Levi

My town is a fairly quiet, boring place. It is one of those quaint, schmaltzy little tourist towns on the coast. I think that must be what sent us all mad.

Anyhow, because we thrive on outsiders and their business we have a lot of small, family owned restaurants and café’s. For a long while the most popular coffee shop was a small building near the harbour, a place called “Rose’s Garden”.

Like many places in town the building is now disused and has fallen into a state of almost insurmountable disrepair. All the tables, chairs and so on have been taken away and burnt and the hollow shell of a building is now home to nothing but one cat and sixty nine thousand, one hundred and five assorted bones.

In order to understand how a popular café turned into a derelict wreck we must start with its owner: a Japanese-English girl named Rose Jayne Elizabeth Gainsborough.

For the longest time Rose had wanted to open a café. She felt that, while it did not compare to being a police officer or a surgeon, she would be helping the community by bringing some modicum of comfort into peoples lives. She was granted her wish on her 25th birthday when her parents announced they had saved enough money to allow her to purchase a small building and start her business venture.

You may think it strange that Rose decided to open her coffee shop in a backwards little nowhere town like mine, but it was actually a very clever move. Around here even the bad tearooms can make enough money to get by and good ones can make an absolute fortune. While Rose did not make enough money to retire early or live a millionaire’s lifestyle, she did very well for herself, since it was not long before her little café became a popular haven for locals and tourists alike.

Rose’s Garden had a mascot – a small, muddy-red cat named Levi. Rose had always maintained that the name was not derived from Mr. Strauss, but was a contracted form of Leviticus, the third book of the bible. This was a fairly interesting choice of name, since Miss Gainsborough was not a religious girl in the slightest. Regardless, the cats name was Levi and he could always be found frequenting Rose’s café.

The seeds of the café’s downfall were sewn about a year after it had opened. One particular evening, after the shop had closed, Levi turned up by the shop’s back door, standing over a dead mouse. Levi’s behaviour was nothing out of the ordinary (after all, everyone understands the relationship between cats and mice) so Rose did what you, or I, or anyone else would do, and threw the mouse away with the rest of the days refuse.

The following morning, local news outlets were buzzing. At some point during the night a local man had been murdered. This murder was particularly troublesome since the police could not work out how it had been committed. The cause of death was easy enough to determine, the victim had been shot, but the problem came in figuring out how the procedure had been executed. All of the usual forensic tells were missing and it was almost as if the killer had appeared out of thin air, silently killed his victim, then vanished as quickly an mysteriously as he had appeared.

In spite of numerous protests from her parents, Rose opted to stay in town, rather than returning home. After all, a steady supply of caffeine is the first step towards successful crisis management.

A few days later the sequence of events repeated itself. Levi presented Rose with a dead mouse, Rose threw it away and someone was murdered overnight.

The second murder shared many traits with the first. While the cause of death was different (the victim had been stabbed, rather than shot) the circumstances surrounding the crime were virtually the same: there were no clues to indicate how the murder had been committed and no way of telling where the murderer had come from or gone to.

A few days later the sequence of events began again when Levi presented Rose with a dead mouse. Initially Rose was set to throw the mouse away, but something in the back of her mind told her not to.

Rose was an intelligent girl. She had a firm command of logic, reasoning and basic common sense. She knew there was nothing that could possibly link her cat to the murders and that it would be ridiculous to suggest anything else. But something in the back of her mind was screaming at her, telling her that if she threw away Levi’s latest gift, someone else would die. Her instinct was so strong that Rose decided to keep the animal in the back yard of the shop, just to see what happened.

Nobody in town died that night. To most people this would be due to the fact that murder is a fairly uncommon occurrence, especially in coastal towns like ours. Rose, however, believed that the lack of homicide was due to her accepting Levi’s gift. So strong was her belief that she kept the next mouse she was given. And the next. And the next. And the next.

As time went on and Rose amassed more and more corpses the crime rate plummeted. I will grant you that, in a community as small as ours, there is not a great deal of crime to begin with, but what little was happening ceased. Even petty crimes like vandalism, truancy and littering stopped as Rose’s collection grew larger.

Of course, Rose’s business suffered as a result. For one thing, the smell was ghastly and drove people away. The few customers that could stomach the foul odour found that Rose was now more concerned with where the next rat or bird would be coming from than she was with serving coffee. But Rose did not care what people thought. She was helping people; more people than she could possibly help by serving coffee in a harbourside tearoom. They just did not know it yet.

The point beyond which Rose’s worrying hobby turned into a dangerous obsession came about a month and a half after she had began hoarding the animals. Returning to her café from a shopping trip, she found that there was no new animal corpse waiting her return.

It did not take long for Ms. Gainsborough to find the culprit. One of her neighbours, one Mr. Barker, had taken Levi’s gift and thrown it in his fireplace. Mr. Barker’s actions were not malicious, of course; in fact it was just the reverse. He felt that dealing with the dead animal would be the right thing to do, rather than being ungentlemanly and making the lady sort it herself.

Understandably, Rose did not share Mr. Barker’s sentiments. Upon learning what happened to the day’s offering she had everyone leave her shop. She then bolted the doors, shuttered the windows, and sat by her radio, waiting for the news.

Nine hours passed. Then Rose heard the sirens wailing past her café. She heard the anchorman interrupt the scheduled broadcast to announce the fire downtown. She heard that the fire had consumed her boyfriend’s house. She heard the reports of the body, charred beyond recognition.

As Rose sat, trying to comprehend what had happened, Levi nuzzled against her ankle, purring contently. She picked up the cat and glared into his eyes. She wanted to kill the wretched animal. She knew that if she could shoot him or drown him or bury him, all her problems would be over and she would never have to look at an animal carcass ever again.

Before Rose could act, however, she heard a voice in the back of her mind. The voice was telling her that it was not the cat’s fault the situation had come to pass, and even if it were he could do more good if he was alive than if he was dead.

Suddenly, everything felt like a veil had been lifted. Rose knew what she had to do, and just how she could do it. She set the cat down and gave him a simple command, “All of them.”

From that point on Rose devoted all of her time to the animals Levi was bringing her. The pile of carcasses that was originally outside was moved indoors, and once inside the pile continued to grow at an astonishing rate. Initially Levi kept to the schedule of one animal per day, but with Rose’s encouragement, his gifts became more and more frequent. It got to the point that Levi was providing his keeper with one body every hour or so.

Rose’s dementia eventually took its told on her body. Given that she had stayed awake for six days straight it is no surprise to learn that she eventually succumbed to fatigue and collapsed.

When nobody had seen or heard from Rose for a number of days, people became worried and alerted the authorities. The police broke into the shop and found Ms. Gainsborough passed in front of her morbid collection. She was quickly transferred to the intensive care unit of our local hospital and kept under observation.

She awoke some days later and was met with the sight of her boyfriend waiting beside her bed. He explained everything: His apartment had burnt down because of faulty wiring, and the body they found inside was likely an unlucky burglar who could not get out in time. The two people who had been murdered on consecutive nights were killed by a local man, whom the police had caught and imprisoned. Everything that had happened had a sensible, logical explanation, and to suggest it was due to Rose and her dead animals was every bit as nonsensical as she, herself, admitted it was.

Rose was delighted to see her friend and relieved that things had returned to normal. When she was well enough to leave the hospital, however, she had herself committed to the Frieda Regan Memorial building. Ms. Gainsborough reasoned that she needed some degree of professional help for believing what she did about the animals she had been hoarding. Not only that, but she knew it would be a few months before her shop was in a fit enough state to reopen, so taking a short time out would probably help her.

The shop never re-opened. Rose found that she quite enjoyed living in The Hexagon and decided to remain there. While there she tended the facilities gardens, enjoyed visitation from her boyfriend, and led a quiet, peaceful life until the facility closed and she re-joined our little town.

As for the shop itself, the local council did all it could to try and make the shop reusable. The building was gutted, washed and refurbished, while the collection of animals was carted away and destroyed in various ways. It took a great deal of work, but the shop was ready in time for the tourist season, albeit with a new owner.

The work was futile, however, since tourism was absolutely dismal that year. In fact, it was about the only year in living memory when we didn’t really have a single tourist. I wonder what happened to them all.