For Those Who Dream Monsters Read online

  The man put down the cleaver and went to answer the door. It was the teenage girl from the house next door.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but I’m locked out of the house. I forgot to take my keys this morning and my mum isn’t back till seven. A couple of workmen followed me home from the high street and I don’t want to wait outside. Can I hang out at yours until my mum gets back?”

  The man studied the girl’s short skirt and the way her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail, revealing the curve where her neck met her shoulder.

  “Sure,” he told the girl and stood aside to let her in. He cast a quick glance around the street. Sure enough, he saw two workmen loitering across the road, but they quickly turned on their heels and disappeared. There was no one else around.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” the man asked, leading the way to the kitchen.

  “No thanks. Have you got any coke?”

  “Yes.” The man got a coke from the fridge and handed it to the girl. “Would you like a glass?”

  “No thanks.” The man indicated for the girl to take a seat. That was when they both saw Schrödinger. It was standing on the kitchen table, tail twitching, staring at the girl.

  “Oh, what a cute kitty!” cried the girl and moved towards the animal.

  “Schrödinger, what the hell are you doing?” The tone in the man’s voice stopped the girl in her tracks. The man moved forward, ready to swipe the cat off the table, but as he did so, the sharp pain in his head came, then went, and a voice near his ear said, “Kill her!”

  “What?” exclaimed the man.

  “What?” asked the girl, staring at the man uncomprehendingly.

  “Nothing, honey, nothing.”

  But the voice came again, more persistent this time: “Kill her … now!”

  The man felt confused. He looked at the girl. Her tanned arms and legs looked so inviting. A small artery in her neck was throbbing. The man found himself wondering how far the blood from that artery would spurt and whether it would reach the ceiling or just spatter the walls. He wondered whether the look of surprise in her eyes would be like that of the kittens and puppies he had dispatched to kitten and puppy heaven as a boy. He suspected that it would be better – much better – than anything he had experienced before. His cock was throbbing and he realised that the cat was staring at him, green eyes blazing, its customary disdain replaced by a feral excitement.

  The artery in the girl’s neck was still throbbing. Her lips were cherry red and a look of alarm was creeping over her face. She raised her hand to cover her mouth and, as she did so, her top rode up a little and the man could see the silver ring in her pierced belly button. As time seemed to stop then stretch around the man, he noticed that the blue of the small gemstone on the ring matched the colour of the girl’s eyes.

  The artery in the girl’s neck was throbbing, the man’s cock was throbbing, and now a blood vessel in his head started to throb. The light in the kitchen seemed to throb and then the whole world was throbbing – a glorious red throbbing, pulsating, pounding. Then the meat cleaver was in the man’s hand and the look of surprise in the girl’s eyes was better than the puppies and the kittens – it was better than anything the man had experienced before, and the girl’s blood was on the walls and on the ceiling and on the floor.

  When the throbbing subsided, the man was sitting on the floor, his hands and clothes covered in blood. He felt calm and he felt good. The cat was standing beside him, face and whiskers stained red, frenziedly lapping up the girl’s blood from the floor. The man stared at the animal in disbelief, but made no move to stop it. Despite the blood on its snout, the cat seemed less dirty than before: its fur seemed sleeker, it seemed somehow fatter and healthier, even its tattered ear seemed to have grown back together.

  “Goddamn you, Schrödinger,” the man said quietly, but the cat didn’t even acknowledge his presence. It had licked the vast amount of blood off the floor and was now licking the girl’s fingers. The man crawled around the girl’s body to the hand that wasn’t being worked on by the cat. He lifted the hand and sucked the blood from the index finger. It had a sickly taste, sweet and metallic. The man sucked on the girl’s thumb and found that the taste was no longer sickly; it was, in fact, rather good.

  A feeling of contented tiredness overcame the man, and he dozed off right there, on the kitchen floor, next to the girl’s lacerated body. When he woke up it was dark and Schrödinger was nowhere to be seen. The man chopped up the girl’s body with the meat cleaver, removing clothes, hair, bones and anything else that was inedible – this he would take to the municipal dump on his way to work tomorrow, along with the girl’s faceless head. Everything else he washed and divided between his fridge and the freezer. He cleaned the walls as best he could, then dragged the kitchen table across and attempted to clean the ceiling. He would have to buy a large tin of emulsion and paint over the stains that wouldn’t wash off.

  That night the man dreamt that he was standing over a precipice, looking down into a vast pit. The pit was filled with fire. The man noticed movement in the flames and realised that the pit was full of people – thousands of people – burning. He found that if he concentrated, he could hone in on individuals. He could clearly see the expressions of torment on their faces, the pain in their eyes. Their bodies were writhing and their limbs flailing about helplessly. The man remembered the wingless butterflies flailing around on the anthill in his parents’ garden, and smiled. He looked down and saw Schrödinger gazing up at him, reflections of the flames dancing in the animal’s eyes.

  Next morning the man awoke to purring by the side of his bed, but wasn’t all that surprised to find that Schrödinger was not by his bed at all, but was waiting expectantly in the kitchen, sitting by the spot where the man had previously left its unwanted plate of cat food.

  “Oh, so now you want to eat?”

  The man knew what the cat wanted, but decided to tease it and put out a bowl of milk. But the joke was on him, as Schrödinger gave him such a look of malevolent contempt that the man’s blood seemed to freeze in his veins and a nasty shiver went down his spine.

  “Sorry,” he said, and poured the milk down the sink. He got out a mincing machine and took some of the girl’s flesh out of the fridge. He pushed it into the mincer and watched the pink worms come out the bottom. A sharp meow distracted him, and he glanced down to see Schrödinger dancing around on its hind paws, teeth bared. He put the mince on a clean plate, and hardly had time to place the plate on the floor before Schrödinger was upon it, wolfing down the meat as if it hadn’t eaten in days. The man couldn’t help thinking that if he hadn’t withdrawn his hand in time, the animal might have devoured that too.

  As he watched the cat feed, the man noticed how healthy it was looking. He thought he might have imagined it last night – in all the excitement, but in the cold light of day he could see that the cat’s fur was a sleek, clean, shiny black, its protruding ribs had disappeared – concealed by a respectable plumpness – and its left ear looked like it had never encountered the Mike Tyson of the feline world.

  The man cut a few thin slices of meat, and treated himself to a full English breakfast.

  Over the next couple of weeks the cat and the man ate what was left of the teenager. The police came round and asked questions, but only the two workmen had seen the girl enter the man’s house, and the police knew nothing of their existence. Officer Jones commented on the man’s cute cat and Schrödinger purred obligingly, and that was that. Or would have been, except that the man couldn’t stop thinking about the girl. Sometimes he worried about getting found out, but mostly he reminisced about the unbearably sweet sensation of plunging the meat cleaver into her soft flesh. His craving for more flesh and more blood wouldn’t let him rest or concentrate on his work. Despite their shared diet, as the cat got fatter and silkier, the man lost weight, grew pale and haggard. When he slept, he dreamt of the burning pit and the bodies in it, writhing in perpetual to
rment. But mostly he just tossed and turned in bed, listened to Schrödinger scratching in the wardrobe and watched its eyes glow by the side of his bed.

  About the time that the girl meat ran out, the man’s cravings reached an unbearable pitch. He was horny and hungry and confused all at the same time. He was distracted in his tutorials and it was just a matter of time before one of the students complained. Schrödinger was refusing to eat anything that wasn’t human, and its body was atrophying. Its left ear was hanging in tatters by the side of its head, and its teeth started falling out, so that its tongue protruded, giving it a rather unsavoury and slightly demented expression. It eyed the man with barely disguised contempt, and the man found himself feeling increasingly uncomfortable around it.

  The student was only in her first term, but she was already behind in her work. She had been good at physics at school, but university was different. The professor was bombarding them with new information every day, and they were expected to come up with their own ideas and solutions to problems. When the professor asked to see her, she was terrified that she was in trouble. She was relieved when he spoke kindly to her and offered to spend some time with her, going over problems they had tackled in class, to help her catch up with the others. The professor explained that he had a variety of textbooks at home and it would be easier if she dropped by his house, where they would have all the books at hand.

  “I realise that young ladies sometimes feel uncomfortable being alone with a man,” he told her, “and you are very welcome to bring a friend with you, as long as your friend won’t mind keeping my cat company while we’re studying.”

  “You have a cat?” the girl smiled.

  “His name’s Schrödinger. He’s very friendly and he’s especially fond of young ladies.”

  The girl smiled again and lowered her eyes.

  “Do you have a friend you would like to bring?”

  The man knew full well that the girl had no friends. Shy and from a state school, unlike the privileged majority of the students, he often saw her sitting alone in the lecture hall and leaving alone when the lectures were over.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” the girl replied. “I don’t feel uncomfortable.”

  “Well, that’s just fine. My cat would love to meet you. He’s been feeling a little under the weather lately.”

  The plan seemed fool proof, but when the student arrived at his house, the man found himself having second thoughts. This was not something he’d envisaged – he’d wanted another girl desperately for weeks. But when he saw her standing on his doorstep in her knee high socks and pink sweater, physics notes in a file under her arm, his palms suddenly felt clammy and a nerve under his eye started to twitch. She was his student, after all, and maybe that meant that he was crossing some kind of line – a line between fair game and … well … not.

  “Come in,” he told the girl, seriously considering actually giving her a physics lesson. But as soon as he shut the door behind her and ushered her into the kitchen, Schrödinger was there in front of them, meowing and twitching its tail.

  “Oh,” exclaimed the girl, “he doesn’t look too well.”

  “He hasn’t been eating properly,” the man explained. “In fact, he’s been feeling rather sorry for himself, but I’m sure he’ll cheer up now that you’re here.”

  The girl stooped down to stroke the cat, but something in its unappetising appearance and intent stare put her off. She straightened up and smiled at the professor, who offered her a cup of tea and put the kettle on.

  The cat meowed loudly and the man tried to swipe at it behind the girl’s back. But the pain in his head was back. The man winced and clapped his hands to his temples.

  “Are you okay, professor?” There was concern in the girl’s brown eyes.

  But the pain in his head was gone, the dizzy feeling was back, and the voice was telling him to kill.

  “Professor? Are you feeling alright?”

  But the kettle was in his hand and, before he knew it, he was pouring boiling water over the girl’s face and she was too shocked to make a sound as her face started to blister. And then he was bashing the girl over the head with the kettle, bashing her face and bashing her chest and bashing the base of her skull. The girl slid to the floor, but still he kept hitting her. He could feel his skin burning as some of the boiling liquid splashed on his hands, but still he kept smashing the girl with the kettle until her head was a bloody pulp and her legs ceased twitching. Then he stopped. He put the kettle down and went to the sink, soaking his hands under the cold water tap until he was fairly confident that they wouldn’t blister. He glanced occasionally over his shoulder at the cat, which was greedily lapping up the puddle of blood beneath the dead girl’s head.

  The cleaning and carving took a long time and the man went to bed exhausted. He fell asleep quickly and dreamt that he was falling into the burning pit. He fell slowly, and had ample opportunity to watch and feel the flames getting closer. The rising heat overtook him on his way down and, by the time he reached the bottom of the pit, his flesh was already blistering and smoking. His skin caught fire and was burnt away, and, as the flames reached the fat beneath, the man went up like a torch. He tried to scream, but his throat was burning on the inside. He looked up and saw Schrödinger looking down at him from the edge of the pit. The cat’s expression was one of mild amusement.

  The following day the man determined to kill Schrödinger. He minced some meat, laid it out on a clean plate and put it down in front of the waiting cat. While the creature was preoccupied, the man opened the drawer and took hold of the meat cleaver. The pain hit his head like a spear and he dropped the cleaver back in the drawer. He looked over at Schrödinger, but the cat didn’t even interrupt its meal long enough to cast him an evil glance.

  It was a while before anyone reported the student missing. The police came to the campus and interviewed everyone who knew her. The interviews didn’t last long, as even those students who recognised her picture weren’t able to provide any information about the girl. But Officer Jones recognised the physics professor as the next-door neighbour he had interviewed in his previous unsolved missing girl case, and decided to pay him a home visit, complete with warrant.

  Officer Jones arrived at the house with two other policemen. If the man was shocked to see three police officers on his doorstep, he didn’t show it. He invited them in politely and stood back as they ransacked his home.

  Officer Jones spotted a pair of green eyes in the shadows under the coffee table in the sitting room, and remembered the man’s cat. He had a soft spot for cats and bent down to the animal, but saw to his surprise that the space under the coffee table was empty. As he straightened up, he noticed the cat sitting on an armchair at the far side of the room, watching him. Before he had a chance to approach the animal, one of the other officers summoned him from the bedroom. He hurried over to his colleague.

  Officer Trevayne was standing by the open drawer of the man’s bedside cabinet, holding a silver belly button ring with a small blue gemstone in his latex-gloved hand. Jones recognised it immediately from a photograph given to him by the parents of the missing girl from the house next door. He moved rapidly out into the hallway, where Officer Green was waiting with the man.

  “Sir, we need you to come with us to the station, to answer some questions,” Jones told the man. For the briefest moment the man looked shaken, but regained his composure almost instantly.

  “Of course,” he said. “Anything I can do to help… I’ll just grab my coat.” The man went over to the coat stand and reached for his coat, but just then he felt the familiar stabbing pain in his head. It came and went, leaving him confused as to how it was that he’d lifted the heavy coat stand and why it was that he brought the full weight of it down on Officer Green – brought the large wooden object down again and again on the policeman, until he felt a stinging pain rip through his shoulder, and the whole world went red, then black.

  Jones put his gun away and radi
oed for an ambulance. He moved swiftly over to the man and checked his pulse; the bullet had passed straight through his heart and the man was dead within seconds. It was a bad situation, but the man would have killed Officer Green – if he hadn’t already done so. Jones knelt beside Officer Trevayne, who was tending to their badly wounded colleague.

  “He’s alive,” said Trevayne, “but he needs to get to a hospital ASAP.”

  “I’ll go outside and flag down the ambulance.”

  But as Jones moved towards the front door, he felt a sharp pain in his temple. He winced and put his hand up to his head, but the pain was gone, replaced by a slight feeling of nausea and bewilderment. This in turned passed, and a voice spoke in the policeman’s ear.

  “Take me with you,” it said. “I’ll show you things you’ve never seen.”

  Officer Jones looked round and saw the black cat eyeing him dispassionately.

  LITTLE PIG

  Adam waited nervously in the International Arrivals hall of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 1. Born and bred in London, Adam had never thought of himself as the type of guy who would import a wife from Poland. His parents had made sure that he’d learnt Polish from an early age; while his English friends had played football or watched Swap Shop on Saturday mornings, Adam had been dragged kicking and screaming to Polish classes in Ealing. But it had all paid off in the end when he went to Poland one summer and met Krystyna. Since that time, the smart, pretty brunette had relocated to London and moved in with Adam. They were engaged to be married, and it seemed to Adam that all the members of his fiancé’s family had already visited London and stayed with them – all, that is, except Krystyna’s grandmother, and that was who Adam was now waiting for. Krystyna had not been able to get the day off work, and Adam was now anxiously eyeing every elderly woman who came through the arrival gate, in the hope that one of them would match the tattered photograph that Krystyna had given him.