Bump bump bump against the back door.
Out of the darkness of the garden, beyond the windows, the lump of a head bobbed with reddish hair and streaked with earth nudges the pane in the lower half of the door. An appalling snout and a pair of pink eyes briefly press forward, then rear away as the thing at the door rises onto her hind legs.
A bristly underside swipes the glass and reveals a crop of wrinkled nubs. They surround two plump human breasts. The swine’s milk is black.
Tom turns from it, his scream building like a sneeze that won’t break. Only to be confronted by a second intruder, its horrid face grinning inside the house.
Shaggy with white hair and up on two legs, the stringy horror staggers before the broken stove, its brown claws scratching lino. The bumpy knuckle of its face whinnies.
They are people. They are animals.
‘Look away. Don’t look at them,’ Tom says to Gracey. She’s standing by the kitchen table, dressed in her school uniform. Behind her, where the hall once was, a black abyss with wet brick walls plummets to oblivion. Inside it, a fearful thing stamps its hooves.
Tom tries to gather his daughter into his arms to protect her from the sight of what grunts at the kitchen door and at what totters inside the kitchen, but the little girl remains out of his reach. His numb legs only manage to stump a step before paralysing.
When he looks at his feet, most of the kitchen floor is missing. Down there, in the gaps, dried-out cats slither between exposed joists.
Without eyes, Gracey can’t see her daddy anyway. And her mum is no help. Fiona’s going out in her best dress and highest heels and she’s never looked better. From the doorway she blows a kiss to Gracey and says, ‘When I get back we’ll go down together. It’s like a sleepover. In a cave. We won’t be coming out again. It’s so exciting. There’ll be new mummies and daddies for you and one of them has a long tail.’
The back door clicks open.
The pig clop-clops into the house on all fours, soaking the air with a stench of straw soaked in urine and rich dung fresh-dropped.
Grunting and squealing, his visitors gather to him. Tom can do no more than tremble before his daughter’s eyeless sockets. Gracey laughs.
Discoloured teeth break his flesh. Like breadsticks, two of his fingers snap away inside the pig’s hot mouth.
Only then does he recover his ability to scream.
* * *
A rhythmic thump-thump-thump . Outside. Outside his closed eyes and faraway mind. Thump-thump-thump . Outside but slowly drawing him from this awful sleep.
Tom rises from the tugging swell of the vision. His last memory of the hell he suffered is of wet bones in a kitchen turned abattoir. But the hold of the dream is mercifully thinning. The nightmare’s devouring anguish and the acute sensations of pain ease as he shivers half-awake.
Birthed by horror, his eyelids snap apart in a face tracked with salt. He’s vaguely aware of being inside the bedroom.
Uncovered to the waist, dirty and depleted, he’s alone, lying half on the bed. Wet sheets have lined the skin of his face like brands.
Bewilderment ensues until he can recall coming into the bedroom and drinking a lot of rum. After … After he put the skull, cat and bottle inside newspaper and carrier bags, removed them from the house and dumped them in the boot of his car. Then he came upstairs. Called Fiona. Twice. There was no answer and his calls were unreturned.
He must have dropped off.
Outside the room, sharp claws now grate brick as something pulls itself up the exterior wall. A shadow passes the window on its way to the roof. A stray foot knocks the window and produces the chink of bone on glass.
Downstairs, the back door handle is tugged up and down, frantically, from outside the kitchen.
Tom peers at the ceiling. Above it, comes a scampering across roof tiles, back and forth as if an animal scratches for access. A roof-tile dislodges and slides and only the distant smash of masonry on the patio below jerks Tom fully into his mind.
What is the time?
A swinish scream. Outside the house at ground level, a porcine monstrousness is shrieking with fury. The old handle of the kitchen door rattles, bangs down, squeals up. Up and down, up and down.
Tom’s scalp shrinks like a rubber cap. He shuffles across his wife’s empty side of the bed to get away from the windows. He knocks the empty bottle of rum from the side table and it rolls, drops, bumps the floor.
Above the ceiling, the thing on the roof clears its muzzle, then issues a dry cough that soon evolves into a squeal that Tom finds entirely too human in tone.
He’s off the bed but swaying, then pitching sideways until his shoulder butts a wall. He’s still drunk and remembers knocking back half the bottle. Blinking furiously to rid his mind of incoherence and the viscous qualities of the terrible dream, he passes to the open door and the landing. Swaying, he listens. From his workbench, he seizes a hammer.
Bang! Against the back door downstairs; a weight thrown upon the barrier. The door holds. The pig bleats in frustration. Sharp feet scrabble from one side of the roof to the other.
Tom’s head whips from the direction of one noise to another. Soon, he grins and descends the staircase.
Like a warrior about to enter battle, he’s ready for them. From fear, desperate courage grows. An inner heat beats his pipes like hot water. A man abandoned and alone but laughing madly, barefoot amidst holed floors, he turns round in the hall, arms extended from his sides, the hammer fisted. ‘Come on, you bastards!’
At the back door, the pig must have heard his challenge. Its rampage intensifies and the bleats growl demoniacally.
Tom staggers into the kitchen. He considers unlatching the door. He needs to swing the hammer into the head of the determined swine. Medea : he wants her broken apart. Yet he pauses as a modicum of self-preservation pleads a case for caution. With their charms removed from the building, their access is denied, so why invite them in? ‘You can’t get in!’
He retreats to the hall, striding backwards to spare his ears from the pig’s cacophony, until one of his feet plants itself inside the nylon seat of Gracey’s toy pushchair.
The noise of plastic wheels, spinning across floorboards, accompanies his fall. He goes down hard, the hammer thrown clear, and his head strikes the floor then bounces. His mind whites to opacity.
Clutching the back of his skull, he groans and waits for the dizzy spell to recede. And only when coherence edges back, does he realise that the night has fallen silent. Beyond the back door of the kitchen and upon the roof, not so much as a muted bleat, or the scrape of a single claw, can be heard.
Raising himself, he peers about until his scrutiny lingers upon the black hole he broke into the hallway floor earlier. Around the dusty abyss, the dry petals of his daughter’s blood lie scattered.
* * *
After the Moots’ failed assault, Tom’s thoughts inch back to the misery of Gracey. And before the last of the alcohol and adrenalin drains from his system, he knows he must call his wife.
He steadies himself and makes a silent oath. In the next few minutes, if he learns that the worst eventuality has befallen his child, he will go next door before grief obliterates him. It will be his turn to invade a home. Once inside, he will destroy anything living, in whatever form it assumes, with a selection of his tools, repurposed for murder. If he finds two old people returned to human form, they will be rent and smashed. If he comes upon them whilst conjured into their dreadful other selves, and possessing such awful strength and agility as they do, then he will wreak as much damage upon them as he can, before they end him. Without his little Gracey in this world, his own death will be a swift mercy.
Perched upon the end of the bed, Tom grips his phone, closes his eyes and swallows.
This time Fiona answers.
‘It’s me. How is she? I need to know, Fi’.’
The sound of his voice may have made her tearful. Or she could be forgiven for being unable to feel anything save grief at such a time. ‘She’s lost a lot of blood. There’s an infection. They’re … pumping her full of antibiotics. But her eye … gone.’ Then Fiona completely breaks down.
As does Tom, many miles away from his wife.