Anthony Horowitz: The Puffin Book of Horror Stories

He bought a hi-fi magazine on the way out of the shop, and there was a freebie stuck to the cover with a bit of Sellotape. A Hi-fi Casebook pencil sharpener. It was clever. A little plastic compact disc with the sharpener on the other side of the spindle hole. On the way home he never lifted his head out of his precious hi-fi magazine once! Typical. He's just as much of a consumer-head as everyone else!

He wouldn't let me whistle on the bus, but when we got off at Brixton Hill I tried to get the Key-Finder to work.

So I whistled. I whistled at it, whistled in it, practically took the thing apart. Nothing.

Dad got mad, which was really ironic considering all the fuss he'd been making about the thing, said he'd a mind to go all the way back to Soho and give the man his batteries back.

I wasn't that bothered. After all, it had been free, it looked pretty and I could still put my keys on it if I wanted to.

But I had another idea, another use for it.

'Are you going to chuck it?' asked Dad as we turned into our drive, past the dustbins.

I shook my head.

Dad stopped and turned on his heels. A single finger was lifted.

I'm warning you, are you listening, young lady? You leave Dylan alone, he's got a hard enough life as it is trying to survive in the Brixton Hill gardens with all that other nonsense you've fixed on the poor little devil's collar!'

I just smiled, politely, and then shoved the key tag deep into ray coat pocket. Dad could be such a pain.

Dylan was scratching himself on the porch mat as we walked up the path.

The front door opened. Mum (or Mary) stood in the doorway.

She didn't look good. I sighed.

Dad (or Jim) was making caustic comments in the living-room about how the Christmas booze seemed to be prematurely lowering its level. The surface line in the large bottle of Gordon's, which sat on the Habitat trolley, was certainly nearing the bottom.

Even I noticed that.

But then again, Mum was depressed.

I spent my time out in the kitchen trying to make the key tag work, but it wouldn't give out so much as a peep. Dylan had struggled into the kitchen too.

Mum and Dad were rowing again and Dylan wanted to get out of their way.

I didn't blame him.

Dad was making the usual fuss about how she had to pull herself together, she'd a family (and him) to look after, just because Edith's number had come up we didn't have to spend the entire Christmas in mourning.

Then he threatened to re-convert the grannie-flat which we'd had built next to the garden shed. He'd always threatened to make it into an outdoor aquarium.

Ah well.

And my new freebie didn't work.

Dylan purred smugly down at me from the top of the boiler. His head was lowered from the weight of his great collection of Cat Consumables. Mum called him our 'Consumer Kitty'.

I attached the key tag to his collar along with the other freebies:

his Katto-Kipper personalized name disc

plastic Burger King bun

miniature Coca-Cola bottle

Holiday Inn room tag

MHI luggage label

Kellogg's Munchkin Man

and a Dr Who Energizer ring which wrapped around his neck.

That had been a special 'give-away' at the Arndale Shopping Centre in Croydon; he liked that best of all.

Dylan opened his sleepy eyes and stretched his paws and shook his new toy. Then, with a loud miaow, probably a 'thank you', he made for the kitchen door. His freebies crashed into the cat flap on his way out.

In the living-room they were still rowing.

Dad's voice was getting really loud.

Outside came the rumble of an approaching car. I suddenly had a bad feeling.

I heard Mum's glass smash at almost the same time as we heard the screech of brakes out in the front road.

There was an awful short tangled wail. The kind of sound cats make when they scrap. Then silence.

I heard Dad yell, 'Oh my God, no!' Dad can be 50 dramatic.

Yesterday was miserable: black and solemn.

Dad blamed me. He was really mad. But it was good of him to dig Dylan a nice neat grave out in the back garden.

He kept muttering about how there had been far too much on his collar, and how the whistling keyring had been the final straw. Just slowed him down, so when he'd run across the street he was an easy target.

Mum told him to shut up, that he'd upset 'the child'.

'The child' indeed. I just ignored her.

We put Dylan in the soft soil where Mum had planted the Hobson's Garden Centre roses, just in front of the grannie-flat.

We buried him with full honours, all his toys intact. I'd wanted the key-ring back, just as a souvenir, but Mum was almost sick when Dad tried to find it. It was like picking a favourite strawberry out of a collapsed flan.

She called me a funny word. I didn't know what it meant, but I didn't like the sound of it at all.

A ghoul?

You can go off parents.

Sleep was very difficult that night, in fact everything was a funny blur. The air in my bedroom seemed thick and it was difficult even to breathe.

I opened the dormer window and looked down into the garden.

It was dark and cold, but winter clear outside.

A grey cloud passed over, and the grass in front of the grannie-flat reflected moonglow once more.

The garden shone.

A newly heaped pile of topsoil marked the spot. I had scratched Dylan's name on a coke can, and fixed it in the ground, a temporary tombstone.

The TV offer peacock wind-chime which hung within the window-frame sang softly as a gentle wind got up.

A last goodnight to Dylan.

I shivered and scrambled back to bed.

I must have forgotten to close the window because I remember the sounds well. So bright. Icy sharp.

There was the rustle and flutter of feathers against branches.

A low warbling sound, and then a single hoot.

It was our owl, and he had come to speak to Dylan.

He'd startled me. Through half-closed eyes I watched as the shadows of the branches shimmered across the bedroom wall. Tangling into twisted claws.

Dylan would sit for hours on the window-ledge. The owl came often. Dad said that it was unusual to find a bird like that in Brixton.

Dylan and the owl were friends. But now he'd have to find somebody else.

I pulled the sheet up tight to my neck, eyelids heavy with sleep.

There was a high-pitched whistle outside.

The owl was preparing to fly from the tree.

It shook its feathers and then let out a strange kind of 'hoot'.

And then another… it was really scary.

Almost a whistle.

Just after that I heard a strangled muffled growl, far away, from deep beneath the still cold earth.

I sank and sank, down and down, into the softness of dream.

My eyes were not quite closed. Not yet. But I knew.

From the distance the owl cried out once more. I couldn't do a thing. Couldn't even move. I didn't know if I was awake or dreaming.

There was a familiar scratching on the bark of the tree outside my window. A slow and perhaps painful kind of shifting.

The shadows of branch claws trembled across the wall as something pulled itself along a main bough.

There was a shape framed within the window, dead eyes that glowed, and then the soft plop as it dropped from the sill down on to the floor.

I heard a gasp, the momentary 'puff of the eiderdown as though something heavy had landed on the bed.

Outside the branches rustled. Twigs cracked.

I became aware of a gentle repetitious pumping at the bottom of the bed, and then a warm comforting vibration in the small of my back like an electric motor.

I was afraid. At first.

But I'm a big girl now.

Mum was very excited. 'Hysterical,' Dad said. She kept asking him over and over about the white and ginger hairs at the bottom of the bed. He told her not to be so silly and to 'lay off the sauce'.