Andrea hated coming to these places with the kids.
It kept them happy for a few minutes but there was always the aftermath, the clean up. They’d leave the plastic table top looking as if there had been an incendiary device planted in the kid’s meals. The good thing was that someone else had been paid to clean up that particular mess so she felt justified in leaving it as it was. Not so the layer of ketchup and mayonnaise that her boys were now wearing over their clothes. She had taken them to the ladies room to clean them up, and had made them at least partially recognizable as children again.
But now Carlo was crying, he’d left the toy he had shown no interest in a just a few minutes ago, so now they would have to head back into the restaurant to find the stupid thing or else listen to him cry.
Great.
But the toy was there, on the table still, along with the uneaten half of their meals still waiting to be cleaned by busy staff who must have hated the sight of her by now. She popped it in her handbag and led her pack away to the exit before something else provoked one of them.
She bumped into a man at the doorway, the man who had been sitting on the table opposite them. She’d seen him, seen the look he gave her—the one that said well, thank you very much for ruining what had been a perfectly enjoyable ten minute lunch by bringing your brats here to spoil it for everyone else…
She used to give people that very same look in the days before the brats were her own. The guy had her deepest sympathy.
She thought she might say something to him, apologize for the kid’s behavior, perhaps even strike up a little conversation. He was good looking enough, even though he seemed worn down. He’d probably driven halfway across the state and she’d ruined his break. Poor bastard.
“Hi, I’m sorry if-” she began.
Then she saw that this somehow wasn’t the same man who had been sitting opposite her. His features were the same, although he had a different pallor. His skin looked suddenly taut, stretched across his face as if he was pulling it back, the result of a swift and abortive skin tuck. The expression on that no longer handsome face had gone missing as well; it was as if all the things she had seen in him earlier, all those little tics of personality that people could never hide, they were all gone. He was walking oddly as well; as if it were something he was doing for the first time.
Flirting suddenly didn’t seem like such a good idea.
But he smiled at her. And just for a moment Andrea got a glimpse, a hint no more, of what he really was. She pulled the kids to her, smothered them in a sudden hug that all three of them protested. The guy just carried on smiling and didn’t say a word, passed through the door and made his way to the parking lot.
Andrea watched him and only left the restaurant when she felt certain that he’d gone.
After all, you could never be too careful these days.
Jonathan Templar has written horrible things for a variety of publishers. His recent stories include the acclaimed short story ‘The Meat Man’ for Cutting Block Press’s charitable anthology Horror for Good and ‘Basher’ for the shared world anthology World’s Collider from Nightscape Press.
He can be found hiding from the sunlight at www.jonathantemplar.com.
Vermin
Blaise Torrance
Amy’s monster-hunting partner was not a grizzled old gunslinger, a moody chain-smoking exorcist or a sexy, tattooed woman in leather trousers and high heels. Her partner was not even a dog. She’d pleaded for one, but her parents were not keen on the thought of a hairy, smelly dog crashing around their renovated farmhouse while they were at work.
She’d talked them round to a cat. That was acceptable, cats were small and quiet and it was a sweet picture that fit in with their new country lifestyle, their daughter sprawled on the sheepskin rug in front of the original eighteenth century fireplace with a pampered, fluffy cat dozing nearby.
“I want a stray cat,” Amy had grimly insisted, declining the offer of a white Persian kitten bred by a family friend, or her pick of the litter from the sweet-faced calico cat that lived in the village post office. Her parents had given in and drove her into the city to a dark concrete building that smelled of urine and echoed with barks and the clashing of dogs throwing themselves against their wire mesh runs whenever a visitor walked by. That was where Amy found Sleet.
Sleet was not a big cat, but she was a ferocious hunter. She’d had to be, her stray mother had been run over when the litter were still young, and most of the bewildered kittens had starved to death without their mother bringing them scraps of kebab meat and dropped hamburgers scavenged from the streets. Only one had survived, a dark grey, yellow-eyed kitten that had stumbled across a city rat almost by mistake while blundering futilely around the empty warehouse where she’d been born. The rat had left her with the first of many scars when she didn’t kill it cleanly, ripping open the side of her face when she sank her teeth into her broken-backed prey. The kitten had soon learned how to batter her prey about first to leave them dizzy and exhausted before going in for the killing bite to the back of the skull. She’d learned how to stalk fat pigeons and ambush mean city rats as they left a rustling nest full of helpless young, and once even killed a half-grown urban fox in a spat behind a fast food restaurant.
But the kitten was pragmatic and took easier meals wherever she found them, tearing open bin bags dumped in alleys to nose through the fragrant contents and scavenging takeaways dropped in the streets by drunken men spilling out of pubs and clubs. And when she investigated a saucer of cat food left in an alley, she had found herself trapped, spayed and up for adoption at an animal shelter.
The shelter staff were not overly hopeful that she would find a home. The cat was hostile and suspicious and scarred and had clearly been feral from birth. They would keep her for a month, and then if she had not been rehomed, she would be put down and her cage freed up for another stray.
At the shelter, Amy drifted ahead of her parents who were touring the cages with a member of staff who dutifully trotted out the quirks and histories of the more adoptable residents. She passed by cage after cage containing fat, fluffy cats that pressed their heads against the cage front hoping for a caress, pets that had been dumped by apologetic owners who were moving house or expecting babies or didn’t want to pay sudden vet bills. She could have loved any one of them, but love was not what she needed from her cat.
All of the cages had a plastic wallet at the front with handwritten information inside about the cats’ ages, temperaments, health problems and history. Amy idly read them as she went, stopping at one cage that had very little information. The cat’s name was Mittens, she was female, she had been found as a stray, she was approx eighteen months and she was not good with children, dogs or other pets.
She peered inside. A lean, soot-grey cat was moving restlessly about the cage like flowing water, her eyes glowing a hot yellow like acid and the rest of her fading in and out of the shadowy interior. As she moved, Amy saw bare ropes of scar tissue beneath the dark fur, the legacy of hundreds of alley spats and hunts gone wrong. The cat bared her needle-thin teeth in a threatening hiss, and Amy pointed. “That one,” she said.
Her parents hopefully showed her the other cats they had short-listed on the walk around the shelter, cats that were clownish and friendly with pretty markings or tragic stories. Amy regarded them all in sullen silence until her parents resignedly paid the adoption fee and took the grey cat, holding the carrier gingerly at arm’s length. They discussed names on the way home.
“She’s certainly not much of a Mittens with claws like that on her,” her father said on the way home, eyeing the puffed-up scratches where the cat had got his hand through the wire carrier door. “How about Freddy Kreuger?”
“Snowball’s a nice name,” her mother suggested vaguely, probably still thinking about the white Persian kitten.
“She’d be a very dirty snowball,” Amy said, staring out of the window. The skies and streets and high rise flats they pass
ed were the same dull slatey colour as the cat.
“Something grey,” her father said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “How about Smokey or Stormy?”
“Shadow,” her mother contributed triumphantly.
Sleet came up at some point and that grey mixture of slushy snow and dirty rain seemed to fit better than any of the other suggestions did, and so that became the cat’s name. Sleet wailed and growled all the way home like a thing possessed, hawking up deep, guttural snarls from the depths of her narrow little chest. Amy saw her parents exchanging concerned looks. When they arrived home in the late afternoon, Sleet was taken straight to the garage as the shelter had advised keeping her in one room at first while she calmed down. Amy helped to set out saucers of water and cat food, then her father opened the carrier and sprinted comedically for the door, slamming it behind him as if the small cat was about to chase him down and eat him.
“Phew,” he said. “I think I need a drink after that ordeal.”
They left the cat to settle down overnight and went to The Green Dragon for dinner. The Green Dragon was a nearby pub catering mostly to people like Amy’s family, city people who had been charmed with the idea of living the country life and went there to drink real ale and eat rabbit fricassee prepared by the Michelin-starred chef. Amy picked at her child-sized portion of rare-breed sausages and heritage potato mash before going out to the pub playground. There was one other child out there, a girl of her own age in a Tinkerbell t-shirt. Amy eyed the cartoon fairy moodily and sat on top of the climbing frame, her knees pulled up to her chest.
The pub sign swung and creaked gently in the breeze. The Pearbolt Wyrm was the local legend, a dragon so large that its wings had blotted out the sun. It had terrorised the local villages until a priest had tricked the beast into following him into the natural caves and tunnels that riddled the hill overlooking the village. Then depending on which version of the legend was read, he’d either converted the dragon to Christianity or simply filled in all the caves big enough to let it back out again, and either way, the dragon had lived peacefully under the hill ever since.
Amy worried at the ragged skin around her nails with her teeth. Her parents loved these kinds of quaint local legends. Whenever friends came round to visit, they proudly pointed out the rowan tree on the village green, its branches strung with bells and chains, the iron horseshoes set into the crumbling stone walls about the village border, the way the old cottages were built with the front and back door in line to let the devil pass through. They went to the spring fayre and enthused while children danced around the maypole in costumes, weaving green ribbons to lock away winter for another year. They bought the wee folk’s bread from the bakery, a local speciality cake that was supposed to keep fairies away.
And they didn’t believe any of it. It was part of their new country life, just like the vegetable plot in the garden, the chicken coop that was still empty, and Conker, the shiny brown pony they’d bought for Amy in hopes she would blossom into the kind of countrified daughter they wanted, a boisterous girl with a thick chestnut plait the same colour as her pony’s coat, thundering about the countryside with her horsey friends and filling the house with rosettes won at local gymkhanas.
“You never go near that pony,” her father had said irritably after realising just how much he was paying to keep the picturesque Conker grazing in the field behind the house. “I thought you loved horses.”
“I’m scared of him,” Amy said. “I think he should go back to the stables.”
It was a lie and she had been thrilled when her father had triumphantly led Conker into the yard on her birthday, but better to send Conker back where some other girl would love him and he would once again be fat and happy instead of the miserable, nervy creature he had become, stamping and squealing at every rustle in his straw, flinching at the sight of the saddle where burrs and twists of barbed wire were so often carefully tucked into hidden crevices.
It was getting late and the sun had set before Amy’s parents came out of the pub, flushed with firelight and real ale. When they got back home, Amy looked around the garage door. She couldn’t see Sleet anywhere.
“She’s probably hiding,” her mother said. “Do you think we should have put butter on her paws?”
“I think that’s an old wives’ tale,” her father said, and belched. “Oops, ‘scuse me. It’s time for bed, Amy. Your cat will be fine.”
Amy went to bed. She lay there tense and miserable in the dark, chewing at her chapped lips until she tasted the bitter tang of blood, flinching at every gunshot creak and pained groan from the old house’s contracting timbers. When she heard her parents spilling into bed with drunken giggles and squeals, she sat up and turned on her bedside lamp, taking the rusty iron scissors out from her drawer. She felt a little better holding them tight.
Her parents couldn’t help. She had tried telling them about the things that crept into the house and tormented her. They were the reason why she was doing so poorly at school when they shredded her homework and kept her awake through the night, why she had lost interest in drawing or playing or reading because they ruined her toys and tore up her books, why she fell asleep straight after school because it was the only safe time for her to rest. Her parents had taken a look at Amy, pale and pinched with bitten nails and red swollen eyes, underweight for her age and always sick with one thing or another, and taken her to see a doctor. The doctor had prescribed her anxiolytics and sleeping pills, and offered them a referral to a child psychiatrist.
Amy had looked up mental disorders online and decided it was best if she stopped seeing little monsters that no one else saw. Even the proof—the dismembered soft toys, the dog shit carefully tucked into clothes pockets, the scratches on Conker’s rump—all worked against her. She would be considered a disturbed child who ruined her own toys and even harmed her own pony.
It was nearly time… Amy slid out of bed and padded to the door. The fairies would be pleased. They liked it when she ran.
She made her way down to the garage in silence without turning on any lights. The cat was in her carrier, but tried to bolt when Amy went to shut the door. Amy managed to seize the cat about her middle and Sleet writhed, rolling in her hands like smoke, sinking in her teeth and bringing up her back legs to gouge at Amy’s bare wrists with her claws, the way she would try to disembowel large prey. Amy held on grimly as she wrestled the cat back into the carrier. Then she threw a sheet over it and carried it back up her room, shutting the door behind her. She sat in the middle of the bed with the carrier in front of her and waited for them to come.
First came the scufflings around the corners of the room, in all those cracks and crevices that her parents thought made the house look rustic and lived-in. Then came the spiky and elongated shadows cast across her bedroom floor as they clustered eagerly outside the windows, scratching softly at the glass. Inside the carrier, Sleet had gone silent and still.
Amy bit down on a scream from long practice as she saw the first fairy climb up over the end of the bed. If she screamed, she would wake her parents and would need to get back under the covers, scissors hidden, ready to pretend it was only a bad dream.
The fairies were intrigued. Amy was holding the carrier close, which meant it was important to her. She had tried to keep her most valued possessions close at first, tucking them into bed at night to try to save them from being destroyed. They had sought them out especially for that—the sagging plush pony she’d had since birth, the book of beautifully illustrated fairytales and the photo album of friends she had left behind after the move—and ruined them all.
The fairies came closer, chittering with excitement. They were stunted and deformed things with mouths packed full of needle teeth like deep-sea fish, wings like tattered dried leaves, smelling of damp earth and fungus. The black, oildrop eyes were bright with malicious curiosity as they crept closer, watching her shiver, hoping to see her wet the bed again or make her scream so they could watch her paren
ts burst in and see her lie to them, knowing they could not help.
Amy waited. They were so close she could make out their individual deformities even by the weak moonlight. One had tiny red and white fungi blossoming from a burst eye. Another was trailing pale white roots from some vine winding through the bony rack of its ribcage. A third’s dry, insectile abdomen was split open and lined with soft white fuzz from a cocoon spun by the parasite living inside it.
Beneath the sheet, Amy undid the latch with trembling hands and threw open the door.
Sleep leapt out, small and compact and spitting with fury. She tore through the room like a bottled hurricane, bouncing from door to window to wall, and when she failed to find an escape, she turned back on the fairies as they panicked and tried to scatter. She battered them across the room with stunning blows from her paws, crunching through tiny skulls with a killing bite that cracked them cleanly open like beetles. When they leapt on her all at once, she rolled as sleekly as a seal onto her back, raking them with powerful kicks from her hind claws that ripped the small, twisted bodies open.
Sleet was a quiet killer, like all cats. Aside from the soft, smothered growls in her throat as she threw off the swarming fairies, she did not make a sound, landing on muffled paws as she twisted and turned mid-leap, pouncing on the little monsters as they fled. Amy watched breathlessly, unable to see anything much except the silhouette of Sleet moving like a living, rippling shadow through the darkened room.
When the cat had stopped moving, she turned the light on. The fairies were all dead.
It was impossible to say how many fairies Sleet had killed. Many of them were in bits. They were strong, Amy knew, as hard and twisted as if they were carved from a thorn tree’s wood, but they were brittle too and they shattered beneath the cat’s silent assault.
Use Enough Gun (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 3) Page 34
