Grand-mother died a few days ago, the doctor said it was natural causes. I don't think so. I remember her arguing with someone the night she died. I had wanted her to read me a story before I went to bed, I was standing behind the door when I heard her arguing. I couldn't hear the other person but I think they killed grand-mother.
I told my parents but they dismissed me, said even if I was right, there is no way in or out the room once grandmother locked the door since the windows were all locked. I don't believe the doctor. He said says natural causes, but her face was in horror. Everyone thinks grandmother may have been having a nightmare, that she was talking in her sleep and that's why her face looked scared.
Whatever it was, I think Cesare knows and he's scared, he's been following me around and only listens to me, like he used to with grand-mother. I like having Cesare around, it feels like grand-mother is still alive. He's with me everywhere, when I'm in the bathroom or the garden or the library. He even sleeps in my bed now too. And whenever I visit grand-mother's rooms and sit in her rocking chair he'll sit on my lap. I really love him. He acts weird sometimes though, he'll stare up at a corner with a surprised look on his face, when I look there's nothing there, by the time I look back at him he's already moved on. Or sometimes he'll call me to follow him, then he'd walk me to grand-mother's rocking chair and hop in my lap. I guess he misses her too.
The adults are all fighting over grand-mother's will. They don't like how she split the money and property, I don't see why we all can't keep living in the same house like we did when she was alive. I got a necklace with a key, I have no idea what the key is for, she didn't leave any instructions with it. Still, it's another piece of her that I have, like Cesare.
You know Cesare can talk! My parents thought I was being ridiculous, but when I kept trying to prove it they took me to a psychologist. She said it's my way of coping with grand-mother's death and that I'd grow out of it. But I'm not making it up, he really can. He sometimes tells me stories about grand-mother when she was younger, some of them I remember her telling me about too. He's a little mean though, always acting like everything I ask the answer is obvious.
Today like always, Cesare walked me to the rocking chair so he could lie in my lap. He's been getting more and more demanding. Making me pour the water out his cup so he can lick at it as it falls, or waking me up in the middle of the night to go sit on the marble bench in the foyer. Sometimes it's nothing at all he just wants me to follow him around. As we sat in the rocking chair I stared absently at the painting hanging on the opposite wall. It's a weird painting of an old man trying to peep through a keyhole. The painting itself is almost as large as a door, a waste of canvas just to draw a peeping old man. As the chair rocked back and forth I realised the area around the keyhole looked real.
I left Cesare in the chair and walked up to the painting. The lock was real! But I'd never seen grand-mother open it before. When I asked Cesare about it, he just flicked his tail at me in annoyance. He wouldn't say how to open it or if grand-mother did. While I was looking around the painting trying to figure out if it was a door or not, I remembered key I got from grand-mother. It fit the keyhole perfectly. There was a click, then a pop, as the painting swung away from the wall. I pulled the painting open but it was too dark to see anything inside.
I took the flashlight on grand-mother's night stand and went in. It was a small room hidden behind the painting, a dusty room with paintings and a book shelf. There were paintings on all four walls and even more lined against floor on two sides covered with sheets. The book shelf was covered in dust and looked really old, it had patterns carved on the front of the shelves, one of which was a drawer. The sides too had carvings of dragons and monsters. I called Cesare to come look but he just sat in front the door watching me.
The paintings were all of different people in different styles but their poses were all the same and always with a cat. The books on the shelves were old too, some looked like random papers tied together in leather, others looked like tomes, there were a few scrolls too. But everything was covered in dust except two books on the top shelf, I took them out of the room with me.
When I sat back in the rocking chair I realised one of the books was an album, I flipped through it first, hoping to see more pictures of grand-mother when she was younger. Cesare didn't seem interested in anything related to the room, he wouldn't even look at the pictures with me, he just lay curled in my lap sleeping. The album wasn't filled with grand-mother's pictures. It had pictures similar to the paintings I had found in the secret room, everyone in the same poses with their cats. I only recognised two of the pictures one was of great-great-great grand-father Elliot and the last picture was of grand-mother. Only when I got to the end did I realise the cat looked the same in all the pictures. White with a patch of black on his chest and a red collar with a bell. Like Cesare.
"Hey Cesare do you really have nine lives?"
No response; nothing, not even a flick of his tail or twitch of his ears. I went back and checked the paintings in the room the cats all looked the same, even those on the floor. How do you breed cats to have the same patterns?
When I sat down in the chair again, Cesare hopped back into my lap. I flipped through the other book, it was grand-mother's journal. It started with her aunt's death, she had heard her aunt arguing with someone the night before she died. The doctor said it was natural causes, but she didn't believe it. Grand-mother's aunt had given her the necklace with the key on it before she died. Her aunt also had a cat that started to follow her afterwards, but she didn't like cats.
"Hey Cesare, did you know grand-mother didn't like cats before?" Still no response. I guess he's ignoring me now.
The other entries went on talking about the cat, how its bell made her sleepy sometimes, how she started to tolerate the cat. Her cat could talk too, maybe we're cat whisperers! I'll have to test it when I find another cat. And like with Cesare and I, no one believed her that the cat could talk, grand-mother thought it was scary to have a talking cat. Things started to get weird when I realised the cat in grand-mother's journal behaved exactly like Cesare. Waking her up in the middle of the night to sit on the marble bench, making her pour its water to drink, even making her follow it around the house after dark with no purpose. It sounded just as mean as Cesare too.
Grand-mother's last entry was from a few days before she died. The cat had told her 'time was up'. Nowhere in the journal did she mention the cat died and she got a new one. That didn't make sense, almost as if the cat she got from her aunt was Cesare. I put him down on the chair and went back in the room.
I checked the other books on the shelves, some of them were too old to read. In the ones I could read, I read the first and last pages. They all started and ended the same way. A family member dying after having an argument with some unknown person, the cat following the writer around and the warning 'time was up'. I looked back to the door, Cesare was sitting in the doorway staring at me tapping his tail.180Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYmu2IhIO3Y
