For Those Who Dream Monsters Read Online Free

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