The Gytrash
Denali Brinton exited Beury Hall into the hunch-weather night moments after the conclusion of a fierce spring storm which rent the skies above Philadelphia with all the fury of a monsoon. In its wake, a dense gray drow had descended over the city, and as the entrance door creaked shut behind her Denali stopped and stared ahead into the fathomless fog. Thick, curdled masses of mist billowed through the campus, in which seemed to lurk every creeping terror a woman’s heart could know to fear.
She swallowed tightly. The door’s computerized lock mechanism had beeped its farewell behind her and it was too late to go running back inside, to tell Angie that actually she changed her mind and would love to stay the night at her dorm. Not that she would have, given the choice. There was work to be done. Sad, sorrowful work. So there she stood, alone in the forecourt, staring off into an opaque nothingness like she were on the precipice of a deep sea trench.
Well, here goes… she thought, taking a deep breath before descending the steps onto the rainslick pavement, her platform boots clicking like hooves as she went.
The postdiluvian cityscape evinced the aftermath of a ferocious battle between the gods of earth and storm. Dribbles of water seep-sobbing off car fenders and cornices while the last brown dregs of yesteryear’s leaves swirled past her feet on the boreal gusts, leaving her feeling like a fish at the bottom of a turbid sea. Stout buildings loomed up on either side of Denali and disappeared into the brume, briefly illuminated in full by a violet jag of lightning whose thunder was muted by the fog. In other locales, the mountains and the seashore, such storms tended to scour the air clean. In Philadelphia, they only seemed to smear the city’s muck around, loosing a sordid, undefinable stench upon the streets, the reek of three centuries of corruption and pollution and every iniquity concealed within man’s treacherous heart.
A parked police car materialized out of the murk, its hood gilt in dew. Denali nodded politely to the officers inside as she trotted briskly by, hoping against hope they were too busy eating donuts to notice her. No such luck- she heard the passenger window squeak open, and turning back she saw one of the policemen stick his head out.
“Where ya headed, sweetheart?” the officer asked in his best Andy Griffith impression, his voice ringing flat as a stone in the fog.
“Home,” Denali replied. Mentally she flailed for an excuse to be out and about. Night class. That was it. There was a curfew exception for night students. Hastily, she added- “I just got out of class.”
“Where’s home?”
“Seventh Street.”
The officer stuck his head out a bit more and looked pointlessly up and down the bleak, shrouded road. “You all by yourself, honey?”
“No. I mean, right now I am. I’m meeting some friends up at Diamond. We’re walking home together.”
It was a bold-faced lie, concealed behind a pouty smile and a shake of the head that tossed her bangs and melted hearts; her patented “get out of jail free” smile.
The policeman looked back at her skeptically. Even at such close range his expression was blurred by the fog, like a half-remembered face from a dream, but she thought she saw him purse his lips. “You want a ride?”
She shook her head again. “No, no, I’ll be okay. It’s only a block.”
“You’re not in trouble, you know.” he offered, but the way he said it carried the dreadful implication of- Yet.
“I’m okay, honest,” she replied, her voice quavering from cold and nervousness alike.
The policeman sighed. He couldn’t force her to get in the car. “Alright, hon. You be real careful, okay?”
“I will be. Thank you.”
Denali waved lamely at him and continued on, the murg devouring the squad car in her wake. There had been little chance of it, but she was thankful they hadn’t frisked her. The contents of her backpack might have raised some questions she wasn’t in the mood to answer.
She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her black biker jacket and tried to pretend it warmed them while the wolfwhistle wind made her stockinged legs quiver like reeds. She cursed herself for not dressing warmer, for not bringing her gloves or a scarf. March was a fickle season, existing on the blurry threshold between winter and spring, and whether the city would receive rain or snow was up to a weather god’s cointoss. It was almost cold enough to make her forget the lurking perils of the street. Almost.
Her legs switched over to autopilot as mentally she drifted off down memory lane. A summer’s day long ago in the misty realm of youth, out in the yard with Madge. Blowing bubbles and chasing butterflies, infinitely grateful to be out of school and the cruel clutches of their teachers, though they never really did escape it. Denali certainly hadn’t- here she was, still in school over a decade later. Barely, she thought ruefully. Her grades had been in the gutter all semester. She’d been sleeping in, missing classes, and even when she could be bothered to show up she just couldn’t focus. There was nothing to be done for it. It was simply something she’d come to accept over the past four years; the depression rolled round in February as reliable as the first frost, as the phases of the moon. After tonight it would lessen. Not go away. It would never go away not ever, so long as there was breath in her lungs. It simply ebbed and flowed.
She sighed, her heart heavy as the fog. At her feet, a fast-flowing gutter current dragged an unwilling copy of the Inquirer into the maw of a storm drain. Front page, backdated three days- TEMPLE UNIVERSITY NIGHTMARE — FIFTH STUDENT DEAD AFTER SAVAGE ATTACK BY ROVING TEENS — ‘MONSTERS!’ SAYS MAYOR SHIPPEN
Denali had just enough time to read the headline before the paper was sucked down into the drain’s inky abyss. Quite instantly she was wrenched back to sober reality. Three days since the last attack. They’d found the girl’s body in the gutter at 8th and Norris, killed the same as all the others- fists and kicks and a lead pipe coup de grâce, after they got through “playing” with her.
Three days. The pattern so far had been that the gang waited a week or more before striking again, but such probabilistic analysis was little comfort to Denali. She cast a wary gaze all about her, though visibility was essentially zero. The other side of the rainslick road might have been the far shore of the Atlantic so far as she was concerned, but she didn’t think anyone was on her side of the street. No chance of the drone patrols spotting her or anyone else in this dreck, if they were even flying so soon after the storm. At least the beat cops were around. If something did happen, if she hollered in time-
Between crisp breaths she murmured half-formed prayers that the savages weren’t out tonight, that she wouldn’t be their next victim. The rape whistle round her neck knocked against the silver crucifix of her grandmother’s Rosary, and she clutched at them both like amulets, precious tinder for her hope.
Could be worse, she thought, It could still be raining. Besides, the fog is good cover. If they’re out there, they’ll have a hard time seeing you… and you them. God, why did it have to be this night, of all nights? Any night of the year and it had to be this one. Well, you can’t say I don’t love you, sis…
As Denali exited the campus and ventured into the wilderness of North Philadelphia, she clutched at the straps of her backpack like a turtle retreating into its shell. Her wide hazel eyes peering out from under a sheaf of chocolate brown bangs, darting to and fro, trying to descry potential dangers in the all-smothering fog. The late night cityscape pulsed womblike in her ears, everything from the distant slamming of car doors to the coyote howl of police sirens simultaneously muffled and magnified by the mist, echoing weakly through the sluttish murk.
Near to her, Denali heard nothing. Just her heels click-clacking far below like the gait of a ghost, and the rhythm of her own heart pulsing tensely in her ears. Occasionally the cemeterial wind kicked up, rattling through the bare branches of the sidewalk trees and icing the marrow of her legs. The vagrants and panhandlers weren’t out yet, still sheltering wherever they hid during such dire weather. Maybe the same place the birds went. Not even the alley cats had ventured back out onto the postdiluvian streets. No one was out. Not after such a storm as this. You don’t need to worry, Denali. Not on this night.
In the deep dark of the cellar, the Dog’s limpid eyes slowly blinkered open.
He gazed out upon a cold, cavernous ruin. The mildewed ceiling sagging ominously, sprouting a bumper crop of plaster stalactites. Rich, rotting pine beams floating aimlessly in black water that rose nearly up to the cushions of the damp couch he slept upon. A rusted metal boxspring looming out of the pool like pier pilings. Nothing moved in that dreary darkness.
Groggily, the Dog tried to recall why he’d awoken and struggled to do so. He’d been dreaming, and his perception of the border between the waking and the somnial was as blurred as the bounds of his own habitation. It had been a scent, he knew. A wispy trace of something… but what? It was too faint to recall in detail. Not any of the usual culprits- not the acrid gasoline of dirt bikes tearing down the street, nor the faint reek of ozone from the lights outside that burned his eyes behind their lids. It had smelled… nice.
He sniffled sleepily, about to dismiss the mystery odor as mere fantasy and drift back off into the realm of dreams. Then the same sweet scent once again brushed the wet tip of his nose like a feather, and he lurched upright. It was a new scent… and yet, very old. One which he had not expected to ever encounter again. Familiar, but nearly forgotten, buried beneath the dust and verdigris of the long ages of his life.
Lifting his vast, shaggy head off the ragged arm of the sofa, the Dog tested the air to see if the scent would return, or if it would yet prove to be a mere phantom teasing him from the recesses of his subconscious. He snuffled deeply to flood his nose with the ever-present reek of damp and decay so they would fade into the background, allowing for fainter, more subtle scents to be detected and matched against those already filed away within the vast halls of his memory. Then he sniffed again, lighter this time, his nostrils wrinkling daintily as he scried the air for the mystery odor.
Yes. Not dream. Real. A human girl, he knew at once. Smelling fresh and clean, and it was easy to discriminate this scent from all others, for he had not smelled anything fresh and clean in a long, long time. More than clean, though, she was terribly frightened. Effusing a brew of nervous sweat and perfume that saturated the air around him. Imploring someone, anyone, for succor.
The Dog rose with a yawn and stretched his long, shaggy legs over the sofa. He knew not how long he had slumbered. Days and nights. Weeks. He remembered only drifting off to the seep-sob lullaby of water dripping from the mold-stippled ceiling like the tolling hands of a clock, while man’s streetlamp simulacra of the sun scorched the night. His intended awakening would simply have been whenever his empty belly groaned for sustenance and compelled him to stalk the darkened streets for food in rote, mind-numbing routine.
But now a shiver of excitement ran through him from snout to shaggy tail as he shook himself off. He stepped into stagnant black water that rose up to his stifles, and waded over to the rotten stairs to go and see what stranger had come his way.
It was impossible, but never in his long life had he forgotten a scent.
The girl smelled like one of the Old People.
Turning north off Diamond Street, the streets reverted to mere horsecoach width. As she continued pushing through the cloying miasma, Denali slowed her pace to try to muffle the clicking of her boots. She needed to hear and, more importantly, did not wish to be heard. She was almost tempted to take off her heels entirely to silence their click-clack racket, but the thought of stepping into broken glass or a stray needle stayed that thought.
All about her the city reared up like an alien ecology composed in the main of moldering concrete and rusted metal. Streetlamps glew like cold, gloomveiled suns, while in the deep, undefinable chasms of shadow between their amber radiances, shapes familiar by day took on baleful new forms. She thought of jungles, of tropical plants and Mayan ruins. Mailboxes and bollards and fire hydrants sprouting like cycads. Wallowing humps of ivy-festooned trash strewn across vacant lots, slivers of glass glinting on the pavement like a field of siren’s jewels. Even the familiar trees, the elms and gingkos and beeches in their quartered pavement plots, seemed to be the flora of another world, erupting out of the sidewalk like sodden tumors. Overlooking all, decrepit rowhomes loomed like catacombs behind the curtains of fog, dancing in and out of reality. It all made Denali feel as though she were some hunted thing wandering down an urban game trail. It made her feel like prey.
Well, you’re not out here for you, she thought bleakly, You’re here for her. You are doing this for her. None of this is new. Temple’s always been in a dangerous neighborhood, even before this all started. You knew that when Dad took you for The Drive. You take your life into your hands every time you go off campus. Well, here it is. In your hands.
She swallowed tightly and tried to clear her head. No one else was on the street. At least, not on her side of it. She checked twice, thrice, and more, her eyes wide as a doe’s as she scanned the murk for invisible enemies. There wasn’t so very far left to go. Just another block and a half. It seemed further than the invisible moon.
“What the hell was I thinking, Madge?” she muttered to herself. She meant to soothe her frayed nerves with the sound of her own voice, but her question pierced through the street’s amniotic silence like a knife and she was startled in spite of herself. Like she were an animal seeing its reflection for the first time, scarcely recognizing the voice as her own. Her whisper seemed magnified by the fog, reverberating off each clotted bank of brume, and she looked around in a wild flutter of fear, as if she’d just given away her position, had rung a dinner bell for the whole sordid neighborhood.
Denali stood tensely, not daring to move, not daring to let the clipped sonar pings of her boots betray her location any further. The empty windows and doorways of condemned rowhomes on either side of the street leered out of the fogbanks black as snake holes. Anyone could be stalking her from such shadowed recesses. Anyone could suddenly lurch out from one of those stygian portals and grab her, and…
The Dog watched the girl in furtive silence from a yawning black doorway, staring down the bare, trash-strewn cement yard where once had been a dewy rose garden. Remaining hidden in the darkness just out of her own field of view, only his eyes glew dimly through the murk to betray his presence, to those who yet had the spirit to see.
He’d heard her coming from a block and a half away. Her nervous trotting gait and the loud clip of her boots on the pavement did not aid her in remaining undetected, but even had she come in silence, her scent would still have foretold her arrival. Many were the smells that danced into the dog’s nostrils on that forlorn street- the wastes of cats and squirrels, leaves dead and new, the acrid reek of burnt rubber, of oily human skins- but midst this sea of odors, her sweet aroma overpowered all else.
The girl paused directly in front of the doorway, looking around cautiously. She felt his eyes upon her but knew not whence he surveilled. That was good. She was not blind to him, like so many of the Old People had been, in the end. The fog clouded the Dog’s view as much as hers, but his eyes were keen, the soul behind them keener still, and in just a moment he’d made an honest appraisal of the girl.
She was young and pretty. Her features were like those of the Old People, even if her clothing was not. The clothes of new were confusing. The clothes and the scents. Hardly any odor from the body, as if they were ashamed to smell as themselves. This one could not hide hers, however. Fear rolled off her hide like rain sloughing off eaves. Fear and something more. The Dog couldn’t place it properly. The fear scent overwhelmed all else. Her eyes were wide with it, but swimming in their amber depths was something deeper, sadder.
But he was satisfied at last, for now up close he received her full odor instead of just tantalizing hints. Smelling is knowing. The girl was no doubt one of the Old People, who had once dwelt upon this street, and left long ago.
The Dog leafed through the long archives of his memory, trying to remember why the Old People had gone away, but what had happened was far beyond his meager abilities to understand-
The Old People had come from the islands across the sea. This the Dog knew, for he had come along with them, stowing away in the hold of a ship. When the ship made landfall in the greene country towne, the Dog had run to the city’s outskirts where it bordered a great forest of oak and ash and elm, and here he ran with the wolves and panthers and bruins, and taunted the dockyard cutthroats and red light bandits. It was not very long until those first of the Old People began building their city outward, and the Dog moved out with them and their great tide of progress, ever a faithful guardian of the hazy boundary between Man and Nature, living the happy and free life of a pariah.
Then the blood and spirit of the place changed for ill. The Old People scorned the Dog, and claimed every bit of his borderland home for themselves. They tore open the fields and cobbled streets to lay down tunnels and pipes, and cut down the trees to string up weird wires which blared forth harsh lights that hurt the Dog’s eyes and buzzed discordantly in his ears. Soon it was only in the deadest hours of night that the Dog was able to be outside at all. And as they chopped down the forests and routed the creeks into dark sewers, the Old People made a still mightier city of the Dog’s former home, and seemed to forget that there ever was such a thing as a Dog, which they had once known by many names- Barghest, Freybug, Black Shuck, the Padfoot, the Gytrash, and many others.
Something had changed, perhaps in their minds, perhaps deep in their souls. The Dog knew only that one day, most of the Old People could no longer see him, nor did they even wonder where he had gone. And his heart was sad at being forgotten and abandoned so, for though he was obedient to no men, he belonged to Man.
Then the Old People themselves went away, leaving behind their stately houses and their rose gardens and their sewers and their wire-poles to fall into decay, as if they had never cared for such things at all, and had raised them up solely to ruin the Dog’s home before leaving him forever. New people came to take their place, but these new people were quite different from the Old- their scents were strange, and their faces dark, and the Dog could not feel their minds as he could the Old People’s. The new people, too, knew not the spirit of the Dog, whom the Old People had both respected and feared as a watchful guardian.
And so the Dog, not knowing why the Old People had left him so, descended into the cellar ruins to sleep away these troubled times, and fell away into sweet dreams of yesteryear- of cool forest nights kissed by pure river breezes, and dewy rosebuds glistening in moonlight.
Now, he had arisen from his long slumber, and found himself watching this girl, one of the Old People, she of the seashell-skin, trotting nervously up a street teeming with unseen enemies. What was she doing here?
The Dog lifted a padded foot and slouched into the doorway.
By some queer instinct, Denali’s eyes fixated on the empty doorway in front of her. She couldn’t say exactly how, but she sensed something lurking in that impenetrable darkness. Something soundless, yet faintly audible; spectral, yet solid; invisible, but tangible. Her heart cantered against her ribs as she stared deep into the doorway, looking for any trace of movement.
Nothing. Nothing but the skeletal branches rattling in the gusting wind. The house was deserted. But she felt in her bones that someone was there, someone who even now was looking right back at her. As if she were being hailed by a ghost. Then a cold tingle of fear crept up the ladder of her spine, for she could just scarcely see the faint yellow glow of a pair of eyes peering back at her from that inky abyss.
A cry caught in her throat, her breath hitching on half a whimper. She stared and stared unblinkingly into the doorway, rigid as stone, scarcely able to wrench her gaze from the door. Praying that the dull amber eyes would reveal themselves to be a mere fata morgana, some cruel trick of light and fog.
A clot of brume drifted sluggishly between her and the doorway, and she stood statue-still waiting for it to pass. Not daring to move lest the figure in the doorway lurch out and give chase. When the fog finally dissolved back into the ether, the eyes had vanished along with it as if carried into eternity on wings of mist, and the doorway was once again a vantablack portal, as inviting as the entrance to a tomb.
Denali swallowed. She looked cautiously from side to side. Still nobody in sight, but with so many abandoned homes that meant nothing. She shook her head.
“I’m seeing ghosts,” she muttered to no one. Still, she thought, better ghosts than men…
She walked tersely onward, alert to every shadow. The sidewalk felt like it was falling out from under her into some bottomless black chasm as she finally realized how truly alone she was. Even her memories fled from her sight- her grades sequestering themselves back into their crisp manila envelopes, Madge politely closing the lid of her own casket behind her. Each step of that lonesome way she tried to convince herself that the dim yellow “eyes” she saw in the doorway were just a cruel trick of the light, some sort of shadow puppetry perpetrated by fog and lamp.
But though she desperately wanted to believe this, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being followed.
The Dog trailed her through the shadowed recesses of the house as she trotted across the empty street, looking all about her like a frightened deer, and again he wondered what was scaring her so. She was behaving like a hunted animal, not one of the ladies who once walked these same streets in crinolined skirts, sheltering under dainty lacework parasols. The neighborhood was teeming with besotted predators, but these were all still skulking indoors, away from the postdiluvian damp. If any did come out, he would know it long before she.
Coming to the end of the house, the Dog leapt gracefully out the empty windowframe to continue trailing the girl from the shade of the vacant lot beside. Ragweed grew between the heaps of bricks and rotting spars of wood where once had stood another rowhome. He had no fear of being seen, for even one so astute as she could not view him in plain unless he willed it, and he did not will it. Not yet.
She stopped suddenly. Clutching at the straps of her backpack, as if by shrinking in on herself she might present a smaller target. She glanced warily around the dark street, scrutinizing each blackened window as if it might be the one hiding a hitherto unseen foe. Her gaze slowly veered towards him, until she looked directly at where he stood invisibly before her in the weedlot.
The Dog froze, not daring to move a muscle as her gaze lingered over him, just long enough that he wondered if perhaps she did see him after all- a few of the Old People had been perceptive enough to sense even that which did not want to be seen. Then the girl chuffed, a quiet, reassuring chuckle to herself, and shook her head before continuing on her way.
He followed her for another half block, flowing like mercury midst the piles of refuse and weeds, lifting his paws where necessary over the rubbled foundations. Then she stopped in front of one of the blaring lightpoles. The one with the flowers placed before it. The Dog knew it well; it had become a landmark on his usual route around the blighted neighborhood.
The Dog shied into the shadows, away from the lamp’s scorching radiance, and continued watching the girl. She stood stock-still at the foot of the lightpole, her hair and skirt gusting about her impassive form. Her fear dissipated now, scoured away on the wind, and finally he understood why her eyes had seemed so somber in spite of her earlier terror.
Then the girl did something the Dog hadn’t expected. She dropped like a stone down to her knees, and knelt silently in front of the lamp…
All at once, there it was. Just like any other anonymous telephone pole in the world, save for the withered wreath at its base. Rain and damp had infiltrated the laminated placard at its center, making the photo of the smiling girl run and blur, but the cursive text below was still legible-
MARJORIE BRINTON. SEPTEMBER 4, 1997 – MARCH 8, 2022. GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN.
Denali looked down at the descanso and sighed heavily. Then she stooped down to begin her work. She did everything quickly and efficiently, trying to work faster than her grief could catch up. First she reached into her pocket for the padlock key and undid the chain tethering the little memorial to the pole. Then she picked up the old wreath and brushed the wilted lily petals beneath into the gutter. Her backpack’s zipper yowled open and she reached in and carefully withdrew the fresh wreath and a new photo placard she’d made in the university’s print shop. This wreath was different, roses instead of lilies. She tried to vary it each year; roses this year, lilies the last, before that carnations…
She tied the new wreath to the pole with zipties and redid the chain for good measure, then spent a minute grooming the roses. She’d placed it in her backpack as carefully as she could, but during the walk some of the flowers had been frazzled and she set them back into more pleasing positions, fluffing their petals like pillows and raking her fingers through the ferns surrounding them until the wreath was as perfect a tribute as it could be.
Satisfied with the wreath’s appearance, she reached into her backpack and pulled out the new photo placard from the protection of her calculus folder. It was the same photo as in the old descanso, of Madge smiling radiantly over a birthday cake. She’d just turned twenty-one and moments after that photograph was taken Denali had smeared an aluminum pie dish full of whip cream into Madge’s face, as joking payback for a similar incident on Denali’s sixth birthday. Dissolving into laughter without end, she’d helped clean Madge’s hair and then they’d gone down to the river pier and gotten quite drunk together, reminiscing about all the good times of their mutually concluded childhoods. Madge was attending Temple at the time, just entering her sophomore year. The coroner said she probably never even saw the speeding Hyundai that ended her life.
When her work was finished Denali knelt there for a long while. Her breath quavering as she was embattled by a storm of memories. She’d refused to let herself feel anything while she worked, but now she had nothing to focus her, nothing to keep the tears at bay. They welled like hot springs, and she tried futilely to blink them away before giving up and letting the dam burst.
It wasn’t just for Madge. It was for the callous transience of it all. Life had conspired to commence dragging her away from the deep pool of her bereavement and she resisted it like a stubborn mule because it felt wrong, dreadfully wrong, to feel okay again while Madge was still so irretrievably dead. Her grief was slipping away like sand through her fingers while smiles returned unto her like the disaster taxa ferns which bloom in the barren wake of volcanic eruptions, and she didn’t know what to do about that. Perhaps there was nothing to be done but wait for the dust of eternity to completely envelope in its all-erasing embrace her grief, her memories, the very name of Madge. This wreath, too, would rot, and need replacing, and Denali knew there would soon come a day when she would lay down a new wreath for the last time and she didn’t know what she would do when that came to pass. She understood that people had to die, that it was part of life, part of the order of the world. She just didn’t understand why God had to choose such a heartbreaking medium as Time to stage it all upon.
When her grief had run as far as it could and she was ready to depart, she stood up abruptly with a sniffle and inspected her handiwork once more. She knew Madge, her soul, wasn’t really there in the wreath, but it focused her, gave her something to speak directly to, instead of just sobbing her sister’s name to the wind.
“I love you, sis,” Denali choked, as quietly as she could. Her voice echoed back off the banks of fog as if she were standing in a mausoleum. “I love you. I love you.”
She hadn’t counted the seconds or the minutes or the hours and had no clue how much time had passed, nor did she care. Totally forgotten was the danger of the streets; it was as if she were the only being in the world, she and her grief. She wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist and, with one more heavy, tear-laden sigh, set back off down the street, toward home. She let the brume to envelope her and she did not look back.
The Dog waited until she had vanished into the fog to inspect her handiwork. Treading gingerly round the descanso, his nose brushing the roses just so. Fresh roses. It was the first thing he’d smelled in a long time that stirred him. Once this street was full of them, rosebuds glinting in dew ‘neath the light of the moon…
He thought that was all. She’d come here to place the flowers, and to cry and grieve her loss. An aberrant daughter of the Old People, passing through his territory on a quest to recall a love that had died long ago. Perhaps he would see her again, perhaps not. He wished her well and knew he would cherish her memory always- the precious knowledge that not all of the Old People had forgotten him, that some were yet able to see.
Then a new scent entered the Dog’s nose- rank smoke, mixed with the terribly familiar stench of lust and rage. The scruff on the back of the Dog’s neck rose involuntarily to attention, and he raised his whole head into the wind, standing absolutely rigid, one paw held slightly aloft from the ground. He smelled the air without sniffing it, simply letting it waft unfiltered into his nose. Yes. Exactly what he’d feared. The Bad Scent. The Bad Scent of the Hurting Men. It was Bad. Very, very Bad. And they were very, very close.
The Dog was not present when the others were slain, but he knew of it. He’d heard the struggles beyond the bounds of his territory, had smelled the grim aftermath as it was carried to him on the sepulchral wind. He knew, too, the men who had done it, had picked up their foul scents when they fled past him, fiendish delight leaking off their hides as they ran back to their wretched spider-holes, impressing them forever in the Dog’s mind as the Bad Men, the Hurting Men, the Terror Men.
The Dog looked back down the street to where the girl was fading into the murk. She knew. She must know. All the policemen of the city had been here, patrolling up and down the streets for weeks in their restless hunt for the Hurting Men. Their lights… so terribly bright, consigning the Dog to the basement for even longer than he normally would have spent down there.
Yet this girl was here now, all by herself, walking directly into an ambush. Was she mad? But then, were the Old People not mad altogether to so ruin the Dog’s home? To paste over the perfect edge of town with still more town, and then to paste over the living town itself with dead asphalt and concrete, and throbbing wires and posts of iron and steel? Resentment throbbed dimly through his veins. What did he owe them, after all? They had left him behind…
But then, this girl had very little to do with that. She was born long after the Old People left, and perhaps she knew not of their misdeeds, or did know, and reproved of them. The fact remained- the rose-bringer was walking to her doom. If none would help her now, she would surely die. The policemen were too far. None of the residents knew or cared of her life. That left him alone to guard this sojourner through his land.
The Dog listened to the girl’s footsteps fade away into the fog like a ghost, and made his decision. He trotted back up the porchsteps of his ruinous haunt, and returned to the flooded basement. The waters beckoned to him as ink beseeches a quill.
He would protect this girl.
Her eyes still damp and her heart still sore, Denali came to a large, dark puddle pooled up in a spot where the sidewalk had buckled and cracked, one slab of pavement subsiding under another like a clash of continental plates. She skirted around it on the verge, not wishing to step into the street on the chance that some wild speedster would suddenly appear out of the brume and mow her down. You could never be too careful in Philadelphia, even at night. Especially at night.
She put the puddle behind her and continued trudging into the fog, too sad to care when or whether she made it home, whether the gang was out there or not. Every shrouded shape seemed a potential enemy, but-
Gy-trashhhh!
Denali’s blood iced at the sound. A cacophonous splash behind her, like a heavy stone being dropped into a pond. Her breath snagged on a startled gasp and she whirled about on her heels, heart vaulting into her throat on a single, jagged beat. Acid terror clawed up her spine right after it. They were behind her. Right behind. She knew it. She could feel their presence with every fiber of her being even before she had completed a half-turn to face them. Oh God. Oh God. Forgotten was her grief, her sorrow. She didn’t want to die. Not here. Not now. Not like this. Her mind ran in hypersonic, as if each clipped synapse might be her last transmission to a callous world. At the last instant of her turn, she yanked her hands out of her pockets to defend herself.
A dog stood on the pavement before her.
All at once, the tension fizzled out of her like a deflating balloon. She exhaled heavily, almost laughing in relief. She’d been expecting death, death and worse. She got a dog.
And what a dog! her still-frazzled mind thought. Indeed, it was the biggest dog Denali had ever seen. Eyes level to her own, set deep back in a big, shaggy, hatchet-shaped head with a muzzle terminating in a walrus’s mustache of whiskers. His chest was deep and narrow, held aloft on lanky colt legs and too-big paws, and his withers were high enough that she thought it might be more proper to count his height in hands, like a horse. He looked like Winn-Dixie with gigantism, covered in long, shaggy fur the color of a well-used dishrag. His tail was thick and plumed like a featherduster, his raggedy ears were carried alertly forward, and every fiber of him looked to be hewn of muscle and bone and sinew.
But it was the dog’s eyes which most commanded Denali’s attention. There was something very off about them. Not wrong, but off. Fierce pools of amber, blazing under the animal’s soot-gray brow like hearths. A wilderness dwelt in those eyes, a wilderness and a secret, for they were the sort of eyes that coursed with ease over the deep abysses of time, and would have been as at home in a pineland thirty thousand years ago as on the ruined streets of North Philadelphia in the current. The realization soughed through Denali’s bones like the wind through the bare sidewalk trees. A dog may have stood before her, but he had the eyes of a wolf.
Denali swallowed tersely. There was no sign of aggression in the dog’s body language. No bristling hackles or bared teeth or snarling jowls. Indeed, he seemed to be more wary of her, though he could certainly have killed her in an instant if he so desired. He leaned forward without moving, his nose wrinkling ever so slightly as he inhaled to take another measure of her, without ever averting his eerie golden eyes from hers. Smelling perhaps for treats, perhaps for something far more special, something beyond reckoning.
Then, as if to rouse her from her dreamlike stupor at his sudden appearance, the dog shook himself dry.
Denali threw her arms up to shield herself from the spray of water. The dog was soaked through, like he’d just emerged kelpie-like from the puddle. Of course it could only mean he’d been out in the rain the whole storm, and she laughed despite herself, a merriment unsuited for the dismalness of the street.
“You’re lost, boy?” she asked, catching a fraidy-cat tremble in her voice. She didn’t care. Maybe she would’ve been embarrassed in front of her friends, but not a dog. There was something about dogs that demanded innocence in kind. “You were the one in that house back there, weren’t you?”
The dog cocked his head quizzically, and Denali smiled. “What’s your name, boy?”
She squatted down slowly to inspect the dog’s collar, keeping her hands cupped nonthreateningly over her knees. The dog took a wary step backward, into the puddle, never taking his wild amber eyes off her. He raised his head just enough for Denali to see her efforts to learn his name were for naught.
“No collar?” she frowned, staring at the matted mass of fur where a tag should have jingled before her. She looked up and met the dog’s eyes. “You’re a stray?”
The dog, quite naturally, did not answer Denali’s question. But there was a spark in his wolfish eyes, conveying an odd sense of urgency- for what?
“I don’t have any food, boy,” Denali said apologetically. She pulled out her jacket pockets to emphasize her point.
The dog didn’t budge. He just continued staring at her, his gaze remarkably intense, almost judgmental, compelling her to… to something.
“I’m sorry. I really don’t have anything for you.”
She tentatively held an empty palm out to the dog, ready to withdraw it at the first sign of aggression. The dog simply sniffed gingerly at her palm, from an almost equally cautious distance, all the while keeping his big, beseeching eyes upon her. Well, mutual wariness is good, she thought. At least you know where you stand with each other.
She pursed her lips.
“Well, look, I’ve really got to get home,” she explained gently, soothingly, just like if the dog were a person. As she spoke, she rose ever so slowly to her feet, turning her hands down nonthreateningly and holding her eyes on the dog’s scruffy, trashtruck toy face. “It was nice meeting you. You take care, alright?”
She was back on her feet and the dog hadn’t shown any sign of hostility. He still stood half in the puddle, watching her. With her eyes bolted onto him for the least warning of bite, Denali took one step backwards. Then she slowly turned, first her body and then at last her head, and began walking away back along her intended route.
She stopped after a few paces at what sounded like a metal chain being draggled across the pavement behind her. She turned to face the jangling sound, and saw the dog following her. She swallowed. What was that sound? She looked at the dog’s neck again, then his legs, to see if perhaps he was trailing some scrap of doghouse lead he’d broken free of long before. Nothing. He took another step towards her and she heard the sound again. The metallic sound was coming, inscrutably, directly from his paws.
Denali said nothing. What was there to say to that? She stared at the dog. The dog stared back. She chuffed in nervous amusement- “I don’t have anything for you, I’m sorry.”
She pivoted tersely away and started walking again, but as soon as she took a step, the dog’s paws immediately jangled on after her. She stopped and turned to face him once more, more nervously now. But the dog’s eyes seemed devoid of any kind of predatory intent. There was just that intense, blazing urgency.
“You’re kind of weirding me out,” Denali said. By a cock of his head, the wolfhound seemed to profess his own confusion at her- I’m weirding you out? Well, what’s a white girl like you doing in a hood like this?
Denali didn’t have an answer for that. The dog sat back on his haunches and waited, an amber glint in his eyes seeming to convey bewilderment that the girl found it difficult to grasp his purpose. He watched, and waited, and then his jowls curled back into a panting smile.
“You want to come with me?” she asked, in sudden a flash of inspiration.
The dog pricked his ears up and again cocked his head at her, as if he’d understood her and was trying to reply in the affirmative. His yellow eyes grew just a bit wider, and a slight whine rose from his throat.
“Well,” Denali said, thinking. It was still a few blocks home through that desolate slum, and the dog was friendly. And large. “Alright. I’ll be glad for some company. Come here, boy.”
The mutt swished his featherduster tail happily. Then he rose back to his big jangling paws and heeled alongside her with all the discipline of a show-dog.
They went like that for four forsaken blocks, Denali speechless at the hound’s good manners. It was as if she’d raised him from a pup, and the wretched neighborhood seemed far less sinister with this huge, apparently loyal animal at her side.
Soon they came upon the alley. It wasn’t really an alleyway in the proper sense, but that’s what everyone called it. Just a vacant weedlot, cutting straight through two blocks where long ago several rowhomes had been demolished, leaving only a few scattered bricks embalmed under wrappings of ragweed and stiltgrass. It was a shortcut through the urban ruins. On the other side, her house was but four doors down. The alternative was continuing straight up Franklin Street and turning onto Susquehanna, a far more likely locale to meet unsavories than the desolate weedlots hollowed out of the once-mighty city like a blight spreading through an elm. And yet, shrouded in that pervasive fog, the corridor was bound up in a stillness infinitely more hostile than mere silence.
She’d been through the alley many times before, but the place hadn’t seemed half so sinister by day. Again Denali felt she was being watched. This time she knew for sure it was the dog, who met her gaze imploringly, as if sharing her hesitation. She took a deep breath.
“Well, are you ready?” she asked. A flutter of nervous fear tickled her tummy as she watched clots of mist coiling under the dim, distant glow of the streetlights. The dog mewled anxiously at her, and looked up the street, the other path she could take. She sighed. “No, no. That way’s too long. I live over this way,” she said, pointing down the alley for emphasis. As if he knows what you’re saying… And yet she felt compelled to explain herself. “It’s quicker. Trust me.”
The dog just stared intently at her. She scoffed. Not to be mean or dismissive; more to bolster her own courage which was being steadily sapped by leeches of doubt the longer she hesitated. She pursed her lips.
“Well, you don’t have to come, but I’m going.”
And, so saying, she took a big step onto the unmown, dandelion-carpeted lot, and began trudging on towards home.
She’d meant what she said. The dog was totally free to depart and go his own way. She could not possibly force such a large animal to obey her. But she sincerely hoped…
A few short moments later, she heard the curious coin-purse padding of the dog’s paws. She breathed a blessed sigh of relief, looking to her left to see the dog alongside her once more, a skeptical but committed look in his eyes. Then they walked on together into the waste of weeds.
Any lingering skepticism Denali had about the dog evaporated when she took note of his calm alertness. Sniffing tentatively at the weeds, sometimes lifting his head to test the air. Leashless, he trotted along at a pace she could readily match, his body a smudge of graphite against the brume. At times the fog was so dense he faded completely into it, and Denali’s only indication of his continued presence was the soft metallic padding of his feet, and the overwhelming, calming reassurance she felt that he was, in fact, still by her side.
They came to the end of the first lot, and at the curb Denali heard the distant, unmistakable din of rap music. The harsh, discordant beat resounded like war drums, ribald lyrics muted by the mist. The dog stopped suddenly, ears pricked forward. He and Denali each scanned the gloom, but it was either too far or too fogmuffled to tell what direction it was coming from. She glanced at the dog. He stared intently into the murk, seemingly as confounded as she about the source of the music. His ears twitched slightly, like satellite dishes recalibrating. When he looked up at her his gaze was hard and solemn as iron. Then, reassuringly, a wag of the tail.
The Dog knew where they were. They, multiple. His ears were of little help, his nose far more. Even an ordinary dog’s sense of smell was many thousands of times better than a human’s, and he was no ordinary dog. He could find and follow a week old scent trail, if he must, his nose able to discern even the faintest traces of a creature’s passing.
In this case, the trail was straightforward. Five of the Hurting Men were directly ahead of them, seated on a crumbling porch at the end of the next weedlot. He knew them instantly. Never in a thousand years would he forget their oils, the pungent sweats and sebums oozing from their pores; nor would he ever forget the fouler memories he associated with their reeking hides. Screams for mercy piercing the night, met only with cruel laughter, the spilling of innocent blood upon pavement. In a crowd of hundreds he would pick them out as easily as if their heads were aflame. Each of them was a marked man, so far as he was concerned, and despite himself, the Dog felt a territorial growl rumbling deep within his chest.
A sixth Hurting Man, the one with the music, approached them quickly from the north, cutting off that avenue of escape and funneling them towards the pack on the porch. The Dog grasped their strategy instantly, and regretted that the girl had not heeded his earlier warning to turn up the street.
He looked over at her. His eyes wide and urgent. Trying with all his wordless tongue to persuade her to change direction, to veer away from the doom at the end of the alley. Down the street, the other way- they would be followed still, but only by one. One he could handle. He whined. Had he been a mere pet, curbed and leashed, he would have tugged and dragged her away from the peril whether she wanted or not, but as a pariah he could only implore as her equal.
The girl shook her head and jabbed a nervous finger at the alley. “This way,” she whispered sharply.
Again the Dog whined. If he were dealing with another of his kind, or any normal beast, he would expect it to behave rationally, to detect the threat and know to avoid it. But the senses of humans were pitifully dull. She probably didn’t know the Hurting Men were even there, awaiting her at the end of the alley. Too, her fear was heightened a hundredfold by the fact that the Hurting Men desired to harm her, specifically, and this same fear only made her behave ever more foolishly.
But the Dog was at her left hand. It felt right to be. He had always been a guardian of the crossroads, of the world’s most liminal boundaries. If ever he’d wrought mischief, he’d always made up for it by being a stalwart protector of the innocent, the lone traveler, even unto the day the Old People had been on the verge of forgetting him forever. What was this but his most ancient calling? Guarding a somber wisp of a girl, she who bore roses in her arms and innocence in her heart, on her journey through a dark ghetto…
And so, he resolved, as long as there was breath in his lungs and a bite behind his bark, no harm would come to her.
Despite the muffling effect of the fog, Denali could tell that the music was getting closer. Not that she was walking towards it, as if it were playing from a stationary speaker. It was moving towards her as well. Which could only mean one thing- someone was heading her way. Gauging the distance was nigh impossible in such dreck, but she knew it was coming from up the street, not in the alley. If she hurried…
The dog whined, again trying to urge her down the street, in the opposite direction as the music. She shot him an annoyed glance- they were so close!- and then crossed the street herself, waiting for the dog to follow. She had a feeling he would, and sure enough when she made it to the other side he was only a few paces behind her.
The next and final alley yawned before them as dark and sinister as one of the gates of Hell. The dog stared long into the blackness, then lowered his head. His matted hackles rose like a mountain ridge down the length of his back and he growled softly, more to caution Denali than to challenge whatever threat he sensed lurking in the abyssal corridor ahead.
Denali tensed in response to the dog’s hesitation. What if they’re in the alley? There’d be no escape. But then, who’s playing the music behind us? Just some guy ignoring curfew? That’s stupid. Maybe we should go down the street, after all. Just loop back up around the bottom of the block… but if they’re heading toward me now they’ll just chase me. This is it, you can give them the slip here or not at all. Your choice.
The lurid, hateful lyrics crept ever closer, piercing the fog, and Denali knew she had to make a decision. She turned to the dog. He was still holding himself taut as a wire. His nose wrinkled as he tested the air. No snarl on his face, but the stout-hearted defiance was plain in his eyes. The dog glanced back at her, begging pools of amber made numinous in the murk.
“It’ll be okay,” Denali whispered. Maybe it’s just an alley cat that’s got him worked up, she told herself. Yeah, and maybe it’s a Pegasus...
She stepped into the weedlot and let herself be cloaked in the pitch darkness, her black biker jacket absorbing the night like the hull of a stealth fighter. The huge dog followed at her side, solemn and wagless.
In the alley the fog was even more opaque than out on the street, funneled through it like sand in a slipstream. She couldn’t see the other end. Could barely see her fingers in front of her face. All about her the walls seemed to enclose like the fingers of a grasping hand. Dank crates and stacks of wooden pallets. The dog hemmed close to her side out of necessity, brushing against her legs, but she nevertheless felt comforted by his presence. Even more so a moment later, when she heard the rap music finally reach the entrance to the alley.
Denali stopped walking. The dog halted too, and looked back. A low growl rippled up from the bowels of his throat. For a moment the music seemed suspended in the air, growing neither closer nor further. Then the beat began growing louder, echoing as it bounced off the walls. Accompanying it was the unmistakable sound of shoes crunching on broken glass. Whoever was playing the music was now following them down the alleyway.
Denali swallowed tightly on nothing and looked at the dog. His huge ignis fatui eyes- still bright and gold as lightning bugs even in the smothering fog- urged caution, but underneath she could see the bedrock of the animal’s soul. Trust dwelt there. Trust and pure, simple honesty. The yearning to bestow comfort, in return for only the same. There was loyalty without flattery, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man with none of his vices. There was, in a word, a dog in those eyes, and if Denali had at any point during her fearful walk home wondered why she’d placed such full and complete trust in an animal she’d never met before, any such misgivings were resolved in an instant by an unbreakable bond which echoed across the abyss of forty thousand years.
Denali exhaled tightly, and she and the dog continued apace down the alley, each acutely aware of the echoing footsteps closing in behind them. As the unwelcome DJ got closer, the words of the song finally resolved into clarity through the fog-
Lead to the head,
A cracka’s gon’ be dead-
A fight, a fight,
It’s a nigga on a white,
If the nigga don’t win then we all jump in!
Kill that devil, kill, kill, kill ‘im now,
Slit his throat an’ burn his house,
Take his bitch an’ tear her blouse,
Uh, yeah, grab that white ass, have her roll-over-roll,
Make hoes eat dirt while we fuck shit outta ev’ry hole.
Denali bristled at the hateful lyrics. Her hands went clammy, her mouth dry and sour. She drew a slow, ragged breath, and reached a trembling hand out to stroke the dog’s scruffy neck for reassurance. It was their first physical contact, and the dog tensed as if unused to such affections. Denali felt his whole body quaver uncertainly under her, but he did not pull away and neither did she, each drawing strength and courage from the other. The girl’s fingers moved slowly up the dog’s sore-covered neck, scratching behind his ragged, flopsy ears and gently toying with the palm fronds of matted fur on his scalp. Finally she withdrew her hand. The dog looked at her for a moment, then sighed and got back to business, pointing his nose ahead into the fog like a radar dish.
Shapes leered out of the brume and Denali jumped at each indistinct apparition. The stacks of crates and lines of garbage cans each, for a moment, presenting the crouched forms of sinister men. The fog thickened so much so that even the dog, though scarcely a footstep away, blurred out like smoke, and only the comfort of his bulk and the incessant padding of his feet reminded her that he was still in fact there to guide her. As they pressed on, the baleful song continued-
Kill the devil’s dog an’ kill they wives,
Kill all the lil’ devils while they sleep tonight!
‘Cuz it’s our time now, we settlin’ the score-
Kill all the devils dead as the dinosaur!
Suddenly the dog growled, his body tense. Denali followed his gaze to the end of the alley. Someone was slouched against the wall, backlit in a fog turned phosphorescent by the streetlamps.
In grade school, Denali had read a book on paranormal phenomena. It was mostly the typical dreck about the Bermuda Triangle and the chupacabra, but one entry, on a Scottish monster known as the Fear Liath Mor- the Big Grey Man- had given Denali nightmares for years after. The Fear Liath Mor was said to be a horrible giant made entirely of mist and shadow, who stalked lone travelers across the moors. Next to a terrifying pencil sketch of a giant, shaggy figure slouching after a frightened hiker, the book calmly assured that the Fear Liath Mor was nothing more than a peculiar trick of the light, the sun casting back the hiker’s own shadow onto the mist, giving the illusion of a darkling pursuer.
This Fear Liath Mor was real. She knew it was real because the shadow man slowly turned his head to face her, then pushed coolly off the wall with a long, leering whistle and began swaggering towards her.
“We-e-ell, lookie ‘ere,” the man drawled as he slouched her way. “Selim brough’ us some more of that white meat, brothas.”
Heart pounding against the bars of her ribcage like a madeyed prisoner, Denali stared in naked horror as a black hand leered out of the fog, knobby fingers spread wide, jaundiced nails clutching for her pale throat.
Behind her, the rap music suddenly was punctuated by a booming voice- “Selim always brings the white meat.”
The dog barked. A short, ferocious snarl erupting out of his throat, warning of far deadlier force behind it.
“Oh, shit!”
The black hand recoiled as if scalded, retreating back into the fog like one of the heads of Scylla.
There was a commotion on the porchsteps as the man reeled back, and Denali realized there was more than just the one man before her and his ally behind. It was difficult to estimate, in the dark and the fog, but it sounded like there were four or five of them. Her stomach contracted into a singular pit of despair. There was no way, no chance of escaping from so many. Then, the still-snarling dog’s coarse side brushed against her legs. The touch invigorated her. She drew in a breath of courage, and continued walking, as slow and calm as her stuttering pulse allowed. To stop now was suicide.
A voice called out from the porch steps. “Selim, watch out yo! She got a dog!”
“Dog shmog,” the one behind her said coolly. “I’m all bricked up, let’s do this.”
“Stop playin’ man. You see the size of that dog?”
“I don’t give a fuck ‘bout no dog, Ty. Let’s go. Bitch need some meat under her belt.”
“Man you wrong as hell…”
Denali turned just in time to see Selim’s hand lurching out of the fog, aiming for her shoulder.
The Dog cast a quick glance behind him to see exactly where the Hurting Man’s incoming hand was. Then, with a savage bark and the fury of a tornado, he whirled round to face his enemy.
He heard the girl yelped as his bulk shoved her back into the brick alley wall like a featherweight. She caught herself on a stack of wooden pallets but the Dog wasn’t paying attention to her anymore.
The Dog lunged up and snapped at the Hurting Man’s hand. His aim was true, white fangs sinking into black flesh. The bite was calculated to just barely break the man’s skin, enough to draw blood without clamping down and inflicting real damage. If he’d wanted, he could have shorn the man’s arm clean of its socket. And oh, he’d wanted to, so very badly. But he knew that would invite battle, and while he could defend himself quite capably, he could not defend himself and the girl at the same time. So, this paltry snap would have to suffice for the time being.
The Hurting Man shrieked and snatched his hand back in a storm of cusses.
The Dog landed on all four paws and lowered his head, hackles bristling. He snarled viciously. Blood scent was in the air, intoxicating ichor overpowering everything, even the girl’s sweet aroma. It was so hard to not finish the task here and now, to not indulge in that eldritch power to kill which he possessed in such abundance. But the girl needed him still, and so he held himself back on the taut leash of his own will.
The Hurting Man lurched back from him, leaking splashes of blood in his wake. His hand was sticky and red. Four puncture wounds from each of the dog’s canines, crimson springwells that never seemed to cease. He squeezed his hand to slow the bleeding and chanted “Oh shit! Oh shit!” over and over again.
When Denali scrabbled to her feet the skirmish was already over. She’d nearly bashed her head into the wall, skinning her palms on the rough bricks as she caught her fall. She turned back just in time to see the dog’s fangs glinting in the air like daggers as he recalled his bite, while the bitten hand writhed back into the fog, its owner clutching at it like a doll.
“Ah sheeit,” one of the men called ahead of her. “Selim got bit.”
“Goddamn bitch and her goddamn dog!” Selim cursed.
Denali looked around. The fog had cleared enough for her to make out five men clustered on the porch, their legs hiked up like they were hiding from a torrent of lava. The huge dog returned to her side and locked eyes with her. His snarl was gone but the will to fight was not. He whined urgently, as if to say- We need to go NOW.
“Okay, okay,” she whispered to him. Her heels clattered upon broken glass as she trotted past the viper’s nest of the porch. The steadfast dog, alert to the possibility of another attack from the rear or the left flank, hemmed close alongside her, herding Denali like a lamb and forcing her to make a wide berth around the men, and she couldn’t help but admire his perfect grasp of the situation. The men, still too afraid of the dog to approach, catcalled as she passed.
“Come back, babycakes, shimmy yo’ tight ass over here!”
“Pretty legs, pretty legs!”
“‘Ey sweetie, I can do you better than that mutt can!”
Denali straightened her spine and walked past without acknowledging them. A calm pace, like the men weren’t even there, like this odd stray hound really were her dog and they were simply out for a normal evening stroll in the park. Even as they taunted her, the men’s sunken yellow eyes darted to check the huge dog, like nervous squirrels peering out of a tree. It was working so far, both the dog’s confidence and her own keeping them at bay. If she broke, if she ran, or worse- unlikely though it seemed- if the dog left her, it would only invite a wild pursuit.
“I’ll gut you, you little bitch!”
That was Selim. Denali turned back to see him keeled over on his knees, still clutching his bleeding hand. His face was twisted into a hateful mask of rage that contained all the enmity of the world. She said nothing.
“You hear me, cunt? I’ll gut you fo’ this!”
His words resounded through the sluttish murk, but in the presence of her wyrd guardian they fell impotently upon Denali’s ears. The dog barked gruffly, as if to say- Move it! She was only too happy to oblige, and began trotting away.
“Motherfuckin’ bitch, get yo ass back here!”
“Forget it man,” one of the other men piped up, “She wasn’t nothin’.”
“Go suck a cat’s dick, Tyqueace!”
“The fuck you jes’ say to me, nigga?”
“I said go suck a cat’s dick!”
Denali and the dog went on, leaving the geckering catcallers on their porch to be consumed by the fog.
The alley’s exit loomed ahead, heralded by the slightly more luminous fog under the streetlamps. Denali kept walking, praying that there would be no pursuit, that the dog would keep his head for a few more moments. One bite was enough. She didn’t think the dog, huge and strong though he was, could hold six grown men at bay.
Dutifully, the dog stayed at her side as they finally came out into the street. Denali almost melted in relief. The dog halted for just a moment, one forepaw off the ground. He looked back behind them and tested the air. Then he turned back to Denali and let his tongue loll out, as if to say- All clear.
Trusting from the dog’s relaxed demeanor that no pursuit was forthcoming, Denali lowered her own guard a bit. Just a bit. She didn’t pull out her phone. Not yet. Not until she was safe indoors.
The dog continued to accompany her as she walked down the last half-block to her house.
“You’re a good boy,” she said. Not in any cute, cooing babytalk tone. She meant it very seriously.
She looked down at her shoes. It was silly, but here she was, struggling for the right words to thank this strange, improbable dog for saving her life.
“I… you know, I’m sorry, but even at home I don’t have any treats for you. I… hmmm.” She huffed in frustration. The dog shivered in his soot-gray coat beneath the glow of a streetlamp. Denali sighed. “Thank you.”
The dog looked up at her. Set back under his scruffy brows, his eyes twinkled like gold dust. Not for the first time that night, a wordless understanding passed between them, the dog seeming to reply- Don’t mention it.
Ahead, Denali’s destination loomed out of the fog. The corner house, lights all on, cutting through the brume like the prow of a ship.
“Well, this is me,” she said lamely. Then, she asked- “You want to come in for the night? The house is too small for you to stay forever, but it’s warm. Warmer than wherever you were staying before, anyway. I could brush you, at least- you look like you need to be reupholstered.”
The dog, naturally, did not answer, but followed Denali across the street to the rowhome.
He knew well of what she spoke, and had he been any ordinary dog, he would have obliged her offer of food and shelter and warmth. But alas, this Dog was not an ordinary dog. His home was in the liminal. He could sleep on her porchstep, certainly. By her bedstead, never. It had been this way for all the long years of his life, in Philadelphia and back in that hazy, dismal place they called the West Riding, where he was whelped. He was a creature of the crossroads, a guardian of travelers, and tonight he had fulfilled his ancient covenant with the Old People.
The dark alley had renewed his strength, but now, under the fierce glow of the lamps and wires, he could feel it waning quickly. He was far from the cellar now, in its odd, comforting zone between the knowledge of the University and the ignorance of the ghettos.
It was time for him to depart. In another buckled section of pavement, water had pooled into a broad and shimmering expanse, and it beckoned to the Dog in ancient song…
Denali fumbled with her keys but needn’t have worried herself. The door swung inward, revealing the shocked face of Jackie, one of her flatmates.
“Oh my God, Denali!” she exclaimed. “You walked home alone?”
“No,” Denali smiled, shaking her head. “Not alone.”
“What do you mean?” Jackie asked, poking her head just enough out of the jamb to look around the porchsteps. Wide-eyed, like a mouse peering out of its burrow. “There’s no one here.”
“Wha-” Denali started, before turning abruptly at the sound of a large splash on her left.
The dog was gone but the ripples lingered, spreading slowly out to the edges of the puddle before it settled back into a glassy sheet.
Denali looked around the empty street in bewilderment, wondering what had become of her furry guardian, but all traces of him vanished with the last ripple of bestilled puddle water.
“Denali?” Jackie asked.
“I…” she started, but she didn’t know where to begin.
“Just come inside,” Jackie insisted, “I’m getting nervous with the door wide open.”
Denali nodded. Then, suddenly, she came back to her senses. “Oh my God,” she stammered, jabbing her fingers into her pocket for her phone.
“What?”
“I have to call the police.”
One week later, Denali strolled down Pollett Walk on her way home from the party. Equal parts somber and joyous, the arrests of all six of the suspected rapist-killers was well worth celebrating. The details were still under tight wraps for the upcoming trial, but apparently a girl had phoned the police claiming she’d nearly been attacked by the men until her dog bit one of them. Three days later, one Selim Brown had checked himself in to an UrgentCare clinic, complaining of a dog bite that refused to stop bleeding.
She walked confidently with her chin held high. The streets were still a dangerous place after dark. They always would be, and one needed to be always vigilant. But the great terror had ended, and Denali felt no fear whatsoever as she strode home.
A splashing sound to her left shook her from her reverie. She smiled and turned to face the maker of the noise. Skulking just beyond the reach of the streetlamps was a huge, woolly, soot-gray hound, whose eyes shined a blaze of amber in the incandescent glare as he watched and followed her from the shadows.
Denali held up a waving hand in greeting, then looked away, a knowing smirk spreading across her face as she did so. Another puddle lay before the dog.
When the next splash sounded and she looked back once more, the Dog was gone. The street was quiet, the puddle settling, and the cool night breeze whispered its secrets to those with the ears to listen.
POSTSCRIPT: This story was inspired by the legend of the Gytrash, which the author first heard about on Dead Rabbit Radio- a daily paranormal, conspiracy, and true crime podcast- in Episode 199, titled “The Guytrash: The Shape-shifting Horror of Britain!” The author is indebted to Dead Rabbit Radio for providing the creative inspiration needed to write the tale you have just read. If you enjoyed this story or the show description interests you, please consider giving it a listen!
I have also published a “WRITING OF” essay to accompany this story, for any readers who might be interested in the research and process behind the story, including an explanation of what exactly a Gytrash is, and several deleted scenes:
WRITING OF: The Gytrash
Howdy! This is just a little behind-the-scenes essay about my latest short story, The Gytrash- here I’ll cover the research, inspirations, the cover art, writing process, several deleted scenes, and a bunch of other stuff that went into writing this. This was a long one to write, so it has an equally long essay accompanying it. Buckle up!
A.I. Disclaimer: This story was entirely human-written. However, the cover art is a collage of stock photos which includes an A.I. effect blended into the final composition.