For Those Who Dream Monsters (18 page)

The Rabbi couldn’t sleep that night. He tossed and turned, and scanned his
memory of
halakhah
, trying to find the right path for all his
supplicants. And then it came to him: he would bake two proverbial
challot
in one pan! If he couldn’t persuade the dirty
dybbuk
to move on to the
next plane of existence, then perhaps he could talk it into moving to a more
suitable home.

And so, not only was Mitzi liberated from the burden of unwanted wantonness,
but the troubled couple became eternally indebted to the Rabbi – for many fine
children, and countless nights, mornings, and even lunchtimes of the most
satisfactory wedded bliss.

And Mitzi’s aunt had no complaints.

It had taken weeks to get a doctor’s appointment, then months to persuade her
GP to refer her to a specialist, more months to get the hospital appointment
with the specialist, more weeks for the results of the undignified and painful
tests to which she was subjected to be analysed, another week for the test
results to get back to her GP, and a few more days for Anna’s GP to call her in
and say that there was nothing they could do – perhaps if they’d caught it a
couple of months sooner it wouldn’t have spread from her cervix to the rest of
her abdomen, from where it was already on its way through her lymph system to
her entire body.

Anna struggled to find a position in which she could survive the night, survive
the next five minutes, survive the next few seconds. She tried curling up into
a ball; she tried lying on her back with her knees bent. She started thrashing
about on the bed in pain and fell onto the floor, where she started to crawl
towards the front door. Sweat poured down her face, her entire body fired up by
the pain in her underbelly.

Anna
reached the door and grabbed hold of the handle, pulling herself up. She left
her bedsit and stumbled blindly along the corridors of the horrible old
building. It had once been a Victorian school or lunatic asylum – Anna didn’t
know which and at this point in time she didn’t care. She reached the fire door
leading out onto the staircase and, clutching the handrail, she stumbled
downstairs, not knowing what she was doing or where she was going. She kept
going down as far as she could. She reached the ground floor, but kept going
downwards until she could go no further. She stopped for a moment and looked
around, surprised to find herself in the basement. Then a particularly violent
wave of pain hit her and she fell to her knees, retching.

After
a couple of minutes Anna got up shakily, and walked ahead – into the dark
winding corridors of the building. She needed to keep moving forward, moving
into the darkness. Maybe if she disappeared into the darkness, the pain would
disappear too. Anna had never been adventurous by nature, but, delirious with
pain, she stumbled on into a place she would not have had the slightest urge to
go near had she been in her right mind. Finally she found herself in the
farthest corner of the basement – there really was nowhere else to go. Anna
clawed at the brick wall in despair and a fresh wave of tears stained her face
as she cried out loud into the night. After a long while she turned to go and
her foot caught on something. She fell heavily, and for the briefest second it
appeared that the sharp pain in her hands and knees would silence the pain in
her belly, but no – it seemed that nothing could do that. And there it was –
once dull and throbbing, once sharp as glass.

Anna
felt around in the darkness for what had tripped her up. It was a large metal
ring. She tried to pick it up, but found that it was attached – to what turned
out to be a trapdoor in the basement floor. Anna worked out the perimeter of
the trapdoor, and moved to one side of it. Then, using all her strength, she
pulled at the ring. Eventually the door shifted and came loose. There was just
enough light for Anna to make out wooden steps leading into the blackness. Her
thoughts started to race in a bid to work out what might be down there – if the
muddled images and disconnected flashes that fired in Anna’s pain-addled brain
could be described as thoughts. Not knowing why or how, she descended into what
appeared to be a cellar. She had almost made it down when the pain increased
again to an unbearable pitch, causing her to cry out and fall from the final
step to the damp ground beneath, where she crawled a metre or so, then curled
up into a ball and lay clutching her abdomen.

When
Anna finally stopped crying, she listened to the beating of her own heart. But
then she thought she heard something else – far too close for comfort – the
sound of something moving in the dark. Anna lay as still as she could and
willed her heart to stop beating so loudly. The sound came again.
Rats
,
she thought. But then she heard what sounded like a cross between a growl and a
squeal – two-toned – low and guttural, yet at the same time high and
penetrating. It was like no sound she had ever heard, and, even though she had
wished for death a thousand times in the past weeks, Anna suddenly feared for
her life.

The
chilling feral sound came again. Before the cancer took over her life, Anna had
enjoyed watching nature programmes, and she was familiar with the sounds made
by even the strangest animals living in the remotest places on earth. But that
mewling, growling sound didn’t come from any animal on earth that Anna could
think of. The movement and the growl came again, and Anna started backing
towards the steps leading out of the cellar. She had almost reached the bottom
one when a guttural shriek froze the blood in her veins, causing every hair on
her body to stand on end. She felt a rush of air as something hurled itself at
her at unnatural speed, hitting her side hard enough to spin her round. The
force of the impact threw her across the cellar, and she screamed as something
sharp pierced her belly. Then she was lying against the cellar wall, paralysed
with fear, the creature that had attacked her sitting on her, what she assumed
to be its fangs buried in her abdomen.

Anna’s
eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and she could see the thing that was on
top of her, almost crushing the breath out of her. It had short, black, course
fur, rather like that of a tarantula, it was muscular like a Rottweiler, and
almost round in shape. Its appearance reminded Anna of the vile creatures in
the Hieronymus Bosch paintings she had seen in the Louvre as an art student.

As Anna prepared for death, the strangest thing happened. The creature
evidently still had its fangs – rather like those of a giant spider – embedded
in her abdomen, but Anna realised that not only did she no longer feel the
sharp pain from the fangs, but for the first time in weeks the pain in her
belly was bearable. In fact, the pain in her belly was slowly draining away –
fading away to nothing. Anna stared down her body at the thing that she assumed
was feeding on her, wondering whether it had injected her with some kind of
anaesthetising substance – like a mosquito or a vampire bat – so that it could
drain all the life out of her without her even being aware. If that was the
case, then so be it; her only regret being that her corpse would rot down here,
in the dark, with no one knowing what had happened to her, and no trace of her
left – not even a tombstone to state that she, Anna Weedon, had ever lived at
all. It would be as though she never even existed, never walked the earth for
thirty-nine years. But she could live with that – or die with that – as long as
there was no more pain.

As
Anna gave herself up completely to the creature, it suddenly withdrew its fangs
from her abdomen and looked at her. Its slanted red eyes glowed with an
unfathomable malevolence. Those eyes were more human than animal, and yet they
were neither. They bored into Anna’s mind, seeing every dark thought she’d ever
had, every sin she’d ever committed, every crime she’d ever contemplated. Those
eyes spoke of places darker and more horrifying than anything Anna could
imagine – anything, that is, except her pain.

“Thank
you,” Anna managed to utter as the creature shifted slightly, allowing her to
breathe more easily. It bared its massive, long, bone-coloured, slightly curved
fangs at Anna in what could have been a grin. “Are you going to eat me now?”
Anna asked, calm and strangely clear-headed now that the pain was gone.

“Not
you.”

Despite
her resignation to whatever fate the creature had in store for her, Anna jolted
in fear as the unspoken voice rang in her ears. She had never heard a voice
like that before – loud and jarring, while at the same time sounding as if it
came from a million miles away – from the bottom of hell itself. She stared at
the creature, but its hideous grinning mouth hadn’t uttered those words. “I
don’t want
you
,” the voice in Anna’s mind continued. “You’re already
being eaten – from the inside out. Why would I want to eat
you
?”

“Then
why did you inject the venom into me … the anaesthetic … whatever it was?”
asked Anna.

“I
didn’t inject anything into you. I just took the pain away.”

“Thank
you … but why?” Anna gazed into the red all-knowing, all-seeing eyes. She knew
from those eyes that the creature must be very old, extremely wise, and
exceedingly malign.

“You
disturbed me. I was asleep for a long time and you woke me. I knew I couldn’t
eat you – I could smell your disease a mile away. But I’m very hungry and you
have to feed me. I took the pain away so you can bring me others,”

“Others…?
You mean people?”

“Yes.”

“I
can’t bring you people.”

“You
have to.” The creature hissed at Anna through its fangs and increased the
pressure on her abdomen, making it hard for her to breathe.

“I
can’t.”

“You
will.”

“I’m
very grateful that you made the pain go away,” gasped Anna, “but I can’t bring
you people to eat. I wouldn’t even know how to, even if I wanted to.”

“You’ll
work it out, once the pain is back.”

Just
then, that familiar twinge in her abdomen and Anna cried out as the pain came
flooding back into her body.

“No,
please!”

“Very
well,” said the voice in Anna’s head, and she breathed a sigh of relief as the
pain dissipated. “But I need to eat. You will bring me someone tomorrow night
or the pain will be back and it will be worse than ever.”

“Okay,”
Anna promised.

Then,
as quickly as it had assaulted her, the creature leapt off her and merged with
the shadows in the cellar. In the instant before it disappeared from sight, Anna
noticed that it had two powerful muscular hind legs, two long ungainly arms
that it used to walk on some of the time, leaning on its knuckles – rather like
an ape – and two membranous wings that were folded along its sides, which it
also occasionally used for support while walking – rather like a bat. Anna got
up slowly and headed up the steps out of the cellar, eventually making her way
back to her bedsit. The first light of dawn was breaking over the horizon and
the dawn chorus was raising hell outside Anna’s tiny window.

Anna sat on her bed for a long time, wondering if she had imagined the whole
thing, but the glorious lack of pain in her belly dispelled any doubts that
there really had been a foul-smelling hideous demon in the cellar, which had
bitten her and taken her pain away. And told her to bring it people to eat.
Yeah, right… Wasn’t it more likely that the whole thing had been a nightmare –
the creature, the pain, the hospital visits, the cancer? Wasn’t it more likely
that she’d fallen asleep and dreamt the last few unbearable months in several
minutes of cruel REM sleep, her mind summing up her greatest fears and
conjuring them up in the night to torment her? If only that were true…

Anna
looked around the room and noticed how dusty it was, how dirty. She looked into
a mirror and winced, as a hundred-year-old woman with a sickly complexion, dark
rings under her eyes and long strands of greasy hair looked back at her.
Christ
.
She spent the rest of the morning cleaning the bedsit, having a bath, washing
her hair and putting on make-up. She was surprised at how good she felt despite
having had no sleep whatsoever. She looked in the mirror again and, satisfied
that she looked thirty-nine once more, she got dressed and went out in search
of food. She felt hungry without simultaneously feeling sick for the first time
in months, and, as she walked to her local Morrison’s for lunch and supplies,
she smiled as men eyed her up in the street – admiring her ample breasts and
long legs.

Anna spent the afternoon wandering around the local park, soaking up the
sunshine, delighting in life and lack of pain. For a moment she even thought
about phoning Frank – the love of her life, the man she had spent seven
wonderful months with until the growing pain and the constant hospital visits
and waiting – for referrals, for appointments, for results – had dampened her
sunny disposition, making her moody, grumpy and needy. Added to that the fact
that Anna’s inability to get work during the recession had shrunk her bank account
to nothing, and Frank had evaporated like the last breath of a dying man. His
departure had left Anna heartbroken and with no desire to live, the cancer
seizing this great opportunity to attack her grief-weakened body with extra
vigour and speed. But it would take a lot more than Anna’s undying love, and
desire to see him, to bring Frank back.

As
night fell, Anna remembered the creature’s words and started to fear that the
pain would return. She watched television for a while, but couldn’t concentrate
on anything, and decided to go to bed as normal. She was tired after a full day
of cleaning, shopping, walking, and the previous night’s lack of sleep started
to take its toll. She dozed off at around eleven pm, thinking that perhaps she
would be okay.

At
midnight, Anna awoke screaming. The pain in her abdomen was like being stabbed
over and over, as if a medieval executioner were thrusting a blunt saw into her
underbelly and twisting it slowly, only to pull it out again, and stab her a
few more times. Anna grabbed the bottle of painkillers by her bed and thrust a
couple of pills into her mouth, gagging as she tried to swallow them without
water. She staggered to the kitchen and turned on the cold water tap, not
waiting for it to run for a while, but drinking the water lukewarm and cloudy –
the liquid splashing over her face and chest.