The Newcomer - Part IV
In Part III, Brynn starts to notice that Phoenix is seeming frail while the newcomer is spry as ever. She brings Phoenix into the vet, who remarks on some heart trouble and his advanced age—19. At work, she and Rosemary cold-shoulder each other to death, and then she find a mysterious clock that’s spinning counterclockwise. On its frame, she finds two small cats.
“Quick, quick, come inside.”
“What the hell is this?” Rosemary said as I ushered her into my apartment.
I shot a quick, conspiratorial look in either direction down the hallway before shutting the door with a decisive snap.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
“Are you injured? Dying? About to hand me a stack of cash to compensate me for my troubles? Because those are the only acceptable reasons to call your ex-girlfriend frantically demanding she come over to your apartment at eleven o’clock at night.”
“Look at him,” I said. I pointed to Phoenix.
He was curled on his cat bed on the floor, his eyelids fluttering, his breath shallow. He wasn’t himself. His limp from earlier seemed trivial now by comparison.
“Something is happening,” I said, fighting to keep the desperation out of my voice. “I didn’t know who else to call. You’re the only one I think might be able to help me figure it out.”
“And why is that?”
“Clocks,” I said.
She stared at me blankly. “What?”
I took a deep, steadying breath. “The cat you saw at work the other day? That wasn’t Phoenix.”
Feeling like a magician about to reveal a secret, I strode to the closed bedroom door and flung it open. The newcomer cat jumped gracefully from where he had been lounging on the bed and ran towards us, meowing with every step. I picked him up, held him where Rosemary could get a good look, and waited with bated breath for her reaction.
“You got another cat,” she said.
“No. Look at him!” I shook him a little in her face, his paws wiggling stupidly in midair.
“What am I supposed to be looking at, his little cat penis? Because that’s what you’re putting in my face.”
“Look at him, and then look at Phoenix,” I said.
She did.
“They sort of look alike,” Rosemary said.
“It’s more than that. They’re identical—they’re exactly the same.”
“What are you talking about?” she said. “Phoenix is like a thousand years older than him. I mean, damn. He’s aged a lot.”
My whole body hummed with frustration. I put the newcomer down and went to the dining table, upon which the large velvet bag that contained the backwards pendulum clock sat. With a glance of significance at Rosemary, I opened the bag and pulled out the heavy, microwave-sized pendulum clock within.
“I’ve been looking at this, studying it, all day,” I said. “I know I’ll never know clocks like you do, Rosemary, but I know this one isn’t normal.”
Rosemary looked at me sharply.
“You stole that from work?”
“Stole? No, no. I just had to figure it out. Can’t you see that something’s happening?”
“You can’t take clocks from the workroom.” Rosemary pulled out her phone, dialed, and held it to her ear.
“Who are you calling?” I said.
“I’m calling Martin to tell him you stole somebody’s clock.”
“Narc!”
I tried to grab the phone away; we broke into an awkward dance across the living room as she dodged me.
“Please, Rosemary!” I cried.
Something about the mortifyingly pathetic way I said her name seemed to give her pause. We stared at each other for a long moment. I could hear Martin’s raspy, muffled voice answer through the phone.
“Sorry, Martin,” she said into the phone. “Butt dial.”
She hung up, cutting off Martin’s yell of annoyance.
I let out a breath of relief.
“You better bring it back to the shop tomorrow,” Rosemary said, and she strode towards the door. “And Brynn—don’t call me for stuff like this anymore. Just let it die already.”
The door slammed shut behind her, and I was alone.
I looked from Phoenix’s sad, deflated little body in the bed to the clock, and back again. It had been a mistake to call Rosemary, I realized. No one was going to solve this except me.
I dug around under the sink for my father’s old clock repair toolkit. With shaking hands, I took a tiny, delicate screwdriver to the back of the clock and loosened it from the body. I took a deep breath, lifted the backing off, and looked inside.
It was empty. No gears, no cogs, no hardware. I didn’t see how that could be possible—and yet, it was.
*****
I fell into an uneasy half-sleep that night. The whistling scream of a strange and unusual wind rattled the windows of the apartment. The weight of Phoenix’s shallow breaths as he lay on my chest kept time with my anxious heartbeat.
Somewhere in the blue, odd hours of the night, I sensed Phoenix rising from his place on top of me. Unsure whether I was really awake or dreaming, I looked towards the end of the bed and watched him join the newcomer cat, who greeted him with a gentle bump of the head. Phoenix made his way down the staircase to the floor, and, to my surprise, the newcomer cat walked right beside him instead of jumping. If I didn’t know better I would have thought that he was helping him, like a young hand offered beneath an elderly elbow. I decided I was dreaming and drifted back to sleep.
And then the morning came.
I don’t remember waking; don’t remember stretching my limbs or rubbing my eyes or rolling out of bed. I must have done those things, but when I try to bring them back to mind they’re absent. All I can remember is walking into the living room and feeling as if the earth had fallen out from under me.
There, in the cat bed on the floor, were the remains of Phoenix.
He was unrecognizable: a shredded mass of blood and tissue and bright, clean bone. His stomach hung wide open, the organs mostly gone, his exposed ribcage poking towards the ceiling. His face, too, was gone, gnawed down to the bone, and the white gleam of his skull amidst the vivid carnage was unlike anything I’d ever seen.
And there, crouched over the remains, chewing, chewing, chewing, was the newcomer.
To be continued…
Amy Monaghan is a queer writer and visual artist. She is a graduate of the MFA Screenwriting program at UCLA, where she was a winner of the 2019 Screenwriter's Showcase, and also holds a BFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. In 2024 she was selected as Grand Canyon National Park's Artist in Residence.
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