Dreams of catzumaki
or, the things I found inside the wall
I have recurring dreams. Or, perhaps more precisely, themes that recur within dreams. These are often dark or plagued by fear—dying in a plane crash and waking the moment the inferno hits, being stabbed and feeling the blood welling from my chest and onto my hands, the sudden and all-powerful certainty that aliens are here, have always been here, and they are right outside my window, fingers splayed on the glass ready to remove it, the air sucked out as that pane is detached and—nrgghh—they’re in here, next to me. Ghost stuff, too; weird things that happen to the mundane, like forks being found in the wrong orientation, a towel being out of the cupboard and folded on the bed when moments ago it wasn’t, the kind of stuff from King and co., probably planted inside my cortex during an obsessive horror-filled youth, always ready to drip feed out during the liminal hours beyond 2am—again a sensation of but they are real climaxing to a jolt back to a shaken reality. It’ll be accompanied by my warbling out some little whimper, a weak emanation as the transition happens. Or so I’m told.
These themes repeat, over and over, taking on different form and context, sometimes sporadic, sometimes frequent. A newcomer came to these themes some years ago: that of falling. Or witnessing others fall. A misplaced foot eliciting a drop from a cliff or a leap from a bridge, the sense that there is someone there and then someone not there, because they are falling terminally away. Usually it’s happening to others, but sometimes it’s me—I’m climbing up a wall, scaling it, and I realise I’m high, oh so very high, and I don’t have a harness and why am I here and what was I thinking and could I just leap and will it be fine if I leap and will I land and live?
I want to talk about one of these now, if you’ll let me. One that’s quite different from the rest.
There’s a ladder and I’m aware I’m bouldering at an indoor gym. These are not things I’d normally place together, but today seems different. Today there’s a community route setting project, where regular climbers—me, it seems—can grab a box of holds and create a route: set it, test it, tweak it, climb it. BECOME YOUR OWN ROUTESETTER the sign proclaimed as we’d entered that afternoon. Normally I wouldn’t bother. I’d rather climb routes than set them, getting joy from the not knowing and having to solve the puzzle of the climb. But something compelled me to try it today. It was quiet, after all. I could sense a few others around, along with a nameless friend. They were always out of frame, but I knew they were there.
The space we were allocated was where two vertical walls met, forming an inverted V. There’s a lot you can do with that kind of spacing: straddling with your feet, backsteps, dropknees, pressing of hands, moves that just can’t be achieved on a flatter piece of wall. For an amateur setter, it was probably a good spot and the crate we were given contained chunky jug-holds that meant anything we set was probably going to be easy. Still, we strived to be creative, to craft a small masterpiece. A ladder had already been placed against the left-side wall, its feet leaving depressions in the soft mat. I picked up a few of the holds, feeling their weight and texture—they were red, mostly, the fine-grain surface giving them a sort of sandstone feel.
But there was a problem. The previous setters—had there been previous setters? Why were we given this space if it had already been used?—had left holds up and along the wall. The holds were red, much like our own. Never mind, I thought. Easy enough to remove them. Presumably this was fine. They’d given us this spot, after all.
So that’s what I began to do, working my way up the ladder, drill or screwdriver or some other tool in hand, unscrewing and unpiecing each hold and extracting it from the wall. One by one I went, moving slowly, higher and higher. The wall itself wasn’t high, but the ladder seemed to be. I had to get into awkward positions to be stable and heft the drill into place, the whirr and clunk loud as each screw was removed. I would toss these screws down onto the mat, followed by the extracted hold. Then I would move one step higher, glancing to each side to find the next victim for the drill. It was slow work, but somehow it was serene. I don’t know how long I spent doing this.
Nearing the top, or halfway, I noticed a sizeable hold to my right. About three handspans across and resembling a jagged and uneven rock; it looked lunar, almost, as though brought back from some mission. I frowned, but set to work—whirr, whirr, whirr—the screws coming out. But it wouldn’t budge. I kept finding more screws, kept having to reposition. I looked down and realised just how high up I had gotten myself, the sense of teetering. Finally, I seemed to have the hold free of all screws, but still it remained steadfast. So I began to work my fingers across the edges, working and prying to create space and find some leverage. The edge started to budge, I could feel it begin to come free. But, as I peeled it back, as I worked my fingers in and under the righthand side—all whilst gingerly keeping my feet on the ladder’s rungs—my eyes caught something glinting behind the hold. Glinting in a space where there shouldn’t even have been a space. It should have just been flat wall—the hold should have just been screwed onto the wall with nothing but perhaps a millimetre of air separating the two, like all the others. But here, here was a… a gap? A recess? Some kind of hole? And a pair of eyes looking at me from within. Eyes that had a body swirled around them, all coiled up. A furry body, sort of grey but perhaps it was white.
It was a cat.
Inside the wall that had been behind the climbing hold, within a hole that shouldn’t have been there, there was a cat.
A cat, all swirled up.
It looked at me. Solemn. Had I disturbed it? I wondered.
It blinked.
I looked down, never quite seeing my climbing companion, instead glimpsing the box of unused holds, those red rocks inside their plastic crate, the screws I’d discarded now in a neat pile. The holds I’d removed were nowhere to be seen. I tossed the drill down onto the mat, watching it bounce and land a few feet away. The ladder swayed at the imprecision of my balance.
My eyes went back to the cat.
Still it stared, inside that hole.
I reached forward, trying to feel around the curve of its body. It didn’t seem displeased at this action, its eyes following the movement of my arm with a sort of placid awareness. The hole, I realised, seemed to extend deeper than I expected. My arm was now past the elbow, fingers trying to wriggle along that warm grey-white fur and get behind the cat. Eventually I seemed to manage this, and with a gentle tug—wobbling on the ladder as I did so—I began to extract this cat, all swirled up. It came towards me, its eyes blinking. The ears twitched, as though adjusting to the transition of acoustics it must have been experiencing. As the cat came out, its front paws caught on the edge of the hole and it began to cling there, resisting the effort of my arms, its talons scratching for purchase and its body dangling pendulous. For some reason I had let go. I looked at it. It was going to fall. But I didn’t reach for it but instead I scrambled back down the ladder, dropping rung by rung until I was on the mat. Then I positioned myself underneath the cat, its body high above, my arms held out, a fireman ready to catch a child. The cat seemed to sense this, a single eye peering down, perhaps judging the drop. I wavered, moved back and forth in little steps, trying to work out just where I needed to stand, somehow unable to fully perceive the angle, the distance.
The cat retracted its claws.
It fell.
It landed in my outstretched arms.
It was all swirled up still, a little spiral, a coil of that fur and two eyes staring into mine and asking something of me. Those eyes were pleading. I looked around at its body, trying to turn its inexplicable form over in my hands, the soft and gentle weight. Where were its hind legs? my mind asked, panicked. Where were they? What had happened?
I placed the cat down near the crate and raced back up the ladder. It creaked and swayed as I took to the rungs, gulping them two-by-two until I reached the point of the hole. And I nearly fell when I looked inside.
At the back of the hole, barely visible, were the two missing legs, seemingly broken off and wedged there against the side. Two limbs, small and lost and incongruent in the dark.
Except that wasn’t what they were at all.
The legs were two kittens, huddled, their form suddenly apparent. They were moving, tiny faces with tiny eyes barely open, mewling now, confusion in the dim light and the loss of their mother. So once again I reached in, my arm swallowed past the elbow and I felt around trying to locate the kittens by feel instead of sight. My fingers walked along the smooth inside of the space until they were brushed by fur and whiskers and then—without me doing anything—I felt tiny paws on the back of my hand, a slow-to-rapid scrambling along my arm and a clutching and licking; then another set of paws, and then both kittens were wrapped on and around my arm, hugging it, pawing at my skin, confused but also perhaps elated that here was a thing and it was warm and it meant no harm.
I withdrew my arm from the hole. Emerging into the brightness were the two kittens clinging onto my skin. A plaintive cry sounded from below; the kittens responded with their own small meow.
Soon I was down the ladder, one hand for stability as I held the kitten-laden arm close to my chest. Then I was on the floor, lowering myself down to the cat. The kittens half-fell and half-scrambled as they dragged themselves to their mother. The cat licked at them, purring, scruffing them closer to her, letting them paw and burrow into her fur.
And that was when I realised that all three had no hind legs. The kittens, like their mother, were all swirled up, a twist upon themselves, just front paws visible and functional, the rest somehow coiling into that spiralling fur.
And the mother was looking at me as her kittens moved across her. She was staring at me, unblinking now, holding her gaze before turning to look up into the distance of the ladder, up into the distance of the wall. Then her eyes would return to mine before she repeated the same actions. Me. The ladder. The wall. Me. The ladder. The wall.
I understood.
I scooped them up, moved back to the ladder and began my ascent. At the hole, I placed them back inside, the mother filling the space, adapting to it, the fur uncoiling and lining it as the kittens returned to the dark.
Another trip brought with it the drill, screws and that large, strange lunar-like rock. It had been the only hold there on the mat—the others were gone, no crate in sight.
I positioned it over the hold, screwing it back into place, trying to do so quietly. As I closed that gap between hold and wall I caught those eyes glinting back at me one final time. They were blinking. With the final screw all I heard was a slight scratching and a quiet, calm meow.
A small note: the cat’s name likely came from the Japanese uzumaki, meaning swirl. This word was likely swirling around in my own mind from having read—years ago—Junji Ito’s dark and brilliant horror manga UZUMAKI.
Holy moly, what a story! Rather Poe-esque, and really imaginative & enjoyable!
What a bizarre dream! You may have done a lot of climbing and mixed it with the manga. I still remember some dreams where I had excessive hours of e.g. programming, which made its way into dreams, so bizarre, I still remember them after 20 years. Very vivid imagery here.