GRACE AND THE DRAWL
Written By
DALE CUSACK
Copyright © 2010 Dale Cusack
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Prologue
~Seven years earlier~
It was the day Grace died that they first came for her. It had started out as a brilliant day. The sun was shining, the wind was absent and the birds chirped happily in the trees around the edge of the frozen lake. Grace was ice skating on Lake Pearson with her brother and father. There were a few families enjoying the lake that day.
‘Look at me daddy,’ Grace called out as she whizzed along on the skates she had received from her grandparents last Christmas. She had relentlessly bugged her parents to go skating and when the lakes had finally submitted to winter’s bitter cold her parents had relented and taken Grace, and her younger brother Jason, skating.
‘Don’t go too far Grace,’ said her dad as he skated along with Jason. It was Jason’s first time on the ice and his dad had to hold his hand to stop him from falling.
It was a loud crack and a quick scream that grabbed his attention. As only a parent could, he instinctively knew something terrible had happened. Frantically scanning the lake surface for his daughter he saw nothing. He sat Jason down on the ice and skated furiously out to where he had last seen Grace.
The ice had cracked and Grace had plunged into the water. She thumped at the ice with her tiny fists. She clawed at it trying to find purchase. Yet it was so slippery she couldn’t hold on, the current carrying her away from the crack she had fallen through. Grace’s small lungs started to burn as they demanded oxygen. The burning fought its way up her chest. She could see people above her on the ice. They looked all twisted and distorted.
Grace bashed her hands against the barrier until her skin split. She tried to scream but no sound would come out. She listened but could hear nothing, nothing but the torturous beating of her own heart tearing at her eardrums, straining the veins and arteries of her body, her lungs burning inside her chest.
Grace’s father skated up and down the surface of the frozen lake frantically trying to find his daughter. He had found the hole that had swallowed her but she couldn’t be seen. He and the other parents spread out to look but they were moving away from Grace as the current dragged her down.
Why can’t he see me? Why can’t he hear me? she thought as she watched her father move out of sight. Her brain was so tired. It was so cold in here, so very, very cold. Darkness started to close in. Slowly at first, hiding all the little details surrounding her, and then, getting greedier, it started to nibble away at her vision. Soon it had devoured everything. All Grace could see was a tiny ball of light, then a pin prick, then nothing. Her mind fought it at first, it didn’t want to let go, it was too soon, much too soon. She was too young. So many experiences, tastes, sounds and sights left to see; her first kiss, her wedding day, so many memories that would never be. She couldn’t fight the urge to breath any longer, her lungs were tearing at her throat, she gulped in a mouthful of icy cold water, then another and another, retching until her lungs were full.
Then her mind accepted its fate, calmed down and told her not to fight it. Grace couldn’t feel the cold sting of the water anymore. She started to sink backwards drifting down, down, down….
The ambulance arrived within fifteen minutes. Grace’s father had found her, catching sight of the red jacket she wore through the surface of the ice. He’d smashed his way through the ice breaking his knuckles and tearing the skin. Then he dived into the lake and recovered his daughter’s body. When Grace was pulled from the water her heart wasn’t beating. The paramedics wrapped her in thermal blankets and started CPR.
At the hospital the doctors told Grace’s parents that the extreme cold had made it possible to resuscitate Grace. Her parent’s elation was short lived, however. Grace was alive again, but now in a coma.
Grace wasn’t alone in the dark depths of her coma for long, however. Something had found her. Found her alone, weak and frightened. It would visit her many, many times and each time Grace would scream and scream until her throat was raw and her lungs ached. But no one answered. No one ever came to help her.
Then one day everything changed. Shadow came.
Last night, dusk.
The large ginger cat waddled down to the end of the concrete driveway and sat facing the last of the sun’s light. He joined all the other neighbourhood cats who had gathered to watch the sunset. It was a regular occurrence for them. All over the world cats gathered in driveways and waited. The ginger cat looked over at the mottled brown male. He looked agitated, impatient. This was his first time on duty.
‘Here they come,’ he whispered to himself.
~~~~
For their entertaining ways and choosing to share their lives with us, I dedicate this book to all the worlds’ cats.
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Chapter One
Grace was just like any other teenage girl. There were posters of teen idols on her bedroom walls. She worried about zits on her face, and her heart skipped a little faster whenever Grant Minke smiled at her in English class. Grace was a normal teenage girl in every way. That was until today.
‘May I be excused?’ asked Grace as she pushed her chair back from the table and started to rise.
‘You may,’ came her mother’s reply. ‘But don’t forget to take your plate up to the sink.’
Grace was already racing towards the door when her mother pulled her up. She returned to the table scooped up her dishes and deposited them on the bench, then beat a hasty exit, lest her brother find some way of weaselling out of doing the dishes. It seemed like every week he conjured up more and more imaginative ways to avoid washing up.
Usually mum would prefix the request with something like:
‘But you do a better job than him.’ Just because my brother is lazy why does that mean I have to do it? Grace thought as she skipped down to her room. Closing her bedroom door, she flopped onto her bed and emptied her school bag full of books onto the floor. She had a stack of homework, but it was a teen magazine that caught her attention. Flicking through the pages, it took only a short time for her to feel guilty about the homework she wasn’t doing, so to make herself feel better about it, she gave her room a brief tidy up. Funny how chores seemed less bothersome when the alternative was something worse.
After putting it off for almost forty five minutes Grace turned her attention to the school work. She was a reasonably solid student, due mainly to the fact that she studied hard rather than any natural ability. Her parents encouraged her and made sure she did her assignments, took an interest in how she was doing, as they did with her brother. But Jason was quite a bit younger than his sister, and not as much was expected of him yet. Their parents had always made Grace study after dinner. When she was little her father had helped her to learn to read and told her stories about the world. He had spent a little time each day making sure she had a good foundation before she was ready to start school.
‘If only my parents had shown more interest...,’ he would say with a distant look in his eye reminiscing about his own childhood.
Now, however, he would come home from work tired, not saying much, just zoning out in front of the TV. In fact lately the whole family seemed to just sit facing the idiot box, rotting their brains thought Grace as she finished her last piece of homework and dropped her books back into her satchel ready for school the next day.
Grace flicked off the light and set out to see what the rest of the family was doing. Needless to say she found them in the lounge.
‘Where’s mum?’ Grace asked her father. At first it looked like he hadn’t heard his daughter. He just sat staring at the telly.
‘Dad?’ Grace repeated. Finally her fathe
r looked up, his eyes were drooping and his face looked flaccid. He looks terrible. If working and being a grown up does this to you, I seriously don’t want it! Grace thought to herself brushing the tight flesh of her cheek as she eyed the deep wrinkles in her father’s face. How he has aged in the last few weeks. Work must be killing him. And yet his job wasn’t all that high powered, he was a marketing manager for an IT company; it wasn’t as though he was running the country.
‘Your mum’s making a hot drink, why not go and see if she needs help?’ her dad eventually managed to reply before turning his attention back to some dumb show he was watching about doctors and police. It seemed every show on TV was about doctors or detectives these days. Grace trudged down the hall into the kitchen.
‘What ya doing mum?’ she asked as she stepped into the kitchen. Grace’s mum was a kind looking middle-aged women with a figure many younger women would be envious of. She smiled up at her daughter and pointed to the fridge.
‘You’re just in time to lend a hand. Can you feed Boot? I’m not sure if there’s any food left in the refrigerator but there’s a fresh tin of cat food in the garage.’
The fridge was empty so Grace retrieved the cat food from the pantry in the garage and came back inside and opened the drawer to find the tin opener. At the sound of the lid being removed from the tin Boot came running through the cat door.
‘He must just sit out there listening for it I swear!’ said Joyce, Grace’s mum. Boot was a stray that had started hanging around a few months back. He was a large black cat with a white cravat under his chin and a placid and gentle nature. Grace’s mum wasn’t really a cat person but her dad was, so Boot was permitted to stay. It wasn’t that Joyce was against cats. It’s just that you are either a cat person or a dog person and Joyce was a dog person. Grace emptied half the tin into Boot’s bowl, and gave his back a good rubbing while he purred madly with his face buried in food.
‘Would you take this into your father love?’ Joyce asked handing Grace a hot cup of ribena. Grace caught the sweet waft of rum. Her father had a rule about drinking caffeinated drinks after lunch. He said it kept him awake, and he would be grouchy the next day. The rum was his dentist’s idea. It seemed that dear old dad had been a tooth grinder in his younger days, so the dentist had suggested the toddy as a way to calm him down in his sleep. Grace stole a sip as she padded down the corridor into the TV room. The ribena was sweet but the rum gave it a bitter edge, Grace couldn’t fathom the appeal. It ruined a perfectly good drink she thought.
‘Here’s your rumbina dad,’ she announced as she deposited the cup on the coffee table in front of him. As she turned to look at her father, Boot pushed open the door and wandered in.
Grace’s face went pale, as her eyes fell on her dad. She sucked in lungs full of air to scream. Hovering over her father from behind his chair was some ghastly apparition. A dark figure with long black claws was clutching her father’s head. It seemed to be sucking something from out of her dad’s skull. Her father rolled his eyes up at his daughter, barely seeing her.
As Boot moved into the room he too saw the creature. As he looked from the creature to Grace, he stared at Grace’s expression. Boot hissed and raised his heckles as he crouched back onto his haunches.
Grace couldn’t take her eyes off the creature; it was so dark, so black. It seemed to just swallow light. And yet it hardly seemed to be there at all. Maybe it was just a shadow from the TV. But then the creature moved. It raised its head and looked up. Facing straight at Grace it opened its mouth. A roar tore out through its horrible gaping hole. Its breath was chilling and its ferocity froze its way deep down into Grace’s bones. Grace wanted to act, wanted to tear it away from her father. She tried to force her body to move, commanded her head to turn and look for something to strike with, and yet her body refused to function. She was frozen in place. After a few seconds her brain overwhelmed by what was happening, simply shut down. The last thing Grace saw before her head hit the ground was Boot and he appeared to be wearing clothes. But that’s crazy she thought as she fainted into unconsciousness.
Chapter Two
Boot walked through the jade gardens. He crossed over the little bridge that connected the palace to the main grounds and paused to check the pond for goldfish. Old habits he thought as he grinned to himself. He climbed the last set of stairs past the two palace guards who stood watching over the grounds, large pikes in their paws. They were immaculately dressed in flamboyant pantaloons and bright white tunics. Both cats wore the insignia of the Emperor.
Boot wasn’t meeting with the Emperor, however. His boss Jasper was just one of many other cats who worked in the palace. Boot made his way to his office, walked in and meowed a greeting.
‘We have a development, something amazing has happened!’ uttered Boot, trying to sound nonchalant, but failing to contain his excitement about the news he was so eager to deliver.
‘The humans I’m protecting, one of them, Grace the young girl, saw it last night when it came. She was in the room, looked straight at it and fainted.’
‘Don’t be silly Boot,’ snapped Jasper. ‘You know very well that humans can’t see the Drawl. No human has ever seen one. They are blissfully unaware of the danger surrounding them, and equally unaware of our efforts to protect them.’
Boot studied his superior’s face in an effort to find some trace, some hint of doubt. A sign that maybe he believed Boot was right, but there was nothing, Jasper’s face had the solemn look of a bureaucrat who had seen it all before.
‘Now if there is nothing else to report...?’ Jasper enquired moving Boot by the arm towards the door. Before Boot could protest he found himself in the hall outside Jasper’s office.
Despondent and disappointed Boot headed out the way he had come in.
‘I know what I saw,’ he muttered to himself. ‘And I’m going to prove it!’
Back in his office Jasper fumbled with a chain around his neck. Pulling forth a key, he opened a locked drawer under his desk, and removed a small manila file with one word typed in bold across the cover - Grace.
He hurried out of his office with the file under his arm.
Jasper took hold of the two large brass handles on the meeting room doors and pulled them open. Two cats were already seated around a circular wooden table. One was large and grey with age, the other younger and very alert. The older one wore a uniform, the younger a white lab coat. Jasper acknowledged both cats as he sat down.
‘This had better be important Jasper,’ said Yang, the younger cat. ‘I’m a very busy feline.’ He looked Jasper up and down as he spoke. Noticing the file Jasper had opened before him, he twitched his ears forward.
Jasper cleared his throat and started to brief the two cats about the Grace file. Listening in silence they waited until Jasper had finished then sat quietly for a moment. Finally Yang drew a long slow breath and spoke again.
‘You are sure about this information?’ he asked.
Jasper didn’t hesitate.
‘I know both cats involved personally, both good men, good soldiers. There is no doubting their testimony. I just don’t know what this means to us--’
‘Let us worry about that. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We will take it from here. You may go back to work now,’ the younger cat cut him off.
Jasper scooped up the folder’s contents, turned and left. As the door clicked shut behind him the older cat spoke.
‘The emperor needs to be told.’
‘Yes, but be careful Talus my friend. There are spies everywhere,’ warned Yang. ‘Now I must get back to work. We are so close to a breakthrough I daren’t leave the lab for too long.’ With a concerned look on his face he rose and walked towards the door.
***
The imperial palace was large, but far from excessive. It was grand, but not grandiose. The current emperor, Gleetus, believed in moderation. He thought the money for massive monuments was better spent on education and basic health care for his sub
jects, than in building edifices to his ego. He was a practical cat, still young and full of life. His father had reigned for many, many years but had done so, for the large part, from his sick bed and little great work had been completed. The empire was in neglect when the younger heir took the throne. But he had been raised well, and had compassion and understanding to temper the brilliance of his mind.
General Talus found the Emperor sitting behind a large desk in a tastefully decorated room with his secretary Emus and religious attaché Thaal. Talus bowed low as he entered the brightly lit room.
‘Greetings Emperor,’ he said in his deep baritone voice that betrayed his age.
‘Ah Talus my friend, come in, sit down. Tell me what news you bring of the war?’ the Emperor enquired as he rose from behind his desk and moved towards a sofa in the middle of the room. ‘Emus, would you be so kind as to bring us some refreshments?’
‘Thank you,’ replied Talus. ‘The war doesn’t go all that well. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Drawl were busy with the humans, I’m not sure where we would stand. It seems like every day their numbers increase, and their appetite grows stronger. We need some advantage, a new weapon or tactic, because if we don’t find something soon…,’ Talus hesitated, ‘I see us losing this war.’ The General looked tired, the conflict worn like a medal emblazoned on his face, aged him beyond his years.
This wasn’t news to the Emperor and he quickly changed the subject.
‘So what brings you here today General?’ he asked, as Emus returned with refreshments. Talus waited as Emus poured tea and arranged some food on a platter before them, then quietly left through a side door.
‘Have you heard of the Grace file?’ Talus began as he sat forwards in his chair.
‘The girl in the prophecy?’ interrupted Thaal, who had remained silent up to this point.
‘Yes, of course,’ replied the Emperor. ‘I was briefed on the situation when it happened a while ago now, about six standard years if I’m not mistaken.’