Guinea Pig Killer by Annie Graves Page A

chance to see what happened afterwards for myself.
    All I know is what Sandy told me later, when I felt too sorry for him to stay mad.
    After Sandy’s parents got back from their holiday, they were very angry with him.
    He was in a lot of trouble.

    But they decided not to tell Dolly what had happened.
    I suppose they thought that she would be so sad and angry about what he did that she might never speak to him ever again.
    So what they did was this.
    They decided to buy a replacement guinea pig for Dolly, one that looked exactly like Princess Snowflake, and to pretend that none of it had ever happened.

    Luckily there was a guinea pig that looked exactly like Princess Snowflake in the first pet shop they visited.
    She had been delivered that very morning.
    Just left outside the pet shop in a little box.
    It was the strangest thing, the shopkeeper said. The very strangest thing.
    They took the new guinea pig home and Sandy’s parents stood over him as he fed and cared for it every single day.
    It was a frightened little creature, but sometimes it stared at Sandy as if it hated him. As if it knew what he was - a guinea pig killer.

    Now and then the new guinea pig would make little squeaking noises with pauses in between.
    It sounded like it was talking to another guinea pig.
    Of course, it wasn’t doing any such thing. There was no one else there.
    And no other guinea pig either.
    Sandy began to have nightmares almost as soon as the new Princess Snowflake moved into their house.
    In these dreams, he was moving through a strange, dark world.
    The only things he could make out in the gloom were two bright red dots, moving slowly but steadily towards him.
    He didn’t want the dots to get to him, so he would try to hide from them.

    They always found him, though, crouched behind a sofa or against the wall with a heavy curtain pulled around him.
    It wasn’t until the night before Dolly’s return that he realised the dark place of his dreams was his own house.
    That night the two red dots made their way to the door of his bedroom, and he was very glad to wake up before he could see what happened to him.
    Dolly came home full of talk and she didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with Princess Snowflake.

    Before he went to sleep that night, Sandy pushed a chair, a toy box and his bulging laundry basket right against the door.
    He dreamt of the two red dots swinging like the pendulum on the hall clock.
    Back and forth, back and forth. Harder and faster, faster and harder.
    So hard and fast that they should have made a noise.
    Only they didn’t.
    In this nightmare world you couldn’t make a noise.
    Even when you tried to, no sound came.

    But in the morning the toy box and the laundry basket were spilled out all over the floor.
    Trucks and socks everywhere.
    Dirty clothes all mingled with his teddies and Lego.
    Sandy’s mum made him tidy it all up.
    Dolly helped him, though he kind of wished she wouldn’t.
    She kept going on about how good he was to take care of Princess Snowflake, even though he didn’t like her as much as Dolly did.

    Mixed in with the toys and clothes, Sandy found a small brown bean.
    At first he didn’t know what it could be, but then Dolly asked if Princess Snowflake had been in his room.
    And then he knew.
    Later on he stared at the hard brown lump, sitting on top of the bin liner like the egg of a strange and disgusting bird.
    It was the poo of a guinea pig, he knew that.
    But whose poo?
    And what did it mean?
    That was the night the rash arrived.

    It started with a dream where something small and cold kept pinching his big toe.
    Hard.
    It hurt, and when he woke up the pain was still there.

    His big toe was covered in little red marks.
    He scratched at the rash but that only made it itchier.
    His mum called it eczema.
    She slathered it with cream that didn’t do very much good.
    Every night the rash spread further and further.
    It was halfway up his leg