Melanie screamed again between sobs. Deniel stood over the body, looking down at the corpse. His eyes slid from the corpse to focus on his right hand. It was covered in blood and he still held the knife in his hand. He backpedaled out of the kitchen, away from the body and the hysterical woman. He bumped into a chair and stumbled over it, falling to the floor and dropping the knife. He needed to get away. Picking himself up, he sprinted out of the apartment and made his way to the stairs. He bounded up the stairs four at a time on his way to the roof. When he reached the final platform, he burst through the door with his shoulder, only stopping when he was on the roof.
Deniel fell to his knees and looked up at the stars, half-hidden by clouds. They blurred in his vision as tears pooled and traced down his cheeks. Falling forward onto his forearms, he sobbed. What had he done? How could it have come to this? The man was a sinner, but he didn’t deserve to die. Emotion overwhelmed him: despair like he had not felt in all his eons of existence. It was a human emotion and heartbreaking in its power.
The sound of sirens shook him from his sorrow. Standing, he shuffled over to the edge of the building. Looking down at the ground 15 stories below, he saw police cars at the front of the building—their telltale lights decorating the street in an almost festive glow. Feeling that overwhelming despair, Deniel climbed up to stand on the edge. He had failed. He was not worthy.
He fell forward, closing his eyes as he rushed to meet the ground.
With a gasp, Deniel woke up. He jerked to a sitting position and looked around. Everything was black. It wasn’t dark; just black for as far as he could see. He heard the staccato tone of someone walking in boots on a hard floor. Deniel stood up and turned around. A meticulously groomed man walked towards him wearing a suit. He had a charming smile and eyes that seemed to glow of their own accord.
“Brother,” the stranger said as he came forward and put a hand on Deniel’s shoulder.
Deniel looked down and his shoulders sank. “I failed. I was not worthy. I died as a sinner and have fallen from grace.” He sighed. “Are you here to gloat, Lucifer? To claim me as a trophy?”
The other man softened his features, pulled Deniel to his feet, and shook his head from side to side. “No, brother. You are no trophy and you did not fail.”
“But I killed a human. He didn’t deserve to die.”
“What about the millions that you were commanded to kill? Did they deserve it?”
Deniel paused and looked up with his eyebrows furrowed together. “I don’t know. They must have. Otherwise . . .”
There was a brief pause and then Lucifer finished the sentence for him. “Otherwise, He would have been wrong.”
Deniel snapped his gaze to meet his brother’s. “That’s not possible.”
“Are you sure?”
Deniel had no answer. His head swam in the possibility of what was being suggested.
Lucifer continued. “You have not failed. You just realized what I realized so many years ago.”
“What is that?”
“Father can be wrong.”
They stood there without saying anything, one providing comfort to the other through a gentle touch on the shoulder. After several breaths, Deniel reached up and put his hand on top of his brother’s. He closed his eyes. In response, Lucifer stepped in and wrapped his arms around Deniel in a gentle embrace.
“Why was I tested?”
“It’s the only way I could show you the truth. Living as a mortal, separated from His voice, you see the world as it truly is with all its faults and beauty. Father agreed to the test because He believes He is infallible.”
With his eyes still closed and his voice a whisper, Deniel asked a question. “What do we do now?”
“Now we search for the truth without being blinded by the light, and try to help those that we can. Will you join me?”
“Yes.”
THE DOG-CATCHER’S SONG
Tanith Lee
They were playing it on the radio, that first time I saw him.
He was by the highway. Just sitting there, and the sun was going west, shining back on him so he glowed like gold. He was a kind of a crossbreed, I guess, biggish built but lean, and his coat real good. I like animals. Always have. They can sometimes reach me where a human can’t. That’s wrong, maybe. Or maybe it ain’t.
Now don’t think I just pull over and run up to any animal I see. I know about rabies, even with the shots, and this was pretty wild, lonely country I was driving through; those long plains and mountains combed up on the backdrop, and maybe one thirsty tree per mile. But he had a collar and he looked in real good shape. Only thing was the way he just sat there.
So I pull up and roll down the window. I say to him, “Hey, boy, how y’doing? You okay there?”
He turned his head and looked right at me. He had one of those long noses. He had white teeth—no suspicion-making froth or nothing. And his eyes. Black. Great big eyes. I never saw eyes, any eyes, so damn sad.
First thing I did, I looked at his collar. Sure enough there’s a tag on it. Scott, and an address. No place I heard of, but out there, no reason I would. I was making for Santa Zora with the delivery, and no need to get there until tomorrow. I left early, get bored waiting around, nervous, if I’m honest. I like to be doing something. Ever since Della. Since then.
Well, the dog seemed calm and together, but how’d I know what kind of trash might come along the road next. And anyhow, in another hour maybe it’d be jet black dark and only the stars for company. The back of the pickup had some space and the stuff I was carrying all boxed-up and waterproof. So I offered the dog a lift to the next town, which according to my info was only a few miles on. From there, I could get directions to the address he had and could drive the poor guy back to his folks.
He just jumped in the back of the pickup like he’d done that a hundred times already. He laid himself down and kind of sighed, the way a dog does. He shut those sad eyes of his, and we drove on, until the sun set chili-red and turned the mountains into crimson glass.
In the town main street I found a guy who knew the way to the address on the tag.
I bought a plastic bowl and a bottle of water, and let the golden dog take a drink. He was thirsty as those desert trees.
We cut off along this dirt road that was full of ruts and stones, and I could hear my cargo complain a tad, but the dog seemed to be sleeping. Took me another half hour. The stars were lit up by then. It was a long, low, white house with a flat roof and some kind of palm trees grew there. Had a swimming pool, too, in the backyard. The other houses around were sort of the same. When I got out, I saw the dog was awake. He was sitting there, looking at the house.
I thought, I guess he knows he’s home. But he didn’t make a move or a sound. So I thought, hell, they’d maybe just gotten him and he didn’t know it yet. Or maybe he does a bit and that’s confusing him. “Hey, boy,” I said to him, putting my hand on his head, gentle, you got to be gentle, “hey, gonna be fine.”
I go to the door and knock. A little round Spanish woman answers.
I say I need to speak to Mr. Scott.
She looks worried. But then her eyes slide past me and she sees the golden dog in the house lights. She sputters out something in Spanish and makes the sign of the cross over herself and then she slams the door shut. I hear her running back inside the house along the tiled hallway. I stand there wondering if maybe I should beat it. Then the door opens again and now there is a tall, well-built guy, thirty-five or so. He looks instantly right past me. He’s still looking past, in a scary, blank kind of way, when I say, “Mr. Scott?” At which he goes red under his tan and glares at me.
“That isn’t my name.”
“Not Scott?” I ask, thinking maybe the feller in town gave me the wrong directions.
But this man says, “My name’s McCall. Scott, for the sake of—Scott is the name of that—the dog.”
I laugh, seeing the dumb but quite logical mistake I made. “But he’s y
our dog,” I try then. “I found him out on Route—”
“I don’t care where in the hell you found him,” the man says, cracking his sentences out at me like rounds from a gun. “Get him offa this property. Take him outta here. Do you get me? Yeah? Fucking get lost. Both of you.”
“But why? What—”
And then there is this girl, running out toward the door. She’s about seventeen, young and sweet, slim, with a pale white skin despite the desert, and long, dark, curling hair and great big dark eyes—and the thing that comes to me is, crazily, how like the eyes of the dog hers are—huge, dark, sad.
“Rosalie,” cracks out the man, “leave this to me.”
“But Dad—is it—oh,” she sighs, stalling just behind him. And the big black eyes are on the pickup, on the dog, and her eyes are raining as it never would rain out here, but for human tears. “Dad,” she weeps. “Oh Dad, make it go.”
“You heard her,” he snarls. He puts his arm around her and she buries her face in his shirt. “S’okay, honey. Go on,” he adds to me. “Take that—thing—and beat it back to hell.” And then a change comes over his face. He says, “No, wait there.”
Turning he bellows behind him, something in Spanish. It sounds like something about paper, or a letter; my Spanish ain’t that good. But the round woman suddenly comes rushing back and in her hands is a folder and she pushes it at him and he shoves it against my chest, so I kind of grab it, not meaning to. The next second the door is slammed again and through it he yells at me, “Read that, you idiot. Don’t come back or I’ll see you in the jail. You hear me?”
“Sure,” I say softly to the door.
Crickets, which have been quiet as stones, start their singing again as I head back to the pickup. The dog is lying in back, his head turned away from the house.
I need a damn beer.
We went to a diner, and like before, the dog sat quiet outside in the pickup. When I was done, I brought him out some of the steak in a napkin, and poured him more water. He ate and drank like a machine, like a robot that somehow still needs food. Then he lay back down. He put his long golden head on his long gold paws and closed his sad, dark eyes. I drove someplace just off the road and parked.
And then I opened the folder.
I don’t like reading. It never holds me, not now. Though when I was younger, with Della, I’d read whole books.
In the folder were these two things: a cell phone, a model like the kids want to have, takes pictures and plays music, that kind of thing; and some sheets of paper. They were printed off a computer.
I sat and stared at the paper. And then put it down, because the words wouldn’t stick together. Then I tried the phone. But something had gone wacky with it; it’d only make a kind of buzz, and then show me just these two pictures. One was out front of the low white house with the palms. Nothing in this picture but the dog. The golden dog. He was sitting on the dry front lawn, slim and shining, and his tongue lolled out, and his eyes all big and bright . . . and happy. It was the same dog, with different happy eyes. And then the second picture would snap on. This one was taken at the back of the house, right by the sky-blue bowl of pool. The dog wasn’t in this picture. Only . . .
Only the moment I saw it first, this second shot, I looked and looked at it. And after I did that maybe seven, eight, nine times, I turned off the phone and picked up the papers again. And read them.
I don’t know how to properly start this. So I’ll simply begin. I’ll be totally honest. Or there’s no point.
I remembered everything when I woke. But somehow I wasn’t fazed. It didn’t really affect me. Which is mad, but that’s the only way I can put it. Or the only way I can, here. There isn’t much time now. I know that. Or much space, come to that.This was all the paper I could find, to print this out.
Please try to believe what I say.
Basically, yesterday—and all the days, weeks, the entire three-and-a-half years before—I was a dog. I forget the name of the breed. Funny I don’t recollect, when I seem to remember so much else. And to know. I can read and write for example—self-evidently. I can use a computer, just like, if if I wanted, I could make a sandwich, and eat it, without a single eyebrow being raised. I mean, how is that possible? And I can talk. From the moment I opened my eyes this morning, when I stretched and stood up, stood up that is the way a young man would do, and not as a dog, from then I knew all these things, had all these human skills. I don’t know why.
But then, I don’t either know why I turned from being a dog into being a man. Just knew I had done. Also, I knew how to operate the human body I was in, just as if I’d done it for seventeen years. I knew and recalled how it had been when I was the dog—only, weirdly, at once removed. The dog, to me, had become, instantaneously with the transformation, he. Not I.
I can confirm, I don’t think or feel or react like a dog, now. My emotions are a man’s. A young man’s. How can this be? I’ve no notion.
It’s the same with the other strangeness. Like this truly peculiar fact—I seem to remember having read certain books—say Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, or listened to pieces of music: Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto, Panic! At the Disco’s song “I Write Sins Not Tragedies.”
How is that? Did the dog get read to? Get music played him? Come to that, did he watch them use the computer? I don’t know.
How can I? Every minute of this day I’ve moved farther and farther from being the dog.Though I still know the people I’d known as the dog. Oh yes. But he wasn’t me. I’m not him.
So I guess I’m just going to have to leave that as it stands. I can’t add anything to it. I don’t have the answer. Or no answer that is sane. As I don’t have—never did, never will—any choice.
Mornings, Concha gets up at about five AM. She is the Mc-Calls’ maid-of-all-work. Thing is, she undoes the kitchen door that opens on the backyard, which lets out the dog. That morning (today), Concha came down and undid the door.At that point the dog, if still asleep, generally sprang up and bounded out, racing up and down the lawn, sniffing and rolling, staring in the pool, gazing up at birds, or any neighborhood cats.Today, though, the dog didn’t wake straight off. He lay there sleeping, it seemed, just twitching a bit, perhaps. She saw nothing to concern her in this, put on the coffee and set out the ironing.
Concha always irons in the mornings, before any of the family drift down around seven. This is because she often irons the clean clothes of her three sons, along with the family stuff. One of these sons is eighteen. Lucky for me.
I came to when she’d gone off to the bathroom, which regularly happens after her first mug of coffee. (How do I know? Because the dog had seen it day after day for almost two years.) And that is when I woke. When I woke as me, how I am now. The clock on the wall showed 5:30 AM. And the morning light showed me myself, young, male, human, and naked, lying out from the dog basket on the tiled floor.
I didn’t have a second’s disorientating doubt. I got myself to my (man’s) feet. I grabbed a pair of jeans, underpants, a white shirt, and—nearly like the dog I’d been—rushed out into the yard. There was a cluster of palm trees. In there I dressed myself. (How did I know? Instinct?) And here is the other weird thing. Before I woke,just as I became human, I’d had access to some kind of—psychic?—bathroom. I’d done all I’d needed to, and was now showered clean, had used some okay deodorant, washed my hair. I’d brushed my teeth. The taste of mint mouthwash wasn’t alien at all.
Concha came back soon after. I’d been given just enough time. She called for me (the dog-me). “Scott! Iprisa, Scott!” But he didn’t, I didn’t, always come when called. Depended how interesting the morning backyard was that day. She’d gotten upset though when she couldn’t figure where the extra clothes had gone to. Then I heard her tell herself, in Spanish, which I partly understood, as the dog had probably learned to, that she was idiota for leaving them behind yesterday, when she’d visited her sons.
I’d gone wandering by then. I’d gotten over the
low wall. I investigated adjacent spaces, paths, walls, the road. A mailman passed me and waved. I waved back. I was just somebody’s teenage son he must have met before, clean, good haircut (it is, I’ve seen it) dressed casual the way kids dress from well-off homes; a friendly, well-raised boy.
I don’t know what I might have done. Or I guess I do know. I just had a walk and rambled back. Like a dog does, if if he likes the house where he belongs. And this time the sun was an inch or so higher. I could smell cooked eggs and bagels. And the . . . I could hear her voice. I knew it. He did.
Rosalie.
“Dad? Wonder where Scott is—”
I stayed by the palms. I never felt that before. The way a human heart can seem to stop, but it never has.And then it beats like a drum.
When finally she came out to look for me (for the dog) she had on her bathing suit. She had a day at home, no school, and Dad had already taken off for town. I’d heard the car.
Her suit was pool-blue. She doesn’t tan, it never takes. She has great skin. That had never mattered. Now it did. Everything about her. She was lovely.
She glanced around and called out “Scott?” a couple times. Then she shrugged. She dived into the pool. Cleaved the sapphire surface with hardly a ripple. Her wet hair spread rich black. When she came out, she shook herself. Waterdrops scattered like pearls from some necklace I must once have seen. Did she learn to shake off water like that from him? The one I’d been—
That was when she saw me.
She stopped still.
I thought, she’ll scream for Concha. But she didn’t.
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