The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (25 page)

Until the black dog’s handler began emanating death smells in the house today, the whole last-minute rescue thing was something she asked him to do, and being a good dog, he did as told. Ordinarily he does what he does in his own time and as he has always done it, but it seemed to please her when he did as she said. She and the big, clumsy men she yoked to him on rescue missions rushed in with their medicine and electric paddles, jerking people back from death, and that is their business. The hero thing was her idea.

The black dog does what he does.

Overhead the applause crescendos and the auditorium floor thrums with the footsteps of a thousand people leaving. His mistress has started down, into the cavity. She descends in a funnel of light at the far end of the corridor. Long stretch: not much time. Must reach her. Drop the phone into her hand. Give her a minute. Sit. She’ll know.

Running with his head lifted and every muscle taut with urgency, the black dog is fixed on the orderly progression, the necessary timing. First this. Then this.

Then all at once a human blunders out of a side passage and skids to a stop in front of him, flailing like a flagman on train tracks. It is barking and barking. “Is that you?”

The one he knows, and does not know why he knows it. The thing has a bad smell. It has an ugly bark.

The black dog growls.
Not now.

It goes, bark bark. “Doggie, stop. I have to see you!” Blarg blarg.

The black dog growls again. No time.
Move.

It just keeps barking. “Doggie, I have to ask you a question.”

Shut up so I can hear her breathe!

She’s on the ladder! She’s halfway down! He growls again but the human in his path is like a balloon, getting bigger and bigger until it fills the corridor. In times like this even a rescue dog must drop whatever he is carrying to bare his teeth.

“Come on, dog.” The human’s bark falters. “Please.” Then it does the unthinkable. It lunges for the black dog’s collar.

The black dog does what he has to. He rakes the human’s arm with his fangs and grunts in recognition. He tastes blood, but only a little, and it is vile. At least he has distracted it so he can move on. Whining, the creature frets over its wound. The black dog puts his huge paws on its back to push it down, vaults over it and runs on, bent on rescue.

Too late. In the lost time his mistress dropped like a felled redwood; she is unconscious. Worse: while he was grappling with the human, the window of opportunity slammed shut. This isn’t the black dog’s fault, even though grief and frustration make him throw back his great head and howl his grief. It is the human’s.

The creature with his mark on it made him drop the phone.

What was that? What is it?
Trembling, Bill tries to sit up. Ahead, the black dog looks up from the body it has been nosing, Bill wonders
What happened? Did it kill somebody?
—whirls, and charges. He cowers as the great beast covers the distance between them in enormous, terrifying leaps. With its red jaws wide and its yellow eyes suffused with blood and turning a murderous orange, it comes.

“Don’t! Don’t kill me.” Bill cries. Still the great beast rushes down on him, and as Bill Siefert collapses and waits for death, the black dog plants one huge paw on his chest, squeezing the breath out of him, and with an efficiency signifying complete indifference, stalks over him and moves on.

The form passing over Bill is huge, warm and heavily muscled, bigger than a Newfoundland with its thick, shimmering black fur soft and rich and every muscle and tendon humming with power. Its passage is swift but the sensation lingers. It is like being overshadowed by a lover.

Aren’t you going to kill me?
Bill gasps, struggling for breath as the black dog passes over him and goes on running.

Did it answer? Does he imagine it? In the instant when the enormous paw compressed his chest and its full weight landed on his heart, Bill thinks he heard or comprehended what the creature may have told him.
It isn’t time.

Right now no one in the auditorium knows what has happened down here in the pit, but the implications are prodigious. The forensics officer, its mistress, is dead. Nobody else can control the animal.

The black dog is on the loose.

“Wait!” the human barks as the black dog passes over it, but when he plants his paw in the creature’s chest there is a shift in the air. He recognizes it at once. It is the human, pleading:
Wait
. He lifts his head, considering. Did it speak?
Oh please, please wait
. Fragile as the human is inside its thin pink skin, the creature is communicating.

A talking human? How? In time he will have to deal with the matter. The human asks,
what are you?
but the black dog has his own imperatives.

*

There is a brief flurry after Bill’s story breaks. Since he was there when it happened, since he found the body, since he
saw
the thing, it is a big story. Blood clot to the brain, but that doesn’t stop false charges against the animal. “I was there,” Bill says breathlessly. “He tried to get me too. I alone am left,” he says. “I alone am left to tell the tale,” he says and by the time he has told his story on every known talk show, he is temporarily famous and eminently employable.

There will be a statewide search and bogus reports of countless sightings. The spawn of the black dog—litters artificially inseminated and carefully reared—turn out to be depressingly devoid of powers and are destroyed. For a short time Bill makes news with his
Encounter With the Black Dog
, but only for a little while. He quits his job to write an existential book under the same title, but by the time he has it finished the black dog is a dead issue. After a brief memorial service for the city’s top forensics officer, felled by a cerebral embolism
on the night of her triumph, the mayor and the police commissioner will forget. After corruption hearings and a series of firings, the city will forget. In time Bill Siefert will forget. Almost.

Meanwhile the black dog runs on. He will not forgive the human he left squirming in the corridor that night, nor can he know why he and it are somehow yoked, but they are. Never mind. In the realm of the black dog there are imperatives that supersede all else.

If their fates are intertwined, then everything will come down when it comes down. When is a matter of no particular importance to him. The time will come and when it does, the black dog will know it. Until then, unencumbered by police handlers, harnesses and leashes and the mistress he almost loved, the black dog runs loose in the world. Not free, exactly, because he is still driven by imperatives. Even so he is free, with nobody to answer to.

Loose in the world, he does what the black dog does.

Bill is not a superficial person, but you can’t go on dwelling on a mysterious moment in your past.

He used to think the black dog would make him rich, and if it didn’t make him rich it would make him famous. All he had to do was figure out how. If he could find it again, if he could catch the thing, then he could follow his big story,
Encounter With the Black Dog
, with
Capture of the Black Dog
, to be followed by
Interview With the Black Dog
and finally,
Secrets of the Black Dog
, but he had no idea how to go about it. Or collect the reward. Then the police department gave up on the case and withdrew the reward, so that was the end of that.

Siefert never caught the black dog and he never got that book contract. His lecture,
Encounter With the Black Dog
, never made him rich and it didn’t make him famous, but it did help his career. He is a local television anchor now. He married a nice girl from the valley, ten years younger. They just bought a house on the other side of the hills.

Still, Bill knows he must have tangled with the black dog for a reason. Like most people in the world, he has to proceed on faith, which in his own way, he is doing. He used to think that if the encounter wasn’t about fame or money, it must be about power. Years pass. That hope has come and gone, so Bill has to wonder whether whatever happened back there had left him marked in some other way. If only he could figure it out!

A family man now, Siefert tells himself he’s finally let it go, but whether or not he knows it, he and the black dog are by no means done.

Even now there are nights when he sits up in bed and wonders. Sitting next to his sleeping wife with his knees drawn up and his arms locked around them, he gnaws on his bare kneecaps and wonders. What happened back then? Was the black dog trying to tell him something that night in the darkened corridor? What? Why were its yellow eyes turning orange, and if they turn red, what happens then? If he and the black dog were thrown together for a reason, it’s no reason he can divine.

And the dog. Every year since his collision with the human, everything the black dog does takes a little longer to do. The slowing tempo is gradual but apparent. Whether it is the byproduct of that night, the black dog could not tell you. Is it that unwanted encounter with an unlike animal that is mysteriously linked to him? The unbidden memory of his lost mistress? The other human’s bark-bark-bark, its smell, his own resentment? Insofar as it is the function of the black dog to wonder, he wonders.

Alone in his slowing body he lifts his head and howls without making a sound.

Bill Siefert is middle-aged now, father of two, secure in his career and still happily married. There were years when he would have been thrilled to see the black dog because he was ambitious and reckless and too young to be afraid of the creature. Even though he has more to lose now he has become—not careless, exactly, but less vigilant.

Then he goes to the E.R. with a bellyache and wakes up in a hospital room—a double—groggy and minus his appendix. No big. He’ll be fine. A lump in the next bed, supported by ticking monitors and a welter of tubes and drains, tells him it’s a double.

It is night in the room, and in the shadows, there is a deeper shadow. Twin lights wink and glow yellow.

Bill shudders.
Is that you?

He gropes for the buzzer to get help but it isn’t anywhere he can find. Nice wife, kids, they have a bigger house. He cries, “You can’t be here for me, it’s just an appendix!”

The black dog blinks but does not move. At least it’s still standing.

He doesn’t mean to whimper, but he does. “You don’t get it, I’m up for the network anchor job!”

Bark bark bark, why won’t the human stop barking and communicate? The black dog creates the silence into which thoughts can fall. In time the creature
in the bed quits flailing and lets the words out.
Don’t take me
. The smell it gives off is feral, frantic.
Not me, I’m young! I have so much to lose.

Exactly.

The human points to the next bed.
Take him.

Still standing, the black dog considers. Nothing will happen until he sits down, and he is not ready.

Although his mission is preordained, he does not know what he will do now, now that they have come to the convergence, only that he and the barking human have been brought together for a reason.

Please.

It seems right to wait until he knows.
All right.

He moves on to the other bed in the room and sits down. He sits until the old soul parts from the old body. For reasons the black dog is not built to contemplate, his bones rattle with foreknowledge.

Bill Siefert emerges from the hospital changed. He can’t say what drives him now but he has lost his ambition. His children find him indifferent. His wife says he is drifting.

This is not precisely the case. He is troubled, distracted. He has become cruelly aware of the multitude of scents, miseries, and toxic humors of the people around him: the lump in his wife’s breast, the rales in the lungs of his producer.

It makes him frantic. Can he make her get a checkup so soon after the last one, and for no reason he can give her? Can he get his producer to the doctor in time to forestall his death, at least for now? He does not know. The pressure is terrible, the responsibility tremendous.

His narrow escape from the black dog troubles him. He is not so much changed as sensitized. Where he used to be self-contained and live his life however, he hears a chorus of outcries and farewell wails crowding in. It is like coming into a room where a million people are calling out to him.

Still, a man has to live his life and support his family, so painful as it is—the voices multiply, a million fingers clawing at his heart—Bill goes to New York with a
DVD
of his best newscasts for the last round of interviews with the Manhattan network affiliates. Only a strategic cocktail party stands between him and that spot as weekend anchor. Not what he wanted as a kid, but better than he expected.

The black dog is dying. He knows it now. This explains everything, but in his life in service, the black dog has never stopped for explanations. For now, he will do what the black dog does.

The top of New York. Siefert has retreated to the penthouse balcony at the top of the glittering network tower. He told them he needed time to consider the offer, but it was the pain that drove him out here, the pressure of the unexpected. Alone for the first time since he arrived, he inhales air so cold that it’s like breathing distilled brandy. Maybe he is a little drunk. That must account for it. When he sees the black dog sitting on the wide cement rail with the wind lifting its shimmering hair he is not surprised. He isn’t even frightened.