“How did he turn it on, Vandal?” she asked him. Another voice was speaking now, this one lighter, quicker, with a peculiar accent. She couldn’t make out the words. Was it Hark’s voice? Was he having conversation? Vandal urged her over prone, prodded her up onto her elbows and knees. His hands were shaking. He was as eager as a teenager, and rough, too rough. She liked him when he was sweet, and mostly he was, he was sweet, but there was no sweetness in him now. Nothing was strange, nothing was outside the realm of possibility. The television was talking to the dog, and the dog was talking to the television. She pressed her face into the smothering whiteness of the pillow, which smelled to her of her own soap and night sweat. Nothing was too strange to happen anymore.
* * *
The next day, as he went out the door, Vandal told Bridie that he’d gone colour blind. Hark was sitting in his place at the table, waiting on his breakfast to be brought to him. He looked from one of them to the other with eager eyes.
“You mean you can’t tell red from green?” She’d had an uncle with the same problem. Except for dealing with stoplights and some problems matching clothes, it hadn’t seemed to bother him much. As far she knew, though, it was a problem he’d had his whole life, not something he’d acquired.
Vandal waved a hand in front of his face, as though he were demonstrating actual blindness. “The whole ball of wax,” he told her. “It’s all shades of grey out there.”
“You’ve got to see a doctor,” she said to him. “This ain’t natural.”
“Natural,” he said. “Ha. I wouldn’t know natural these days if it came up and bit me in the ass.”
“Seeing colours. That’s natural.”
“It’s winter coming down,” he said. “Just winter, and the colour goes out of everything. It just looks like it’s all an old movie.”
She shook her head, and he drew her to him with a hand on her waist, another in the middle of her back. He pressed against her, and she felt the warmth that spread out from him, felt his hardness. His need for her was palpable, and it made her sad and excited all at once. She peeled his hands from her body because the dog was watching, too avidly. There was something in Vandal’s touch that wasn’t just for her, and wasn’t just for him either, it wasn’t just selfishness. There was something in it that was for the dog too, and she couldn’t stand that.
Vandal withdrew. “Who has the money for a doctor?” he said. “Who has the leisure?” His brow was furrowed. Already his thoughts had turned from her to his work. Seldomridge, their neighbour to the east, had called to say that a half dozen of his cattle were dead in the night, no telling what had killed them but the condition of their bodies was very strange, and could Vandal bring over the skid-steer and help him plant them? It was a full morning’s labour lost from their own place, but there was no way a man could refuse to help in such a situation. No time to worry about little things like the colour of the world going away.
His expression cleared briefly. “It’s the winter time. That’s what’s got everything all turned around. Come spring and the colour will come back. You watch.”
* * *
After Vandal left the house, Bridie shooed Hark down off the chair and away from the kitchen table, hustled him out the door with gestures and cries. She made as if she might kick him, and he went, but she could tell by the set of his shoulders that he knew no blows were coming, and he went at his own pace. She kept waiting for him to tell her no as she drove him across the yard towards the dog run.
She had decided upon rising that morning what she would do if he refused her, if he refused to do anything she told him. She was expecting it, she was waiting for it, she was even hoping for it: reason to take down the choke collar that Vandal kept for training and slip it over Hark’s head and cinch it tight as a noose around his neck. Watch the chain links cut into his thick pelt and the delicate flesh of his throat. Force him to do what she wanted. Hiss her orders into his sensitive ears. Show him what a dog was, and what a human was, and what the proper relationship between them should be.
And if Hark grew angry, lashed out, bit her? Then she should show Vandal the marks on her skin, and he would understand at last how utterly wrong the situation was, how obscene, and he would do what was necessary. She allowed the ball of her foot to come in contact with Hark’s rump – was she tempting him? – but he just hurried on ahead, as though he were suddenly eager to enter the dog run. His tail was up and switching when the steel latch of the kennel door clanged down behind him.
That’s that, she thought as she went back into the house. The day stretched out in front of her. Plenty to do, as always, and no Vandal, no Hark, no Xerxes to keep her from it. That’s it for him, returned to the place of his beginnings.
All day, the voice issued from the kennel. Answered at first by the growling and defiant barking from the other dogs, and then their cowed whimpering, and then silence. They were good dogs, obedient dogs, conditioned to a man’s voice. It pained Bridie to think of him out there among them, but what else to do? She had hopes that their good simple natures would remind Hark of what he had used to be, what he ought still to be.
Better out there than in here anyway, she thought. A kennel’s the place for dogs, and what happens out there is no worry of mine.
It was dusk getting on toward night when Vandal arrived home again, the skid-steer up on the flatbed, his shoulders slumped with weariness. “It’s bad over at Seldomridge’s,” he told her. “Worse than he said.” He washed his hands vigorously under the hot water tap, skinning them hard with the scrub brush and the Lava soap, lathering himself all the way up to the elbows. His face was pinched and drawn-looking.
“It’s bad over here too,” she said. He didn’t seem to hear her.
“I’ll be back over there tomorrow,” he said. “After that, it’s no more cattle at Seldomridge’s.” He looked around the kitchen, ducked into the parlour to check in there. “Where’s he at?” he wanted to know.
She gestured out the window toward the silent kennel, and his face hardened. “I had work to do too, you know,” she said.
“I didn’t say nothing.” He was already in motion toward the door.
“I didn’t have the time to babysit your new pet,” she called after him. His pet. His changeling child. She watched his large awkward figure cross the yard and enter the chain-link run, kneel down just inside the gate. Her heart quailed. All afternoon the silence had worn at her. It worried her as much as the voice had done. More. A kennel was never a silent place, always some kind of choir going out there, a tussle, an alarm over a rabbit or over nothing. The jolly voices of dogs. Vandal was bent over something, shaking his head, mumbling, his shoulders bowed.
She strained in the failing light to make out what he was doing. She had a moment in which she imagined that the normal dogs had torn the strange one to pieces, and her heart leaped. It will be my fault, just like the death of Xerxes, she thought, and he will never forgive me, and I will bear the blame gladly.
And then he was coming back to the house, Hark slinking along at his side. When they entered the kitchen together, Vandal’s face was wreathed in a great smile. The smell of dog, hairy and primeval and eye-wateringly strong, struck Bridie like a blow. Hark trotted into the parlour and climbed wearily onto the davenport, where he lay draped like a rug, his sides heaving.
“Tell her what you told me,” Vandal called in to him. No answer. “Tell her what you been doing all day, while we was working.”
Humping, came the voice from the living room, muffled against the davenport’s cushions.
“Did you hear that?” Vandal asked her.
“I heard,” Bridie said.
“Made them line up for him, and then he humped every one of those bitches out there, one right after the other. He’s the king of the dogs now, I guess.”
“I guess,” Bridie said.
“We got to make sure he eats good tonight,” Vandal said. “He tells me he wants to do it all over again tomorrow.”
>
When Hark started in to walking on his hind legs, Bridie told Vandal that he couldn’t spend his days in the kennel anymore. “I thought you wanted him penned,” he said, “to keep him out of your hair.”
“It’s not right,” she said, “a thing that goes on two legs and a thing that goes on four.” She couldn’t bring herself to call Hark a man. He wasn’t a man exactly, not yet anyway. He was like a tadpole, Bridie thought when she looked at him, something in between two other things and not really anything in itself. He was neither man nor dog, and he was both, and he was awful. Nothing could exist for long in that middle condition, she didn’t believe. It was unbearable.
“We’ve got to put him in some clothes too,” she said, “to get him covered up.” He went around in an excited state half the time, and the sight of him, slick and red, sickened and haunted her.
“Can he wear some of mine?” Vandal asked.
Probably, Bridie thought. He was getting more man-sized and more man-shaped with every day that passed. And it’s probably exactly what he wants to do too. But she said, “I think we should get him some of his own.” Some coveralls, she thought, and a tractor cap to cover that low sloping forehead and the bony ridges above the eyes.
The more like a man he became, the more he horrified her. She wondered if there was a point at which she would simply be unable to stand his transformation any longer, and what would happen when she reached it? Would she start screaming and be unable to stop? Would he simply turn into another man who lived in their house, like a vagrant brother or an unsavoury cousin? Like Xerxes. Would such a creature be possessed of a human soul? Would it be murder to kill him?
After a couple of wobbly practice laps around the pasture field in the truck with Hark behind the wheel, Vandal yelled at him to stop the vehicle. “There’s no way you can drive on the road,” Vandal told him. Hark’s head barely poked up above the steering wheels, and his thin legs wavered uncertainly over the pedals. He glared at Vandal. Bridie, who was watching, silently applauded. She was glad to see Vandal denying him something, anything. “You’d kill somebody, or die yourself.”
You take me, Hark said. There was very little he couldn’t say these days. Occasionally he struggled for a word, a phrase, but mostly his speech was fluid. At times his voice could be silky and persuasive.
He had taken to answering the phone when it rang, which was not often, and even to initiating phone calls in which he carried on long, secretive conversations with they knew not whom. There was no one outside the house, outside the farm, that they could imagine him knowing. When they asked, he simply told them that he was finding out. “Finding out what?” they inquired. Finding what’s out there, he said. “What’s out there?” Vandal had asked him. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Hark said, staring straight at Bridie. But you’ll know before too long, anyhow. It’ll soon be more of me and mine out there than you and yours.
In the truck, he repeated his demand. You take me, if I can’t drive.
“Take you where?” Vandal wanted to know.
Into town, Hark said. When Vandal just kept looking at him, he continued. To get . . . fuck.
Vandal laughed. “You want to get laid?”
Hark shrugged his narrow shoulders. He wore a youth-size denim work shirt and a pair of Levi’s, procured at the Rural King store out on the county line, and they fit him reasonably well, adding considerably to the illusion that he was just a slightly misshapen boy or small man. Sunglasses and a one-size-fits-all John Deere cap helped to obscure his hairy forehead and his unnatural eyes. Everything wants to fuck, he said.
Vandal shut off the truck’s ignition, pulled the key, and climbed out of the truck’s cab.
You won’t let me go in amongst the bitches no more, Hark said. His voice was less peremptory now, pleading. It ain’t right, keep me from what I want. What I need.
“You think you’ll find women in town to sleep with you?” Bridie called. “A thing like you are?”
Hark laughed, a short bark that went strangely with his hominid appearance. There’s them in town as would be glad to be with me any way I am. Any way I want.
“That’s why we stay far from town,” Vandal said. He stalked away from the truck, his face dark and angry, and marched into the house. Hark stayed where he was, behind the steering wheel, glaring balefully through the dirty windshield. The glass was spider-webbed with fine cracks.
“Get out of there,” Bridie said to him. “You’re not driving nowhere.”
I belong in town more than you do, Hark said without looking at her. You know it’s so. More and more every day. You got no right to keep me out here with you, amongst the cows and the crows.
She pictured him among people, in some smoky place where she herself would never go, a cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth, his hat tilted back on his head because he was unafraid of his own peculiar nature, his long teeth gleaming in dim light, his eyes slitted, one of his paws (his hands, she corrected herself, they are much more like hands now) on the thigh of a giggling, sighing girl beside him. But was she a girl, exactly, this creature in the vision? Wasn’t she just a bit too large to be a normal sort of girl, too sleek and well-fleshed, her hair thick and coarse down her neck, her nostrils too wide, her eyes broadly spaced, on the sides of her head, almost? A pony, she thought. And the heavily-bristled, barrel-bodied man across the table from them, snorting with laughter, little eyes glittering with nasty delight, his snout buried in his plate . . .
“Probably you’re right,” she said, and she followed Vandal into the house, leaving Hark where he was.
He found his way into the liquor not long after that. The bottles had belonged to Xerxes. Vandal was strictly a beer man, and Bridie didn’t drink at all. It was a holdover from her upbringing, which was hardshell Baptist. Much of that way of thinking and living had left her in the years she had been gone from her parents’ house, which had been at once a stern and a gentle place, but her dislike of hard spirits had stayed with her. She found him in the living room, as usual, fixated on the television screen, which was announcing yet another series of nightmares. His eyes were glazed, a half-empty bottle of Knob Hill on the TV tray at his elbow, and he blinked slowly when she entered the room, so that she knew he was aware of her presence. His breathing was loud and stertorous.
This ain’t happening just here, you know, he told her. He nodded at the TV, where hail was pelting down from a clear sky, smashing windows, denting the hoods and roofs of cars, sending people scrambling for solid cover, flattening crops. Birds of every description were dropping dead into the streets. It’s happening everywhere. He burped lightly and covered his mouth with his hairy palm. His tone had sounded mournful before, but now he giggled.
Bridie understood that he didn’t mean their own situation, not exactly, not a dog turning into a man, not just (her thoughts turned away, but she forced them back: she had to look at everything that was happening, and not just a part of it) a man turning into a dog, or at any rate something less than a man; but other, equally terrible things, inexplicable things, things that had never happened before. And she knew that he also meant, There is no stopping them.
She sat down across from him, close enough that she could touch him. He took his gaze from the television and looked her full in the face, and his eyes were soft and brown, much more like the dog she remembered, and not antagonistic. There was pain written in them – did it hurt, to become a man? – and fear. For the first time, the sight of him didn’t fill her with disgust. He sniffed.
It’s the foller-man as gets bit. It’s the foller-dog as gets hit. His voice was a kind of singsong. Playful. He took another swig from the bottle, waiting on her response. If he had not been what he was, she might have thought he was being flirtatious.
“What’s that mean?” she asked him.
You tell me.
She thought a moment. She believed that she had heard a rhyme like it somewhere before. Her girlhood, maybe. A cadence for jumping rope. Wa
s it some kind of a riddle? The foller-man. She thought of the head of a snake, then, the dead eyes and the mouth wide, the fangs milky with poison; and she had it.
“It’s always the second man on the trail that gets bitten by the snake,” she said. Hark nodded, and his head moved so slowly that the gesture seemed wise. “The first man wakes the snake up, and it strikes the second man in the line.”
And the lead dog, he said, judges the distance to get across the road before the car comes. But the dog that comes along just a second later, trailing the first one like he always does, he . . .
“Gets hit,” she said.
Is it a joke? he asked. That the first one plays on the second one?
“Not so much a joke,” she told him, “as just not giving it any thought. Always looking forward and there’s no looking behind.”
I never want to be no foller-dog anymore, he said to her. Nor no foller-man neither. I’m going to be the firstest one along every trail, and the firstest one across every road. He took another drink, and the level in the bottle dropped appreciably. He coughed and sputtered. From now on in, he said.
In other places, some not so very far away, the television informed them, the dead were said to be rising up from their graves. The recent dead, and the long dead: it didn’t seem to make any difference. The ones who came back to life most often found their ways back to their homes, their families, back to those who loved them, and when they found somebody who recognized them – assuming anybody was left who did – they cried aloud at the wonders they had seen in the great lightless cities that they inhabited after death.
Would resurrected people have the vote, the television wondered?
Hark closed his eyes and sighed. Some folks just have too much life in them to die all the way, I guess, he said. He looked so sad when he said it that she felt a sudden stab of unexpected sympathy for him, and sorrow.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20 Page 54