“We’ll take him,” John said. “If that’s all right with you. He’s adorable. He’s perfect.”

  “Yes, he has been perfected.” Miss Aiken pulled out a folder from beneath her desk. Her eccentric way of speaking continued as she worked through the papers—

  “He’s prepared for the world,” she said, “as he has been fully born. His name is as yet unspoken, but I expect you will want to give him a name you will know him by.”

  “Jasper,” Mel said.

  John looked at his wife. They’d not discussed a name. The kitten was tumbling through her hands so swiftly she looked as though she were juggling. “Jasper,” he said. “I like Jasper.”

  Miss Aiken seemed to have taken to them. Once she’d set out the paperwork, she placed Jasper into a basket she called a creel. The creel was curious as she had to pull it open. Afterward, this creel appeared to seal itself of its own accord, then she pushed the enclosed kitten into the darkness at the edge of her desk.

  “You can take him tonight if you want. I can make my own decisions on adoption, and I think you are perfect.” She stared at each of them, those eyes painfully wide. “It’s important to note there’ll be a visit to check on him.” She gestured to the corner of her desk where the kitten’s tiny eyes were visible as two green rooms. “A welfare visit. A formality.”

  “When?”

  Miss Aiken paused. “Where do you live?”

  “The other side of Cubton.”

  “Then it shouldn’t take more than three weeks for her to get there.”

  John blinked. The answer was oddly phrased, but before he could ask Miss Aiken had pushed another piece of paper over, a commitment not to return the animal and initialled clauses acknowledging their understanding and agreement that the colour of the fur might change over time, and that the creature’s failings were their own.

  “I’ll also need the creel back when he is settled.”

  As they signed and chatted, they felt Miss Aiken warm to them further, and they ended up speaking for an hour while Jasper thundered in his creel. For all her oddness, they found the woman a quirky delight, and even though each was storing her choicer expressions to giggle at later, they enjoyed their time with her, strange though it was to be chatting in an old stone room by candlelight.

  It was evening when John looked at his watch. “We need to get back,” he said.

  “May I show you something before you go?” Miss Aiken said. “I feel we’ve made such a connection.”

  She took them out the back of the chapel. It was lighter there, the last of the sunset making the large backyard a warren of shadows. High hedges ran down either side enclosing the garden from outside view, and the trees at the bottom of the garden were impenetrable.

  “Those are the trees we passed,” Mel murmured. “The same trees.”

  To the left was a wooden structure like a stable with no fourth wall, the struts filled with molten wax in which hundreds of other candles had given up their strength, the lit candles standing like sentinels on a charnel mound of the waxen dead. On the floor were tin mess plates filled with even more candles, all of them different and each at a different level of burn. These massed candles surrounded a vast sofa raised on hay bales. The seat was double the size of a regular three-seater, the upholstery’s design near impossible to make out despite the light from the many candles. Paisley, John thought, A dark paisley or fractals.

  “I can’t let you in the house,” Miss Aiken said, “but I wanted you to see some of my other charges.”

  John didn’t want to turn his back on the stable. It had the aspect of a manger in a dark nativity, a bestial altar. Miss Aiken tapped him hard on the shoulder.

  The window was wide, even more candles beyond the glass illuminating the gloom of what looked to be Miss Aiken’s lounge.

  “I rarely show these cats as they are not yet complete,” Miss Aiken said. “Not everyone is as welcoming as you.”

  The woman pointed to where a white shape appeared to fall repeatedly towards them. As the form approached, it became clear the cat’s front paws had no length of leg. The paws seemed to have been fixed directly to its chest like a couple of soft brooches. The shock of the deformity was profound, and as their eyes became used to the low light, they were suddenly aware of dozens—limbless, eyeless, with misshapen skulls and spines—most simply staring into the darkness. Right in front of John reared a lengthy rope of fur with a wide face and three eyes, the process of splitting into two cats in the womb somehow arrested.

  “I thought they didn’t live,” he whispered, voice tight.

  “They live if they are loved,” Miss Aiken said.

  These deformations kept coming as the cats realised they were being looked at through the glass. A large queen had her front paws too far down her rib cage, and where her paws would normally be protruded another pair of legs turned backwards. Perversely, from near her throat, a tail curled up and over her head, which the cat licked with a split tongue.

  A teratoma, John thought, an imperfectly-separated twin.

  “What happens to them?” Mel whispered.

  John could tell she was upset. “Some are not chosen, it is true,” Miss Aiken replied, “but others, when they are old enough to be reborn, become more perfect.”

  “Okay,” said John. “Okay, I’m very aware of the time. You’ve been so kind, Miss Aiken. I cannot express how happy you’ve made us.” He paused. “We never discussed the price. The donation.”

  Miss Aiken shook her head. “It is forbidden to profit from the dark young. When they go out into the world, they must leave without debt or arrears.”

  “Okay. Okay then.”

  As they turned to leave, the view to the black woods was obscured by a creature the size of a bull in silhouette moving from the trees into the garden.

  Despite himself, John swore. His body understood the creature as it might a wolf or a bear, a being that deep human memory told him was lethal to his survival. Yet at the moment instinct told him to grip Mel and run, the animal turned and made for the covered stable and the hay bale nestled sofa, ascending to its rustic throne.

  “Night has fallen,” Miss Aiken said. “She comes home to the birthing bed.”

  Mel was shaking. The animal was too large, muscular, like a monstrously-swollen goat wealthy with smooth black wool. The creature fell onto the sofa, rolling half on her back revealing udders dark and shiny as molasses.

  “She’s so beautiful,” Mel whispered. “So beautiful and so terrifying.”

  John’s recognition was more disturbing. Now that the initial shock had somewhat dissipated, his sight of the great goat was less the rattling of seeing a wolf, a bear, a deadly snake than the instant rake-step halting of seeing a woman of startling beauty. The creature’s monstrous beauty was seductive to him at a level that gave him a dark, dark rattle—

  In the car they sat in silence for a long moment. It was full night now.

  “That was not what I expected,” he said at last. “Did you see the size of that creature?”

  Mel didn’t reply. After a moment, she told him of a road she used to travel in north London when she was at university. There was a particular road where—if on the top deck of the bus—a person could look over the siding of a research farm to see outsize livestock. Chickens, pigs. Goats. The sight had always unsettled her as it was secret, surely in truth experimental animal husbandry but wrong somehow—

  “The goat was like something I saw on that farm.”

  “If it was a goat. And her lounge,” John added after a moment. “What was that? It was freakish.”

  “I think that’s why the girl at the shelter called it Miss Aiken’s School for the Gifted,” Mel replied quietly. “Nasty little cow.” She paused. “Can we go home now? I want to go home.”

  The kitten was wrong. They knew it from the first.

  This wrongness didn’t matter, however, as their cottage became his, inhabited, the moment he walked in and his tail shivered erect. They fell in love with Jasper as into an abyss—

  “He never blinks,” Mel said, “and his pupils are wide as if he’s scared all the time, yet he’s fearless.”

  John, not knowing cats as well as his wife did, took her word that Jasper’s relentless wide pools of darkness were unusual, although he wondered if part of this might have been that the kitten could not be persuaded to go out during the day, hiding from the light until they drew their lounge curtains and kept them shut.

  Jasper moved like a king, assured and aloof, yet his affection for them was undiluted. This affection was part of the wrongness as the kitten desired what Mel described as more than usual closeness. After a morning run, the kitten had insisted on working his fur into John’s sweaty armpits. When John realised this was what Jasper was doing, he raised his arms and the kitten rubbed himself deep into his underarms.

  “What is this?” he asked, laughing. “It tickles, but I could get used to it.”

  “He did it to me too,” Mel replied, shamefaced. “Not my armpits either. Don’t be surprised if he heads south.”

  John howled. “It must be a bonding thing. Like with the litter scent marking.”

  At night, Jasper went out. Miss Aiken had said there was no need to keep him in for a time. Just scoop his first wet litter and use it to mark the outlines of your property. This they had done, an horrific task as the used litter smelled like an open grave. Mel had wanted him to stay inside nevertheless, but the creature’s unhappiness could not be borne so they put in a cat flap and watched as he sat in their small garden perfectly still and staring at nothing as if he were waiting for a night train.

  “He’s strange. He just sits there.”

  “He can’t. Not all night. He brings presents so he must hunt at some point.”

  There were other curiosities to Jasper. As a child Mel had loved working a little finger into the pads to make a cat’s paw splay outwards, yet the kitten did not have four toes. Four claws, yes, but instead of them belonging to individual toes, a pair of Nosferatu teeth each sprung from two fused nubs more resembling a hoof than a paw.

  “Maybe it’s one of those cats from that bloody room,” John said. “I suppose it doesn’t look odd when you leave him alone though.” He caught her look. “I mean when his feet are at rest and you’re not forcing the toes apart.”

  The feet did look wrong though, now they’d noticed it. Jasper had a curious way of moving as if he were in feline high heels, and he was the only cat Mel had ever heard walking.

  Every dawn as he called to be rescued from the sun, there was a mound of organs at the door sill, none of the kills small, and once a squirrel larger than their tiny boy himself had been torn open, the entrails arranged as if they were the limbs of a many-armed goddess.

  The sight sickened, yet it could not mar the love that had settled in them for their kitten. They were infatuated by the way he curled into an innocent ball on their sofa, one paw-hoof over his nose as he slept, rumbling. At full dark, like clockwork, he’d rise and leave the house to sit out in the darkness regarding the night.

  “I swear he looks like he’s waiting for a train.”

  When Jasper was in the house, he always returned to the handmade creel he’d arrived in. Even if they placed him on their covers or the sofa to encourage him, after a while he’d still clop back over the wooden floorboards to the dark nest.

  “She said she wanted it back.”

  John shrugged. “He’ll grow out of it.”

  The basket, creel—whatever it was—was so strange an object. It was shaped like a coracle made of thick, supple branches all bound together, reminding John of a ball of rubber bands. The individual branches that formed the creel seem to have no beginning or end, the thinnest perhaps the width of his little finger, the thickest the width of a handheld bicycle pump. It was a unique construction as there was no door. On placing Jasper into the creel, Miss Aiken had simply pushed her fingers through the gaps to wrench the branches apart, and slowly the branches slid back into place of their own will, enclosing the kitten within.

  After a few days, however, Jasper stopped insisting to have the creel reopened, content to sleep beside it, and the humans were pleased not to have to stick their fingers through the branches. The pull as they reformed looked sinister; it was as if the basket was alive rather than simply stretched, sliding back into a comfort the creel had been forced from.

  The next day Jasper stopped sleeping next to the creel.

  “Give it another day,” Mel said, “and if he doesn’t pine for it, you can take it back to Miss Aiken.” She paused. “I love him so much, my heart hurts.”

  John nodded. “Yes. It’s everything we wanted.”

  Mel paused. “You don’t think the welfare visit will be a problem? The check up? I couldn’t bear to lose him.”

  In truth, John had forgotten all about the visit, and at once he recalled the unease he’d felt on adoption day when Miss Aiken had said, It shouldn’t take more than three weeks for her to get there, as if whoever was coming was already embarked on a long journey with their cottage as the destination.

  “No,” he said. “No, it’ll be fine.”

  Mel wasn’t in when he returned the next day, but she’d written a note to say Jasper had ignored the wooden creel all day. John left a note to say he’d get a takeaway on his way back then drove out to Brithemwell to return it.

  Night had fallen by the time he placed his order at the restaurant and driven on to Miss Aiken’s house. No answer came from the front door or the chapel. He didn’t want to leave the creel on the doorstep—it was so intricate and old a construction it might have been an antique—but neither did he want to return, so he turned the knob on the chapel door. It opened.

  Careful to call out as he walked through the unlit interior, he made his way through to the far end, conscious from the low thunder and greenlit eyes that he was watched. At the end of the dark stone interior, his fingers found the rear exit that led to the garden hidden by the high hedges—

  The scene looked familiar, yet the sense that sinister presences had moved in was clear to John instantly. He saw some of the trees from the cancered wood looked to have crept into the garden, branches charcoal-black and waving. The moving branches caught John’s attention as there was no wind. The candle flames in the covered stable stood upright. For a moment he saw the trees as an audience, a slow-moving congregation gathering. An illusion, surely, he thought, placing the creel on the ground and turning to leave—

  It was then he saw Miss Aiken—

  The woman was weaving through the black growths on the lawn, naked, so white in the dark she resembled a cockleshell, her nethers exposed to him whenever she bent down to catch a thing on the ground. The thing was a cat, he realised, one of her special rescues—

  The cat had no back end, tapering to a nub beneath its rib cage, but it moved swiftly by dragging itself with its front feet. The cat fought when at last she caught it and carried the hissing length of spite to the stable.

  Miss Aiken looked like she’d been in battle by the time she reached the candlelit sofa. John was mesmerised, appalled. The woman’s cat-lashed breasts were bleeding, empty—what his brother cruelly called Hungry tits—and her dimpled nethers ran with sweat. She was tiny against the creature on her throne—

  The great goat—

  Unable to move or speak, John watched as the vast animal raised a rear hoof and parked it on the back of the sofa, exposing the reptilian leather of her udders. In one swift movement Miss Aiken pushed the frantic cat deep in the great goat’s rear, John assumed anus as the woman’s fist slid in up to the elbow. At the hole, there was a fizzing, a puckering, before what looked like a tentacle squirted out, past the squeeze of the sphincter, gripping Miss Aiken’s elbow like a stiff handshake brace strangers give during photo shoots.

  John couldn’t move. Words that had come to him that first evening grew malign significance. Dark nativity. A bestial altar. What was once only disquieting had turned into an existential threat so profound he feared any attention he brought to himself would result in instant and permanent harm.

  Miss Aiken left her arm inside the goat a full minute before she removed it. Her hand came out empty, dripping with what looked like oil or thick ink. The cat had been embedded deep inside—

  Naked, coquettish, Miss Aiken nuzzled her white weight into the goat’s dark embrace, soon snoring. Even then, John could not move. He stood there for hours, until the candles began to gutter and die, and only when he could not see his own boots did he dare move.

  The takeaway was cold when he picked it up. At home, Mel was sitting in darkness at the table, staring at Jasper who was lying flat on his back asleep, front feet and rear pointing straight down. He looked as though he was on a luge. An unearthly rumble rose from him, deeper than expected for a kitten. At first John imagined Mel was lost in the worship of their perfect boy but when he caught her eye he saw she’d been crying.

  “He sleeps so completely,” she whispered and, after a pause, “I love him more than I thought ever possible.”

  John put out the food. Jasper didn’t stir, his tiny chest rising and falling as if he was sunbathing by candlelight between them. He told Mel what he’d seen, the dark midwifery and grotesque implantation, the sight of naked Miss Aiken forcing her crotch against the great goat’s teats—that caprine Gargantua—as she snuggled in, the malignant growths that had moved in from the trees as audience—

  “I think,” John quietly said after a moment, “we have mistaken the nature of the welfare visit we were told to expect. I believe she takes so long to come because she moves so slow.”