For Those Who Dream Monsters (2 page)

“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
torment. 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 radioed 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.