by Penny Alley
Rocky as the ground was, it couldn’t have been comfortable for him. Grunting and straining with every tentative pull, Karly had only just drawn abreast of the rear passenger door when the dog seemed to gather wits enough to try standing again. She stopped pulling, for fear she’d accidentally sweep his unsteady feet out from under him.
“Easy, puppy,” she soothed, offering support until he locked his legs, gaining some stability. He was still weaving though, still dazed. “It’s okay, baby. Easy. Easy.” She reached past him to open the back. “Okay, up. Get inside.”
Head hanging low, he stared into the backseat, but made no move to comply. Gradually, Karly let go of him and sat back on her heels, watching without breathing, halfway hoping he might simply shake off his wounded lethargy and lope off into the woods without any further interference from her.
It was an incredibly selfish moment for her, and one that she was heartily ashamed of as the seconds bled out into minutes and it became painfully obvious that the poor dog was anything but fine. He wobbled, he swayed. He took a single, faltering step, his front legs completely out of sync with the back and, in the end, Karly went back to her original plan.
“It’s okay,” she soothed as she wrapped her arms around his thick chest. One paw at a time, one step at a time, she muscled the heavy canine into the back of her car. She all but lifted his hind legs up onto the seat when he seemed incapable. Massive, furry and bloody, he lay where she left him, overflowing her rear seat and whining softly when she tried to tuck his rear limbs in out of the way of the door.
“It’s okay,” Karly said stupidly one last time. Her hand trembled, but she gave his massive head an impromptu pat in the hopes there would be no hard feelings when this was all over.
As she withdrew, he lifted his nose to lick the back of her retreating hand. His tail thumped twice, a halfhearted wag that dropped it back off the seat. She carefully brushed it up to lie over his rear legs and softly closed the car door. Then she stood there, staring in at the dog, who stared fixedly back at her with lupine yellow eyes.
Now what?
Bending, she picked her coat up off the ground and looked at the blood smears. She turned in a full circle, looking up and down both ends of the gravel road. Should she go back to town? Surely there had to be a vet…somewhere. If not in Hollow Hills, then maybe the next town over, wherever that was. And what about the cabin? The sun was going down, and it was getting very dark, very fast. If she lost what little daylight she had left, how would she ever find her way to the cabin?
It was her second moment of supreme and shameful selfishness, but when Karly got back in the car, instead of taking the dog where he could get medical help, she continued on.
She half wondered and maybe even expected the dog might be dead by the time that long and winding road culminated in a cul-de-sac in front of the small rental that was her new home. By now, the sun was completely gone and all she could see was black shadows set against a dark gray and star-studded sky. Set well back in the trees, the cabin blended with the shadows. Two narrow stories tall, each level seemed no larger than was required to house a single room, and it was dark. Not one welcoming light could be seen anywhere, apart from her own headlights reflecting back at her off the two front windows.
Shifting into park, Karly stared at the cabin. She had never lived on her own before. She had left college and her mother’s house for marriage with Dan—a four-year descent that had taken her from happy straight into hell. Now she was alone.
Well, but that wasn’t true anymore, was it?
Glancing into the rearview mirror, she looked at the injured dog sprawled across the seat behind her. It was too dark to see him clearly, but she could hear his panting breaths, so she knew he was still alive.
She really should take him to a vet. That was the decent thing to do. But she didn’t. She took the keys out of the ignition instead.
“I’ll be right back,” she told him, trying to swallow her guilt as she pushed open the driver’s side door. The dog watched while she got out, following her with his eerie yellow eyes.
Engulfed in the glow of the headlights, Karly climbed the front porch steps and unlocked the front door. In many ways, the cabin was better on the inside than the outside had led her to believe. In some ways, it was worse.
The interior was smaller than it looked and there were only two light switches—one for each floor—located in the living and bedroom respectively. The lower floor consisted of the kitchen and living room, bisected by a bar-style counter. A very steep and narrow staircase, carpeted in bright orange shag, led up to a bedroom barely big enough for the full-sized bed it housed and a tiny closet of a bathroom. The unexpected marriage of old and new appliances was something straight out of Hayseeds-R-Us. A claw-foot tub and pull-string toilet waged an aesthetics war with the faux-Grecian pedestal sink and camouflage shower curtain, complete with deer heads poking out at odd angles. A chipped, rusted and very old medicine cabinet hung off-centered on the only wall wide enough to occupy it, and that was over the tub, not the sink.
The entire cabin, both upstairs and down, couldn’t have been more than six hundred square feet. It was sparsely furnished, mostly clean (apart from a little dust) and haunted in the corners by cobwebs. That no one had lived here in quite some time was obvious. Now she did.
Welcome home.
Karly shivered.
CHAPTER TWO
The dog stood in the center of the bathtub with his head hanging low, his tail tucked and his yellow eyes locked on her face. His was a canine expression that held all the subtle nuances of ‘Why me?’ and ‘Lady, what did I ever do to you?’
Karly bathed him anyway. Her gentle fingers probed through thick black fur, searching for injuries her eyes couldn’t seem to verify, but which she knew had to be there. Admittedly, she wasn’t a veterinarian. She’d never owned a pet before—not as a child and certainly not as an adult—but that didn’t stop her from touching every inch of him. She ran her hands up and down his limbs, over his ribs, along his spine all the way to the tip of his drooping tail. Nothing felt broken or swollen, and the dog neither flinched nor yelped. Ultimately, she figured he’d probably be all right once his bumps and bruises, sore muscles, and scratches had a chance to heal.
The worst injury she could find was on his back leg, the one he’d been lying on in the car (as the crimson smears clearly attested). His entire right flank was matted with blood, but once she’d softened it with a little soap and warm water, patiently working the mat loose to part the thick black fur, all she found was the smallest of cuts. It wasn’t even bleeding anymore.
“There’s a good puppy.” She gave him a pat and turned the water off. “You’re going to be okay.”
Head and tail both hanging, the dog stayed exactly as she’d left him while she found a towel and wrapped it around him. He didn’t even try to shake himself off.
“Poor baby.” He must be one hurting puppy. She dried him gently, giving liberal scritches behind his ears, and did her very best not to make it all feel worse.
His fur was very long and held a lot of water. It took two towels to get him to a point where he wasn’t dripping a lake’s worth of water into the bottom of the tub.
“Come on.” Hanging the towels up over the curtain rod, she stepped away from the tub. “Can you get out by yourself?”
He looked at her, tail still tucked—wet, sore and miserable.
She opened the bathroom door to make it a little more obvious that the punishment was over. “Come on, puppy,” she coaxed. “Paroling all prisoners.”
The dog looked from her to the door, and then shuffled closer to the edge of the tub. He crawled out one paw at a time with soft chuffing groans following each hobbling step. He looked so stiff and sore.
“What a brave boy.” She offered another sympathetic pat. “Come on, I think I’ve got an aspirin in my purse.”
She made her way downstairs, moving slowly and looking back often to see if he was st
ill following. He was. Each step every bit as stiff and deliberate as when he’d followed her up and into the bathroom. She found a dish in the cupboard, which she filled with cool water and put down on the floor near the wall so he could drink. He didn’t. He hobbled only as far as it took for kitchen linoleum to meet garish orange carpet and then he stopped, and stood there, staring while she started dinner.
Generic hamburger helper never smelled so good, although that might have been because she was incredibly hungry. She hadn’t eaten all day, not since before Dan had come barreling home with those divorce papers clutched in one hand and his other clenched in a tight fist. It wouldn’t have mattered how they’d been delivered to him, but that they were delivered at work in front of all his cop buddies, and just minutes before she’d been ready to run…
She touched her bruised eye, prodding tenderly, fully aware of how much worse it could have been. From the corner of her good eye, she saw those yellow eyes watching her. “I guess we’ve both taken our lumps today, huh? I’m very sorry about giving you yours.”
He hobbled a step closer, his sharp nails clicking on the linoleum. He looked from her to the stove, to the bowl of water, and back to her again. She really ought to find that aspirin and see if she couldn’t ease his discomfort.
Stirring the brown beef and noodles together, she left the mixture to simmer and picked up her purse, still on the counter where she’d dropped it along with the supplies she’d picked up at the local store. She found a small bottle of aspirin at the bottom under her keys, and shook two pills out into her hand. One she broke in half, setting a partial piece to one side while she took the other herself. With a spoon, she fished a larger clump of hamburger from the pan. Blowing until it cooled, she tucked the partial dose into it and offered it to the motionless dog.
He did not shy from her. Apart from rotating his ears toward her, he didn’t move at all.
“Look what I have for you,” she coaxed, dropping to one knee. She held the aspirin-laced hamburger out in her open palm. “Yummy ground beef. Ninety-three percent lean. Nothing but the best for puppies I hit with the car. Come on, take it.”
His lupine gaze never left her face. But after a moment, one stiff step at a time, the dog came closer. He stared eerily deep into her eyes for a very long time before, with another soft groan—almost like a sigh of defeat—he ate the meat from her palm. He took it gently, his sharp teeth never touching her skin, and then stood in meek acceptance of the cautious, two-fingered scratch she bestowed on top of his massive head.
“There’s a good boy,” Karly murmured, petting him. “Such a handsome puppy.”
And he was, too. Having never had one before, Karly knew next to nothing about dogs. She knew enough to recognize a wiener dog from a hot dog, and that was about it—the total extent of her canine familiarity. Her basic animal knowledge went a little further and included tidbit gems like: if it has teeth, it can bite you. And, injured animals probably shouldn’t be fed hamburger helper by hand. But this one seemed rather sweet, his mannerisms bringing to mind old gentlemen in furry tuxedoes.
Somewhere in the growing darkness outside the cabin, a long, low howl cut the night.
Puppy’s ears swiveled, tracking the sound, but otherwise he didn’t move. Startled, Karly went to steal a peek out through the small window above the kitchen sink. She craned her neck while her breath fogged the glass, but all she could see were shadows and trees, waving gently in the passing of a stiff wind.
The howl came again, low and mournful, shivering its way up her spine because it didn’t sound as if it were very far away at all. A moment later, it was echoed by another more distant voice and then, quite suddenly, by a third that was right in the very room with her. Karly spun, staring in shock as Puppy, head tipped up and muzzle extended, sang back. Those mournful notes sent tiny, icy fingers positively scampering up and down her spine, raising every fine hair on her body until all she could feel was the prickle as they stood upright.
Wolf.
It was the first word that leapt right to the forefront of Karly’s mind. She’d seen a movie about those once, too—Never Cry Wolf starring Charles Martin Smith. Damn fine actor. She couldn’t remember a single thing about the film apart from Smith catching and eating a lot of mice, and yet as she stood there, staring at the massive dog singing so loudly and so desolately not four feet away, suddenly wolves were very much at the forefront of her mind.
Which was silly. Dogs howled, too. Everybody knew dogs howled—even bona fide city girls like her knew dogs howled. Barks, yips and baying could be heard for miles around every time the sirens went off, be it an ambulance, fire truck or police car. At two in the afternoon or two in the morning, it didn’t matter. When the sirens went whizzing past Redemption suburbia, every dog in the neighborhood sounded the alarm, but not one of them had ever sounded like this.
A fact that did not automatically make this particular dog a wolf, she told herself firmly. A wolf would never have allowed her to get close enough to roll him in her coat. He wouldn’t have let her put him in the back of her car, or bathe him in her bathroom, or eaten out of the palm of her hand as sweetly as Puppy had. And if all that weren’t proof enough that this big, black, shaggy beast standing in her kitchen could not possibly be a wolf, there was still Margo. Margo had told her to watch out for the animals, not wolves. Knowing all of that, however, did not make listening to this any less…eerie.
The howling abruptly ceased, both inside the tiny cabin and out. Lowering his head, Puppy looked at her again with those yellow, yellow eyes. Everything was quiet. Painfully quiet. All she could hear was the sizzling of their supper on the stove and the pounding of her nervous heart.
“Please don’t do that again,” she whispered, uneasy.
Puppy neither blinked nor looked away, and made no promises.
With a pained groan, he eased himself into a sit and then pointedly shifted his stare to the stove where their supper was now burning.
Karly leapt to rescue it, yanking the pan off the heat and quickly stirring to keep what was on the bottom from scorching any worse than it already had. By the time she’d turned around again, Puppy was lying down with his massive black head resting on his massive black paws, looking completely doglike once more.
Which, of course, he should since that was what he was—a dog.
Just an ordinary, everyday, bushy-haired, yellow-eyed, occasionally very wolfish-seeming dog.
* * * * *
Country quiet was as different from city quiet as earth was from sky. In the city, quiet meant fewer cars on the roads, less honking, less shouting and fewer jacked up radios or TVs in the middle of the night. In the country, Karly found, quiet was so far removed from what she was familiar with as to make it a completely different animal altogether.
Quiet was horrible in its unfamiliarity. Sporadic whispers of wind made the branches of the surrounding trees tap at the cabin’s roof and walls and scratch at the kitchen window like a serial killer itching for entry. There was an entire forest’s worth of crickets out there—she’d never heard such a racket in her life. The constant chirping somehow echoed out into the moonless, starlit black night, so soft and yet so deafening. And the owls. There was one somewhere just outside her bedroom window and every few seconds it let loose a deep hoo-hoohoohoo-hooooo!—a rhythmic and ever-changing Morse code of hoots that just about caused her to jump straight out of her skin.
Curled up on her side, it was a fight not to cry. Karly had dreamed of this for almost four years: her first night of total freedom away from Dan, the lectures, the guilt and blame and beatings. If she’d had any idea how much more terrifying this all would be, she never would have run.
And there it was again, the scariest sound of all: the dog—not Puppy this time, but the one right outside her house. Chuffing, whining, skulking around the foundation of the cabin and rustling through the bushes. Toe claws clicked over both front and back porches as every window and door was thoroughly investigated.
Now and then, she could even hear the snuffling as a black nose pressed up against every crack, taking careful note of her. She’d never been so terrified in her life.
Lying between the faintly must-smelling sheets, Karly clutched at her pillow, listened intently for the inevitable sounds of that beast finally just breaking in. She wanted to go home. Even knowing the beating that waited for her, if she’d thought for a second she could make it to her car, she’d have fled.
But she wouldn’t make it. Within steps of opening her front door, the beast hunting in the shadows out there was going to get her, she was sure of it. She was trapped here, in this strange house, in this awful wilderness.
How could she have been so stupid? Had life with Dan really been so bad? Yes, of course it had, but how could she have thought this would be any better?
A single hot tear trickled past her lashes and Karly knuckled it away. Unfortunately, that small escape was enough to break the dam, and the rest she let soak into her pillow, turning the fabric hot and wet beneath her cheek. Staring fixedly into the darkness, she made herself small and quiet, breathing as softly as she could through her open mouth so the creatures outside wouldn’t hear her. After so many years with Dan, survival had made her an expert in the art of crying soundlessly.
The snuffling had moved around to the back of the house, now. The owl on the roof loosed another stream of rapid-fire hoots. And just outside her bedroom door, a carpet-muffled floorboard creaked. Karly snapped up off her pillow, every nerve inside her crawling with dread as she stared back over her shoulder, but it was only Puppy.
His shadowed silhouette barely distinguishable from the rest of the black, he nosed open her bedroom door and stood there, watching her for several long minutes before slipping inside. Soft padding steps rounded the end of the bed, but she didn’t see him again until he crossed between her and the faintly lighter darkness of the world outside her window. Hooking his muzzle over the mattress, he studied her.