by SL Huang
A Neurological Study on the Effects of Canine Appeal on Psychopathy, or, RIO ADOPTS A PUPPY
by SL Huang
Copyright ©2014 SL Huang
The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License:
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Cover copyright ©2014 Najla Qamber
All rights reserved. The cover art may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission from the copyright holder, except as permitted by law.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance in the text to actual events or to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover art: Najla Qamber Designs
A NEUROLOGICAL STUDY ON THE EFFECTS OF CANINE APPEAL ON PSYCHOPATHY
OR
RIO ADOPTS A PUPPY
A Russell’s Attic Interstitial
THE MAN who calls himself Rio is doing his work in the region surrounding Hanabe when the dog appears on his doorstep.
The animal is lame, one leg matted with blood. It’s young, perhaps a few months old, if that. It’s thin, thin enough for its hide to stretch taut over its ribs, as if its skeleton endeavors to split its skin.
It whines at him, pushing a damp black nose against the ground next to his foot.
The blood on its leg is an exquisite crimson.
The puppy is one of God’s creatures, and it doesn’t inconvenience Rio to take it inside, so he does. The house he’s staging from has no plumbing or electricity, but that does not perturb him; his plan here will take some days to come to fruition and he’s stocked enough supplies to wait it out. He lays the puppy on a table—the creature is so light he can lift it in one hand without effort—and opens a gallon jug of water to pour some into a pan.
It seems a shame, part of his mind whispers, as he wipes the blood from the puppy’s leg with a gentle touch. The image of the flesh and bones beneath blazes brilliant in his brain, calling to him. He envisions abstract precision in red and white, a magnificent harmony of order, instead of this inexact, organic messiness.
It would be triumphant.
Rio ignores the temptation. His perversity is a cross he has borne long enough that its presence in his thoughts is unremarkable. His fingers stay calm and indifferent—he will do penance for the thoughts later.
The cut on the puppy’s leg is shallow, and Rio does not know how to treat a dog so he bandages it as he would a human wound, with antibacterial salve and gauze. The puppy immediately twists around and chews at the side of the dressing. Rio moves its head away, and it licks his hand.
It must taste its own blood, he thinks, not without a mild pleasure.
He puts some clean water in another shallow pan for the puppy to lap at as he cleans the rest of its fur with a damp cloth. It starts to gain energy, wriggling around to lick or nip at his hands and sleeves as he works, but the antics do not bother him.
Its skin is very warm. Rio has thirteen different knives on his person and more in the cases in the next room. He imagines the dog’s hot blood flowing over his hands, its flesh parting beneath the razor edge of a blade in a perfect line. Imagines the sensation of total control as he stretches one joint back and then another, until he makes the creature dance like he’s a master puppeteer.
The dog is innocent, so he won’t.
Prayer resonates through his brain on well-worn tracks. Panginoon kong Hesukristo, ako’y nagkasala sa Iyong kabutihang walang hanggan. Ako’y nagsisisi ng buong puso at nagtitika na di na muling magkakasala sa tulong ng Iyong mahal na grasya… the resolution is a lie, of course; he knows he will continue to sin. He asks forgiveness for that as well.
He finishes cleaning the puppy’s fur and moves to the side of the room, where he retrieves an MRE with beef in it. The dog belly-crawls toward the edge of the table closest to him while he heats it up, its stumpy tail oscillating back and forth with a speed that seems like it should be tiring.
Rio finishes the heating process and tears open the bag. The puppy’s claws slide on the tabletop as it pushes itself up with a high-pitched yip. Rio feeds it a few chunks with his fingers—it tugs the bits of food free greedily and manages to wash every inch of Rio’s skin clean with its tongue—and then he puts the bag aside. If dogs work in the same way as humans, and he suspects they do, the pup will be sick if it tries to devour the whole bag.
It whines at him.
He stares down at it, anticipation stirring as he denies it the sustenance it desires. It’s not the same as using a knife, but his power over the creature surges inside him, endorphins shimmering in his veins. The tiny beast fills his vision, its scraggly brown and white fur and its lop ears. He yearns to do more.
To make it perfect.
Panginoon kong Hesukristo. The prayer’s necessity is so predictable that it’s flowing through his thoughts before he’s decided to say it. Ako’y nagkasala sa Iyong kabutihang walang hanggan.
The puppy rolls over on its back and clamps its tiny teeth on the gauze dressing, tugging at it and growling. It curls into an energetic battle with the gauze until it overbalances and flops over onto its side. Rio puts away the medical supplies, but when he goes to retrieve the towels, he finds the little animal alternately pouncing on one of them and snuggling into it, as if unsure whether to judge the thing an adversary or an appropriate bed. After a moment’s pause Rio leaves it.
The puppy tries to nuzzle him, but he pulls back his hand before it can. It’s too close.
Too stimulating.
Rio steps back. The familiar buzzing is starting beneath his skin, prickling, creating its unignorable thirst. He needs satisfaction, and not here.
He checks his thirteen knives and sweeps out the door into the darkening evening, leaving the puppy attempting to express dominance over a textile product.
♦
When Rio comes back close to dawn, his hands tacky and his nails crescents of dried red, the puppy is curled up asleep on the bare tabletop. The towel is on the floor, and the water bowl has been upended.
Rio cleans up the mess, cleans up himself, cleans off his knives.
He is spent now, and bathing in the usual aftermath of an imposed moral guilt, as familiar and expected as the cycle of his own base needs. The litany of repentance replays again in his head, even as he knows mercy will never be his, neither to deserve nor to receive. How does one ask for delivery from evil when one is the evil oneself? A conundrum.
The water in the pan clouds with the color of beauty.
The puppy wakes up and whines at him. It scratches at the tabletop and then urinates, making a small puddle.
Rio wipes up the liquid and then turns to get the dog some food. The night is hot enough that the MRE from the day before is surely unsafe for consumption now; flies buzz around its contents. He asks forgiveness for the waste—he should have finished it himself, would have if he hadn’t been distracted.
He heats another one, chicken-based, and this time allows the dog to have more. It wags its tail as if it’s trying to power a motor and burrows its nose into the bag.
He watches the tail. It would be so satisfying to see what he could do with that anatomy.
His breath quickens. He’ll have to find somewhere else for this animal. Away from him.
♦
Of course, there is not any readily available place one can leave a puppy near the town of Hanabe and trust in its survival.
Rio is not certain that should concern him. After all, he eats meat and cares as little for the plights of random animals as he does for the plights of random humans—that is, not in the least, other than as a reminder of his general duty to mitigate those plights. When he leaves Hanabe it will be wisest to leave the dog behind anyway. Even well before his departure, when the pieces of his chessboard align and the time comes to shatter the warlords keeping this region in thrall, he will not have time to worry over animals. And that day is coming within the week if he’s set his trap properly, which he has no doubt that he has.
Leaving the puppy on the streets now, better-fed than he found it and with its leg healed and uninfected, is an aggregate positive result. Yet upon pondering the act, he finds he isn’t entirely certain it is not an immoral one.
He is unsure why. It does not seem expedient to continue to care for the dog at the expense of his other plans. And even if he would choose to wait on his agenda, he knows himself too well—the dog would fare better on the streets than it would if he forced himself to be its caretaker for too long.
He crosses himself: light, familiar touches, one, two, three, four, and a hand to his lips. He will pray on it.
♦
Things rarely go wrong for Rio, but when they do, they tend to go violently wrong.
The day ends with one of the regional warlord’s highest lieutenants, a man known as the Handler, bound and bleeding on the floor of the house Rio has been staging from. Above his unfortunate captive, Rio sits in a chair and eases out of his coat and shirt to expose the long, vicious gash across his own ribs. The flesh fits together neatly when he presses at the skin, perfection in reverse. The pain is cathartic.
He almost died today, and that would have been fine. Instead, he will live another day.
He opens a medical kit and cleans the wound, then threads a needle with sutures and begins tugging the edges of the shallow slash together in tiny stitches. The artistry of it is satisfying, though not as satisfying as what is about to come.
The Handler moans. The jagged tear in the man’s thigh hasn’t nicked an artery, but it will kill him eventually if it continues to bleed.
Rio won’t let him die, of course. The justice stops when they die. The satisfaction, too.
The puppy—now on the floor instead of the table—pokes its nose out from where it hid behind a stack of boxes as soon as Rio swept inside with his cargo. It cautiously pads out and sniffs at the back of the Handler’s legs.
Eyes rolling, the man lashes out a heel and kicks the puppy in the face.
The tiny creature tumbles across the room from the force of the blow. Before the motion completes, Rio is on his feet, bearing down. He stabs a blade straight through the man’s Achilles tendon and punches into the wood of the floor beneath. The Handler screams, unearthly and long, his leg rigid with agony above his pinioned foot.
Rio is unperturbed. “Don’t kick the dog,” he says.
He turns to the side of the room. The puppy has picked itself up and shaken itself, and it takes a few cautious steps back toward him, tail already starting to wag. It doesn’t appear to be injured.
Good.
Rio goes back to his prisoner. He is about to have an excellent night.
He sits again, purposely drawing out the wait. He will savor this. The needle has dropped to dangle from his half-stitched wound; he carefully wipes at the blood that has leaked out, running the cloth over his ribs on either side of the gash. Then he lifts the needle and goes back to sewing himself.
At his feet, the warlord’s lieutenant sobs.
♦
Ten hours later, the Handler has stopped screaming. He’s still conscious, but his remaining eye is glazed and lacks any focus. Every once in a while, he twitches.
He’s barely recognizable as human now. Instead, he has become a grotesque and gleaming red-and-brown sculpture made from a once-human skeleton—morbid fantastic surrealism made real. It is achingly stunning.
The sculpture doesn’t look like a thing that could still be alive. But Rio has an expertise honed over decades.
Rio steps back and admires his work, drinking in his own artistry. He is suffused with contentment, as he always is when such a job pleases him—this night may have started in catastrophe, but it has ended satisfactorily. He will bask in that satisfaction now, and pray later. He would say cleanse himself, but there is no cleansing possible for him, not until he meets God’s justice beyond this world.
That will be a glorious day.
He lays out his knives and other implements on the table all in a row, a row of shining metal now mottled with a sticky red gleam. The cleaning has a ritual to it too, a sense of the ephemeral, as he erases the trail of his craftsmanship to leave only the masterpiece.
A noise makes him turn.
The puppy has snuck out from…wherever it was; he wasn’t paying attention. It approaches the living corpse on the floor in a crouched wriggle, a growl emanating from its tiny throat. Before Rio can wonder what its aim is, it leaps forward and snaps its jaws down on one of the Handler’s mangled calves and shakes it with the same vigor it applied to the towel.
Rio hadn’t thought his subject could speak anymore, but a high-pitched keening echoes threadily from somewhere, a sound of raw agony. The puppy lets go and hops back, then pounces on the ankle that still has Rio’s knife through it, its tiny claws digging in, and alternately gnaws and licks at a bit of exposed white bone. Its fuzzy face has become smeared with scarlet, blood speckling its fur and painting its paws.
It gives Rio an unexpected thrill to see. He watches, transfixed, as the puppy starts to tug at bits of flesh and jerk them free of their erstwhile owner.
Maybe he should keep this dog.
The implications of that thought slam down on him so hard and fast that he flinches, and he crouches and sweeps the puppy away from the dead man’s still-living flesh with a swiftness that makes the creature yelp in surprise. He shoves his knives to the side—some of them clatter to the floor—and puts the dog on the table again.
Away from the floor. Away from everything.
He breathes.
The puppy whines.
“Hindi,” he says aloud, a harsh whisper. Whether he says it to himself or to the dog or to the Lord, he’s not sure. The word repeats itself over and over again, in the polyglot mix of all the languages he thinks in and some he doesn’t. Hindi. Nie. Hayır. Nu. Hapana. Aniyo. La. Tidak. Nyet. Nein. Nunca. No.
Putting a knife in an innocent creature is not the only way to harm it. Remaking the animal in his own corrupted image would be a thousand times worse than dispatching it—a thousand more sins, each a thousand times more mortal.
He has to remove this pup from himself.
He shudders, deep and visceral, and the rhythm of another prayer starts up in the back of his mind. He’s not sure he hasn’t committed such an evil before, with someone he was bound by God to protect. He’ll never know where the line was—and is, the one between ensuring she had the ability to survive and twisting a susceptible mind toward his own corruption. He’s not sure he didn’t trample that line beyond question.
And it would have been so easy to do to her what he suddenly so desires to do to the dog. A brain and personality for his own molding. To carry on his legacy. She trusts him completely, falsely, and he knows why it was necessary—but the power of it, of holding someone’s soul in his hands, was a heady temptation. Is a heady temptation.
He tells himself he resists it, but how well, truly? How much does his influence taint her?
Ako’y nagsisisi ng buong puso at nagtitika na di na muling magkakasala sa tulong ng Iyong mahal na grasya. Amen. The prayer slides into another one, then another. Rio wipes off the dog’s fur and shuts it in another room while he cleans up.
♦
It takes Rio another nine days to complete his work h
ere to his satisfaction. He keeps the puppy shut up the whole time, with adequate food and water and some papers to make its messes on. It whines at him when he comes in to change the papers or its water bowl, but he ignores it.
On the tenth day, Rio leaves behind what he’s wrought in Hanabe and carries the puppy in a small crate onto a cargo plane. He lands in the town of Tali Kha in the foothills of some of the tallest mountains in the world and acquires a rickety truck.
He arrives at his destination just before sundown. The rural village is a picturesque handful of buildings rooted in the emerald meadows blanketing the mountainside. It’s chilly here, a crispness in the thin air and the smell of snow on the wind. Ice blue peaks pierce the sun’s rays into stripes overhead.
There’s no sign now of the blood that soaked into this mountainside so many years past.
Rio hikes around the outskirts of the village, to the far end, avoiding the locals. Two children playing go still and stare at him with unabashed curiosity, their dark eyes wide in their brown faces. The village doesn’t get many strangers these days, he is sure.
The path up the mountainside behind the village is steeper than he remembers, or perhaps there’s been some erosion. But the garden at the top is just the same. Or at least, back to just the same, with no sign now it ever burned among panicked screams. Rio steps around the decorative stone wall and among the flowers and vegetables.
A woman is on her knees in the dirt, digging at the soil with a trowel. Her head comes up as Rio’s shadow crosses her, and her face goes slack with surprise for a moment before she smiles.
Rio wasn’t sure she’d still recognize him. Her face is older than he remembers, a light spiderweb of wrinkles netting her skin under her cap of gray hair, though most of those wrinkles show years of laughter instead of pain. Thanks be to God, runs the disinterested mantra in his head.
“Sister,” he greets her, the local dialect falling off his tongue as easily as if he’d been here for longer than one bloody conflict more than a decade past.
“Rio.” The sister wipes muddy hands on her clothes. She’s dressed like her fellow villagers, her head uncovered, but the only times he’d seen her wear a veil anyway were when she was meeting with Westerners—begging, pleading with aid organizations, petitioning foreign politicians for anyone to turn their eyes toward what was happening in this place.
