to give my wife the key to the house; for all I knew, that thing was dangerous.

My wife looked at me skeptically, then got out of the car and went up to the house’s front window. She put her face up against it, her hands cupping her eyes like binoculars. I watched her peer for a good minute or so. Then, she slowly came back and sat in the car, her face white as sheet paper.

“Well?” I demanded. “Did you see it?”

She told me she did indeed see something man-sized with a tail roaming around the house, but couldn’t get a good look at what it was. However, she did see torn up bodies of all six of the other cats thrown around the room like chew toys, and a bloody mess all over the carpet and furniture. We went back home without saying another word.

Marge never called us when she got back from her trip, and we never talked to her or went to that house ever again. Thankfully, at the time of this story, we were in the process of moving to a new place in another nearby town, so a confrontation never came. Sleep didn’t come easy for my wife and I the next few weeks, though, and many times I woke up screaming from nightmares full of red hair, teeth, and yellow eyes.

I have no exact idea what that thing in Marge’s basement was. I’m not sure if I completely believe what I saw. I'd like to think of my personal beliefs as being relatively grounded in reason. I’d like to think maybe I had just seen a large animal and mistook it for something else. But I remember the facial features that abomination had.

And, to this day, I swear they looked just like the man’s in the photos I had seen down there.

Marge’s late husband.

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Hartijay