There's a Good Dog...

by Chris Middlehurst

  “Ooh, it tickles!” he cries hysterically.

  Whipping away, I watch Todd Baron’s mask fog up with condensation. His arm is aching by now and he lowers the whalebone whip and narrows his eyes to see through the cloud of blood and goby guts. Bianca and the Goby have been replaced by a seething mass of bleeding jelly, still shaking with hysteria and screaming, “Stop tickling me!” Suddenly something hits Todd square on the shoulder. He looks down and sees Dr Schnitzelgrüber’s severed head bounce across the ocean floor, an ammonite clinging to the inside of his mouth. Todd Baron turns around slowly. Sixteen square feet of serrated teeth stare back at him. A dark bulge of a more haemorrhoid kind to the one before grows out the back of Todd’s swimsuit. The screen fades to shitty black. End of part one.

  A little hedgehog rolls towards me. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but the poor animal seems to have impaled itself on its own back. It’s sniffing in agony and its owner, a little boy in shorts, tries to peel it free but then it screeches not unlike the parrot and tries to scratch at him. This only sinks its skin further into the prickles and it winces with pain. I can’t see its teeth but I can imagine they’re about to crack because its jaws are so tightly clamped together in mute protest. There’s not much more the little boy can do than sit on his bored mother’s lap and play with his nose. I turn to the hedgehog and whisper in his little ear.

  “Sorry, spikey. Looks like your owner’s got a new friend, now.”

  Ah! The bastard child has kicked me right in the chest! I fall backwards and crash across the floor, landing in a pile of playing cubes and fruit blender manuals.

  “Angus!”

  “But mum, he tried to eat Prickly!”

  “Don’t be silly, Angus!”

  “But mum!”

  White light. Black as night. Stings a little. I’m back at the Sheltons. Estella is wrapping a little bow around my head, stroking the spaces in between my ears where she knows I like it best. She’s staring into my eyes lovingly. I’ve never seen so much kindness in a human face.

  “There there, pretty dog!”

  Her voice waxes taste of silver honey with singing crickets in the moonlight. She’s wearing a little blue dress and running to the other side of the banister in her short stumpy legs and little green shoes. She smiles at me with the love of a mother I dreamed I once had.

  Like a little piglet, she squeals in delight as I rush towards her, paws extended, claws grasping for her and teeth heading straight for her face. I clamp my jaws around her head and force my paws onto her two shoulders, bringing her down onto the floor. She giggles. She loves it when I do that. My tongue laps at her face feverishly as she cuddles me and rocks me gently in her arms. Then she sits up.

  “Game!”

  I look at her quizzically. She claps her hands together, gets up and jumps up and down.

  “Game!!”

  I roll onto my side as my tail flaps violently against the floor. She claps her hands together and I rush towards her again. Once more we hold each other close and I try to wipe the saliva off her face because I know her mother doesn’t approve but Estella doesn’t mind. I feel her tie the little blue bow gently around my neck. It tickles and sends shivers of pleasure to the far recesses of my skull. She laughs, throws the rest of the bow up in the air and runs around the back of it in that excited little way that her stumpy legs can barely keep up with. She falls but catches herself just in time, giggling all the way to the other side. I sit still, tongue hanging out stupidly but I don’t care. I’ve got my happy face on today.

  “Up doggy!” She points up the stairs but I look back at her. “Up doggy up up up! You go up doggy haha!”

  She starts to pull the bow towards her that I can now see she has swung over the banister above me. Ah! So that’s what she wanted me to see! I bark happily back at her. Yes, I can see what you’ve done and I don’t know what the hell it is but I love it! She giggles and pulls down hard on the bow.

  The bow tightens around my neck as I’m jerked off my feet and begin to rise towards the top of the banister like some demented hairy four-legged balloon. She has incredibly strong arms for a toddler and I think to myself is it really her pulling me up off my feet but yes it is it’s her oh mother of mercy it’s definitely her. The bow clamps around my neck and begins to cut into my throat. I rise more slowly now and can see the top of the white painted woodwork slowly coming closer and closer. My belly seems full of air but then I feel a pop in my ears look down and see a few brown specks fall like dewdrops onto the staircase. But I know they’re not dewdrops.

  “Ugh! Doggy poo poo!” She laughs.

  My legs are flapping and kicking in all directions as I feel the noose rising even further to the top of my neck. I let out a few more brown raindrops and feel my face whirring uncontrollably like a toy aeroplane caught in a twister. Crying and shitting my way to a strangled grave. The noose saws my head off like cheese wire and I feel the last clinging hairs of my neck strain to hold onto my head but they’re not strong enough. I gag uncontrollably like I’m trying to yawn. The air is stuck at the back of my throat as I try to force it outside of me. But I can’t. Estella rises up the stairs like a ghost. She’s holding a little candle in her right hand and a wire in her left dipped in the candle wax. She holds the wire over the flame as it turns from orange to white. Then she takes the wire off the flame and brings it closer and closer to my screaming gushing eyeballs. I throttle from side to side and smell the burning flesh and hair. She squeals like a little piglet.

  “Doggy go sleepy now!” she coos sweetly. Oh so sweetly.

  “Right, that’s it! I’m putting a stop to all this bollocks!”

  “But doctor!”

  “ENOUGH!”

  Shirley and the doctor suddenly drop to cardboard box size. The doctor squeezes my arm as Shirley warns him:

  “Now, now, Archie! Don’t get too close to him, dearie! He’s only a pup, remember!”

  “But mummy, he likes it!” he wails.

  The angelic choirboy reaches out to me with tender porky little arms. His straw hat blows away from his straw head of straw hair in the spring breeze and drops softly on the well-manicured garden lawn. He smiles at me with a twinkle in his eyes and black diamonds where his milk teeth have dropped. His bright blue chequered shirt is neatly tucked into his orange dungarees and his yellow sandals with the faded red straps show the wear and tear of a wealthy happiness of years spent climbing up avenue trees and jumping over park benches. His parents beam down at him lovingly, the picture postcard of suburban decency. His podgy fingers climb around the back of my ears and very gently nurse away the itch that has been distracting me all day. I feel my leg muscles relax as a wave of harmony strums down the side of my back. The warm, light touch of this little lad gives me more pleasure than all the paw-shaped croquettes of Crackerville Retail Park.

  I want to put my own paws around him and touch him as tenderly in the same way. His eyes can see that I am enjoying what he is doing to me and they burst with the satisfaction of kindness as he passes his nursing fingers from the back of my ears to right around the back of my skull like a soothing tingling muzzle, then rests them on my eyebrow muscles. He gently feels the grooves and granges of my face, etching skin over bone. A warm blanket over cold naked limbs. I shudder forward as if I’ve been pulled towards him by an invisible leash and I feel my front legs knocking against his muddy sandals. I stretch my teeth into a grin: the least I can do is give the boy a smile.

  Before I know it I’m being bundled back into the boot of Greg and Shirley’s grey people carrier while her sister and brother-in-law shake their fists at me in rage. Far off I can hear the screams of the boy I’d wanted to kiss not a few minutes before. I later hear that his nose still had yet to be found. Turns out my expression of gratitude had been so close to him that it had ruptured his cartilage and cheekbones, bringing th
e whole fabric of his face crumbling into a pile of broken bones and hanging viscera. It was all Greg and Shirley could do to keep their relatives from tearing my legs apart with a pair of rusty grass cutters and grinding the rest of my stumpy torso into their newly tarmacked front drive. Shirley and her sister are no longer on speaking terms. Just as well, I suppose: I mean she was a bit overbearing. Kept insisting on giving me milk which turns my stomach to puking jelly if I have more than a bowlful. I felt a bit sorry for poor little faceless Archie. Considering how close he was to me, he should be thankful he only escaped with just fifteen facial stitches to keep the plastic surgeon in work. Any closer and they would have had to X-ray the inside of his throat to find the rest of his freckled face.

  Intermission

  A million miles away from his wife Donna and that no good high school dropout of a son of his whose name he couldn’t even recall at that present moment in time, Horton Shelton Sr meditatively kneaded the shark fin shoulder blades of his secretary Charles Riley in the privacy of his custom-made VX12.976 model-G1 space capsule. Harnessed together with a Velcro belt keeping their weightless bodies from drifting apart, they resembled a shaven spider monkey baby clinging to its uncle, their frail, slightly puckered bodies bobbing and dipping in the air. Globules of semen and saliva hung in the atmosphere and an unflushed faeces lay suspended six feet in mid-air above the toilet bowl. Charles Riley’s ditched bedtime companion, a stuffed one-eyed koala bear named Mongo holding a felt eucalyptus leaf in a clenched three-clawed masturbatory fist, teddy-rolled gracefully through the winding corridors to the sounds of April Rainfall reading the lunar forecast in the background, her electronic voice bouncing off the walls like a broken harpsichord down a hillside church. A condom wrapper-”Rod Steiger size and don’t you know it!” printed in yellow fairy-tale castle font across a purple background - floated onto Horton’s cheek like an autumn leaf as Charles wrapped his freckled arms around his neck and shivered with erectile delight. After a few seconds the faeces floated by behind and caught Horton’s eye. He sighed wearily.

  “Oh shit. I’ve done it again.”

  “What is it, Horton baby?” Charles Riley crooned.

  “I forgot to flush.” He began to shift in the harness. “I should probably um...”

  A wave of pleasure suddenly crept through his spine as Charles Riley traced imaginary trajectories on his back with the fake asphalt-blue fingernails he’d won from Karen Benson-Jensen at the charity raffle at the last Save Our Extra-terrestrials day office shuttle party they had held back on grim grotty Mars. One hand caressing Charles Riley’s hair, the other playing with the harness belt, Horton unhooked himself from the harness and spinning slowly in the air put one hand on the airlock hatch and another on his penis, twisted the airlock hatch and roared “Yeeeee-haaaaaaw!” as a steel trapdoor opened up beneath him and he propelled out of the capsule spinning into silent stereophonic space, splurging his semen across the Milky Way. His dream had finally come true.

  April Rainfall finishes the forecast, fumbles awkwardly with her microphone and growls between gritted incisors bound in the vice-like grip of a crescent moon smile. Back to you, Ezra.

  Chapter Six

  On the tube through London I saw visions of a hell gone hellishly wrong. The wail of the rails. Two rats scuttled in the gutter. Correction: one lay still while the other chewed at the gash in his mate’s neck with the bloody zeal of a baby cuckoo hurling its egg-bound siblings to a yolky death.

  People rush and crash into each other like famished flies around the infected eyelashes of a retired slowly dying cockapoo I once fucked the cock of the poo out of in the rear of the ear when I mistook it for a chunky breathing welcome mat. The ever-blinding light on the tube ride to hell and people - my so-called elders and betters - are standing and sitting, staring at incongruous snakes-and -ladders boards with names like “Piccadilly” and “Jubilee” tattooed on the once-white walls of the screaming metallic worm as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  I had to clear my throat at least four or five times before Shirley realised that I had wrapped myself into a ball under the seat of the silver creature wearing vicious-looking bat skin boots and ill- matching pink socks. The fucker was poking at me with his heels, deliberately spreading chewing gum that clung to my fur like chemical honey. I wanted to bite the pink socks until they turned blood red but the colour was so sickly it sent a gagging reflex through my neck muscles and the air in my belly started to clog at the back of my throat. I felt like I needed to yawn and stretch myself but the cunning bastard saw my exposed ribs and kicked me softly but sharply into a hairy heap of howling bones.

  Shirley ignored all of this, of course. All I had to comfort me was a dead spider lying in the dust by the metal pole holding my cowardly aggressor in a comfortable seating position so that he could kick me to death at his leisure. I felt like one of those waspish creatures (well, they were wasps as a matter of fact) that Estella liked to spoil with her talents before she turned her garrotting and maiming expertise towards yours barking truly.

  I felt the ground beneath me shudder uncontrollably, bouncing me up and down and down and up. Then it grinded to a halt and the force of the carriage’s shudder smacked me against the floor with a bang going off in my ears. I rolled out from under my hiding place and glanced out into the open, waiting for the tug of Shirley’s leash to sever my neck into silence but it never came.

  Shirley was nowhere to be seen. The bitch had abandoned me. The rush of panic and fear brought tears of horror to my eyes. I felt my tongue fall out of my mouth and onto the floor below. My jaw began to sag then tense and shake like pennies in a fat woman’s purse, shaking as if my whole skeleton would rip apart at any minute and get swept away by a member of the council or a Keep the City Clean volunteer. At that point I realised that up until now I had been alone my entire life and that no matter how many humans rubbed the back of my ears and no matter how many times they ever fed me and no matter how many times they told them they loved me they all did it to get me precisely where I was now: on a screaming boxcar of a disaster that would most certainly lead me to my death in one way or another. I dropped to my chest as I felt my legs breaking under me. The theatre of life was coming to the final curtain drop. The cats and ghosts of my victims were waiting in the wings to soliloquize me their hatred for a billion acts and scenes to come with no intervals to slow the cancer of my journey. This was the moment of reckoning they had all been waiting for. Is this what they had always hoped for when I’d snatched their lives away from under their paws and claws? I’d always wondered why it had been so easy for me to get away with the things I did. The twisted bastards would explain it to me soon enough.

  And I hadn’t even killed or fucked a single thing during the whole time I’d been in London. What a bummer this trip had turned out to be. I started to put my head between my legs and stretched my tongue out down below for one last time. Might as well get started while my limbs are still in relatively good order. Who knew where I’d be when they’d find me drowning in my own sticky fishy fluids?

  An invisible force suddenly whipped my head backwards. I felt myself being dragged underneath and being pulled across the floor. I tried to reach for my bursting erection but my limbs were too short and stumpy to reach it. My tongue thrashed against the corners of my mouth and throttled down my throat, retreating to the back of my head. I could feel it tickling my brain tissue and I somehow managed a garbled scream before my invisible enemies would rip out my heart and dump it in the resentful cat’s milk bowl.

  Not now, you bastards! I screamed. Can’t you see I’m in the middle of something here!

  A hazy voice from the blurred vision chirped.

  “I’m so sorry! You’ll have to forgive him. He’s never been on one of these before and I think he’s getting a little excited!”

  A human voice at last! My liege! My saviour! No longer was I dying upside
down, the hungry envy of the butcher clan. The Angel of Life had saved me from the cat claws of death!

  “Sorry. So sorry. Terribly sorry,” she warbled.

  Shirley tugged me back down towards reality. Back down below earth. Pulled me through the jaws of the train and out onto the shaking tectonic plate of a concrete platform that the London loonies labelled “Victoria.” I darted and swerved my eyes here and there, desperately looking for a green sign with a grass or green symbol on it or a window of some kind that hadn’t been filled with brickwork and concrete. She pulled me on and on through the sea of swarming feet and I saw socks of all shades riding skinned beasts of black and brown. Most of these monsters had two or three strands of hair tied into a bow above them and were tattooed with ticks and stars across them. Sometimes patterns of holes, although these tended to be shinier and I didn’t see too many of them where we went. Many of them trailed black, brown and red wheeled carriages that squeaked and grinded but disappeared up into the sky when we got to a flight of steps but then crashed back down near my head when we reached flat ground again. On and on they rolled, pieces of digested meat through the infected intestines of the squalid industrial beast. On and on through the bowels of the asphalt warren that the be-shoed rat rabbits yodelled the City of London.