I

I really, really, really want to put this all behind me. I just want to wake up tomorrow morning and pretend that Lola died at a vet’s office in Islamabad and move on with my life. The past 48 hours have been absolute hell and, again, I want to move on — but I feel like I owe you guys an update.

For those of you who are not familiar, or forgot, I posted on here last night about Lola (my cat). I was moving from Islamabad to Prague for a teaching job and, shortly before my flight, Lola died. My airline wouldn’t take her body so I booked her a flight through Morana Air. When she arrived, she wasn’t dead anymore.

Well, it’s not really Lola. The body that the creature inhabits used to belong to my dear Lola, of that I’m sure, but whatever came out of that animal carrier is not my cat. It howls in this horrid dark way and it smells like rotting meat. My Lola died and I was still growing to accept that and suddenly this horrible creature got thrust into my life.

There were a couple nice comments when I originally told you my story, and I guess it’s because of them that I’m back — but goddamn it, there were so many of you telling me to just keep the cat. More proof the internet is filled with crazy people.

This thing stank to high heaven and was not meant to be alive. I knew I had to get rid of it. I tried calling some adoption places last night, but none of them spoke English. There was a new faculty city tour coming up in the morning, so I figured I would ask someone there. I thought that one night with the weird howling creature would be manageable.

It was utter torture.

Back at the start of my career I was working in Estonia and I supervised a history class trip to Berlin. During our second night at the hotel, one of the kids tried climbing over the balconies to reach his classmate’s window and fell. He just broke his leg, but it was a pretty long drop. The amount of worry and dread I went to sleep with that night in Berlin is just about only thing comparable to last night.

The inescapable stench, the terrible noises, the stare — I spent the whole night in utter dread. The creature spent the whole night shifting its gaze between me and the pigeons gathered on the other side of the courtyard.

Around four or five I lost my nerve and tried pushing the cat out onto the roof. I figured if it was so interested in the pigeons, it could go investigate them on its own. The undead cat did not like that. The moment I touched it the creature hissed and scratched and revealed teeth completely unlike those that Lola had.

I had to do the three-hour city tour in the morning on no sleep whatsoever. What was considerably worse was that the smell of death had fused into my clothes and people noticed. Prague is a fascinating city but hearing about its history while sleep deprived and smelling like an overfilled trashcan is far from pleasant.

No one from the school staff had any idea about pet adoption centers but one of the folks who helped organize the tour told me she would send me some info on Monday when the school year started. I wasn’t about to start talking to a new colleague about undead cats. I made it sound like I was planning on adopting myself. Staying with the cat until Monday though was out of the question.

I was going to go scour the expat friendly section of the internet for a place to drop off the cat, but throughout the tour the guide seemed to constantly find reasons to talk about how Prague is the most haunted city in Europe. When he took us for a beer after the tour, as a joke, I asked if he knew of any paranormal experts to consult with in Prague. Without missing a beat, the guide provided a business card of a woman who dealt with the occult and spoke English. She had an office at I.P. Pavlova and could help with whatever strange problems one might encounter around Prague.

Being out in the fresh air helped me forget the horrid smell of the undead cat. Returning back to my apartment provided a terrible reminder. The sounds it made, the terrible way it stared at me — I knew that what was in the room with me was not my Lola, but the resemblance hurt. For a while I did my best to ignore the strange cat and just search for adoption places, yet when my search didn’t provide any results, I picked up my phone and called the number off the business card.

The voice on the other side of the line was cold and slow. She said she didn’t want to know what my problem was. That is what the consolation was for. All the woman wanted to know was my name and when I would arrive. Once she got that information out of me, she told me she looks forward to our meeting and hung up.

I didn’t know whether to take the cat with me. Picking it up made me dry heave and, even if I could handle prolonged exposure to the horrible stench, the cat was not interested in being carried. As the clock counted down to my meeting with the presumed paranormal expert, however, I realized that going without the cat would make it considerably more difficult to explain my predicament. It hurt to push what used to be my Lola into the animal container, but I did my best to remind myself that the smelly howling thing wasn’t actually my cat.

The paranormal expert’s office was directly above a busy intersection. All the way up the stairs I could hear the screeching of trams and constant hum of traffic, yet past the threshold of the office all trace of the outside world disappeared. The windows were covered and the lights were off, only a singular candle sitting on a table provided vision. The world outside had gone quiet, but the room was not completely silent.

The howling from inside of the animal container refused to relent.

She did not introduce herself, but she addressed me by name. She was in her thirties, maybe. That’s all that I could figure out past the bizarre costume she wore. Her skin was colored a pale blue and a mess of eyeballs was drawn on her forehead. The smell and meowing of the creature in my animal carrier was unavoidable but she didn’t mention it. She simply twitched her nose and asked me whether I was there for a tarot card session or a crystal ball reading.

I told her I was there for neither. Holding back tears and battling constant interruptions from the animal container, I told her the whole story. I told her everything, from the little kitten that followed my trail of kebab meat back in university to how that little kitten grew to become an old globe-trotting cat to how that old cat died. Then I pointed at the animal container and told her that that’s why I’m here. I told her I came to her because my cat had risen from the dead.

With a nod that I could not decipher, the strange woman slunk back into the darkness of her office. She emerged with a glass sphere that looked like it belonged to the IKEA catalog. I tried to tell the woman that I wasn’t looking for her to read my future, that I just wanted to figure out why my dead cat was still alive. She ignored me. She ignored me and started to rub the ball and dramatically chant in a language I couldn’t understand.

The louder the woman got, the more agitated the cat in the animal container got. It started to claw at the door and throw its body from side to side. The blue painted woman didn’t spare as much as a look for the howling animal. She just ran her palms across the crystal ball and chanted and did a terrible pantomime of communing with the spirits or something among those lines. The glass sphere beneath her fingers was turning a sickly hue of green but by then I had decided that I was in the office of a fraud.

The paranormal expert had zero interest in my problem and was just trying to squeeze money out of me. I had seen countless videos about the scams inside of Prague’s tourist trade and I had been dumb enough to take my tour guide at face value. I was beyond ready to leave and just consider my payment to the blue fortuneteller an idiot tax.

That’s when the undead cat burst out of its container.

Somehow, I don’t know how, the cat managed to get the metal door of the box open. Immediately, it jumped onto the table and pressed both of its mangy paws against the crystal ball. Something popped inside of the glass sphere and the greenish light went dark. For a second, in the light of the candle, I could see the fortuneteller’s face twist from religious zeal to confusion but then the room was plunged into total darkness.

MNEEEEoooOOOooOOw!

A blood red glow stemming from the crystal ball ate away at the darkness of the room. The cat, the corpse of my Lola — it was standing with its front paws pressed against the glass. Her familiar milky eyes were gone. Shining orbs of red had replaced them.

“No, no, no! This is not the vessel I was promised!”

The words seemed to be coming from some deep region of my skull, but on the crystal ball I could see a set of lips moving. They were bruised and chewed and wet with blood.

“No, no, no! This is not the vessel I paid for!”

Whatever calm and cool demeanor that the mystic had disappeared the moment the candle went out. She was staring at me with her mouth wide open. The eyes that weren’t drawn on were filled with terror.

“The covenant has not been fulfilled to my expectations. No, I demand reparations!” the bloody lips screamed as the crystal ball grew brighter and brighter. “A circle of salt, an unborn thing. Yes, that will free me of these shackles. A circle of salt, an unborn thing. I will avenge this swindle. A circle of salt an unborn —”

The crystal ball shattered in a flash of light. For a moment, as the room fell back into complete blackness, I could see the cat’s eyes glow red in the dark like two fading embers. When even those went out, for a breath or two, the room plunged back into utter silence.

I asked the fortune teller what to do.

The blue lady shoved me out of the room. All trace of the mystic in her had disappeared. She was scared. She was scared and she wanted both me and the cat out of her office. She didn’t even ask for money. She just shoved outside of her door and closed it and locked it and refused any other form of communication.

I was left alone with the corpse of my cat. Even before it had used a crystal ball to speak at me with bloody lips I wanted to get rid of the thing. Whatever demoniac stunt I had just witnessed pushed me over the edge.

I walked out of the building, crossed the intersection and then went to the nearby KFC. A flock of pigeons was pecking away at discarded chips outside. I thought that was a good enough spot to leave the cat as any. She seemed interested in the pigeons in my courtyard so I figured KFC pigeons would be just as interesting.

They weren’t.

When I put down the animal container and opened the door the cat had no interest in the pigeons. It simply sat there, howling and smelling like an aged corpse. It wasn’t until I caught a tram that she crawled out of the box. For a second, for a mere second, I could see Lola’s eyes looking back at me. Then the doors closed and the tram screeched off.

I’m not one for crying on public transport, but I did. I cried to a point where three separate people came to talk to me. Two of them came to check that I was okay. One of them came to tell me to keep it down. The good old charms of city life.

I’ve cried on the tram ride back home, but I’ve got no more tears to give.

I’m done now.

I’m done with this whole insane situation and I’m going to move on with my life and pretend as if nothing happened. I owed you guys an update, and now you have it. I’m never coming back to this weird corner of the internet. I’m never going to think about what happened to my poor Lola again.

She died in a vets office a thousand miles away and that’s it. She died and she got buried and I’ve never heard of the name Morana Air.