The Dogs: Not Exactly Night - Episode VI
It was November - the sky was leaden. Blowing through the air was a cold mist, not quite rain, not quite fog, in this golden-grey world where all the trees stood, half-naked in their autumnal mourning cloaks - vanishing leaves. A Gothic picture - vampire's country, this Transylvanian vista transported to Appalachia. It was full of beauty, but a stark and terrible and savage beauty, a beauty that demanded something of its beholder...everywhere, the mountains - their soft, maternal shape marred with the bristling, gnarled things that grew upon them - ached, stoically, in the mist. Halloween was over, and so there was no room for ghoulishness, just the slow march into winter that was marked, in passing memoriam, by this scene of decaying grandeur... He recognized this place - the great wooded mountain-slope behind Pappy's - but he only half-knew where he was. There was a familiarity, but only a faint familiarity, not strong enough to know if it was a dream, but not maddeningly mimicking of other places and other times to be déjà vu. "C'mon, Drew!" he heard Bligh shout - he looked up to see him pacing slowly up the wooded hill before them. He shivered. "Why we gotta hunt the dang turkey ourselves? Can't Pappy do it?" "Pappy wants us ta hunt jest us, Drew," Bligh called out over his shoulder. "Cuz he wants us ta learn how ta shoot. Now c'mon! We ain't gonna have Thanksgiving if'n we dun come back with a turkey!" "Dang..." Andrew murmured, shivering again as the cold mist wafted onto the exposed flesh of his face. Up the mountain the two boys went - Bligh, just ahead of him, with his grandfather's hunting rifle, and Andrew, clutching the rifle his father had lent him specifically for the occasion in his small gloved hands. The quiet of the mountain-forest was only interrupted by the rustle of leaves underfoot, the gusts of silvery November wind, and the strange warble of Bligh's turkey-call. After what felt like too long a time, Andrew began to grow restless. "We too young fer this!" He protested in between deep breaths from the steep climb. "C'mon Bligh this is dumb, ain't no reason sendin third graders out ta do this! Let's go home!" "Hush, Drew! We gotta do what Pappy says! He said - he done told me he was shootin turkey when he was younger'n us, so--" Whatever Bligh said next, Andrew did not hear - his foot had slipped on a moist pile of leaves, and for an instant he was weightless, before landing hard on his stomach, his father's rifle still in his hands, underneath him. He rose, slowly, gasping - the rifle breaking his fall had knocked the wind out of him, and for several seconds he gulped at the air in a vain attempt for oxygen. He stood at last, hunched over, gun in hand, coughing and sucking in as much air as his briefly pulverized lungs could manage, before he heard Bligh's voice in shaky, hushed panic: "Drew...Drew - look up, Drew. Look up." Andrew searched his immediate field of vision for Bligh, who he saw coming toward him, cautiously, down the mountain, so as to not repeat Andrew's performance of slipping and falling...when he saw something else, something strange, in the corner of his eye. There, not seven feet from him, was the sleek figure of a prowling mountain lion, whose gaze, primal and predatory, had fixed itself on Andrew. Where had this beast come from? There hadn't been one seen in these parts in twenty, thirty years - how did it get here, how did it know where he was? Andrew gulped hard, eyes widening in rapidly growing fear. Nearer it drew, Bligh's hushed admonitions betraying a mounting sense of fight-or-flight terror: "Drew - do sumthin." The beast, as though hearing him, seemed to sneer - an unholy ululation, not quite a purr, not quite a growl, escaping from its bared, threatening fangs. As though on autopilot, Andrew knew he had only a slim chance to avoid certain death - he raised his gun, and clutched it, white-knuckled, as he had seen it done in the movies, knowing in the back of his mind it was the wrong way, and that if he actually fired it he would undoubtedly get knocked on his ass - but he was scared, too scared to be self-aware of his own mistake. "Squeeze, dun pull - squeeze - dun - pull--" He murmured the mantra Pappy had taught him under his breath as he steeled his final nerve to perform the act. The crouching mountain lion could not wait a second longer, and leapt, fangs bared, claws splayed to slice flesh into ribbons. He had no time to pray, no time to react, just to shut his eyes tight and cower, the hunting gun thrown into the air as he threw himself to the ground, hands to his face. He heard the monster cat's shrill, ear-shattering scream, nearer to death than he had ever been and would ever be again - and a loud, equally deafening bang. For some seconds which passed as some eternities, he still cowered, his whole body in the grips of a tremor as though struck by lightning. "Drew - Drew." Andrew lifted his eyes, slowly, beyond the cover of his hands, to see Bligh, his own eyes wired and alert, down the barrel of his hunting rifle - as Bligh lowered the gun, Andrew jerked in a spasm to see not a foot away the mangled mess of what once was the head of the threatening mountain lion. It took some several seconds to realize what had happened - and he was overcome by a crashing tidal wave of the most debilitating shame he had ever felt in his life. "Wha - ah - B-Bligh - I--" "S'okay, Drew - I got em." "B-but the - he almost--" Bligh turned briefly to lay the hunting rifle behind him before venturing closer to his friend. "S'okay, Drew, he came outta nowhere. T'weren't yer fault, now, c'mon..." A sob tore through Andrew as he could no longer bear the mounting guilt that he could feel scalding his insides. "He coulda killed yew, Bligh - he coulda tore y'up killed ya dead n'then - n'then what would I tell Pappy? I - I hid like a coward!" It was odd, very odd, that it would be Bligh who would have been the dispassionate one in this situation - but so it was, as he tried to reason with his shaken friend: "He wudn't be comin fer me, Drew, he--" "He woulda been! He - cuz I cudn't shoot em, he'd git ya next and - Pappy'd be so ashamed of - m-me--" "Drew - hey, don't--" Andrew was inconsolable: "Wh-what if he - gone fer yew first? And th-then I'd - I'd couldn't've shot em, I'd-a lost ya--" "But I'm right here, Drew." "I c-cudn't - I wudn't ev-ever wanna th-think about ya - g-goin - l-leavin me, not after n-now, when y-ya s-saved m-me--" He spoke no more - silenced, by the feel of Bligh's arms around him and a wet whisper in his ear, as it played out so many times over the years, over the past decade - as it would some nights when he was a teenager and first felt the bitter twinge of the nameless love that his father, years afterward, would cast him out for ever daring to feel. "I'm gonna always be here, Drew. Ain't nuthin gonna happen t'ya long as I'm here..." Bligh's voice echoed in Andrew's head, as vivid as if he was whispering it even now, into his ear. Glaring afternoon sunlight pierced the darkness behind Andrew's eyelids, and he awoke, gasping - and he found himself top of his bed, alone. For a moment, for a blissful and fractional moment, he could not remember why he was there. It was the same soft place he had been before - between waking and dreaming, in stasis between nowhere and nowhere. And then - he remembered. He remembered the depraved scenes of bestial lust - the moans, the foul and flying fluids - the cut on his arm on the beach. He remembered everything, all the memories crushing him at a stroke. A cascading surge of panic shot into him - he bolted off the bed, or attempted to, before crying out, and collapsing to the floor in a heap of agony...struggling, his whole body was a mass of rough soreness, as though he had not used his muscles in years, and he crawled across the floor, reaching to grab the doorframe, and pull himself up. He paused for several seconds, shaking, to let the waves of pain ebb away before he attempted to keep moving. Out from his bedroom he stumbled, his legs threatening, with each step, to give out from under him and send him headfirst to the carpet - at last he made it to the couch where, collapsing on his side, he gripped the top cushion to pull himself up, to lay, as he had done two nights ago...when the world made sense. He turned his head about him to scan the area...there was nothing to indicate that Bligh had ever been in his apartment, soundless and hollow as it was now, with Andrew, alone. He paused. Something was off - something smelled off. He inhaled deeply - yes, there it was. Bligh's smell- faint, barely noticeable, but there could be no mistaking it, Andrew could smell him still there...still close... His eyes widened in profound confusion. Bligh had a smell? Perhaps - Pappy's house was always saturated in the blowsy odor of that ancient cologne the old-timer sometimes wore, and Bligh often smelled of it too, but...this...was different. This was some strange new mixture that he felt he had never smelled before and yet - somehow recognized, and recognized distinctly to be Bligh. "Bligh?" he said to the room. "Bligh? Are you in here--?" Only silence answered him - he shut his eyes and sighed, convinced that what he was experiencing was how the events of last night had broken his sanity. He tried to get comfortable on the couch, shutting his eyes in a thoroughly vain attempt to recall some further snatches of sleep, to shut out this new world and its circumstances - but a thought, ringing and electric, came to him, and he rose, unsteady still with the abating pain, to move to the balcony's sliding glass door. He stepped out onto the patio, where yesterday he and Cody had waited, perhaps foolishly, for Bligh to arrive. The early afternoon Sun greeted him, harsh and brilliant as it rises in the Florida meridian sky - he adjusted his eyes as he looked about the parking lot before him, searching for that blue Ford Ranger which had been the harbinger of so much terror. The space where Bligh had parked was now occupied by some nameless neighbor's Toyota, and the truck itself had vanished, as though it had never been there at all. Andrew recoiled to grasp the sliding glass door, hanging his head - what had he been expecting? Of course Bligh was gone - only his strange scent, effervescent and enigmatic, remained. His gaze drifted to the patio floor, his mind racing - but where_could they have gone? Back to Tempest? Somewhere else? How much money did Bligh have, anyway? Hadn't they said something about turning him into one of them--? His eyes swept over the patio as he tried to make sense of what he had seen last night - _how was it possible for Cody's body to just change like that? His body had altered its form, and DNA just didn't work like that, unless it was cancer, but this wasn't some sort of neoplasm, no, the changes seemed to work with Cody's body to become a part of it... None of it made sense - nothing made sense. His god of science, of logic, of an ordered universe, had failed him. And he had nothing to say or show for it. Andrew returned to his living room, sliding the door behind him - he stood there for a moment, at first staring at nothing, but then lifting his eyes to the counter that ran as a sort of imaginary barrier between the living room and kitchen. He noticed the crystal dish his mother had sent him a year ago for his birthday - Waterford, only the best for that cowardly bitch who only did what his father told her - where he and Cody kept their keys. A cold pall swept over him, as he noticed Cody's housekey was still there. Cody had left, gone with Bligh, not even bothering to take his key - and really, why would he need it? He was Bligh's now - Cody would have no intention of coming back to Andrew. Cody's heart had changed to a dog's - and so as his heart had physically transformed, so could it belong only to Bligh. It was too much - it was much too much. Andrew felt his chest tighten as the tears came, the convulsive jerk that presaged the first sob, as he slid down to his knees and wept. He wanted to do much more - to tear his shirt like a Hebrew in a bygone age, and lie there, in nameless sorrow, to stew and rot in the coarse sympathies of his apartment's carpeting. But at some length, he rose - tears still wet on his cheeks, as his eyes caught the dish once again. The same pain exploded through him, and he jerked his head away - away from the dish to that hateful pile of papers on the kitchen table, the pile of papers that did not yield to change, yet always spoke of it, profound and silent, still in the same disorderly mess where he had left it yesterday. All those choices for him to make - not enormous for his field of study - clashed dissonantly with the vague dreams those same choices could very well make come true...work somewhere to study Lepidoptera, holding a real Atlas Moth on his hand and feeling its wings beat on his hand, like a bird's... ...gone. All gone. He shook his head - the killing irony too vivid of having planned so hard and so passionately for the future, only to have it taken away, at a stroke, as if it had never been at all. A scientist. Was not he still a scientist? Did not the dream of greatness - to rise above the curse of his family name, to set out and conquer the world on his own terms - mean anything, anymore? The silence that closed in upon him, like Bligh's fang-filled jaws, gave him his answer. "I c-can't - I can't do anything," he heard himself croak to nobody. For several moments after this, nothing happened. His eyes, well in spite of himself, drifted back to the incriminating crystal dish. Nearly at once, as he had done two nights ago, he could see beyond it - seeing and yet not seeing his whole life, past and future, stretch before him... There were others before Cody - many others. His freshman year of college, the treasures of the sea - of Tampa Bay - had opened up to pour out to him, a delight and a chaos, of boys. ...lithe, deity-on-Earth Aryans - muscular brunettes with eager faces and earnest, impatient eyes - skaters, scenekids, hipsters - there were gilded Ganymedes and debauched sex dwarves, there were mighty warriors and feudal kings, worshipped and devoured, everything to him one week and useless refuse the next. Boys - boys - boys - he remembered their names, echoing like the snap of a finger in the nave of an empty cathedral. And in the collapsing twilight - quite literally, in the sunset - came Cody. There was that image again - the blazing sky behind him, the skateboard in hand, so helpless and so lost. Andrew could see that, anybody could have seen that - Cody was lost. And Andrew's first reaction was to be taken aback by how beautiful Cody was - but the second was worry... Andrew started - the painful urge to urinate had awoken him from his waking catatonia, and he shambled, an unhappy zombie, on to the bathroom, feeling a gaping wound grow with every step where, it seemed, his life used to be. As he moved, slowly, to the bathroom, his hands patted his shorts in an erratic pattern for his phone, still in his pocket...retrieving it, he glanced down - there was Cody, precious, shirtless, both middle fingers up at Clearwater Beach a few months ago, staring back at him, as his wallpaper. Andrew sighed at it and, shaking his head, noted the oddity of no calls, no text messages. It was, again, as if Bligh had never been there at all, but instead had appeared, a half-dream half-waking vision of monstrous sex and hybrid horror, only to disappear into thin air. Look like I changed any? That son of a bitch - what kind of question was that, knowing full well that something had happened to - change him, to transform him into what he was now? Now inside he and Cody's bathroom, flicking on the light, his nostrils were immediately assailed by another ineffable odor - there were the familiar smells of the liquid-musk body wash, the too-sweet peppermint of toothpaste, but there was something else, something enveloping and comforting... ...it startled him, as perhaps it should not have, given its nature. He inhaled deep, shutting his eyes - why had he not smelled this before? _ Cody_...home... He shook his head to literally shake away the feeling - something was wrong with his nose, some side effect of the paralysis or the poison, one or the other, he'd look into it later. He positioned himself over the toilet, and unbuttoned his shorts - then, pulling down his boxers... He jerked his hand away in horror. What he felt - what he saw - was not the penis he was born with. It seemed altogether too firm¸ as though permanently erect and upright although, paradoxically, still flaccid. At its base, near a new, small bit of loose foreskin, was the faint outline of an unsightly, bulging lump. "S-shit..." he stammered to himself. Of course - it made sense, horrific sense. Bligh was part-canine...half-dog, or wolf, or whatever it was, with multiple nipples following milk lines. And the genitals also...a baculum, an_os penis_, attaching itself to the base of the abdomen... He shuddered hard - as he emptied his bladder, he felt his breathing quicken, as panic overtook him, and his mind explode in a vain striving for explanation and understanding: What virus, what bacteria - did this? Humans into dogs, into wolves - was this what the Medieval Europeans screamed about in their hysterical chronicles centuries ago? Was it rooted in some truly horrid fact? And if it was - why canid? Was there a parallel disease that created half-horses? Or - satyrs, from Greece - goats? Was this something totally out of the realm of science altogether? What if the infection wasn't really an infection, but a permanent, insidious form of magic, like a curse? Was there hope in that? Or was he dreaming? Was - this - all a dream...? He clutched his genitals again, with a strange anger, as though of all things his own body could provide him with an explanation why this was happening to him...but he took his hand away and nothing had changed. There was the foreskin that had reappeared from being shorn in the first moments of his life, the glans of his penis subtly pointier than before, the bump at the base of his shaft that, he reasoned - his train of thought at last calming down into a grim logic - would inflate if he had an erection. His hand fell away, and looked up and to the side - to see himself in the mirror. What he saw was appalling, but expected. His eyes were so tired - so sad. He looked - he felt, faintly - hungover...there was a hideous nostalgia to being this way, standing alone in a bathroom, feeling diseased, disjoined from reality. Cody represented that as well - the victory over the beforetime of freshman and sophomore year, when he, as his brother Stephen often did, dwelt in a permanent flux-cycle of intoxication and hangover. He had never told Cody the true depths to which he had sunk - a night in the drunk tank which his father, like everything else terrible his family did, made disappear with a phonecall...and now, he would never get the chance to. He felt the need to drink again - to numb this - claw at him, as it had not in a year and half, and his mouth quivered as dropped his arm down to his side - the person in the mirror was so unlike him, mentally, physically, so dead, so utterly devoid of the solar-powered vitality that fueled him these Florida years...even if, yes, some of those years - some of the months, some of the days - were marred, black and besmirched, with the phantoms of failure and loneliness. How could they not? He was a stranger in Florida - he still was. Every autumn still he would spend a week disoriented and confused because it was balmy yet, and the absence of the chill air - "hoodie weather," the yuppies call it - wrought disorienting havoc on his spirit, as it sought in vain for changing leaves, for steaming breath... Cody was gone - he was why Florida worked, he was why Florida was not_merely his place of tropic exile and little else. It was apropos to the point of poetry - Cody was born of Florida, his first breaths taken smeared with the dirt of a strawberry field...it must have been he, Cody Tyree, what Ponce de León had been searching for, the fitful hallucinations of the Spanish with their iron armor and iron frowns, all those centuries ago. Even if the Lightfoot name should die with him - and with Stephen - what should it matter, if it ended in the hollow splendor of the Florida sunshine, the warmth that he could physically feel even on the colder days when Cody smiled? A smile - that he would never see again. Andrew's eyes grew moist at the thought - there was a profound truth here, a soul-devouring new cosmology that peered shadowy behind the corners of this revelation, but Andrew could not and would not acknowledge it, because it meant that not only was Cody physically gone, but so too his life...it would mean that not only had he lost Cody to the person he trusted the most - he had lost _everything. Bligh, a monster in secret, had made the love of Andrew's life the same as he - infected him, with whatever disease caused the transformation into a canine-human hybrid. And despite what was said last night, he had departed, Cody in tow. The bottom had fallen out of the bottom, and suddenly, where there once was a sure certainty that this_was the point he could turn it around, that _this was his second chapter, that this was his proof that he wasn't a one-hit wonder - where once there was there still some semblance of self-belief and self-esteem, there remained only a nighted pit of self-mockery and self-pity. The moisture in Andrew's eyes grew, until - as he watched, his head rising back to mirror, staring at his pathetic reflection - they were filled with tears. Who would want him now? Who would want this monster - this diseased beast, infected with something more insidious than all other STD's put together? At the very least a drug, a pill, could be taken to stave off the rot of syphilis - what cure could there be for what Andrew had, something that was warping his body with every passing second? The mirror could not lie: Andrew, as he was now, was a laughably loathsome parody of who he had once been - and what he could have been. It was more than him slimming down from the days of lifting weights back for Adkins County High back in West Virginia - this was actual, physical decay. He immediately dismissed the idea of taking a shower, lest he should see even more of his own nude body, which was becoming, hour by hour, utterly alien to him as he thought he knew it... Instead, and looking away, he turned the water on, and leaned forward, to drink deep from the faucet - perhaps too much, as his near-empty stomach cavity seemed to shirk away at the sensation of cold liquid. He took a breath - the taste in his mouth still had not disappeared and he grimaced as he felt the metallic tang still dancing gracelessly along his tongue...he resolved that brushing his teeth would probably do the trick. Toothpaste on the toothbrush, water to moisten it...Andrew coughed slightly as he leaned forward again to the mirror to finish this daily chore, to go on living as though the plunging nightmare of last night - of today, of now forever - was nothing. The first few plunges of the toothbrush across his teeth were uneventful, like virtually every morning as part of his routine. But then...something was wrong. Why did the toothbrush seem to scrape against his teeth as he brought it back from his molars to the front of his mouth? As if his teeth had grown bigger, or... His heart sank, and he spat out the toothpaste and smiled into the mirror - a rictus to examine his upper canine teeth - where, as he expected, overnight, they had become uncannily like_fangs_...sharpened, to a point, now quite like the vampire's teeth that Bligh and Cody had, but not the same teeth he had been born with, either. "They - they're like - Bligh's..." He marveled at this aloud, before shooting a hand to cover his mouth, and then, muffled: "N-no! I'm--" He didn't, couldn't, finish. His ears - were they, too? He leaned into the mirror to look at them, go over them with wild, leering - and now, as Andrew seemed to feel his lungs no longer fill up in anguish, confirming - the tips were more tapered than they had been, and, although no fur graced them, it was clear they were already deforming, self-destroying and reshaping, to the tyrant form that Bligh's infecting sickness demanded. He dropped his arm to his side once again...he coughed - his stomach hurt, and he was suddenly aware of his whole body, what little of it still seemed to function as it should. He hadn't completed even that mundane task of brushing his teeth, and so the ebbing metallic taste, the aftermath of Bligh's nameless poison, still ran bitter along his mouth. He spat out the toothpaste, moistening his mouth with a quick blast of cold water from the faucet., and he sighed, harsh and ragged - in defeat, once more, because today was a series of battles he simply could not win, he departed the bathroom to retrieve some chocolates from the kitchen. It was small - too small, probably - but it was the only thing he could bring himself to eat...no need to ever make pancakes, their favorite breakfast together, ever again... Once there, he grabbed a handful from the open bag next to the toaster - Hershey's dark, with almonds, Cody's favorite - and put his back to the sink...to, beyond it, the sliding glass door, the outside, the hatefully cheerful sunshine streaming in, the Floridian fantasy-world that, he was becoming increasingly sure, only existed in the stabbing stupor of his wishful thinking. There were three of them - three chocolates, wrapped in gold paper foil, and he laid two of them next to the sink, taking the third and slowly, patiently, unfolding it in his fingers...every action he took was a numb copy of his real self, keeping his mind quite deliberately on whatever was before him, so that it could not go back to the memories of the night before, of the reality of his present. And with that same deliberation he took his first bite of the chocolate - he savored the taste, creamy with the chocolate and nutty with the almond, idly thinking that maybe a glass of milk was a good way to complement this little treat...he swallowed the candy and sighed. As he was making his way to the refrigerator, not a foot away, a sudden, violent cramp overtook his whole abdomen. He cried out in pain as he was doubled-over in very abrupt agony - an overwhelming urge to vomit flew him back to the sink, where out of his mouth he upchucked the chewed up bits of candy and parts of yesterday's lunch, all bathed in murky yellowish chyme. Another violent cramp - another surge of foulness from his stomach into the sink. He felt his legs give out beneath him - slipping, he landed hard, with another pained cry, on the linoleum beneath. The pain was so intense he could hardly breathe - and suddenly he felt like he could not breathe at all, and he panicked, in desperation trying to swallow all the air he could, until he was obviously hyperventilating, helpless to his body self-destructing. Poison, his brain screamed - but how? And then, a fleeting thought - wasn't chocolate poisonous to dogs? And especially dark chocolate - the canine theobromine intolerance - his body was becoming part-canine and it was reacting to the alkaloid in the chocolate...fatally... This was it - he was going to die. Bligh had destroyed his body, his health, his boyfriend, his entire life, and now he was going to take it as well. He clenched his eyes tight and, clutching his stomach in another shot of excruciation, there on his kitchen floor, awaited death, the only thing from the past twenty-four hours that made any semblance of his sense. He cried out Cody's name, one final time, hoping it would be his last word.