The Dark Master of Dogs

by Chris Ward

  ‘Thank you, Uncle,’ Patrick muttered as he walked out.

  ‘Glad to be of help,’ Tommy said.

  The door closed. Patrick looked up at the night sky with tears in his eyes. He clenched a fist over the handrail and tried to recall Suzanne’s face, but all he could see was his ugly, grinning uncle.

  His mother had passed out on the couch. Patrick fetched a blanket from upstairs and draped it over her. Snoring like a crashed motorbike, she didn’t even flinch as he turned out the light, picked up the empty glass from the floor at her feet and tossed it into the half-full sink in the kitchen.

  No way could he sit at home and brood, and he didn’t think he would sleep even if he tried. How could he, if Suzanne was still locked up? What might be happening to her?

  In the fridge he found a plastic bottle of the homebrewed liquor Race had got for their mother. The stuff stank like methane when he pulled off the top, as though someone had taken a shit in it. Patrick wrinkled his nose then took a long swallow.

  It burned on the way down and he threw it straight back up into the sink. The second swallow stayed down, though, and by the third he was flying.

  Thirty minutes later, he lurched out of the front door, unsure what he’d been doing since he came home, but with a heart filled with frustration that needed an outlet.

  ‘I lose her,’ he muttered as he stumbled up the street. ‘Either I lose her to Tommy, or I lose her to the DCA. Either way, we’re both fucked.’

  The irony of his words made him burst into laughter that quickly degenerated into choking sobs. In a house he was passing, lights came on behind the curtains, so he picked up his pace until he reached the junction at the end of the street.

  With the curfew in place, the streets—sleepy even before—were deserted. The liquor had made him bold, but there was nothing around on which to take out his frustration, and the nearest DCA headquarters was a five-mile walk.

  He spotted the first patrolling nightwatchman at the end of the next street. A gun slung across his shoulder, rather than keeping a lookout, the man was instead peering into the screen of a banned smartphone, no doubt forcefully taken during an inspection.

  No chance. The man wouldn’t even see him.

  Patrick climbed over a fence and fumbled about in a flowerbed until his fingers closed over a lump of rock used to hold down a little identifying sign with a picture of a rose on its front. He hefted it in his hands; heavy but not too heavy, it should put the man down with a single accurate blow. Then Patrick could steal his gun and finish him off.

  A masterplan.

  Cutting through front gardens, Patrick tried not to make too much noise as he crept up on the nightwatchman, now standing back against a lamppost on Patrick’s side of the street, still leering into his phone. As Patrick got within a few metres, the sound of scampering feet made him turn.

  A hunched figure wearing a robe was hurrying up the street. Bare feet were visible beneath a pseudo-monk’s habit, and overlong toenails clacked on the tarmac. A hood hid the figure’s face, and arms clutched tightly around something held in its midriff made it hard to define whether it was a man or woman.

  The nightwatchman, still peering into his phone, didn’t spot the newcomer until the figure was almost past him. Then, stuffing his phone quickly into his pocket, he swung his gun up and shouted, ‘Halt!’

  Patrick dropped down behind a stand of bushes as the figure paused. The nightwatchman stepped onto the street, even as the groans and gasps of the porn he had been watching continued, muffled from his pocket.

  ‘Stop right there,’ the nightwatchman said, pointing his gun at the figure’s head, immediately marking himself as an amateur tough. Even Patrick knew that aiming at an opponent’s stomach gave you a better chance of hitting your target.

  A low growl came from under the hood.

  ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going? Don’t you know what time it is, dickhead? You’re jail-bound unless you can pay the on-the-spot fine.’

  Patrick tensed, wanting to help the figure about to get screwed for a bribe. He lifted the rock, taking aim, wishing the nightwatchman would focus.

  ‘Get your money out, bitch.’

  The nightwatchman took a step forward as Patrick loosed the rock.

  It went nowhere near the nightwatchman, bouncing harmlessly away across the road, but in the moment the startled man turned and fired off a shot, the figure attacked.

  Claws sprang from the robes and raked the man’s face. Blood sprayed. One hand reached up, twisting the nightwatchman around, jerking his neck back. He let out a single cut-off cry, then fell dead on the street.

  The figure stood over the body for a few seconds, then retrieved the box it had been carrying from where it had fallen in the street. Hands gave it a little shake and then turned it over. A growl came from under the hood.

  Patrick stared, too terrified to move. In the moment the figure had attacked, the hood had billowed up, and a streetlight illuminated the face beneath.

  As the figure looked up and down the street as it crouched near the nightwatchman’s body, it gave another little growl. Its head swung around, and the blackness beneath the hood looked in Patrick’s direction. Even behind the screen of bushes in the shadows, the intensity of that hidden gaze told Patrick he was marked.

  Then the creature jumped up and ran, quickly accelerating until it was a blur of movement, far faster than any human had the ability to run.

  Patrick became acutely away that he had pissed himself, and his hands were shaking so badly he had to put them into his pockets to hold them still.

  He hadn’t recognised the dripping teeth or the dog’s snout, but the human eyes behind it had been as familiar as any.

  ‘Race?’ he whispered, voice trembling. ‘Was that you?’

  6

  Patrick

  The sirens woke Patrick out of a drunken stupor. At first, as he hauled himself out of bed, he struggled to recall what had happened last night. Then, as he staggered to the bathroom where he threw up in the sink, it slowly came back in patches.

  He had sold Suzanne to Uncle Tommy in exchange for her freedom. Then, while stumbling around drunkenly in the pursuit of some trouble to relieve his anger, he had witnessed the death of a local nightwatchman, by a doglike creature with his brother’s eyes.

  ‘Damn, how fucking drunk was I?’ he muttered, splashing water into his eyes.

  Downstairs, his mother was making tea in the kitchen. He thought about telling her about Race, but he hardly believed it himself, and before he could even get a word out, she began to berate him for drinking her stash. Apparently he had come home and thrown whatever was left down the drain.

  ‘You’ll thank me for it one day,’ he muttered, heading for the front door with a barrage of insults at his back.

  A couple of streets away he found a cluster of DCA and local police vehicles blocking off the road around where the nightwatchmen had died. A small crowd had gathered by a ticker-tape line, but the policemen standing guard were refusing to answer any questions.

  Afraid someone might have seen him wandering around, Patrick headed on past, but by the next street corner, a second crowd had gathered around someone who was talking quite animatedly out of earshot of the DCA.

  ‘Man, he was ripped open,’ the speaker was saying. ‘I was waiting for the dog to finish taking a shit, and I looked up, and there he was, dragged behind the bushes. Whoever did him in tried to hide him after, but they did a crank job.’

  Johnny Lewis. The bassist in Race’s band.

  Patrick felt a sudden hot flush. He must have dragged the body into the bushes. How long had that taken? And the way he felt this morning, it was unlikely he had been subtle. Someone must have seen him.

  ‘Gonna start a war,’ Johnny was saying. ‘No way they’re gonna let someone get away with that. And guess who suffers? All of us. I tell ya, if it gets out who did that before they catch the arsehole, there’ll be a lynching.’

  ‘Pric
ks had it coming,’ an older man on the edge of the circle shouted. ‘Curfews, guards on the streets … whatever happened to freedom?’

  ‘We fucked it by not behaving ourselves,’ said someone else.

  ‘You young idiot. You don’t know what it was like.’

  The tensions of the group had changed from casual interest into latent violence. Patrick started walking away, but a shout from behind made him stop in his tracks.

  ‘Hey, Pat! Race shown up yet?’

  Patrick turned. Johnny had spotted him. Several others had turned too.

  Feeling as guilty as if he had ripped up the nightwatchman himself, Patrick shrugged. ‘Not yet. Let me know if you hear anything.’

  ‘Hey, I heard about Suzanne. That sucks, man. Sounds like hanging with you is a pretty raw deal these days.’

  A couple of other guys from the group who know Patrick chuckled. The rest just looked bemused.

  ‘Well, I’d better get looking,’ Patrick said.

  Not wanting to go home, he headed for town, relieved to leave Johnny’s group behind. Before he got even close to the cluster of shops around the cathedral, the wanted posters started to appear, stuck to telephone poles and lamp posts, walls and fences. More each day, and it concerned Patrick how many he recognised. There was a distant uncle on there, wanted for inciting mob violence, another old school friend for suspected sabotage.

  And there, on a corner post just before the turn into the cathedral avenue, a picture of his brother.

  RACE DEVAN

  Of 14 WESTWARE ROAD, WELLS

  WANTED FOR QUESTIONING

  ON CHARGES OF FAILURE TO APPEAR

  AT APPOINTED WORK OPERATIONS

  CALL: --------

  Patrick sighed. His mother would die. She might already be dead, if one of her brown-noser friends had spotted it and gone around to inform her of the news.

  Before he could talk himself out of it, Patrick ripped what he could of the poster down. Paste kept parts of it stuck it to the pole, and what remained was a streaky memory of a human face: one eye, part of a chin, a corner of ear. Patrick tore away the address and charges beneath, then screwed the paper into a ball and tossed it over the fence into the yard behind a hairdressers.

  Perhaps the hangover had removed his sense of self-preservation, or perhaps his suffering had brought a sudden brainwave, but Patrick marched down the street to a police station in the shadow of the cathedral.

  An officer sat behind a desk, wearing the grim expression of contempt that appeared to be a prerequisite for DCA enrollment.

  ‘I have an enquiry,’ Patrick said.

  The man sat up. ‘You have a case number?’

  ‘No. A name. Roger Devan. Is there any news?’

  The officer pulled a file out of a drawer and flicked through a few pages. When he found what he wanted, he tapped the page and then looked up. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Still missing. No leads. It’s looking like he fled town. It goes national in one week. Who are you?’

  ‘His brother.’

  The officer leaned forward. ‘Are you now?’

  ‘He hasn’t been in contact, if that’s what you’re wondering. Do you think I’d show up here if he had? It’s just that my mother’s sick and she’s craving news. Even if he’s dead, you know, that would at least be closure.’

  ‘Is that all?’ the officer said, showing no sign of any empathy. ‘I have work to do if you have nothing else.’

  Patrick started to shake his head, then hesitated.

  ‘Actually, yeah, there is.’

  The whole sensible part of his brain that had got him through thirteen years of schooling relatively unscathed was screaming at him to shut up, but he was winging it, pulling out anything that might get some kind of answer.

  ‘I was up early this morning, looking out the window. I heard a sound, hoped my brother had come back. I saw someone running up the street.’

  ‘Did you now?’

  ‘Yeah. He was carrying a knife.’

  The officer sat up. His eyes not leaving Patrick, he flicked the pages of the file back to the front. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘He was heading south, in the direction of the Carmichael-Jones Robotics Factory. His face was flushed, and I’d swear there was blood on his shirt.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Just before six-thirty.’

  ‘How did you see him in the dark?’

  ‘There’s a streetlight outside my house. I saw the glint of the knife, and his uniform had a patch of dark that looked like blood.’

  ‘I thought you said it was a shirt?’

  Patrick flushed. He backtracked. ‘Yeah, like a uniform shirt.’

  ‘What exactly was he wearing?’

  ‘A Carmichael-Jones uniform,’ Patrick said before he could hold the words on his tongue. ‘I mean, I doubt it was anything significant, but you know, we’re supposed to report anyone breaking the curfew. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘You’re a model citizen,’ the officer said with a sarcastic smirk. ‘There was an incident this morning.’

  ‘Was there?’ Patrick said, trying to look surprised. He wondered if the officer could tell how hard his hangover was drumming at his temples.

  ‘Yeah. We’ll need to take a statement from you.’

  Patrick started. ‘I thought I just gave you one?’

  The officer leaned forward. ‘No. An official one. I’m just the desk clerk. Take a seat, won’t you?’

  Patrick started to protest, but the officer waved at him to sit down, then gave an obvious nod to a CCTV camera in a corner that was trained on the waiting room.

  Headache pounding harder than ever, Patrick sat nervously in a corner, squeezing the material of his jeans to try to keep his nervous hands still as he waited for a DCA agent to appear. He tried to review what he had told the officer in order to make sure his story didn’t change, but he could barely remember what had come out of his mouth.

  He was flicking through a dog-eared fly-fishing magazine from three years ago when his name was called. He looked up to see a burly DCA agent with greying streaks through what was left of his hair standing in the corridor, waving him forward.

  ‘Mr. Devan, come with me please.’

  He followed the agent down the corridor to a bland office room. It wasn’t what he had been expecting of an interview room, with comfortable chairs and pleasant framed landscape paintings on the walls.

  The agent sat down across a table from Patrick. ‘Tell me everything you remember,’ he said. ‘Leave nothing out.’

  Patrick did his best. He was sure a couple of times he contradicted himself, but the agent simply nodded along or asked occasional questions as he jotted Patrick’s words down on a notepad.

  ‘Is that all?’ the agent asked as Patrick wrapped up his fabricated account. ‘Anything you might have forgotten?’

  ‘No, I think that’s it.’

  ‘Well, thank you for coming down, Mr. Devan. If you remember anything, please stop by again.’

  The agent led him to the door and held it open. Patrick let out a huge sigh of relief, just as a strangled scream came from farther up the corridor.

  Two agents were dragging a bound girl out of one door and toward another. The girl kicked one agent in the shin, and for her troubles received a hard cuff across the face. She recoiled then snapped upright, darting at the agent with her teeth bared. He managed to avoid her as the other grabbed her arms to hold her still.

  Patrick stared. One side of her face was puffy, but otherwise Suzanne was unmistakable. She had bitten him once, too.

  ‘Suzanne!’ he shouted, before he could help himself.

  She glanced up as the agents pushed her through the door. ‘Patrick!’ came a strangled cry, then the heavy door was pulled shut, cutting off the sound.

  Patrick stared at the space where she had been standing as though a ghost had just passed through the walls. A flood of relief that she was alive backed up against her obvious injuries. At least he could
prove to Tommy that she was alive.

  He wanted to go to her, but it was impossible. He turned to leave, and found the agent’s gun pressed into his stomach.

  ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ the man said. ‘I think it might be worth extending our chat a little, don’t you?’

  7

  Urla

  Urla Wynne lowered the phone with the delicacy that her perfectly manicured nails deserved. She stared at it for a moment, recalling the conversation with her London-based superior in vivid, exact detail, then gave a short nod and stood up straight. As she turned, she caught a brief view of herself in the wall-length mirror behind the door, revealing a lithe figure that looked mechanically shaped in a dress so dark she could almost disappear into a shadow, below an angular face framed with a symmetrically designed bob of dyed black hair.

  She was looking thin, she thought. She ought to eat better.

  ‘Justin. Come in, please.’

  Her voice, high like an angry cat, could cut through the wood of her office door while other voices would be masked. From outside came the shuffling of feet and then a tentative knock.

  ‘I already told you to come in.’

  She enjoyed having a male secretary. Not just because it represented a gender reversal still frustratingly rare after decades of continuous campaigning, but because she had been gifted the opportunity to choose the holder of the position herself, and had taken a fine specimen who would fulfill all her various needs. Justin Bower was a hard worker, both behind a desk and between the sheets. In between, he kept his mouth shut, and his head down … unless she requested otherwise.

  As Justin entered, he kept his eyes respectful, perhaps knowing the time was never far away when both they and his hands would be free to roam.

  ‘I have heard reports of protests,’ Urla said.

  Justin nodded. He glanced down at his hands as though inspecting an invisible file, then looked up. ‘Two in Taunton organised for next week. One in Glastonbury that spontaneously broke out yesterday, and I’ve heard word from my underground sources that another planned for tomorrow could erupt violently.’