"Something Got At Them"

Part 4

It was an evening in early September and I was sawing in my garage at home in Prent, making a crib for my brother. Brian Addison was being fruitful and multiplying with his wife Emily, and I was the old cool uncle with nine fingers to his kids, living up north making furniture with a giant saw.

On this night my giant saw nearly took another finger, because when an awful howl filled the night my hands tensed and shifted with the wood.

My garage door was open, spilling light down my slanted driveway to the road. I could drill and saw and hammer all night and even play loud music and it wouldn't bother my closest neighbors. The Banvilles were more than a mile down the road, and the forest in between was normally peaceful, with frogs in one corner of the property and crickets in another. They stopped, but the lightning bugs continued throughout the howling and what followed.

The howl came again. It was closer, and it sounded wet, choked and sloppy. Whatever it was, it gurgled and growled between howls, and as I stared out of the garage I was convinced that it could only be a wolf. A huge wolf, full of rabies. The garage door button was on the other side of my workbench, and my pickup truck.

Just five seconds, I thought, and then the dog came up my driveway.

Or rather, it staggered up. It shuddered and groaned and growled, revving up like a slow chainsaw to howl again and once more lift every hair on my body. Before it could I moved, absent-mindedly shutting off the saw like a good boy, programmed and marching, not running. I got around my bench and truck and slammed the door button with a sweaty palm and the staggering, sick dog was still halfway up my driveway, and despite my worst fears it did not run. It probably couldn't run.

Only when the doors closed did I finally realize that it wasn't a wolf. It was Spike, the Banville's beagle, about as high as my knees. But I wasn't going outside, and I thanked God my garage is attached to the house.

I wasn't very sure about what I had seen. In my mind the dog that might have been a huge wolf had only become Spike once the door was shut, when I could breathe again. Had there been a foaming muzzle, a clear answer? I thought so, but I hadn't been looking very long. Had there been red on Spike, had he hurt himself, or was it someone else's blood? I was an unreliable witness - if I hadn't seen Spike many times before, I might have thought it was a coyote or a fox with as much chance as a dog.

I called the Banvilles, and got the answering machine. It must have been one of the custody weekends.

Did I just have a lost dog to report, or a rabid dog? Or was it a hurt dog, looking for someone it knew to help? Shit.

Putting on three layers of socks and two pairs of pants, plus heavy gloves and boots, I picked up a flashlight and went outside. Spike was a goofy coward and he liked everyone, so I thought that I must have misread the situation, but I'd be able to take a nip like this. If he was sick or hurt, he couldn't have gone far.

But my hairs lifted up as soon as I stepped outside, and circling around the house with fireflies flickering on and off in my front yard I stopped with wide eyes, paralyzed by a nightmare thought: that Spike was out here, but I hadn't seen him howling.

Something got at them before they were found. Thanks Paul.

If another animal had continued chasing Spike to a grisly conclusion after I had closed the garage door and sealed his fate, it hadn't made a mess that I could find out here. Maybe it just carried him off. After forty minutes of stomping around with the fireflies and careful whistling I got nothing, and I went back inside to think and sleep, all doors locked and windows closed.

The last of the year's mosquitoes whined in my ear as I came back in, and I smashed it. No blood in my palm, and for some reason that made me breathe a sigh of relief.

I never saw Spike again. There were drops of cold blood on my driveway, coming up from the road and then turning into the wet grass off my property, quickly getting lost in the high grass, with no other trails coming back.

When I woke up the next morning, Harold Lefler was dead. That lost beagle flew out of my mind.