FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Foundations

Miles let out a long, drawn-out sigh. He had finally finished unpacking! He looked over in the corner of his new room at the assortment of empty boxes and sneered at them.

Over the years, the sight of empty boxes had become a sort of symbol to the tall, lithe feline. To him, they represented the constant drudgery of a life based on the existence of nomadic tribes, of travel and uprooting. He sometimes wished that his father wasn't a computer programmer, having to cross the country over and over just because of the demand for his particular trade. He just wanted to settle in one spot, it wasn't too much to ask for, was it?

Anyway, Donna seemed to be taking to their itinerant lifestyle as though it were all a big game. He felt happy for her, which was weird he supposed, for a brother to feel happy about his little sister, but he wondered just how quick the sadness and stress that still afflicted him would get to her.

Miles sat down on the foot of the bed, his long black tail resting against the starched white sheets. Its snowy-white tip bobbed up and down, tapping as silently and as soft as cotton. Tufts of his white chest fur peeked out from beneath his brown t-shirt, stopping at the border of black around his neck. The white reappeared beneath his chin and enveloped his cheeks and mandible, stopping again at the horizontal border between his coal-grey eyes. He looked up at the ceiling, a slate-looking kind of blue in the sunlight. Suddenly a knock came from the door. He opened his eyes and saw Donna standing there in a pink t-shirt and a yellow skirt, spring clothes.

"Miles, I'm scared," She said, her dark green eyes staring at him with worry. She twisted the hem of her skirt tightly in her tiny, nine year-old hands.

"What?"

"It's the house. There's something about it that's...icky."

Miles smiled as he stood up. The situation had finally gotten to her. He just didn't realize it would take her this long. He walked over to her and got down on one knee, looking directly into her eyes. He realized he was doing the same thing his father did to him when he was little, and he would probably hate himself for it later, but he wanted to comfort her. It would be nice to have a sister that thought the way he did about such things, but not now, not with her best years of untainted innocence still in her midst.

"Look," he said, "It's a new house, Donna. I know it's a little scary at first, but when you walk around for a few days and get used to it here, it'll be just like the old place. I promise that in a few days you'll like it here."

His little sister looked at him with narrow, mistrusting eyes. She stuck her head just a little bit, as she often did when she was suspicious of something or someone. "Are you sure, Miles?"

"How about this? If you still don't like the house after two days, I'll help pack your bags for you. But if you do like it, I'll buy you that toy you've been wanting."

Donna's eyes widened and a smile slipped over her face. "Okay!" she cried suddenly, making Miles recoil slightly and lay his ears flat against his head. She gave him a quick hug and skipped away down the long hallway, passing the flower-styled wallpaper that was coming off in long, ragged strips. A sickly yellow, borne from decades upon decades of spiteful and prejudiced age, dominated the main color that may have been at one time a light beige. The floorboards groaned agonizingly as the joints in a weary and beleaguered old man would groan agonizingly.

The smell of dust and mold was prevalent in the two-story sheetrock structure, which was at first glance, and in every subsequent glance thereafter, in some bad need of T.L.C. The house in itself resembled in many respects that of an elderly person, one of the many you'd expect to meet in a retirement home. There are many creases and wrinkles appearing on the surface, wherein lie, as is the often the case, dust and sand. The attic was filled with untold treasures and a wealth of knowledge of the bygone days, but is often safeguarded and inaccessible from the amount of cobwebs. A bit crotchety, a little belligerent at times, they opened up to you after a few days of adjustment and familiarization. Then you were free for voluntary trade of understanding. So far, though, this house remained silent and, as Donna so poetically put it, "icky."

As Miles watched his little sister skip merrily away, he felt his resentment for his new accommodations slowly recede, like the retreating waves of the sea as they slide smoothly over a sandy, golden beach. Maybe he could stand it here. He didn't have to like it, but he could at least put up a good front for his family. Times really are changing, he thought to himself.

I

The mornings, Miles soon discovered, were really no different than how they were when their home was in Iowa. It was comfortably warm, and the birds sang out their sovereignty over the country morning with many merry chirpings. After the first week, he soon came to expect the sound of spoons clanking roughly against the porcelain surface of a bowl as they sampled the contents of cereal, and the stereophonic quality of his mother and father browsing through the newspaper. On Saturday, Miles walked through the kitchen, which had just been through a campaign of sanitization and purging. The rest of the house, such as the attic, the basement, and the cellar were yet to face the crusades. He sat at the table, wearing a pair of black camouflage shorts and a green t-shirt. He poured himself a bowl of cereal (he would have preferred the more healthy stuff, but since Donna went to the store with their mother the only thing they had were Raspberry Zingers) and listened to the crinkling noises of the newspaper.

Suddenly Donna ran into the kitchen, her tail trailing behind her like a blur. Miles was amazed that she didn't run into the furniture. She was carrying something in her clenched paw, and she was yelling at the top of her lungs.

"Hey, mommy, daddy! Look what I found! See, look!"

She ran up to her father, who laid the newspaper down and smiled at his daughter. It was a nice gesture, but it didn't hide the bags under his eyes or the look of wariness that crossed his black-furred face when she ran into the room shouting. "Well, let's see what you've got." He said, still sporting that false smile. Donna dropped a small rock into his paw. It was to say the least an ugly thing, looking very much like a spherical, dark green sponge. It looked very rough, but as he turned it in his paw, it glinted in the light with an unexpected sheen.

"Pretty cool, huh?" Donna said.

"Arguably the coolest thing you've found since we moved in," her father said, exchanging a look with her mother. Michelle Knight put down her section of the newspaper and took the odd stone from her husband. "Where did you find this, Donna?" she said.

"In the cellar," the little cat piped up cheerily.

"Oh, Donna. I thought I told you not to go down there until it's been cleaned out properly."

"I know, I just wanted to show you that. Besides, I didn't go in that other room."

Michelle looked at her husband, who casually glanced up from the want-ad section. "What other room is that, sweety?"

"Yeah," The little feline said, happy to uncover a secret that only she knew about. She had looked a little dejected after being reprimanded, but in an instant she had regained her elated condition. "There's a door down in the cellar, but it's blocked by, like, all this stuff. Plus I think there's a lock on it. So what do you think?"

At the mention of it being in the cellar, Michelle had held the stone as though it had come from the bottom of a barrel of hazardous waste. "It's very interesting, honey, but..."

"Why don't you put it in your room, Don?" Miles said. Immediately his mother and father rounded on him, his father's eyes bemused and his mother's somewhat cold. He didn't care.

"Okay," Donna cried happily. She took the stone from her mother and ran out of the room, the white tip of her tail flailing like a ghost behind. When she was gone, Michelle began her remonstration.

"Why did you do that, Miles? For all you know that thing could be infested with germs..."

"What if it isn't? Besides, she needs something, some kind of gift that only she knows about to keep her from going crazy the next time we move. We all know I needed one."

Miles met his parents' reproving looks with equal amount of determined resistance. They could banter around with each other and pretend that it wasn't affecting their children in any way, but he'd be damned if they were going to take it out on Donna. Whatever the hell that stone was, it was Donna's, and only Donna would have it.

"That's not fair, Miles," his father said. "No, it isn't," Miles agreed, then left the spoon in the bowl and went upstairs to get his things for school. As he left, he heard his mother say to his father "We really should clean that cellar. I don't want the children to get sick or anything..."

He had had five days of school at Westbury high school, and already he had made a few friends. He wasn't sure of their social status in the school, but he knew that his was minus-nil, so he wasn't in the position to pick and choose his friends or enemies. They were nice and pleasant to talk to, but they were a bit unexpected, and he found it hard to compete with them in terms of kookiness and clever, madcap conversation. Being with them, he quickly found out, was like being in a Monty Python sketch. He also found out that they were like a kind of outlet, through which he could vent and speak his mind about the sort of things he couldn't have spoken about with his parents or his sister.

He gleaned a lot of information from them, especially from Joanna, a punk-looking tigress whose hair color seemed to change every two days, and who was in his sophomore class. Her flamboyancy rivaled that of any shock-rocker in her prodigious mental compendium of musical history, making her dangerously passionate about her beliefs. It was this characteristic that made her so attractive.

School this day, in itself, was no different than any of the other days, except during lunch, when zaniness seemed to be the be all and end all of existence. Nikolai, an absurdly thin white fox from Ukraine, sat beside him and started talking about how when he was younger he and his family was always moving, making Miles feel better about his own position. Harvey, a fast-talking rabbit who had a habit of wearing ridiculous hats, sat on his other side and started chattering about something Miles couldn't understand. Evidently that was the joke, and he joined in the laughter that ensued. Stephanie, an otter who was the best artist Miles had ever seen (and who had a reputation based on a little incident that happened two years ago involving a pair of knee-high platform boots and her boyfriend's scrotum) sat ahead of him to the right. Joanna sat in the seat facing him. It became a ritual, one that was as sacred and arcane to him as the rituals of the ancient druids from the long forgotten days of yore. It was what got him through the day.

"You know, the owner before you died in that house," Harvey said casually as he plucked at an apple. Miles looked at him and asked him what he meant.

He saw Stephanie's body jerk lightly, and suddenly Harvey cried out when her shoes connected with his shin. "He doesn't want to know about that, Harv. If you were in a new house, would you want to know if there were any deaths that happened there?"

"Sure. I could get police and frame you up as the infamous Shin Killer."

"Wait, wait, wait," Miles interjected, knowing that if they weren't stopped now the conversation would carry into next class period. He asked about what they really meant, and he let it be known that he wanted to hear the truth.

Joanna told him about how an old couple who lived there before he did were seen by their neighbors as they ran out of the house, flailing their arms and shouting at the top of their lungs. Eventually, they were carted off to the hospital, where for some odd reason they were pronounced dead. "At least, that's what my dad says," Joanna said, brushing her fiery reddish-orange hair out of her eyes. Miles asked if that was all there was to it, and Joanna said yes, but she'd ask her father later today for him. Miles thanked her, ignoring the emergence of Stephanie's and Harvey's conversation he had interrupted.

II

It was quiet at the dinner table, a lot quieter than normal. So few words were spoken between them it made the fur on Mile's tail bristle with discomfort. He would have expected much more than the usual banter about how school was, how the day went, how things were going. But there was nothing, just silence save for the scraping of their forks against porcelain plates.

Donna must have sensed the strangeness of it, too. Her head was sticking out slightly, eyes narrowed suspiciously at her spaghetti. Miles felt like he was a third party watching a bad soap opera. What made it worse was the realization that he was part of it.

Michelle spoke up, after dabbing the corner of her white muzzle with a linen napkin. "Well, I managed to clean out the cellar today. I'm sure I missed something, but for the most part it's pretty clean now. I hope that despite its cleanliness, Donna, that you won't go adventuring down there anymore. There're so many things you can step on and hurt yourself with."

Donna merely looked up from her plate and mumbled an okay. Miles made a mental note to cheer her up later. He stabbed at his spaghetti as their mother continued.

"You were right, though, about there being a door down there. I cleared away all that debris piled against it. It was locked, though, so I couldn't open it. I wonder if the owner has the key."

She looked at her husband when she said this last part, who had obviously been listening on a semi-oblivious level. It was by mere chance that he had heard her. "I'll ask her tomorrow after work. They should have something for it."

Michelle stood up to take her plate away, but suddenly stopped. She closed her eyes and held her head, swaying gently on her feet.

"Michelle?" her husband said, now very interested and worried. He got up to steady, but she brushed him away with a whisk of her hand, saying she was fine. She appeared unbalanced for a moment, but soon regained her composure and walked on to the kitchen with her plate, her husband trailing in her wake. Donna and Miles watched her go, their faces worried and nervous.

Miles didn't sleep that night. His mind was preoccupied with other things that forced out the idea of sleep. He only lay there, hands crossed behind his head, staring at the ceiling with eyes shimmering in the moonlight. He wanted to talk with his friends. They would know what he should do.

Suddenly there came a loud shutting of doors, and a rush of footsteps outside his room. He jumped out of bed and opened the door, peering out into the black hallway. He saw the outline of his father and mother running down the hall. He stepped out of his room to follow them, clad in his black boxers.

He moved swiftly and silently down the hall, down the stairs, through the kitchen, and into the living room by the entrance. He called out quietly into the dark as he saw his father and mother putting on their coats in quick, jerking movements. "Dad?"

His father reeled around to look at him, and Miles was swept up in a cold chill that ran down his back. His father's face was shocked and terrified. His mother ran out into the driveway.

"Miles," his father said worriedly, "Mom has to go to the hospital."

"What?"

"You have to look after Donna tonight, maybe tomorrow. I can trust you, can't I?"

"Well, I--"

But Miles couldn't say more; his father had heard his mother's call and hastened to join her, shutting the door with a gentle slam. Miles stared at the shut door, unspoken words stuck on the tip of his tongue.

He was walking back to his room when Donna's shrill scream shattered the quiet. She was crying out his name, shrieking while saying it. For a moment he felt an absurd sense that the sound he was hearing was in fact the sound of his brain squeezing out through his ears as he slowly became insane. Hey, it's the sound of me going crazy, he thought.

Donna screamed his name again, and he immediately came back to his senses. He rushed through the rooms and up the staircase at top speed. When he got to the hallway, he saw Donna standing there just outside of her room, staring inward at horrors that inhibited her movement and made her petrified. Miles ran to her, and as he kneeled beside her a bluish light faded into existence inside her room, soft and unnoticeable and first but quickly growing in luminescence. Miles and Donna stared in terrified awe at the thing which radiated the light, vaguely spherical in shape, yet things which looked like roots or veins were spreading out from it in all directions, crawling over the headboard of Donna's bed and reaching out beneath the covers.

It took Miles no less than a minute to realize that the iridescent sphere was the stone Donna had found in the cellar. He shielded his eyes from the steadily growing ethereal light and grabbed Donna, who after finding her voice in the dark well of shock she was in, began to scream again.