by Isaac Thorne
“Let’s all stay cool,” he said, mostly to himself. “It’s not growling or snarling at us. If it wanted to attack us, it probably would have done that by now.”
On his left, softly but with some quiver in her voice, came Patsy’s reply: “I’m texting the constable. Going to let him know we’re waiting for some help.”
“Good. Send him the video you just recorded. It would be nice to have some law enforcement backup witnesses for this if anything happens to us. God, I wish I had my camera.”
“I’m getting some good shots of it on my phone,” Afia said. “Video and stills. As long as it doesn’t run off or run at us, we’ll have plenty of evidence of what we’re seeing.”
Staff nodded. “Ok, good. I’d like to get some footage with the Channel 6 camera, too. Just in case. If you two can keep it busy, I can back into the house and get the camera. It has a better zoom on it. I can get some close-ups of the face. Oh my God, that face!”
“Go. Patsy and I will close the gap between us, keep her distracted.”
Staff slid his left foot backward. “Ok. Here I go.”
He’d taken only two steps backward when the creature in front of them reacted. As Afia and Patsy attempted to close the gap he’d left between them, the black bitch opened its human mouth. Its eyes changed, too. The humanity inside them vanished, was replaced by solid black orbs of insentience, or maybe it was insanity. Its human-like mouth elongated and became more muzzle-like. Its teeth transformed from rows of tombstones into fields of spikes. Staff attempted one more backward step, and then the thing took its own step forward, toward the women. Patsy screamed. She tried to retreat but managed to trip over her own wedge heels as she did, tumbling backward into the overgrown clumps of grass that lined the driveway. Her iPhone flew out of her hand. It went straight up into the air, made a short arc, and then plummeted back to earth where it smacked her on the forehead. There was a wet thunk sound when it hit her. She yelped in pain, then grabbed the iPhone and started trying to scramble to her feet.
The thing lunged forward from between the two vehicles without a sound: no growling, no snarling, no shrieking or screaming. Afia lowered her phone and dove on top of Patsy then. Staff figured she must have been afraid that the creature was going to take advantage of her fall and pounce. Staff, prompted by her, fell on top of both of the women and shielded them as best he could by stretching out his arms. He partially buried his face in Afia’s hip, attempting to protect himself from losing it to the thing’s jaws. When the black bitch didn’t land on them, he allowed himself one peek to see if it had vanished.
It had not vanished. Instead, it had crouched outside the shadows in the middle of the driveway, eyeing the pile of humanity before it. Its now distinctly dog-shaped head was close to the ground, sniffing at it through its destroyed nasal orifice in a distinctly non-human way. After poking around the area immediately in front of it, the thing crawled forward again, toward Staff, Afia, and Patsy. It paused half-way between the vehicles and the huddle of frightened people to sniff again in what appeared to be one of Staff’s own footprints in the dust of the driveway.
“Just lie still,” Staff whispered into Afia’s hip. “Maybe it doesn’t want to hurt us. Maybe it’s just curious. Afia, do you still have your iPhone out?”
“Yes,” came her whispered reply. “It’s in my right hand.”
“Give it to me. It’s getting closer to us. I’m going to try to get a close-up of its face when it does.” His eyes trained on the black bitch, he stretched out his hand toward the point in space he thought Afia’s right hand most likely occupied and soon felt her press the iPhone into his palm. He transferred the device to his left hand, where he could aim the rear-facing camera more directly at the thing in front of them, and held the screen up to his face. Either Afia had never stopped recording, or she had restarted the video camera for him before handing him the iPhone because the recorder appeared to be already running. Staff grimaced. He might need to edit out their panicked tumble later on.
Its examination of his sneaker’s print in the dust completed, the creature on the iPhone screen crept closer to him. Its face appeared to change again as it did. The canine teeth shrank and reformed into tombstones. The elongated muzzle with the destroyed nose on the end retracted some, although the wound did not heal. The mouth took on a more human shape. Not Cupid’s bow lips this time. It was more of a masculine mouth and chin. Above them, angry brown eyes stared back at the device in Staff’s hand. For a few seconds, anyway. The creature didn’t settle on that face. Each step closer to the pile of human beings on the ground seemed to change the beast’s appearance, at least around its head. The darkened skin that was partially visible beneath the black fur on the thing’s face lightened next, becoming pinkish. The angry brown eyes became angry hazel eyes with elongated lashes above them: feminine eyes. Its mouth and tongue changed again, too. The human-like lips pinkened along with the flesh around them and took back some of the feminine quality he’d noticed when the thing first emerged. The fur on its face lightened somewhat as well. It had taken on something of that pumpkin spice muffin flavor that Staff had noticed atop Constable Graham’s head.
One step forward. Two steps more. Until finally it was within inches of their pile. Staff kept the camera trained on its face, which continued to transform into something more human the closer it came. No, not just human. It looked more familiar, the face of someone he knew but could not quite place in his memory. Its fur darkened again and the skin beneath along with it. The hazel eyes remained, but their shape was different now, more almond-shaped than the round orbs it had had a few seconds ago. The thing was close enough now that the iPhone was having difficulty maintaining its focus on its subject. Now and then a yellow frame appeared around the creature’s face as if the device had recognized it as a person. Then it would disappear again as the thing nosed around them, sniffing the ground, sniffing the iPhone in his hand, sniffing at their clothes. On one approach it had come so close to his face that Staff could feel its fur or hair or whatever it was tickling his cheek. It had an odor, too. It wasn’t the smell of dog, or wet dog, or even human body odor. It was a stink of rotting flesh, the stench of the grave.
The creature moved out of frame then, too far for Staff to twist the camera without startling it, not to mention Afia and Patsy. He could no longer see it, but he could hear it sniffing, hear the pads of its feet as it patrolled the perimeter of the heap of humanity that lay before it. It smelled around back of Staff, no doubt gathering the scents of Afia and Patsy below him. From somewhere inside the mound of flesh they had created, he felt someone twitch. Probably Patsy trying not to panic again. Then, from his periphery, he saw the thing come around the opposite side of their pile, nudging in close to Afia, whose face was buried in between Patsy’s shoulder blades, the straightened black hair on the back of her head in plain view. Staff risked turning his head a little, angling for a better look, just in time to see the thing nuzzle its human skull-like nose into the folds of Afia’s hair and inhale a good long sniff. It backed away then, exhaling audibly and, Staff would swear it, uttered something in what sounded to him like plain English. He couldn’t make it out exactly, but it was two syllables, the last of which ended with a hard arr sound. Immediately following that, he heard—and felt—Afia gasp.
The black bitch padded away from them then, toward the front porch. Staff craned his neck to follow its path, watched as its head continued to transform shape while it marched up the driveway and beyond his range of vision. He rotated his head in the other direction and located the beast, which was now sporting the pumpkin-spice flavored fur on its face again. It had planted itself in front of the porch steps and sat there, staring at them from that distance, its head slightly cocked to one side, its amorphous facial features becoming clear in his sight and then unfocused again as they ceaselessly transformed.
“Everybody,” Staff whispered. “I think we can move now. It’s just sitting in front of the porch steps. I�
�m going to slide off Afia and stand up. If it stays put, Afia can stand up next and then Patsy. All in?”
There was simultaneous acknowledgment that they were. Staff rolled to his left instead of sliding off the top of the pile and landed, as quietly as he could, on his bare knees. The black bitch did not move. She only sat there, watching, transfiguring as she did. It was difficult to tell from this distance, but Staff thought her black orb eyes might have returned and then rapidly changed back into the soft, sad brown ones he’d first noticed. When she made no moves toward him, Staff stood up. He pointed Afia’s iPhone at the creature, stepping only close enough to get Afia and Patsy out of the shot at the bottom of the frame.
“Safe?” Afia called.
“Oh, right. Yes. She hasn’t moved.”
Afia stood up more quickly than Staff had. So suddenly, in fact, that Staff winced, fearing that she might provoke the thing at the steps to charge them. It remained there, however, unprovoked, as if waiting for the trio of strange beings it was watching to finally be done with their outdoor and mat-free game of Twister. Patsy arose last. Her iPhone had left a reddening slash mark across her forehead that Staff figured would probably be a lovely shade of purple by sundown. Her Coke bottle glasses sat askew on her face. She adjusted them automatically before dusting the earth from her rear end with her left hand. Her own iPhone was still clutched in her right. She seemed to suddenly realize that she had her back to the black bitch and spun on her heels, nearly taking a second tumble in the process. Staff stretched out a steadying hand to prevent it.
“She didn’t hurt us,” Patsy exclaimed. “I think she sniffed my hair, but that was it. She didn’t hurt us. Her face, though! Look at how her face keeps changing!”
Staff studied Afia’s expression, which was calm still, but perplexed. He sidled up to her, close enough so that he could speak to her without Patsy overhearing. The iPhone video camera was still rolling, and its mic would no doubt pick up what they said, but he could edit the sound from it later if he needed to. As if she understood his intent, Afia combed her hair out of the way of her left ear with her fingers, revealing a single gold stud earring in the lobe, the glamorous without being gaudy mark of a female television field personality. “I saw it stick its nose into your hair,” Staff whispered to her. “It sniffed me, too, and it sounds like it sniffed Patsy. I think it was especially interested in you, though. I also thought I heard it say something to you. Did you hear it say anything?”
Afia nodded. “Her,” she corrected. “I heard her say something.”
“Point taken. But don’t keep me in suspense. What did she say to you?”
Afia shook her head but was not looking at him. Staff wondered whether that meant she was trying to remember what the creature had said or to understand it.
“It was just one word if I heard it right. I think it was ‘daughter.’ She said, ‘daughter.’“
Together, they faced the—what? Dog-woman? She-dog? Spirit? Omen? Staff was suddenly uncomfortable referring to the creature as “the black bitch” anymore, or even “the creature” or “it.” It was an entity, a being of some kind that had the body of an English bulldog and was able to somehow shape-shift its face, so that it alternately looked canine and human. More than one human, in fact. And the voice. It—she—had a voice and had spoken the English word “daughter” practically in the ear of an entirely human woman as she lay on the ground in fear of an attack.
Patsy glided over to them then, her large eyes endlessly trained on the creature that sat on its haunches at the foot of the porch steps, as if hypnotized by it. It stared back at her, at them, waiting for them to connect the dots. “I think she wants us to follow her,” Patsy said. “I don’t know why I think that. It’s just a guess. Maybe it’s intuition. Either way, I feel like she wants us to follow her somewhere.”
Afia nodded. “I’m getting the same thing.”
Staff, who would have called himself an “empath” if he were more New-Agey, felt no message, intuitive or otherwise, emanating from the beast. He nonetheless agreed. There was no reason for it—her—to just sit there staring at them. If she was just a dog with a weird face, she might have already been distracted by something else by now or might beg one of them for a treat or a belly rub. Instead, the creature simply stared at the trio from her sad, constantly changing eyes, patiently waiting and simultaneously insistent upon it. “Well. I guess there’s no time like the present. Would it be too callously journalist of me to ask that we all record it on our phones like you two were doing before? I can edit the footage together later. Since I can’t get to my camera equipment right now, using our phones is the next best thing.”
“I don’t think it’s callous,” Afia replied. “But let’s not let our cameras do our thinking for us. If she leads us into some kind of risk to life or limb, we stop recording and back out. This ain’t The Blair Witch Project. Right?”
“Right,” Patsy said, “but I never saw The Blair Witch Project.” Staff followed that with “Got it.”
When they each had their iPhones aimed with cameras rolling, Staff took the first step toward the creature. For a moment, he felt ridiculously like Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, following the dusty overgrown driveway toward the mysterious oracle with Afia on one side of him and Patsy on the other and a Toto with an endlessly transforming face leading the way, seeking answers to questions that had not yet themselves become fully formed in their minds. He allowed the image to present itself to him and then brushed it aside so he could focus on the task. He glanced at the hands of the women on either side of him. Each of them held their iPhones in landscape mode, obtaining a television-friendly full-width shot of the creature and its surroundings as they approached. Staff chose to shoot his video vertically. Not to be different or contrary, but just so he could obtain an additional perspective. The portrait-oriented video allowed him to close in tighter on the creature itself—herself—without zooming, and that would be valuable for presenting detail to viewers when everything was eventually all cut together. He wasn’t sure whether the morphing face would look as electrifying on-screen as it looked through the iPhone lens, but he was hopeful.
As they closed in on the creature, Staff saw her eyes transition again from those soft brown irises against white eyeballs into matte black orbs. He hadn’t noticed the matte appearance of the blackened eyes the first time he’d seen them, but it was there. There was no shine. It was as if they had been drained of all moisture or had had their natural lenses removed. There was no light reflected in them. He stopped short the forward momentum of the group when he saw the transition occur, and waited. The face had stopped changing. The features hardened, becoming clear and real against the backdrop of the physical world. For now, the thing had its canine face on. The beast drove her missing nose into the ground in front of her and began to sniff. Her inhales were short but loud, like the sound of a bloodhound tracking an escaped prison inmate through a field. She turned her back to the news crew and Lost Hollow town administrator, sniffing at the lowest step to the porch, and then veered to the right around it, sniffing against the exterior wall of the Gordon house as she strafed along its length.
Afia leaned into Staff. “She’s following the exact path of those pawprints we found,” she whispered.
Staff nodded and whispered back, “She’s not only following them, she’s leaving them.” He indicated the fresh pawprints that the creature was creating as she moved in the dust between the clumps of overgrown grass that sprouted alongside the house. “I’ve always heard that some ghosts are mostly just residual after-images, sort of sometimes visible external memories of some event that happened in the past. I wonder how many times she’s followed this exact path around the house?”
“No idea. I wonder if we’re the first ones to have ever tagged along with her like this?”
When the creature was far enough away from the porch steps and not quite to the corner of the house, Staff stepped out from the middle of the two wome
n and positioned himself at her right flank. Afia, taking the cue, placed herself at the creature’s left flank, which forced her to step backward as the creature strafed along the wall to keep her in the frame of the iPhone’s camera. Patsy, apparently unsure what to do at this point, remained behind the creature, following along with its strafe. When Afia reached the corner of the house, she went ahead and turned it, focusing the iPhone on the edge itself so that she could capture the creature as she rounded it. Staff had no doubt that she would. She was so far perfectly following the original trail that he and Afia had discovered earlier that day.
By the time Staff, the last in the line of the creature’s videographers rounded the corner of the Gordon place, she had already sniffed her way up to the square of cinder blocks that served as a barrier to what at one time had apparently been a crawl space access. The creature was pawing at the ground there in front of it, wiping away dust and small clumps of grass that had sprouted there since the last time she had scraped it away. Most of her pawing and clawing was focused on the small mouse hole-looking damaged section of the barrier. It was the same spot where Staff had earlier surmised that a rabbit might have squeezed through to escape this...well, she wasn’t exactly a dog now as far as he was concerned, but he couldn’t seem to think up another name for her species.
Staff crept closer to her, crowding the frame of his iPhone’s camera with the black fur of the creature while Afia and Patsy both stood back a few paces, obtaining their wider-angle views. He wanted to get as close as possible to the action, the spot where she was digging, perhaps even get a peek through the hole in the wall by shining the iPhone’s LED bulb into it. Too close, and he might scare her away or—worse—make her angry enough to finally lash out at him the way they had all feared she would when she was sniffing at them before. Then, just as if she had heard his thoughts, the creature stopped pawing at the ground and stood before the cinder block barrier with her head erect and cocked at that “processing” angle dogs use when they’re attempting to understand something. From his position, Staff saw her eyes change from the matte black eyes—what he was beginning to think of as its “dead dog” eyes—to the sad brown human eyes, then the angry brown human eyes, then the angry hazel human eyes, and back. Its transformations had churned up again. She jerked backward a step, as if the wall had unexpectedly tried to grab her or as if she’d heard something behind it that didn’t quite ring true. Then she bolted, running away from the house and toward the wooded area behind it, away from the shadows of the pickups and the dead-end street. She leaped into the woods through a massive tangle of scrub and blackberry shoots. At the apex of her leap, she disappeared into thin air without disturbing any of the growth beneath her.
