This is not a creepypasta.
This is a true story. I'm not writing this in character, kids. Were it shorter, I'd just make it a forum post, but as it is I feel like it deserves a page of its own.
A few years ago, when I was seventeen or so, my grandmother still lived in the same house she'd owned since before my mother was born. She and her husband had never shown any interest in moving, and the house had been completely paid for years ago. It was in a nice neighborhood brimming with the trappings of middle class affluence, where the last bad thing to happen had been a major car accident on a nearby hillside in the mid sixties. All in all a boringly normal place for an older woman and her husband to live out their retirement in a happy miasma of suburban contentment.
They'd never been much for pets. They took care of my aunt's dog for a week once, I think, but beyond that I don't recall my grandmother ever even considering owning a pet. Then, one day, when my entire family had been bundled and prodded into the car for the three hour drive to visit, we found that they had at some point acquired a… cat.
There's a reason for my hesitation.
The first time we encountered the cat was in the middle of a family dinner. Now, dinner with my family is a boisterous affair, with much passing of food and chattering and good-natured ribbing and usually a tantrum from at least one cousin, and this occasion was no different. But midway through the meal, we all stopped. As one, we grew quiet, and turned to face the still empty doorway. We could all somehow tell something was coming. My idiot little cousin actually dropped his fork with a resounding clang, but no one turned around. And the cat stalked in.
It never blinked. Ever, that I'm aware of. It just stared, slowly moving its gaze from side to side like some strange ritual, never seeming to so much look at anything as to scan it. Then, it opened its mouth, wide, wider than I've ever seen any animal's mouth open, and sat there in silence. After a few moments, a sound came, rising from nowhere in particular, a harsh shrieking beep like a microphone slowly moving closer to a speaker. Feedback, tinged with silence. Then its mouth slid closed again, and it wandered out. Dinner resumed.
No one mentioned the cat that night.
The next morning, when we had all risen and dressed and fought over bathrooms and generally lost ourselves in tumultuous preparation for our various drives home, I sat in the kitchen with a plate of stolen leftovers and asked my grandmother about the cat. She told me that it had just shown up one morning, waking her up with its strange harsh feedback not-meow. She'd taken it outside, and her husband searched the whole house for holes and cracks and gaps it could have come in through, but found nothing. Every morning, the same routine. Eventually they'd even resorted to replacing the grates on the ventilation shafts in a fruitless attempt to keep it out. It always reappeared, stalking into rooms and scanning them with its weird red gaze, then beeping like a broken amplifier and stalking out to vanish again.
They never fed it, and as far as I know it never ate. But for those times it swished into rooms to look around and split the air with its noise, it was nowhere to be found at all.
My grandmother moved. The entire family was angry about it, and still is. She and her husband just packed up and left that house and all its memories behind for a small bungalow in a less classy neighborhood. They refused to say why.
This story is too long, and I'm sorry. I know I should cut it short, but I've been wanting to write this down for a long time, and I want to be sure not to leave anything out. To make a long story short, the cat appeared in their new house as well, repeating the same bizarre behaviors as it had before, but this time its sound took on a harsher, buzzing quality, with the single tone beep slightly fainter among the static-like hiss. They put up with it long enough to complete building a new house, then they left it behind. So far, it hasn't been back.
Recently, in a phone call with my girlfriend, I brought up the subject of the cat, and how strange it had been, and realized something that worries me. She asked me to describe it.
I can remember the pure white of its… fur?, and the deep angry red of its eyes, but beyond that…
I don't think it had a tail at all. And the strange wide mouth I remember was like nothing I've ever seen on a cat before. In my mental images, there's no teeth. Just a gaping pink maw. And that strange, stalking walk… Cat's knees don't do that. Really, they don't.
In fact, the only thing remotely cat-like about it is the fact ingrained into my consciousness, that every time I or anyone else looked at it the hair on the backs of our necks rose and our minds said loudly, "CAT".
There's a theory that nothing we see is real, and that the entirety of our consciousness exists solely as a way of protecting ourselves from the realization of what's really there.
Anyway, I just needed to get that out.
~yoric