For Those Who Dream Monsters Read online

  What are you afraid of? What are you haunted by?

  What waits for you in the dark?

  Face your fears and embark on a journey to the dark side of the human condition. Defy the demons that prey on you and the cruel twists of fate that destroy what you hold most dear.

  A sadistic baker, a psychopathic physics professor, wolves, werewolves, cannibals, Nazis, devils, serial killers, ghosts and other monsters will haunt you long after you finish reading

  FOR THOSE WHO DREAM MONSTERS

  by

  Anna Taborska

  18 tales from the abyss.

  With chilling illustrations by Reggie Oliver.

  “… Anna is nothing if not a cruel blade when it comes to scary and horrible fiction.”

  Paul Finch, author of Stalkers and Sacrifice

  “Anna Taborska's fiction combines an unflinching eye for human cruelty and evil with a deep compassion for those who suffer from it. Stark imagery and psychological truth are the hallmarks of her work; she's a powerful writer we'll be hearing a lot more from in years to come.”

  Simon Bestwick, author of Tide of Souls and The Faceless

  “… surely among the grimmest contemporary horror authors

  (I mean that as a compliment) …”

  Demonik, Vault of Evil

  “Anna Taborska’s fantastic, surreal, dark fantasy … is still seared in my memory.”

  Colin Leslie, The Heart of Horror

  “… nothing short of chilling.”

  Tom Johnstone, The Zone

  For Those Who Dream Monsters

  Anna Taborska

  Mortbury Press

  Published by Mortbury Press

  First Edition

  Paperback published 2013

  E-version 2015

  All stories in this collection copyright © Anna Taborska

  Illustrations and introduction copyright © Reggie Oliver

  Cover art copyright © Steve Upham

  ISBN 978-1-910030-01-1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of the author and publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Mortbury Press

  Shiloh

  Nant-Glas

  Llandrindod Wells

  Powys

  LD1 6PD

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  SCHRÖDINGER’S HUMAN

  LITTLE PIG

  FISH

  BUY A GOAT FOR CHRISTMAS

  CUT!

  ARTHUR’S CELLAR

  THE APPRENTICE

  THE GIRL IN THE BLUE COAT

  RUSALKA

  FIRST NIGHT

  HALLOWEEN LIGHTS

  THE COFFIN

  THE CREAKING

  DIRTY DYBBUK

  UNDERBELLY

  TEA WITH THE DEVIL

  ELEGY

  BAGPUSS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  For those who dream monsters.

  INTRODUCTION

  It is not supposed to be a good thing to be in someone’s black books. An exception may be made in the case of Charles Black’s ground-breaking Black Books of Horror. I have read many excellent stories in his anthologies and have met their authors and found them to be, without exception, very delightful people. Since joining Charles’s ‘stable’ I can proudly number among my friends not only Charles himself but many of his writers, including John Llewellyn Probert, Thana Niveau, Kate Farrell, Mark Samuels, Simon K. Unsworth, and Anna Taborska.

  I first encountered Anna Taborska’s work in the sixth of Charles’s Black Books. The story was called ‘Bagpuss’ – it is included in this volume – and I was immediately struck by its originality and the excellence of its writing. Here is an authentic and exciting new voice in horror writing, I thought. I immediately got hold of and read whatever stories by her that I could, and my subsequent readings more than confirmed the first impression.

  The truth is that in all genres, and perhaps that of ‘horror’ in particular, writers tend to fall into certain easily recognisable styles and themes. They move along predetermined grooves, and they may do so well or badly, but in so doing they produce work which is not distinguishable from the general run, and therefore, in the end, not very distinguished. Anna’s work has an individual feel about it, a personality. She has a very acute sense of personal suffering which is conveyed in poignant but never excessive detail. She does not commit the fault to which most minor writers of horror are prone, that of making her ‘victims’ mere cyphers, puppets into whom the storyteller can stick pins at will and without conscience. There is real pain in these stories and the horror is conveyed on a deep psychological level.

  Nor is she one of those writers who, in their individuality, pursue one particular theme or atmosphere to destruction. “Damn him, he is so various!” said Gainsborough in exasperation at his contemporary and rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the same could be said of Anna Taborska. Here in one generous volume are eighteen stories in a variety of settings: the United Kingdom, the United States, Africa, Eastern Europe, the present, the past. She deals movingly with the matter of the Nazi Occupation of Poland and the Holocaust (‘Arthur’s Cellar’, ‘The Girl in the Blue Coat’) but from a very personal and individual angle. ‘Dirty Dybbuk’ is a story based on Jewish folk myth; others such as ‘Rusalka’ and ‘First Night’ take their inspiration from Europe’s rich tradition of fairy tale and legend. We enter the film world for ‘Cut!’ and that of non-governmental organisations for ‘Buy a Goat for Christmas’. There is mordant satire in ‘Tea with the Devil’ and an exploration of our deepest and darkest fears in ‘Underbelly’. There are wolves in ‘Little Pig’; there is witchery – or imagined witchery – in ‘The Creaking’. I could go on, but I would become exhausted: readers should have the pleasure of discovering for themselves how constantly Anna Taborska breaks new ground. “Damn her, she is so various!”

  And yet, and yet… Through all this wonderful diversity runs the thread of a particular sensibility: a very deep compassion for the sufferings of humanity, and a poetic quality in the writing that suddenly lifts horror into a world of strange and terrible beauty. Anna is the daughter of a great Polish poet, and a poet herself: it shows.

  It is for these reasons that I asked Anna if I might do some illustrations for her first volume of stories. I have hitherto only illustrated my own work and have no plans to do so for anyone else, but Anna Taborska’s work has a special quality which evokes powerful and seductive visual imagery. This is hardly surprising since Anna is an award winning film maker, a mistress of the moving image. It is something we have in common: we both have a background in the performing arts, albeit slightly different branches. I began my career as an actor and playwright, and I tend to write my stories in ‘scenes’ as a result; Anna, from her more film-orientated perspective, does the same, and this is what gives her work its dynamic quality as well as its strong visual stimulus.

  I immensely enjoyed entering the strange and terrible world of Taborska. Many of the stories prompted not one but several vivid images, but I decided that one per story was quite enough: any more might prove too tiring both for me and the reader. I can truthfully say that any merit these illustrations have can be directly attributable to Anna’s pen rather than mine.

  Of one other thing I can assure the reader: there is more to come from that pen of Anna’s and it will be of the same devastatingly high quality.

  Reggie Oliver

  Suffolk, August 2013

  SCHRÖDINGER’S HUMAN

  The cat had the uncanny ability of seeming to be in two places at once, and it appeared logical to the man that he should name it Schrödinger. The cat evidently approved of the name, purring as the man tried it out.

  “Well, Schrödinger, I expect you must want some dinner today?” the man asked, backing away from the plate of cat food to allow the animal a chance to feed. But the cat stayed where it was, high up on the kitchen cupboard, and refused to give the cat food the time of day, just as it had refused milk and water, and even ham.

  The man had first come across the cat on his return from work the previous day. It was thin and dirty, a mud-smeared black, with cold green eyes and a tattered left ear. The pitiful-looking thing was stretched out on his doorstep and refused to budge, even as the man approached. Instead, it fixed him with an expectant stare and weaved its tail from side to side. The man studied the cat, and a long-forgotten joy stirred within him.

  Ever since he was a child, the man had enjoyed torturing animals. His grandfather had bought him a butterfly net, and the boy quickly worked out that if you rubbed too much of the colourful dust off a butterfly’s wings, it had trouble flying. And things got even more interesting if you pulled off its wings altogether and pu
t it on an anthill. You could watch the black specks of the ants swarm all over the wounded intruder; watch the butterfly that was no longer a butterfly, but a fascinating broken thing, try to lift itself out of the writhing mass of small stinging creatures, helplessly flailing its long thin legs, its proboscis furling and unfurling in some strange insect rhythm of pain.

  Butterflies continued to fascinate for a long time, but eventually the allure of real animals – one which screamed and bled – took over from those that merely twitched pathetically. After much begging and family debate, he was finally given an air rifle for his birthday, but sadly this was confiscated when he moved up from shooting crows and squirrels to shooting the neighbours’ pets.

  If necessity is the mother of invention, then a twisted imagination is its father, aunt and uncle. The boy came to understand that the air rifle, which he had so mourned, wasn’t even a drop in the endless ocean of possibilities when it came to inflicting suffering on anything small and fluffy that had a heartbeat. And the smaller and fluffier it was, the easier it could be lured with a warm tone of voice, a friendly smile, a tickle behind the ear and, if all else failed, a piece of ham.

  The boy tried a variety of techniques on his victims: dismemberment, disembowelment, decapitation, throwing off the roof or out of a window, the breaking of individual bones with a blunt instrument, bloodletting, crucifixion, and even electrocution – he was particularly good at this, as he had an excellent science teacher at school and displayed a definite propensity for the subject. But his favourite was luring a cat with the promise of food or affection, locking it in a cage and carrying it to his parents’ roof, where he would douse its tail with petrol and set it alight before pushing it headfirst down the drainpipe. The trapped animal, its tail ablaze, would scream all the way down the drainpipe until it got stuck in a bend, where it would burn to charred bones and then fall out the bottom. This method only worked on small cats and kittens, but could also be extended to some breeds of puppy. The boy’s attempts to involve the little girl next door in his pastime resulted in his being sent to a boarding school run by monks, where his sadistic horizons expanded to the use of canes, whips and rulers.

  The boy left school with top results in science and went on to university, where his interest in animals waned somewhat, as his physics studies and unreciprocated fascination with girls led him to attain a First Class degree, despite almost being sent down for peeping through a female student’s bedroom window. He stayed on in academia, eventually becoming a lecturer at a reputable university, where he could continue to indulge in physics and his unreciprocated fascination with girls.

  And now here he was, trying to get home after a tiring day of lectures, and this scruffy, ugly cat was lying on his doorstep, as if daring him to gouge out its eyes and cut off its paws. Old passions awoke within the man, but he was too tired to act on them. He picked up a piece of brick that was lying in the roadside and aimed it between the cat’s eyes. Just then a piercing pain shot through the man’s temple. He dropped the brick and put his hands up to his head. As quickly as it had come, the pain was gone, but the man was left feeling bewildered and a little dizzy. As he rubbed his eyes to clear his head, he heard a voice close by his ear.

  “Let me in,” it said.

  The man spun round, but there was nobody nearby – only the cat sprawled on his doorstep, eyeing him like a scientist eyes a mildly interesting specimen before dissection.

  “Let me in,” the voice continued, “and I’ll show you things you’ve never seen … I’ll take you to places you can’t begin to imagine.”

  The man closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the voice was gone and he felt his normal self again. He looked at his front door; the cat was no longer reclining, but sat alertly a couple of feet away from the door, as if waiting for the man to open it.

  What the hell? thought the man. If the cat wanted to come in, then let it. He was tired now, but he would amuse himself with the animal later. He opened the door and stood back to let the cat in. It eyed him suspiciously for a moment, then darted past, leaping over the threshold and heading straight for the kitchen.

  The man followed it, locking the door behind him. He put his briefcase down in the hallway and went to see what the cat was doing. The kitchen was bathed in darkness and before the man switched on the light, he caught sight of the cat’s eyes glowing in the shadows by the sink. But as the light from the overhead lamp illuminated the room, the man saw that the cat was not by the sink. Surprised, he looked around and spotted the creature sitting high on a kitchen cupboard, peering down at him with some curiosity and possibly a hint of malevolence.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” he told the cat. “The rough and tumble world of quantum physics would have a field day with you.” The man laughed at his own wit and went to the fridge to get some milk. If he was to get any use out of the cat, he’d have to start by getting it down from the kitchen cupboard.

  But no end of coaxing would bring the cat down from its vantage point – not even a slice of premium ham. The man contemplated standing on a chair and dislodging the cat or throwing something at it, but he really couldn’t be bothered. Besides, it would be much more fun to get the cat to trust him and then see the surprise in its furry little face when he took his penknife to it. The man made his own dinner, ate it and went through to the sitting room to mark first-year physics assignments, leaving a plate of ham out to see if the cat would come down in his absence.

  That night the man dreamt that he was walking through an unfamiliar landscape of red and black. The landscape was constantly shifting and changing. One moment he was walking along a mountain path, looking down into a valley of houses and fields, next he was in a labyrinth of tunnels, the walls made of human bones and skulls arranged in intricate patterns, one on top of the other. Somewhere ahead of the man a fire burned, and light from it bounced around the bone walls, bathing them in a warm glow and sending shadows flitting around the man. Beside him walked Schrödinger the cat, watching him with a modicum of curiosity, as if all this was familiar to the animal and it was merely interested in what the man made of it all – interested, but not that interested.

  As the man approached the source of the flames, he became aware of the crackling sound they made. The crackling became a scratching, and the scratching grew louder until the man awoke. The scratching continued and the man realised that it was coming from his wardrobe. The damned cat had somehow got into it and was probably ruining his suits. He reached over to switch on his bedside lamp and recoiled as his fingers touched fur. The man sat upright and the cat leapt off the bedside table on which it had been sitting.

  “Goddamn you, Schrödinger!” The man switched on the lamp and glared at the creature now sitting in the doorway. He swung his legs out of bed, but the cat had already gone. The man closed his bedroom door and went back to sleep.

  In the morning the cat was back on the kitchen cupboard, and the ham was untouched on the plate where the man had left it the night before. The creature obviously hadn’t eaten for a while and it had to be hungry. Either it was sick or it had been trained not to eat anything other than cat food. The man determined to buy some Whiskas on his way home from work.

  But the cat wouldn’t eat Whiskas, or Meow Mix or Friskies. It wouldn’t drink milk or water and it wouldn’t eat cat biscuits. In fact, it was a miracle that it was still alive. It was growing more emaciated by the day, and its protruding ribs only served to make it look scruffier and uglier. For a moment the man astonished himself by contemplating taking it to a vet, but quickly shrugged off such an insane idea and decided to kill it. He placed a kitchen chair next to the cupboard on which Schrödinger was perched, and went to get the meat cleaver. Then the doorbell rang.