“Bingo,” I thought. “Golden Retriever.”
The dog stood up when we walked in. It stayed in the same spot, standing on top of several big old towels that had been spread across the floor. Its tan fur was streaked with blood. One eye was swollen closed. It breathed in a raspy, whimpering kind of gasp, as if its throat was full of blood and mucus.
Jerry lifted a belt from the top of his chest-of-drawers and handed it to me.
“Go ahead,” he told me. “You’ll feel lots better. You’ll sleep like a baby afterwards. Go on.”
I stood looking at him, and at the dog. He picked up the leash. It was bloody, cracked, worn with use.
I felt that hot-steamy-meat feeling in the pit of my stomach. I broke out in a sweat. My mouth got dry.
He struck the dog across the face with the leash. The dog yelped once. But it didn’t try to get away. It just stood there.
“Go on,” Jerry said. “Use the belt.”
Water was running from between the lids of the dog’s swollen eye. The damn dog looked disgusting. Standing there like that. Not fighting back. Not even trying to get away.
I realized just how easy it would be.
Stupid mutt, I thought. Why didn’t it try to get away?
What would it feel like to hit a helpless piece of living flesh, I wondered. It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered such a thing, I’ll readily admit. But to have it made so easy, to have everything I needed right here in front of me . . .
This was one of those opportunities I’d never wanted to actually have, wasn’t it? A chance to find something out about myself. A chance to feel something I’d never felt, but had just wondered about, quietly, all by myself, for a hell of a long time.
Still I hesitated.
“Go ahead,” said Jerry. “There’s plenty of dog for the both of us.”
Maybe just once, I thought. Just so I’ll know how it makes me feel. Just so I won’t ever have to wonder about it again.
I hit it. A hard slap right across its skinny butt.
It yelped once. And stood waiting for more.
I felt strange. Appalled at myself. But fascinated with everything about the situation. I’d done it. I’d inflicted pain for the sheer curiosity of it—for no other reason than I’d finally had the opportunity to do it.
Jerry smiled. He flashed All-American teeth straight and clean and white. “God damn dog,” he said.
He hit it again.
And so did I. It yelped. And I hit it again.
We both kept at it for about twenty minutes more.
Until we were both exhausted.
I dropped the belt. Jerry dropped the leash.
The beaten dog sank back to the floor, its mouth oozing saliva onto the blood-spotted towels.
I was shivering. And I had a hardon. I walked out of the bedroom, my hands pressed over the front of my pants to hide my embarrassment. I headed toward the door of Jerry’s apartment. Jerry followed me as far as the living room.
“Feel better?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Then come back tomorrow,” he said.
I guess I nodded again.
I went back to my apartment.
I closed the door.
I stripped off my clothes and stood in the shower. I jerked myself off, then let the bathroom fill up with steam. I soaped myself three times, and rinsed all the lather away each time. I dried off and went to bed. I think I may have cried a few tears, but I know I slept soundly, as if everything had been a dream.
I worked ten hours on the automotive line the next day. I kept thinking maybe it all really had been a dream. Knocking on Jerry’s door. The dog. The belt. The leash. I went home in a daze. I ate a TV dinner. I wrote a filthy sexual poem, drank a sixpack. Stripped for bed.
But I didn’t lie down.
Instead I pulled on my blue jeans, a T-shirt. My tennis shoes.
I went to Jerry’s apartment, knocked on the door.
He opened it; again he was all smiles. Again he was dressed in a stylish suit—this one was dark gray.
“Mike!” he said. “Welcome! Ready for another round, eh?”
I nodded.
I felt a moment of doubt. Was I ready? What did I expect to get out of tonight? Was I just curious again? Did I wonder how I’d feel about beating a helpless animal for the second night in a row? Would it make me feel any different than I’d felt the first night? Would it make me feel anything at all? Had I really cried last night? Had I wept for the dog? Or myself? For just a moment, I wondered if I’d wept because I’d finally learned that all my old lonely thoughts were who I really was. They weren’t harmless little whimsies from some innocuous and secret place destined to remain hidden forever. They were me. They were the stuff I was made of.
“Come on in!” Jerry said.
I walked into his apartment. He closed the door behind me.
I felt a little sick. But less sick than the night before.
As soon as I saw the dog, I picked up the leash. Jerry grabbed his belt.
I hit the dog first; then Jerry hit it. He aimed for the face. He loved to hit its face. I went for everything—its butt, its flanks, its neck, its big bloody nose.
The dog never tried to get away. Never tried to fight back. Its behavior infuriated me. Made me lash it harder. Made me take real pleasure at each and every pathetic yelp.
It was actually difficult to keep myself from kicking its head in.
When we were done, I threw down the belt and got ready to leave. But Jerry stopped me.
“I’m moving out tomorrow,” he said. “The dog’s yours. Take it with you tonight.”
“I don’t want it,” I said.
“Don’t lie to me. You want it. You want it a whole lot.”
“But what about you?” I asked. “It’s your dog.”
“I’ll find another,” he said. “Go ahead. Take it.”
So I scooped it up in my arms. I got its blood on my shirt, the front of my pants. Some of it stuck to the hair on my chest.
I carried it into my bedroom and lowered it onto the bare floor in a corner.
It whimpered once. I gave it a bowl of water. Some scraps of bread. It lapped them up slowly, gratefully, its one open eye looking at me with utter love and devotion. The expression on its pathetic face made me want to whack it a few times. But I just shrugged. I decided it had had enough for one night. Besides, I had a hardon that required immediate attention. When I got in the shower, I realized I had some of the dog’s blood on my cock. I came while I was scrubbing it off—it felt like two tons of dynamite exploding.
Then I dried off and went to sleep.
I slept fine.
The next day, I put down a stack of newspapers for it to do its business on. But I’ve since found out that the damn thing knows how to use the toilet. It’s one of those city dogs you hear about, one of those dogs that actually knows how to squat over the fucking toilet. The damn dog’s nearly perfect. It’s no trouble at all. Can you imagine that? It barely eats; it lies in its corner all day. It shits and pisses in the toilet. And it knows how to take a beating.
Anyhow, I went to work the morning after I brought it home. When I got back that night, I knocked on Jerry’s door, just to see. There was no answer.
So I went back to my apartment and ate dinner. I watched TV, wrote a poem, drank a few beers, and beat the dog.
I beat it the next night too. And the next.
It’s getting easier every night. Easier to accept everything I’ve learned about myself. Some nights I wake up crying, though. But not many. Only once during the past week.
I keep thinking some guy’s gonna move into Jerry’s old apartment. Some guy who’ll hear what I’m doing to this poor dog. Some guy who’ll think about calling the police or the SPCA. But who’ll really want to resolve the problem himself.
Until he knocks on my door late one night and discovers what it is that he really wants.
I feel like all this has just been a warmup, ya know
? I feel like once I’ve gotten rid of this damn dog, I’m gonna give up the bachelor life, find the right woman, pump up her belly with a kid or two.
Funny. Never seemed like I had a place in my heart for a wife and kids. But I feel different now.
I feel ready.
KARL EDWARD WAGNER
The Slug
KARL EDWARD WAGNER has been editing The Year’s Best Horror Stories since volume VIII, and probably knows more about horror fiction than anyone else working in the genre today.
Recent projects include a graphic novel for DC Comics, Tell Me, Dark, with artist Kent Williams; a medical chiller, The Fourth Seal; Satan’s Gun, a horror novel, and the reprinting of the Year’s Best series as HorrorStory in multi-edition hardcovers.
A multiple winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award, Wagner reveals in his original afterword to this story in Ellen Datlow’s A Whisper of Blood that “Every writer—every creative person—lives in dread of those nagging and inane interruptions that break the creative flow. A sentence perfectly crystalized, shattered by a stupid phone call, never regained. A morning filled with inspiration and energy, clogged by an uninvited guest, the day lost. The imaginative is the choice prey of the banal, and uncounted works of excellence have died stillborn thanks to junk phone calls and visits from bored associates.
“After all, a writer doesn’t have a real job. Feel free to crash in at any time. Probably wants some company.
“Nothing in this story is in any way a reflection upon this one writer’s various friends, nor does it in any way resemble any given actual person or composite of any persons known to the author. It is entirely a fictitious work and purely the product of the author’s imagination.
“It has taken me five days to scribble out this afterword.
“There’s the door . . .”
MARTINE WAS HAMMERING AWAY TO THE accompaniment of Lou Reed, tapedeck set at stun, and at first didn’t hear the knocking at her studio door. She set aside hammer and chisel, put Lou Reed on hold, and opened the door to discover Keenan Bauduret seated on her deck rail, leaning forward to pound determinedly at her door. The morning sun shone bright and cheery through the veil of pines, and Keenan was shit-faced drunk.
“Martine!” He lurched toward her. “I need a drink!”
“What you need is some coffee.” Martine stood her ground. At six feet and change she was three inches taller than Keenan and in far better shape.
“Please! I’ve got to talk to someone.” Keenan’s soft brown eyes implored. He was disheveled and unshaven in baggy clothes that once had fit him, and Martine thought of a stray spaniel, damp and dirty, begging to be let in. And Keenan said: “I’ve just killed someone. I mean, something.”
Martine stepped inside. “I can offer gin and orange juice.”
“Just the gin.”
Keenan Bauduret collapsed onto her wooden rocking chair and mopped at his face with a crumpled linen handkerchief, although the morning was not yet warm. Now he reminded her of Bruce Dern playing a dissolute southern lawyer, complete with out-of-fashion and rumpled suit; but in fact Keenan was a writer, although dissolute and southern to be sure. He was part of that sort of artist/writer colony that the sort of small university town such as Pine Hill attracts. Originally he was from New Orleans, and he was marking time writing mystery novels while he completed work on the Great Southern Novel. At times he taught creative writing for the university’s evening college.
Martine had installed a wet bar complete with refrigerator and microwave in a corner of her studio to save the walk back into her house when she entertained here. She sculpted in stone, and the noise and dust were better kept away from her single-bedroom cottage. While Keenan sweated, she looked for glasses and ice.
“Just what was it you said that you’d killed?”
“A slug. A gross, obscene, mammoth, and predatory slug.”
“Sounds rather like a job for Orkin. Did you want your gin neat?”
“Just the naked gin.”
Martine made herself a very light gin screwdriver and poured a double shot of Tanqueray into Keenan’s glass. Her last name was still McFerran, and she had her father’s red hair, which she wore in a long ponytail, and his Irish blue eyes and freckled complexion. Her mother was Scottish and claimed that her side of the family was responsible for her daughter’s unexpected height. Born in Belfast, Martine had grown up in Pine Hill as a faculty brat after her parents took university posts here to escape the troubles in Northern Ireland. Approaching the further reaches of thirty, Martine was content with her bachelorhood and her sculpture and had no desire to return to Belfast.
“Sure you don’t want orange juice?” She handed the glass to Keenan.
Keenan shook his head. “To your very good health.” He swallowed half the gin, closed his eyes, leaned back in the rocker and sighed. He did not, as Martine had expected, tip over.
Martine sat down carefully in her prized Windsor chair. She was wearing scuffed Reeboks, faded blue jeans, and a naturally torn university sweatshirt, and she pushed back her sleeves before tasting her drink.
“Now, then,” she said, “tell me what really happened.”
Keenan studied his gin with the eye of a man who is balancing his need to bolt the rest of it against the impropriety of asking for an immediate refill. Need won.
“Don’t get up.” He smiled graciously. “I know the way.”
Martine watched him slosh another few ounces of gin into his glass, her own mood somewhere between annoyance and concern. She’d known Keenan Bauduret casually for years, well before he’d hit the skids. He was a few years older than she, well read and intelligent, and usually fun to be around. They’d never actually dated, but there were the inevitable meetings at parties and university town cultural events, lunches and dinners and a few drinks after. Keenan had never slept over, nor had she at his cluttered little house. It was that sort of respectful friendship that arises between two lonely people who are content within their self-isolation, venturing forth for nonthreatening companionship without ever sensing the need.
“I’ve cantelope in the fridge,” Martine prompted.
“Thanks. I’m all right.” Keenan returned to the rocker. He sipped his gin this time. His hands were no longer shaking. “How well do you know Casper Crowley?”
“Casper the Friendly Ghost?” Martine almost giggled. “Hardly at all. That is, I’ve met him at parties, but he never has anything to say to anyone. Just stands stuffing himself with chips and hors d’oeuvres—I’ve even seen him pocket a few beers as he’s left. I’m told he’s in a family business, but no one seems to know what that business is—and he writes books that no one I know has ever read for publishers no one has heard of. He’s so dead dull boring that I always wonder why anyone ever invites him.”
“I’ve seen him at your little gatherings,” Keenan accused.
“Well, yes. It’s just that I feel sorry for poor boring Casper.”
“Exactly.” Keenan stabbed a finger and rested his case. “That’s what happened to me. You won’t mind if I have another drink while I tell you about it?”
Martine sighed mentally and tried not to glance at her watch.
His greatest mistake, said Keenan, was ever to have invited Casper Crowley to drop by in the first place.
It began about two years ago. Keenan was punishing the beer keg at Greg Lafollette’s annual birthday bash and pig-picking. He was by no means sober, or he never would have attempted to draw Casper into conversation. It was just that Casper stood there, wrapped in his customary loneliness, mechanically feeding his face with corn chips and salsa, washing it down with great gulps of beer, as expressionless as a carp taking bread crumbs from atop a pool.
“How’s it going, Casper?” Keenan asked harmlessly.
Casper shaved his scalp but not his face, and he had bits of salsa in his bushy orange beard. He was wearing a tailored tweed suit whose vest strained desperately to contain his enormous beer gu
t. He turned his round, bland eyes toward Keenan and replied: “Do you know much about Aztec gods?”
“Not really, I suppose.”
“In this book I’m working on,” Casper pursued, “I’m trying to establish a link between the Aztecs and Nordic mythology.”
“Well, I do have a few of the usual sagas stuck away on my shelves.” Keenan was struggling to imagine any such link.
“Then would it be all right if I dropped by your place to look them over?”
And Casper appeared at ten the following morning, while Keenan was drying off from his shower, and he helped himself to coffee and doughnuts while Keenan dressed.
“Hope I’m not in your way.” Casper was making a fresh pot of coffee.
“Not at all.” Keenan normally worked mornings through the afternoon, and he had a pressing deadline.
But Casper plopped down on his couch and spent the next few hours leafing without visible comprehension through various of Keenan’s books, soaking up coffee, and intermittently clearing his throat and swallowing horribly. Keenan no longer felt like working after his guest had finally left. Instead he made himself a fifth rum and Coke and fell asleep watching I Love Lucy.
At ten the following morning, Keenan had almost reworked his first sentence of the day when Casper phoned.
“Do you know why a tomcat licks his balls?”
Keenan admitted ignorance.
“Because he can!”
Casper chuckled with enormous relish at his own joke, while Keenan scowled at the phone. “How about going out to get some barbecue for lunch?” Casper then suggested.
“I’m afraid I’m really very busy just now.”
“In that case,” Casper persisted, “I’ll just pick us up some sandwiches and bring them on over.”
And he did. And Casper sat on Keenan’s couch, wolfing down barbecue sandwiches with the precision of a garbage disposal, dribbling gobbets of sauce and cole slaw down his beard and belly and onto the upholstery. Keenan munched his soggy sandwich, reflecting upon the distinction between the German verbs, essen (to eat) and fressen (to devour). When Casper at last left, it was late afternoon, and Keenan took a nap that lasted past his usual dinnertime. By then the day had long since slipped away.
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