We instinctively know not to hurt animals, at least most of us do.
Most people, however, never wonder why it is that we know not to hurt animals.
It isn't because we feel bad about it. Most people could rest easy after a few perhaps restless nights. No, it isn't that.
The reason why we don't hurt animals is because we know, deep down inside, that something is keeping score.
Graham Henderson was one of those kids that you probably shouldn't leave around your pets.
He pulled the tails of cats, went out of his way to step on insects and took delight in crushing snails from the back garden of his house between his fingers.
The crunching sound of the shell fragmenting and butchering the soft and tender meat within was simply the height of pleasure.
Outside of Northon, the small village hamlet where he lived, was a very dense forest. In the middle of the dense forest, past several thickets packed so tightly it was almost as if they had been cultivated to keep people away, was an ancient stone well.
The forest itself was only accessible by climbing over a small wooden fence that skirted across the fields and meadows.
It was a late Saturday evening, one of Graham's favourite times. At home, he was constricted to only beetles, ants, ear-wigs and toads in the garden and killing them got boring fast. but if he tried to kill anything else, his mother and father had a tendency to find out and give him a hard wallop, a day's extra chores and a week consigned to his bedroom.
That order.
In the forest, he felt that he had more or less free reign over the entire animal kingdom.
Nobody to stop him, nobody to tell him "no", nobody to tell him to do something else.
He'd already managed to ground two little pigeons by hurling stones at their little nest and stomped on their tiny heads as they lay wounded on the forest floor, hurt and confused.
He'd even managed to kill an early rising fox cub, throwing his weight onto it. Since it was a considerable amount of weight, especially for a boy of twelve, it gave out a shrill yelp and collapsed, its left rib broken.
It got to its legs and tried to crawl away, letting out piercing wails as if trying to get the attention of its parents, most likely sleeping soundly in a nearby burrow unaware of the cub's suffering, before Graham Henderson snapped its neck.
It stopped after that.
It stopped doing anything.
Graham headed home under a golden evening sunlight which split the world into Autumn colours of yellows, browns and rich reds.
He was smiling as he usually did after an especially high kill count.
Fifty-seven was a new record for him and he felt the tired relief he assumed most people felt after finishing a very satisfying personal project.
Some people wrote, some people painted and some people sewed or baked or sculpted. Graham Henderson killed animals.
By the time he closed his front gate and knocked on his front door, a pink twilight had taken over the sky.
His mother let him in.
She suspected, but had given up trying to stop him. His father hadn't given up hope on his son yet, but his mother? She'd begun to realise that no matter what she said or did, it had little effect. The boy would kill, and he'd kill until nature restored the balance.
"If you push against the world again and again, eventually the world's going to push back." Those had been the words of her grandparents. And the words of her husband Sam, who learned them from his grandparents. Those were the words of the grandparents of everyone who lived in Northon.
Graham ate his dinner, fish fingers and chips, that had been sitting in the oven under a large piece of tinfoil for two hours, and then went straight to bed. He was exhausted. Exhausted, but happy.
Whilst Graham slept a soundless sleep, Sam unlocked the front door and headed through to the kitchen.
"Can I crack you open a beer, Sidney?" Sam asked, pausing with a bottle under the ornamental dragon bottle opener mounted on the fridge.
"You got it!" Sidney said, hooking his coat up and sliding his car keys out from his jeans pocket. "You mind?"
"Not at all." Sam grinned, catching the car keys in his outstretched hand, depositing them in the fruit bowl in front of him.
"I'll give them back to you at the office tomorrow."
Graham's dad took a long pull of his beer and let out a low sigh. He clenched his shoulders and unclenched them, feeling the knots of his shoulders fall away as the beer worked its noxious magic.
Sidney snapped the ring pull and took a swig.
The two work colleagues chatted for a while whilst the rind of cold white moon pulled itself across the sky. Sidney's girlfriend called at around half-nine, but he pressed the large red button opposite the green one, stowed his handset back in his pocket and gave Samuel a conspiratorial wink. Both men were already three beers deep.
After office politics, football, the building work on the patio and even the weather became exhausted as avenues of conversation, Sidney talked about Graham.
Usually this was a verbal cue that the night was drawing to a close.
"You don't seriously believe what they teach your son at that school, do you." Sidney asked, leaning back on the kitchen footstool. He gave the can a quick shake, hearing only the rattling of the ring pull he'd dropped inside. He crushed it in his hand and hurled it at the green crate of recycling where it bounced off of a wine bottle.
"Careful Sid, I'm trying to avoid mixing my recyclables this week."
"Well, do you or don't you?"
"I do, yes."
Sidney didn't move for quite some time, his mind trying to process. Finally, he spoke.
"So you're a creationist."
"I suppose everyone in Northon is to an extent. This world is ten thousand years old. Not the billions that scientists are telling everyone about and-
"Explain the Grand Canyon." Sidney said, interrupting.
Samuel raised an eyebrow.
"It's a large hole that's pretty big, I guess."
"And do you know how old the sandstone and limestone rocks at the bottom of The Grand Canyon are?" Sidney asked, smiling and crossing his arms. A man confident in his victory. "Do you know what age they've been dated as, Sam?"
Samuel was quiet for a short while.
"I'm assuming quite a few millions of years?"
Sidney simply gawped.
"But you said-
"Yes, this layer of Earth is ten thousand years old. The ones below are millions upon millions of years old.
Sidney burst out laughing and Sam quickly joined him. Laughter is infectious like that.
When Sidney had regained control of himself he asked a few more questions.
Yes, Samuel believed in Adam and Eve and The Original Sin, but he believed that the first act of evil that occurred the second that the apple was bitten into, then perpetuated by Cain when he killed his brother Abel, caused the creatures and giant monsters that lurked all over the globe in the deepest jungles and in the deepest oceans. Dinosaurs, sure, but other horrors with thousands of spindling legs and chittering teeth, aberrations made from the violence and brutality of men.
"Miles across!" Sam shouted, throwing his arms out to exaggerate the size of the primordial animals and knocking over a bottle of Budweiser which hit the floor and broke into a thousand pieces causing both men to jump because they were, of course, completely smashed.
"Can't be miles." said Sidney, slurring his words. The arm he was resting on slipped off of the table and he almost went sprawling.
"S'can't. S'can't be."
He hoisted himself back up with the spare hand that he caught the table with and looked Sam dead in the eye, wobbling on the chair slightly. His eyes were blinking independently of each other in his drunken stupor.
"And what happened to those creatures then, what happened?"
"Meteor probably."
"How come all the scientist men-
Sidney belched and then continued his line of questioning.
"How come they found the bones of dinosaurs but none of the other creatures then?"
"Ah, but they were clever. They knew all the best places to hide. They weren't found because they never died." Sam replied, looking sagely in that way you can only pull of when you're absolutely tanked. "There might not be any left because of the world we built on top of them, but I believe there's one. Or two."
"Really Sam?"
"Sure. Last year we had a village fete up near the old well. Well sort of. I mean, we don't go near it usually and there was this young girl of seven. Libby."
"What happened to her?"
Sam stood up and stared out of the moonlit window, his face a pale and ghostly reflection upon the windowsill.
"She wandered off. Nobody noticed at first, her dad had left her to wander the field but eventually went looking and she'd, well, gone."
Sidney drained the last beer on the table. Sam continued.
"Her father spent hours looking for her and then heard from a villager that she'd clambered over the fence because she'd heard about the well."
"Well?"
"Don't rush me, I'm half drunk."
"No, I mean, what well?"
"Oh, right, you're not from round here are you? Weren't born here originally?"
Sidney shook his head.
"The Northon Well is a focal point. It's where the old world lies underneath. This isn't something I'm making up, everyone here knows it. And people who go near it and look down have a tendency to-
He mimed putting a gun to his temple and Sidney winced.
"So the girl gets to the well just as daddy's gaining on her and she climbs up and falls straight in."
"Did she die?"
"Nope. She's still fine and healthy, just four doors down from here."
"Then how-
"She was a good kid. Always mindful of the animals. Sometimes on weekends she'd go up with her mum to the woodlands just to see the birds and clean up any litter on the trail. The thing in the well knows. Don't ask me how it knows, I can't tell you, but it knows. And it threw the girl out again."
The overhead lights in the kitchen turned on as Mrs Henderson stormed in wearing little but her flannel dressing gown and her hands on her hips. Sidney made his excuses and quickly ran away whilst Sam's wife scolded him for being up at two in the morning doing nothing but boozing it up in the kitchen with his dumb friend.
Sidney fell over his own feet in the driveway, but still managed to walk home.
The next day, Graham got up early just to get into the woods before lunchtime. Mornings could be prime killing time for a lot of animals that only came out at dawn. He figured he could get home for about one o' clock, have lunch and be right back at killing for the early afternoon.
He never made it home.
Graham Henderson walked across the sunlit woods, the trees speckled with shining dew and the air smelled clean and fresh. Graham hated the smell of a morning forest, much preferring the coppery scent of a fresh kill.
He made good groundwork for an hour, but soon ran out of animals. He could prolong the fun by torturing the insects little by little, pulling off the wings and legs, but he still found himself spending more time walking listlessly around the woods than killing.
He was about to give up when a fox sped past him.
He gave chase, but the wily fox vanished into a hedgerow.
But he soon forgot about that when he saw the well that the fox seemed to have led him towards.
Jackpot.
All around a small forgotten well were hundreds upon thousands of millipedes, scurrying around the base.
He broke into a run and was soon at the edge of the well, stomping away.
Graham felt alive.
Graham couldn't have stopped if he'd wanted to.
Graham slipped.
He saw the dark hole of the well rise up to greet him and then swallowed him whole.
He felt for what seemed to be an age before hitting a large clump of soft dirt. As soft as it was, he still felt a snapping in his ankle and cried out in horror as blood rushed from his leg in hot and dark waves.
Something moved in the blackness as his eyes adjusted.
When his eyes focused, he wished he'd simply remained blind.
The cavern was gigantic, spanning the size of hundreds of olympic stadiums. There was plant life, strange and exotic fauna the likes of which had not existed on the world above, that Graham could make out. Some were oddly shaped and others coloured in ways he couldn't have even imagined, sticking out fronds with beaded flower buds on the ends that were never to open in the dank gloom.
And there was also the thing.
One of the first things, still very much alive. It slithered on the ground towards Graham from the far distance, having heard him falling or maybe smelled the blood oozing out of his leg. When it came even closer, Graham opened his mouth to scream but couldn't manage a sound.
Hundreds of tiny insectile legs coated the right side of the creature's body that flailed uselessly as the body glided towards him. The creature had the torso of a snake. Millions of tiny wings on the other side including doves and moths and butterflies and even bats flapped on the left side and Graham was suddenly aware that this was the first, the big one, the creature from which all creatures came.
Not a benevolence. This. The thing in the well.
The creature raised up on it's front and gave out a series of bristling clicks, its eyes trained on Graham. It seemed to be counting.
Graham briefly wondered what the creature could be counting whilst the surging pain in his leg continued, but then he realised.
It was counting in the same way he'd counted. The kill count.
Eventually the clicking stopped and the creature leaned it's head out of the gloom towards Graham. Graham looked up at the evil and went insane almost immediately. He'd been shocked into silence but was now screaming his last.
The face, the face was human but stretched almost to the width and height of a skyscraper. The eyes, each one the size of a truck, glared at him. One was blue and had a small black pupil and the other green with one giant pupil. It's horrifying mouth opened like a cave and hundreds of rows of fine ivory pins glowered.
It took a bite and Graham felt fresh unbearable agony slide over his body.
Graham looked down. His right leg had been bitten clean off. In that moment he wished not for the safety of his home, or his parents. He simply wished for death. For unconsciousness. For all of it, his life and every second he'd spent living, to simply perish. Because he knew, in his heart, that the creature in front of him wished to deny him that for as long as possible.
The search team never found anything.