Read For Those Who Dream Monsters Online
Authors: Anna Taborska
For Those Who Dream Monsters
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 sa
distic 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
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
For those who dream monsters.
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
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 put 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.
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.