Rabbit Cage

The package had finally arrived and I opened it with excitement – I was so happy for my bunny, the cage he had was too small for the so-called dwarf, he’d outgrown it so much it was almost bordering cruel to keep him in the damn thing. That’s the thing with pet shops isn’t it? You can never trust what they say; our female dwarf rabbit became as big as a cat and turned out to be a male.
Moshi was his name, a big fat white rabbit with big floppy lop ears and despite what they say about rabbits and carrots he hated them! Couldn’t coax him to eat a carrot for his life!
Poor thing…
I got my husband to open the package with his craft knife as I didn’t want to slice myself to pieces, it was perfect, but we wasn’t quite ready just yet to get the rabbit to move into his new home, so we propped the cage up against the wall of the utility room until we had the time.
Later on, just before bed-time I decided to move the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer when I saw a shadow moving near the cage. The cage rocked slightly, but I shrugged it off as a breeze that was getting in through the backdoor as it was picking up a wind outside.
I continued to move the clothes and then I heard the cat shriek and run off the washing machine and out the cat flap into the garden. Odd, she never goes out after dark, I thought. I decided to open the backdoor and ask Lissy (our cat) what was wrong? Then I heard a loud crash, looked behind me and saw that the cage gate had opened wide and seemed to have moved slightly out of place. Wearily I went back in the house through the backdoor, constantly keeping my eye on the cage, I saw more shadows around the cage and on in the inside, but I thought perhaps it was my imagination? Perhaps it was only my shadow and the holly tree outside in the moonlight reflecting?
I locked the backdoor and left Lissy outside, she could always come in the way she went out if she wanted to. I heard the sound of a low growl as I went past the cage, it weirded me out. I straightened the cage the best I could, but decided to turn the cage gate towards the wall to prevent it popping open again. As I did this, I felt a cold icy mist around me, but there was nothing there. I also felt something touch my arm as I shut the cage, like something was stopping me. Terrified I half ran out of the utility room to bed and told my husband what had happened.
“No more horror stories for you tonight I think” he said, and took my Stephen King novel away from me and turned the light out, kissed me and laid down to sleep.
Needless to say I couldn’t rest, but eventually I drifted off into a sleep.
I dreamed and in this dream I was compelled to go back to the utility room and when I did, I saw that the backdoor had been opened and the cat was mewling outside crazily and the rabbit hutch shredded on one side and ripped open on the other. I saw blood everywhere, I walked closer and closer to the hutch to see what had happened, but just as I opened the lid of the hutch to peer down, I woke up!
It was morning and I was greeted with a kiss by my husband as always. I told him I had a nightmare and he said to me he wasn’t surprised with all those horror stories and what happened before I went to bed last night.
I said to him “I’ll go and make coffee then”. He simply replied “that would be great”.
I went to the kitchen as usual and saw I had left the utility room door opened. I went to shut it, but noticed the cage was wide opened again and had turned around to face the back door, the door of which was opened!
As I gasped at the sight, I saw another shadow and low laughs, then the cage shut itself.
I stood stunned at the cage and my husband came down and saw me. He kissed me again and said that he would feed the rabbit this morning as I am working myself up about this cage.
I couldn’t move, I had a deep grinding sick feeling low down in my abdomen and an ache of concern at what could have happened? Was my dream real in some surreal way?
My husband came into the kitchen, his face unchanged, he directed me to a chair and sat down next to me and said “Moshi’s dead”. I instantly stood up and started crying.
My hands were in my face and I was marching on the spot with tears streaming down my face. “Oh no, my poor baby, he has been ripped to shreds, it’s the cage, the cage has killed my rabbit, oh I can’t bear to see the blood”.
My husband took me in his arms and tried his best to comfort me.
“Hey, hey, hey, don’t be silly, the cage didn’t do this, there was no blood. Looked like he died peacefully in his sleep”; He said, stroking my hair.
“He did”? I asked, looking for more reassurance.
He nodded.
“I have to go see him, it’s so strange he is too young and showed no signs of being ill”. Just as I went to go and see for myself, my husband pulled me back and looked at me firmly and with a voice of stern seriousness said; “That would not be a good idea”.
Quizzically I looked at him. “Why? You said there was no blood”?
“He is in that stereotypical watership down pose, love; I don’t want you seeing that”. From the expression on my husband’s face, I didn’t want to find out whether he was telling the truth or not. So I sat back down, stunned.
“I am going to destroy that cage, May”. He said and I just nodded.
The cage was smashed in and sent to the landfill, on the way back my husband had an accident. Nothing fatal, but it was like they were saying…
“We’ll be back”…
Story inspired by true events but with a fantasy twist.
Because I felt guilty about the new rabbit cage and then two days after buying it the rabbit died, I felt something bad about the cage before he died. I sense something uneasy about it – I have some kind of clairvoyance skills, I have very spiritual leanings and I just sensed something bad about the package when I opened it. My imagination ran riot about the cage, particularly when the rabbit died two days later and the rabbit was meant to have been moved into the cage (he never was, I started to imagine that there was a portal in the cage and that some kind of demon came out and harmed my rabbit – but that’s the mind of a writer isn’t it? We are often irrational creatures.

Spectral Vampire

I tiptoed through the shadows, stalking him and he didn’t know I was there. Light-footed, my steps traced the line of his footsteps down the darkened pathway towards the car-park; gently I called to him, nothing more than a whisper in the breeze of the night and he turned towards me, he didn’t see me at first, but then, just like a cat, I stealthily approached him and made my excuses to ask for directions to keep his guard down.
He came to me and leaned towards me, nodding at the map in my hands and pointing helpfully, but all I was interested in was clenching my thirst and hunger and grabbing at him around his neck and pulling him close to me. After I was sure he was in my grasp I did so and dropping the map that was in my hands I bit into his neck for the warm sweet juices that flowed within. I barely drank away half of his life until we were disturbed by something brash, violent and fast, coming out from the car-park at us with beams of painful light. The old jeep of my enemy Neil Porter swerved up behind my victim and ran out towards me, I instantly tried to flee the scene but he had a new weapon, something I wasn’t aware he had – a crossbow and it hit into me through the back and into my heart and before I knew it I was standing next to my broken shell, seeing it bleeding to death alongside my victim and my enemy cleaning up both the mess he made and the mess I made.
I was confused at first; watching him packing the bodies away into the back of his jeep, washing the blood on the car-park floor and praying for our souls.
I don’t know where I went after that, I don’t know if spirits sleep, I just went and came back again, nothing filling the gaps; this went on for a long time, each time I would arrive at the scene I last left, each time I would arrive as hungry as the night before and each time I would vanish into the ether of the unknown again and again and again.
I would like to tell you about the first night that I came back.
I came back to the car-park, confused at the new night, wondering where I went and how I got here again. Why here? That question never got answered. I walked through the car-park and across the pedestrian crossing and into the park, I sat on a bench for a while, collecting my thoughts. A few people walked passed me, but no one seemed to be able to see me, someone nearly sat on me that’s how I know. When this happened I felt a deep loss, a sense I had lost my self somehow, I knew I wasn’t whole anymore, I saw that yesterday, but I had hoped that death would have been kinder to me somehow.
My hunger grew to an unbearable level, standing up from the bench I walked further into the park and had hoped to go through to the gates at the other end of the park that lead me to the town’s most night friendly amenities, but I was stopped by some peculiar young girl, twenty something, sniffing the air, smiling and dancing like she was chasing butterflies and coming straight towards me. Right into the jaws of death, so it seemed.
Confused I watched her with both bafflement and caution as she laughed and spoke out loud to herself “Oh the lovely smell” and reaching up into the air trying to catch something invisible even to me! The hunger in me made me retch; I tried to ignore it, because I was dead right? Dead people don’t need to eat do they? So why have I got this hunger? Is this my eternal punishment? Am I in Hell? But the pain got too much; I took a chance that perhaps I can still feed in my spectral form? So, as her head was stretched up looking high around her I put my arm around her waist and lunged into her throat but I couldn’t feed on her blood, her body writhed in agony in my grasp, screaming, but her blood wasn’t soothing my hunger. I held her whilst she screamed, cried and bleed to death. Then I knew, I saw her life leave her and as I sniffed for her suffering, I breathed a little of her into myself and my hunger lessened. Her spirit was too fast for me to catch once I realised what it was that I now needed. How beautiful the feeling of peace was, when I breathed in her soul.
Shortly after a man came into the park and saw the girl lying in a pool of blood, he ran to her to see if she was OK and tried to raise an alarm, but I went to him and my scent side-tracked him from his alarm call as he stopped in mid-sentence and started to sniff the air dreamily around himself. I placed my hand over his nose and mouth and whispered comforting things to him whilst I suffocated him to death. He didn’t see me, he only felt and heard me. He died within minutes of oxygen deprivation and I kissed his life out of him and felt in paradise.
That’s when I knew that vampires don’t find peace. That’s when I knew that being a vampire I am truly eternal and that’s when I knew that nothing can be explained simply.

Vampire specter poem

I sing with the whispers of the night
My head is raised to the moon
I live in a world of darkness
I am its flower and I am in full bloom
Gentlemen come to me like moths to my nectar
I drain them of life
I’m the vampire specter
I was once like him with bones and flesh
Until one night my life was threshed from my shell
By a hunter who wanted me to return to Hell
So now, I like a ghost, dwell in the everlasting night
Bringing mortals to the same plight