*This short story is brought to you by La Bella Collaborative: Spooktober Submissions!
**The featured writer chose the following prompt: Begin and end your piece with a black cat.


“How To Find Killer Stock Photos” by Merlina McGovern

The black cat photo was just trash. She typed “black cat, vacation home” into the search bar of Pexels. Maybe this time she’d find what she needed.

And what Jenny needed was to get her article done. She’d already gotten several polite, but firm, reminders from her editor about an upcoming deadline for a lifestyle article about working remotely from airbnb rentals. She was currently cocooned in a shaggy afghan on the first floor of her own Somerville airbnb. She had rented it with her best friend, Kelly—a kickstart to their first summer living in Boston. The article should have been dead easy, but the right cover image eluded her. The tongue-lashing she’d gotten from another client for using results from the first page of her stock photo search was still fresh in her mind.

A velvety-looking black cat with green eyes faced three-quarters to the photographer in the next photo. It sat on a stoop in front of a faded triple decker. A splash of white fur kissed the tip of its muzzle and its tail. The photo was dark, overcast skies hunched over the house.

Jenny stared out her window. She liked writing these articles well enough, but they didn’t pay. Her editor was wonderful, but obviously had no control over the budget, which resulted in fewer and fewer requests.

She was writing an October article, so it needed those dark, cozy vibes. This photo wasn’t quite right, though. The cat was off center a bit. She clicked into the “See more photos by this photographer” link at the bottom.

A photo carousel unfurled on her screen. The photographer, AJSkinner71, had a whole series of photos with this house and cat. They all seemed to be taken during the same photo shoot. The same mystery-laden skies with thick clouds hung over each photo. Something caught her eye in the window of one of the photos. A silhouette? It almost looked like the shadow was holding a camera to their eyes, looking straight at the person taking the photo. Straight at Jenny.

“Hey, Jen!”

She started. It was Kelly, in all of her overbright, sunshiney abundance. 

“Yeah?”

“I’m heading out. You coming?”

Jenny sighed. She wished she could go, but unlike Kelly, her parents weren’t paying for her week’s rent in this Somerville rental. A triple decker just like the row house in the photo. “Go ahead. I’m on deadline, and I’ve got to get this wrapped up.”

“Killjoy,” Kelly said. She poked her head around Jenny’s door, a waft of “champagne” body lotion floating in, followed by Kelly’s blond curls and round, pink face. “Look, you’ve got to get out of this apartment. I swear, you’re going to grow mold and roots and then Adrian is never going to ask you out.” She giggled at her own joke.

“Get outta here, Kelly. The faster you leave me alone, the faster I’ll be able to get this article done. Scram.”

This particular airbnb was moldy. And stale. And not at all like what she was writing about in her article. Oh, well. She had to make a living, right?

Kelly bounced out of Jenny’s room. Jenny tried to block the sounds of Kelly laughing on her phone as she got ready to go out. After the cacophony of a bathroom door slamming and a buzzing hair-dryer, Jenny finally heard Kelly slam the front door.

“Serenity now,” Jenny whispered to herself and then turned back to her screen. She continued scrolling and found a perfect image. The cat was confidently walking down the front steps of the triple decker. Its soft black paws were taking the wooden steps one at a time. Its head was cocked slightly up. There was something in its mouth.

Something bloody in its mouth.

What the hell? Jenny hesitated for a millisecond and then by habit, clicked onto the photo to enlarge it. Oh my God. This has got to be a joke. One of those series of stock photos that is campily dark. She remembered one that had some guy with a suit and necktie. He was holding onto chains tied to a bunch of cats, meant to represent something stupid like herding cats at work. For some strange reason, he’d also had a set of vampire teeth poking from his smile.

She leaned in closer to the monitor. The cat’s canines pressed deeply into a severed and bloody thumb.

Jenny clicked off of the photo and closed out of Pexels completely. She shivered. She was alone in the house, and it was late. Deadline or no, she needed to get some sleep, but tonight, she’d leave her light on.

*** 

The hallway light was off when she woke up. Kelly must have turned it off when she came back. Even though she could be totally oblivious and seemed to have not a care in the world, she was a good friend. They’d met in college their freshman year, and had been fast friends ever since. Kelly rarely rubbed it into Jenny’s nose that she was grotesquely rich, but her carefree ways had a way of letting her know all the same.

And the constant stream of boyfriends into their lives was beginning to get on Jenny’s nerves. But she swallowed her irritation. She only let her real thoughts out when she wrote. It was the only time that she felt free to be herself. In the real world she had to be responsible and self-sufficient. When she wrote, she could be lusty and carefree. A spendthrift who lied to everyone she met. A cheating poker-player, selling bootleg whisky on the side. A librarian moonlighting as a serial killer. Anything except for her boring, rule-following self.

She could maybe even be the person that flirted back with Adrian, the lanky, brown-haired drifter who had appeared out of nowhere and had gotten caught up in Kelly’s rich circles. Who seemed to like her.

Jenny microwaved a glass of water and then spooned two heaping tablespoons of Folgers instant coffee crystals into a glass tumbler that thankfully hadn’t exploded. The rental had plates and glasses, but zero coffee cups. 

When she wrote, time flew. Before she knew it, it was evening again, and Jenny had barely eaten anything. She got that way when she was revising. She’d read the words that she’d just written and think, god damn, that’s good. And then she’d sit for a bit and nearly cry at how cliched the writing was. Back and forth on the self-flagellation carnival ride. Two rides for the price of one. Her phone was ringing.

Adrian.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Just wondering if you want to hang out tonight. There’s some live music at the Purple Pit.”

There was nothing Jenny wanted more than to go out and forget about all her bills and worries. The bands at the Pit were always amazing. She looked at her screen. It was open to the stock photo site. She was almost done.

“Sure, come pick me up at 8.”

She could practically hear his Colgate-white smile through the phone. “Awesome! Jonesie will see you then.”

Jonesie. What a dope. Why did he have to talk about himself in the third person? She knew he was too handsome for his own good. 

She knew she was being reckless, but fuck it. She shouldn’t be shackled to this unforgiving work grind. What was she doing it all for anyway if not to be able to enjoy herself just once in a while?

Before she could talk herself out of it, she scrolled through the stock photos again. Curiosity kept tugging at her mind, pushing her to look up that AJSkinner guy. She typed his name into the search bar.

Hundreds and hundreds of photos popped up. They were all of the same neighborhood. She half stood and stretched out the leg she’d been sitting on to get rid of the pins and needles she was starting to feel in her foot. She knew some of those houses, didn’t she? Some of them were in this neighborhood; she knew that triple-decker style. Too many people squashed into too few houses.

And there was that cat again. A series of photos where it was pulling itself out from beneath a holly bush. The red berries brilliant against the dark veridian of the shiny holly leaves. The series caught the cat pushing its paws out from under a bush and then slowly emerging into the bright moonlight. This time there was a rust-colored stain on its muzzle, and there was definitely something bloody dripping from its tail. Was that a tangled clump of hair? Was this real?

There was a ping at her window, as if someone was throwing rocks at it. She stood up and walked to the window. The sun had set a while back, so it was hard to see. A street light at the end of the block was flickering on and off, emitting just enough light for her to see something slinking down the sidewalk toward her building.

A cat. A cat with white on its muzzle and the tip of its tail.

Was she dreaming? What was she seeing? There was a sharp rap at her door, and she whimpered. Her fear had risen inside of her sharply and out of nowhere. But she looked at her clock and saw that it was 8pm. It had to be Adrian. It had to be.

“Hey, Sunshine,” Jenny cringed just a bit at the overly sunny greeting. “Ready to party?”

Jenny wasn’t sure about partying, but she sure as hell was ready to get out of her apartment.

****

Waxy crust pinched at the corners of Jenny’s eyes. She’d woken up back in her apartment, her legs sweaty and tangled up in her sheets. The morning had risen unusually warm and muggy, and there was a sour smell in the air. It could be because she was half hungover, but, ugh, the smell was seeping in under her closed bedroom door. She had only fuzzy thoughts of the night before. Too many G&Ts.

She pulled on some fuchsia pink workout skorts (somehow Kelly was always leaving her workout gear in Jenny’s laundry basket, that sneaky bastard) and a white tank top and felt her way past her door and clean clothes that she must have knocked over as she had stumbled into her room to sleep.

A fat fly lazily smacked into her cheek as she walked into the kitchen. The sour smell was coming from an open Chinese food container gathering flies on the dining table. What the hell? Kelly wasn’t usually a slob, but she had clearly come in for dinner after Jenny had left with Adrian for the evening. But why hadn’t she cleaned it up? And where was she now? She liked to party, yeah, but she usually came home for the evening. Kelly loved her morning make-up routines, and Jenny couldn’t imagine her going a day without one.

Jenny gathered up the open food containers and tossed them in the garbage. Her stomach still queasy from the hangover and the sour smell of food, she skipped breakfast and walked straight to the corner café. Walking down the Somerville street on a Sunday morning, she dodged healthy joggers and moms bringing their kids to pocket-sized parks with their oversized strollers. Even though it was only September, front stoops were already decorated with white and orange pumpkins and vermillion mums in cans painted to look like pumpkins. The most ambitious triple deckers had Styrofoam headstones with pithy sayings like “Finally, some peace and quiet” and “I told you I was sick” along with chicken-wire covered in gauzy white cheesecloths made to look like floating ghosts. The ones with the gigantic inflatable skeletons and witches were just tacky.

There was one house that stopped her in her tracks. It looked exactly like the one in the stock photo carousel. And in front of it sat a black cat. A black cat with a white muzzle and a white-tipped tail. The cat sat calmly licking its front paw. Desiccated plants lined either side of the stairs leading up to the dark house.

It gave Jenny the creeps. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shadowy figure pull open a curtain from the top floor. The figure appeared to be holding a camera and was about to bring it up to its face. Jenny felt icy drips slip down her spine. She picked up her pace and jogged to the café.

****

She’d taken the long way home to avoid the creepy house. Armed with an extra-large iced black coffee, she stared at her Word document. A few hundred words to go and one cover image.

“Businesses are losing their battle with their employees over remote work. It’s here to stay. Make sure to check out my tips for week-long vacation rentals and get checking on their Internet access. A happy Wi-Fi connection is all that stands between you and global adventures while you work.”

Finished. The ice was melting in her coffee cup, leaving a tepid watery slosh at the bottom. Jenny was procrastinating, she knew, but she was actually scared to look for a cover photo. Something wasn’t right about that photographer in the window. She didn’t know what made her do it, maybe it was Poe’s imp of the perverse, but she quickly typed in “AJSkinner” into the search bar again.

And there it was, a new set of photos. The black cat a star in every single one. She scrolled, and there were so many. A flash of fuchsia caught her eye. What in the actual fuck? The final photo in the updated series was of the airbnb they were staying in. The cat was scratching at the bushes to the side of her front stoop. And it was pulling at a bright pink tank top covered in blood.

She screamed when she heard a yowl just beneath her window.

Right at that moment, her phone rang. She was breathing so hard that she almost couldn’t speak when she answered.

“Hey, Jenny, it’s me, Adrian. Jonesie wants you to come out and play.” Something wasn’t right with his voice. There was something slippery and sickly sweet about it. 

Jenny quickly hung up on Adrian. Jonesie. Adrian Jones. 

Her scalp tingled. 

AJ. 

AJSkinner.

It had to be him. Kelly had introduced Jenny to Adrian only recently. He had met Kelly at a bar. They thought nothing about sharing their airbnb rental address with him. He seemed like a great person to party the week away with. Jenny knew there had been something off about him. He was staring at Kelly and Jenny as if he wanted to devour them, but Jenny had shrugged it off. She’d dealt with her fair share of Kelly’s rich and sometimes creepy friends.

But where was Kelly?

A sudden banging at her front door startled her. She was panicking now. There was no time to think. She decided to climb out her front window. She slowly slid the window open and felt a wisp of night air slip in under the opening.

“Jenny? Where are you? Kelly says that she misses you! She wants you to come out and play.”

Adrian’s voice was unhinged. Kelly cracked the old window open even more and struggled through the opening. She grunted and tossed herself out, falling into the bushes below. A cat screeched, and she could feel it scratching at her ankle. Pumped full of adrenaline, she staggered to her feet and started racing down the street. She ran until she couldn’t feel her feet anymore.

In the distance, she could hear the cat yowling.

****

She stayed at a friend’s house that night and called the police. They went to the airbnb but found nothing. She put in a missing report for Kelly, but she could tell from the bored look on their faces that a 22-year-old who’d been missing a few days was not anything they were going to expend precious energy on.

Jenny was terrified to go back to the rental and decided to fuck the cleaning fee. She didn’t go back to her old apartment either. Her parents welcomed her back home. They were disappointed, but not surprised. They hadn’t really thought she could make it on her own, and she hated that they were right. They were old and tired, and she knew that they didn’t want to have to take care of her again. She knew that they had no confidence in her, but, hey, they had good Wi-Fi. With that, she could work anywhere.

She kept thinking about Kelly, but had no idea what to do with her thoughts. Kelly’s parents were gallivanting about Patagonia, incommunicado. She had no idea how to reach them. And what would she tell them anyway? She couldn’t think about that now. She had to write. When she wrote, her worries melted away. 

Thankfully, her editor had requested another article. She knew she would have to look for another photo. She couldn’t stop herself. She searched for AJSkinner.

A single photo came up—the black cat sitting on a porch in a nondescript neighborhood. It had one paw up to its mouth, caught by the photo midlick. It’s possible that there was dried blood on its paw, but it was also possible that it was a trick of the light. 

She closed out of the photo window and started typing up an outline for her next article: Top Tips for Staying Safe in Urban Rentals.

“Copyeditor by day, hobbyist artist by night”, Merlina McGovern has so much to offer!  Not only is Merlina an extremely gifted and skilled writer, but a multitalented artist practicing other forms of art and story telling, like watercolors and oil painting. If you’d like to see more from this featured writer, you can connect with Merlina at any of the links below:
Threads: @lacalaveracat
Website: lacalaveracat.wixsite.com

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