by Terry Brooks
In the morning, he called for a taxi.
“You’re looking for a dog?”
The man behind the counter seemed amused, but Alexander couldn’t guess why. Outside, the street traffic was thick. Cars and busses and pedestrians locked in the perpetual daily struggle of lunchtime at the edge of the business district. Inside the pet shop, birds shrieked and complained, and puppies yapped. The display cages ran down the wall, little rooms the size of closets with stainless steel bowls for food and water, oversize cushions to rest on, and in each one at least one dog. The walls facing the shop’s main room were thick plexiglass, scratched and pitted but clean.
“Thinking about it,” Alexander said, the words rich with shame. I want a dog that didn’t know me before. One that doesn’t expect anything.
In the days since Dickens left, he’d found himself looking at pet shops and animal rescues online like he was testing to see whether a wound had healed by pressing on it. More and more in the past week, he’d found himself daydreaming at work or at the office, thinking how he could have done things differently or telling himself that it was the change that had made the difference. A new dog would never know what kind of person he’d been before, and so wouldn’t be disappointed in who he was now.
“You thinking more companion or protection?” the man asked as he came out from behind the counter.
“I…I don’t know,” Alexander said.
“Had a dog before?”
“Yeah,” Alexander said. “Always. Since I was a kid.”
“Me too,” the man said. He was a few years older, with graying stubble and jowls. His eyes were dark brown approaching black, and he seemed almost dog-like himself. “My mother had a dog before she had me. There’s pictures of me when I couldn’t walk yet, dragging on old Hannibal’s ears.”
Alexander felt his gut tighten a little at the idea. A baby, soft-skinned and awkward, and standing over it a dog, yellow teeth and black eyes.
“Must have been a sweet animal,” Alexander said.
“Hannibal? Hell yes. He was great. The whole time he was alive, no one broke into our house, and it wasn’t a great neighborhood. But no one messed with our place.”
“I meant with you. When you were a kid.”
In the cell nearest them, a small terrier lifted his brown-and-tan head, looking at them with curiosity. The man chuckled.
“Oh, he kept me in line, all right,” the man said. “I pushed things too hard, he’d let me know. Didn’t take any crap, that dog.”
Alexander walked slowly along the wall, looking in at the dogs as he passed. An Australian shepherd with one pale blue eye barked and wagged and barked again. A bloodhound cross eyed him with an expression of permanent sorrow built into its breed like a poker face. Alexander couldn’t guess what it might be thinking. Or what it would do if it were free. The room was feeling oddly warm. Sweat dampened his neck.
“Nothing in this world will love you like a dog,” the man said with the air of repeating something everyone knew, everyone agreed on. “Loyal. Best protection there is. Better than a burglar alarm, you know that? And anyone messes with you, dog’ll be right there beside you.”
“Yup,” Alexander said. Unless, he thought.
But most dogs were good. Most never bit anyone. He counted the cells. Two, four, six—up to fifteen. If Erin was right, about three of them would be predators. A dozen good dogs and three predators.
“You feeling all right?” the man asked.
A bulldog sat by the plexiglass, looking out. Its flat face with the loose black lips and lolling red tongue looked insectile and obscene. In the corner of his eye, Alexander caught a sudden flash of motion, but when he turned, the animal was behind its transparent wall. Thick-shouldered, wide-faced, its tail cutting through the air behind it in pleasure. For a moment, it was the hound with its permanent smile, and Alexander’s throat was tight.
“Seriously,” the man said again. “You all right? You’re looking kind of pale.”
“I’ve always had dogs,” Alexander said. “You know? Always.”
“Yeah,” the man said, but his voice was polite now, distant. He’d seen something in Alexander that he knew wasn’t right, even if he didn’t know what. Alexander pushed his hands deep into his pockets and nodded. In their cages, the dogs licked themselves and slept and barked. Twelve of them were probably fine. Good dogs.
“Thanks,” Alexander said. “I’ve got to think about it. Talk to the landlord. Like that.”
“Sure,” the man said. “No trouble. We’ll always be here.”
We’ll always be here, Alexander thought as he stepped back into the reassuring press of humans of the sidewalk. The man hadn’t meant it as a threat.
The downtown streets were thick with bodies, each one moving through its own peculiar path, its own life. Alexander hunched down into his clothes, hands in his pockets, and head bowed trying to seem like one of them. Trying to seem normal. And maybe he was. Maybe the thick-bellied man with the navy blue suit and gold tie was just as worried about seeming strange. Maybe the woman driving past in her minivan had the same sense of almost dream-like dislocation. The kid bent over the bicycle weaving through stopped cars at the intersection might be riding hard and fast so that no one would see the tears in his eyes or ask him to explain them.
A bus huffed by, throwing out a stinking wind of exhaust. The cars started moving again, following the autonomic signals of the stoplight. Alexander paused at the corner, waiting his turn. Across the street, the glowing red hand meant he had to wait. A little crowd gathered around him—an older man with skin the color of mahogany and close-cut hair the color and texture of snow clinging to stone, a woman in a tan business suit with the empty stare of boredom, a man Alexander’s age tapping at his smartphone and glancing up occasionally to make sure the world was still there.
A dog barked. The sound of pure threat.
Alexander’s heart raced. He turned his head. A white sedan idled at the curb, waiting for the same light to change. The woman behind the wheel had straight-cut hair and makeup that was starting to wear thin. In the back seat, the dog stood, teeth bared at the window. Its gaze was on Alexander, and with every bark, every snap of its jaw, it lunged toward the thin sheet of glass a little. Flecks of saliva dripped from its raw, wet lips, and its tail wagged with pleasure at the threat and anticipation of violence. There was an empty child’s car seat behind it, a clawed hind paw digging into the cloth upholstery. Alexander glanced away. The others were ignoring the dog; the older man looking out at the traffic light, the young one at his phone. The woman noticed Alexander looking at her and pointedly didn’t look back. They were in some other world. Some different reality where a predator wasn’t an arm’s length from them. Alexander looked away, kept his head down. Dogs didn’t jump through car windows. They didn’t attack people on the street. They waited until you were alone.
The red didn’t turn. And it didn’t turn. And it didn’t turn. The dog shouted at him, wordless and unmistakable. It wasn’t just barking. It was barking at him. It knew him, knew his scent. It wanted him. The motion at the corner of Alexander’s vision drew him back. The car’s back window was smeared with something clear and viscous. The teeth snapped white, tearing at the air. Ripping it.
The light changed. The red palm became a pale walking figure, the light went green, and the sedan pulled away, dog still barking as it went. Alexander walked into the street, carried by the flow of bodies more than any impulse of his own. By the time he reached the far corner, the sedan had vanished, woman and dog and booster seat. The thought came with a strange detachment: A child probably rode in that seat every day, to school and back from it, with that dog sitting at the far window. He wondered what the woman at the wheel would do if the kid ever started screaming.
In the office, Alexander sat at his desk, his glazed eyes on the monitor. There were words, projects, windows open that held all the information that was supposed to be his life. All he could see were teeth. A
fter an hour, he got up and went to the back storage room where he could sit on a box of printer paper and wait for the dread to pass.
He didn’t hear Erin’s footsteps, only her sigh. Alexander looked up. She was in the doorway, a handful of pale green printer paper in her hand, a grim expression on her face. Alexander tried to smile. Tried to wave hello. His body wouldn’t comply.
“Rough day,” Erin said. It wasn’t a question.
Alexander felt a tear on his cheek. He hadn’t realized he was weeping.
“I can’t do this,” he said. His voice was weak. Erin squatted down next to him, carefully not touching.
“Do what?”
“Any of it.”
Erin nodded.
“Feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“How am, how am, how am I supposed to ignore it? How am I supposed to pretend it didn’t happen?”
“Or that it won’t happen again,” Erin agreed. “That was the worst part for me.”
Alexander looked into Erin’s waiting eyes. Her smile was sorrowful. She put down the handful of paper, pale green spreading on the floor, leaned forward, and took the bottom of her shirt in her hands, pulling the cloth up until the bare skin of her belly and side were exposed. The scars were white and ropey, and they pulled at the healthy skin around them, puckering it. Alexander couldn’t imagine the wounds that had created them, and then, for a second, he could.
She let the hem of her shirt fall. In the silence, the distant sounds of the office—voices, the hum of the air conditioner, the groan of a printer—could have come from a different world. She shifted the fallen pages with her toe, the paper scraping against the floor with a sound like dry leaves rattling down a gutter. The smell of overbrewed coffee slipped in from the breakroom, familiar and foreign at the same time.
“So how’d you do it? How did you get to where you aren’t scared all the freaking time?”
Erin’s smile drooped a little, tired with the effort.
“You’re making an assumption,” she said. “Just hang in there. It’ll get easier.”
“But not better,” Alexander said.
“But not better.”
Living without a dog felt strange. It felt wrong. It felt better than living with one. Maybe later, Alexander told himself, it would get easier.
Days passed and flesh knitted. The last stitches came out, and the low, gray skies of winter settled in. Thanksgiving came and went, and Christmas began its low, flat descent. He had nightmares sometimes, but less often. He had moments of profound and crippling fear that came like bad weather and then moved on. His doctor put him on antidepressants, and they seemed to help some.
The morning he didn’t call a taxi was a Wednesday. He’d been online the night before, looking at his bank balance, and when he woke up, he just didn’t make the call. He drank his coffee. He ate his eggs. He walked out into the cold, biting air with a scarf wrapped around his neck. The dog park was empty, the grass brown and dead, the trees leafless. Walking across the parking lot where it had happened was like going back to an old elementary school; the place was so much smaller than he remembered it. It was like someone had come and taken the old place away and brought in a scale model. The fear he’d expected didn’t overwhelm him. It was just asphalt and sidewalk. It didn’t mean anything. Or maybe everything it meant he carried with him anyway, so the location added nothing. He reached the bus stop with its green roof and advertising poster walls for the first time, pleased with the accomplishment, and spent the whole day at work exhausted and unable to concentrate. He wound up staying late to finish things he should have had done before his afternoon coffee break.
The evening streets were dim and empty, the daytime world of downtown already closed down. A dull red between the skyscrapers to the west marked where the sun had been. The shopfront displays glittered and shone for nobody. Alexander pushed his hands into his pockets and scurried toward the bus stop, his mind already skipping ahead to a cup of hot chocolate liberally spiked with rum and an early bed. Maybe he could see if anyone had left a message for him online. Or if there were any decent movies on. At the stop, he sat on the formed plastic bench and pressed his hands between his thighs. The city had put a programmable sign marking the time until the next bus, and he watched it count down to nothing and reset without any actual bus arriving. A few cars hissed by.
The dog came out from an alley to his left, its claws clicking on the pavement. The blackness of its coat seemed to defy the light. It trotted down the street toward him, moving in his direction with a distracted air. A mastiff. A rottweiler crossed with something huge. No fat cushioned its skin, and the muscles working under the fur were as large as a man’s. Its breath steamed past stained teeth. Alexander pressed himself against the back of the bench, heart racing, the metal taste of fear in his mouth.
The dog angled toward him. The clicking of its claws was unnaturally loud, drowning out the sounds of traffic. At the curb, it sat, looking into the street as if it was waiting for the bus too. It turned to look at Alexander, its black eyes expressionless. For a single, horrible moment, Alexander imagined he saw blood on its muzzle. The dog chuffed once and bent down to lick itself, the unself-conscious intimacy threatening and obscene. Alexander could already feel its teeth on his neck, smell its piss in his face, even though it hadn’t so much as growled at him.
Four out of five, Erin said. Only two in ten ever bit anyone. Ever mauled anyone.
Lights glowed white and red and green in the growing dark. Any moment now, the well-lit bus would lumber around the corner. Safety would come. The streetlights changed and cars moved past, hurrying away on their own errands, oblivious and uncaring as birds. The dog stopped its obscene licking and looked up at Alexander again.
The dog’s broad head bent forward a degree. The bus didn’t come. The dog grunted, not a bark, not a growl, just a sound low in its throat, and Alexander smiled at it, trying to act like he wasn’t scared, trying to imagine how someone who wasn’t scared would be. The seconds stretched out into years.
“Good doggie,” he said, his voice weak and thin as a wire. “Good doggie, good doggie, good doggie…”
For quite some time I’ve been fascinated by the old Grail legends that developed in several countries of western Europe but today are largely associated with England. The legends illustrate how our stories and beliefs evolve over time, for the Grail originally had nothing to do with the Christian mythology that got stapled onto it in later iterations.
Modern scholars have filled many pages trying to figure out the pagan origins of the grail, most notably Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance that inspired portions of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Since several scholars have suggested that the grail was of Celtic origin and in fact may have been Dagda’s Cauldron—a far cry from the cup of Christ—I could not resist the opportunity to explore that idea in “The Chapel Perilous.”
The Chapel Perilous is a feature of many grail legends, a final challenge that the questing knight must face before he’s ready to see the Fisher King, the keeper of the grail. Though the details vary from version to version, it’s definitely not a place of peace; it’s uniformly creepy, often surrounded by a graveyard and suggesting an abandonment of faith more than anything else.
This anthology offered me the chance to help out a friend and indulge my penchant for mythological geekery, so I took it. Hope you enjoy this glimpse into the past of Atticus O’Sullivan before he became the Iron Druid.
— Kevin Hearne
THE CHAPEL PERILOUS
Kevin Hearne
Stories are sometimes born in fire, but regardless of origin they always live around fires and grow in the telling. If bellies are full and the veins pulse with a flagon or two, why then, all the better for the story. Sometimes, as a Druid, stories are expected of me. People just assume I’m a part-time bard as well.
ng on the Mogollon Rim near Knoll Lake. After cooking fresh trout over our campfire for dinner, we were relaxing with hot cocoa and roasting marshmallows.
“You want a story?” I said aloud. My apprentice couldn’t hear my hound yet; she was still four years away from being bound to the earth and practicing magic. To be polite and include her, I sometimes spoke aloud to Oberon by way of inviting her into the conversation.
“Usually he wants snacks,” Granuaile said. “I’d go for a story, though. It’s a nice night for one.”
“All right, what are you in the mood for?”
Granuaile didn’t hear any of that, so she spoke over him and offered her own suggestion: “I want a story where you took part in an historical event—a famous one.”
“All right.” I paused to think and plucked a gooey marshmallow off a steel stake before answering. “How about the quest for the Holy Grail?”