Ke-style law enforcement officers

Chapter 625 The Cat's Story

吱…

Milo pushed open the door and carried Enid, who reeked of alcohol, inside.

They placed the mud-like Enid onto Emma's bed.

Emma, sitting at the desk by the window, turned around. The huge frames of glasses hanging on her nose made her face, no, her whole person, look very small.

Seeing Enid's drunken state, Emma didn't seem too surprised. She calmly tucked the long hair that was blocking her view behind her ear and said:
"The images from my nightmare appeared."

...

"Don't worry, she threw up everything on the way." Milo found a pillow and propped Enid's head up a bit, then opened another window.

Enid, who had already lain down, was still frowning and mumbling incoherently in words that no one could understand, occasionally letting out a "yue" in her speech.

Emma remained turned away, adjusted her glasses with her shoulder, and then asked:
"A pleasure house?"

“She’s been longing to go there.” Milo shrugged.

"Remember to put a glass of water by her bedside; she'll get very thirsty in the middle of the night." Emma turned her gaze back to her book.

"Aren't you going to sleep with her?" Milo asked.

Emma shook her head: "I want to solve the whole equation as soon as possible... After all, time is not very plentiful, and it would be too extravagant to waste it on sleep."

Her tone was very flat.

Milo didn't say much, he just nodded:
"Then rest when you're tired."

Then he turned around, went downstairs, poured a glass of water, and brought it back.

"Then this little one is yours tonight."

As he was about to close the door and leave, Emma seemed to remember something and turned to remind Milo:
“Speaking of small things, you have one in your room too.”

...

……

In his room, Milo met the little thing Emma had mentioned.

Unlike Enid, that large little thing that kept babbling and yawning, the one in Milo's room was truly a "little thing".

As Milo opened the wardrobe door, he saw a pair of wide, gleaming eyes in the darkness.

After confirming that the guy hadn't suffocated himself in the pile of clothes, Milo turned around, turned on the room light, and pulled up a chair to sit down.

Explain what you're trying to do by hiding in my closet.

The person hiding in the closet wasn't Marshall or Wendigo, but Marty.

Do you still remember the youngest psychic in the entire city of Nanwei?

Or rather, a master of cat abuse.

Milo had almost forgotten about the problem child; the last time he seemed to see him was at the law enforcement office.

...

Marty is still very young and much thinner than his peers; it seems like only his head is developing.

She exudes a youthful and innocent air, yet she is paired with an excessively deep and dark pair of black eyes.

He peeked his head out of the dark closet, glanced at Milo, a hint of disappointment flashing in his eyes, and slowly crawled out, muttering to himself:

"It seems the nightmare wasn't entirely accurate; you didn't bring back any midnight snacks."

He acted like he knew her all too well, walked up to Milo's bed, leaned against it, and tried to jump on, only to find that his legs were too short.

Milo rolled his eyes, moved to sit on the windowsill, and gave the only chair in the room to the little devil.

After Marty climbed into the chair and sat down, he slowly said:

"Finn invited me over, but he didn't know I hid in the closet. You don't believe me? It's quite common for kids to fight and then become friends."

“But why a wardrobe?” Milo asked.

Marty pointed to Milo's bed, which was far too high for a child his size, meaning—I just demonstrated, you can't climb up there.

Then she added, "Didn't you feel safe hiding in the closet when you were little?"

Milo shook his head: "Absolutely not. Until I was twelve, I firmly believed that there was a monster locked in the closet that would crawl out and eat people while I was sleeping."

Marty looked thoughtful, as if he was seriously considering Milo's nonsense, and nodded: "An interesting point."

“I’ll take you home. We already have one troublesome kid at home, we can’t have any more.” These days, Finn would always sneakily rummage through Milo’s “elective” books hidden in the corner when he wasn’t looking.

"One?" Marty suddenly looked up at Milo in confusion.

After a second or two of silence, he lowered his head and muttered softly, "Shouldn't there be two..."

This guy seems a bit eccentric.

As we all know, what can truly shatter a person's sense of security silently is not a monster with a head full of eyes and a fierce appearance, but rather a bewildered child and a semi-demented old person.

And Marty in this current state is the former.

...

“My mother is going to send me to the church shelter,” he suddenly said.

"Let me guess, is it because you forgot to add seasoning when you cut your kitten in half and put it in the pot to cook?" Milo asked with a yawn.

"seasoning?……"

Marty sometimes displays wisdom that surpasses that of an adult, but at other times he is as naive as a real child, completely oblivious to the sarcasm and mockery in Milo's words.

He then proceeded to talk about some past events without paying any attention to whether Milo was interested in listening.

The story is mostly about another cat.

Before the cat that turned into two stars appeared, Marty's family actually had an orange kitten.

"It was picked up by our landlord, Uncle Locke. It has a lot of orange stripes on its body, and it's not afraid of people at all. It'll crawl into your arms on its own."

Marty said:

“It had small bugs on its body and a dirty nose. It liked to scratch the carpet and curtains, so my father and mother didn’t like it and always tied it up in the living room.”

"It's very thin, I guess it gets very cold. Often it barks all night long, and the next day it can't make a sound at all, just a hissing noise..."

As he spoke, Marty even imitated a cat by opening his mouth and exhaling. After only a couple of exhalations, he choked himself and coughed repeatedly, tears streaming down his face.

But he continued coughing as he spoke:
“One morning when I woke up, my father said, ‘Little Orange is not a good cat because it climbed into his bed last night.’”

"Little Orange disappeared before I woke up, along with my father's bed sheet."

"Later, my mother said that earlier that day, my father wrapped it in a bed sheet, swung it around, and killed it on the steps outside the house."

“They comforted me by saying that Little Orange was a bad cat and that it would infect me with the virus it carried, telling me that this was how the great plague of the past came about.”

"Behind my back, he said a lot of bad things about my landlord, Uncle Locke, and promised to help me find a new, healthy cat."

"Soon after, on the night of my birthday, I saw the new cat that my father had brought home."

"It had no bugs on its body, and no black dirt on its nose..."

"But it doesn't stretch its neck to rub against people, and it doesn't have orange markings; it's gray. But aren't cats supposed to be orange? What do you think?"

"It should be orange..."

...

The story ends abruptly here, as if Marty's thinking has become somewhat confused and entangled regarding the issue of orange versus gray.

At this point, Milo probably understood why the gray kitten later turned into two stars.

"But the problem is."

Milo muttered, resting his chin on his hand:

"It was your father who made Little Orange disappear, it had nothing to do with Little Gray, didn't it?"

“Yeah, that’s why I don’t understand why they’re so angry. My mother is like a madwoman, trying to send me away, as are the neighbors. Even Uncle Locke says I’m a devil.” Marty looked puzzled.

Mother, neighbor, Uncle Locke...

Milo suddenly noticed that Marty's statement seemed to be missing a certain important character.

So he asked:

"what have you done?"

Marty lowered his head and began picking at his fingers, saying in a very calm tone:
"I wrapped my father in a bed sheet..."

Milo pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Okay, now I know why she sent you to the church shelter."

……

“Little Orange is a bad cat, and I’m a bad kid, right?” Marty looked up and asked Milo with utmost seriousness.

"..."

Looking into those dark, oily eyes, Milo was momentarily at a loss for words.

Perhaps Marty's parents did make a mistake, or perhaps from their perspective they didn't, only their methods were cruel. But it was precisely this cruelty, which they perceived as benevolent, that took root in the child's heart and amplified infinitely...

"Thank you for sharing your story."

Milo shrugged.

Then he pointed to his bed and said:
"I think I won't take you home tonight. Why don't you lie down here for a while?"

Marty looked at the perfectly smooth sheets on Milo's bed and did not answer.

"Or you can sleep in the closet if you want," Milo shrugged and changed his mind.

“Okay.” Marty nodded.

"Then I'll tidy up the wardrobe first; you've turned it into a bird's nest."

Milo got up and walked to the wardrobe.

He planned to take out the clothes piled up in the closet and put some things inside to make Marty more comfortable.

He opened the other door of the wardrobe, and the light from the kerosene lamp finally filled the inside.

Behind the few clothes hanging haphazardly, on the inner wall of the wardrobe, Milo saw something familiar.

That's a painting.

A painting composed of a child's innocent brushstrokes.

...

Almost the entire interior wall of the wardrobe was filled with messy lines drawn with black paintbrush.

But this time, the Night Demon with its three-lobed fiery eyes did not appear in the center of the image.

A circular blank space appeared in the upper middle part of the black inner wall. Under the dim red light of the kerosene lamp, the blank space was stained with a layer of color. The incomplete circle became the word that Milo had been unable to get rid of during this period of time—blood moon.

And below the blood moon.

There are too many overlapping, chaotic lines.

They seemed to mean nothing, yet they also seemed to represent everything, because the land beneath the blood moon was filled with chaos and death...

...

At the very bottom of the image, there is a glaring blank space.

It was a human figure, and the fair skin seemed to suggest that it was a woman.

Her body possesses the only clear and steady brushstrokes in the entire painting.

The deep shape formed by those few lines was something Milo could recognize at a glance.

Those are cracks from the abyss.

……

"Did you draw it?"

Milo turned to look at Marty.