Jane's dad made the announcement at breakfast: “I've made an invention that I think could change the world and make us a lot of money.”
“Wow, Dad. Like the toilet cleaning robot? Or more like the love-letter writing app?”
Both of these inventions by father had failed hopelessly.
“More like the letter-writing app.”
Jane rolled her eyes. The letter-writing app had written things like: “Dear Sally, I love you more than a penguin loves ice bergs.”
Which was ridiculous. Penguins don't actually live on icebergs. Nor do they love ice. They don't know any different! It's like saying worms love dirt. I love you like worms love dirt.
Journalists tested the letter-writing app which had produced sentences like this. Or this: “I want to hug you until the end of time.” How on earth did a computer come up with that? Was this actually the computer expressing its feelings?
“So Dad, what is it this time?” said Jane, stuffing a triangle of Marmite-covered toast into her mouth. They were alone in the tiny kitchen of their flat which was stuffed with weird machines, parts of weird machines. These days he was making apps.
“It's a story-writing app. It writes a story based on your social media profile.”
“Ok. That's sounds pretty weird. What's it called?”
“Um. Well, the provisional title is something like, 'Write your life.'”
“Sounds...thrilling, Dad! Maybe you need to work on the name, though.”
While brushing her teeth, she looked in the mirror and decided to take the day off from school.
“Dad, I'm feeling really bad. I have a cold,” she said in her best sore-throat voice. She let out a few fake coughs from the depths of her 13-year-old lungs.
“Oh...darling. Why don't you just stay home from school today? It's Friday. Practically the weekend, anyway.”
Jane was extremely good at school. She got excellent grades without really trying much and she always managed to do her homework using no more than 10 percent of her brain.
“I've got to go out for a few hours. To meet some people who might invest in my app.”
As soon as Jane heard the clack of the door closing, she ran into Dad's room and turned on his computer, an ancient Windows 7 thing. “How on earth does he work with this piece of junk?” thought Jane as she sat impatiently staring at the screen. No password was needed to get to the desktop. Jane hit her forehead with her palm. “How stupid can he be?”
She quickly found a folder labelled “Apps”. In there were lots of folders with strange technical names. She opened the “Writeyourlife” folder and clicked on a cheesy looking feather-icon. A simple window with no graphics opened up, just a bunch of questions.
Choose from the following: Romance; Comedy; Crime; Horror.
Halloween was coming up, so Jane chose Horror.
Then she put in her What's App user name and her Instagram account details. Then finally, a menu with check boxes: What would she like to see in the story?
Blood. Yes.
Vampires? No.
Zombies. Yes.
Murder. Yes.
Ghosts. No.
Haunted house. No.
Death of a loved one. Er, ok. Yes. Check.
Jane hit enter. And waited.
And waited.
The computer was working. She went and made a cup of tea and another slice of toast with butter and Marmite and sat back down. Mmmm.
Finally, a text filled the screen. She felt a rush of excitement. This is what she read:
ZOMBIE CATS by Write Your Life
“June Schimdt arrived home from school exhausted. She had three exams (Latin, Maths and Geography), a piano lesson and two hours of hockey practice that day. And now she was supposed to get her Halloween costume ready because her friends were coming over to go trick or treating at 6pm. Her dad was at work...but at least she was looking forward to snuggling up with her three cats for a minute.
Jane tapped the screen: “Hey little computer. My name is Jane Smith...not June Schmidt.”
She continued reading: “June had tripped over the neighbour's detestable pug sniffing around at the bottom of the stairs, causing her to drop her school books on the tiny beast. Now she was having trouble getting in the door. It took her hours to find her keys in her backpack and then another ten minutes to jiggle the door in the right way to get it to open. Dammit! She kicked the door. And it promptly swung open making a creaking sound, perfect for Halloween!
She squeezed through the door, lobbing her sports bag and overfull backpack into the pitch black flat. The light switch didn't work. “God, dad,” June thought. “You're so impractical. Can't you fix anything? Can't you just be home sometimes, instead of just working on impossible inventions and drinking down at that stupid old pub with your stupid old friends? Can't you grow up?”
She groped her way through the hall to the next light switch in the living room, but nothing happened when she flipped it. June turned on the flashlight function on her phone, shedding a ghostly light across the room. “Where are you, fluffy little things?” she said calling the three black and white cats, making a squelchy sound with her lips: Pumpkin, Robot and Charlie (who had a bit of a Hitler moustache). She heard a thud from across the room, like a cat jumping to the floor and maybe she saw some shadowy movement in the corner of her eye. Or maybe she imagined it. It was strangely cold in the apartment. A rush of cold air passed over her. Why is the window open, she thought? Through the window she could see the wall that separated her house from the cemetery, a favourite place her cats would climb up to on summer nights and stare at the moon like little werewolves.
She walked on through the long living room into her dad's bedroom in search of the kitties. Here too the light switch was broken, here too the windows were open, the thin white curtains billowing in the pale moonlight that shone through the gaps between the leafless black trees. No sign of the cats. But then she saw the laptop on the bed. Her dad's computer was turned on: a video was playing on the screen, a repetitive video of three cats – her cats – walking in a circle. An icy sensation filled her body. Why had she never seen this video? Why was it playing on dad's computer? Where on earth was he?
The door to dad's bathroom was cracked and a faint scratching sound was coming out of it. “Pumpkin, Robot, Charlie?” June felt her heart thumping like a hammer and she tip-toed towards the door, through which came a flickering flight as if someone had lit some candles in the bathroom.
June then saw the source of the scratching and it was the most peculiar thing she had seen in her life. She stared at the scene in the bathroom and was sure she was in a nightmare: in the bathtub were three cats, one of them with a tiny black patch of fur over its mouth, walking on the back legs like little monkeys, back and forth from one end of the bathtub to the other. June rubbed her eyes. Her body was frozen in terror but her feet moved her forward automatically like a wind-up doll towards the bathtub. And when she saw what was in the tub, she screamed louder than ever before in her 13 years on earth: in the centre was a small fire in which a tiny man stood motionless. Around the fire the cats – her cats – seemed to be dancing in a demonic ritual. As if this all wasn't horrific enough, the moment when she let out the scream was when she saw the face of the tiny man: her father, his mouth open in a silent scream, trapped in the miniature fire....
She ran out of the bathroom, and out of the flat, down to the street. There she bumped into her friends Dorothy and Carrie. “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.” June couldn't stop saying it and her friends tried to calm her down. “What's wrong?“ they asked, but June couldn't tell them. It was too terrifying to even try to understand and remember what had happened.
“So, how's your costume? You're going as a cat girl like us, right?” said Carrie.
“Yeah...” Finally, she was calm enough to talk normally. As she spoke to her friends she became convinced that what she had seen had been just a strange fantasy so she didn't mention it to them. The three of them walked up the stairs to the flat. As soon as they walked in, the three cats ran over – on all four legs - to June and meowed like normal, hungry cats demanding their dinner.
THE END”
Jane turned off the computer and stared out of the window at the black, leafless trees over the cemetery. She was happy it was daytime. What a screwed up story. And it didn't have a proper ending. Dad had created a seriously weird app. What kind of freak would make a “Write My Life” horror story app? As she played with her cats at home she couldn't forget about the image from the story of them dancing around a tiny version of her dad in the bathtub.
That evening, when her friends came over with cat suits – she thought about the story-app again. It had obviously read her chat messages and figured out that they would be dressed up as cats on Halloween and somehow made up this super crazy story based on that.
The three girls put on their cat costumes and had a grand old time prancing through the streets collecting sweets from all the homes and shops in the neighbourhood. After about two hours, her friends, Carrie and Dorothy, who were also her friends in the computer's story, said they had to go home or their parents would be angry.... Jane only had her Dad and she was angry at him most of the time. He always came home late. That “investment” meeting had lasted all day and into the night.
As she walked up to her house, she finally saw her Dad. He was stumbling towards the door.
“Are you drunk?”
“No, darling. I just had an accident....”
“Oh my god. What happened?” Blood was dripping from a wound on his hand.
“I was leaving the pub on my bike. Don't worry, I hadn't had much, just two or three beers. I was riding down the street past the cemetery and suddenly three cats just walked out of nowhere and I crashed the bike into a bush so I wouldn't hit them.
“Three cats...”
“Yes, three cats....”
“Oh my god.” Three zombie cats, Jane thought. And blood. And murder. And death of a loved on.
“Dad, that app you made.”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“That sounds like a crazy idea.”
“Do you want to try it out, Jane?”
“No Dad, it sounds a bit scary.”
“Yeah maybe.”
I'm glad you're alive dad...