Estimated reading time — 11 minutes

I need help. I am in hospital and in a stable state. I am Australian so healthcare is taken care of, just need urgent legal advice.

I am a 26 y/o male from the inner west of Sydney. I was just a victim of an incident in which I am pretty sure my girlfriend died. I am concerned that I will be the main suspect… I would never lay a hand on her but I have had enough anger management issues in my life that her family is going to name me as the main suspect. Plus, they are not going to believe my story. I don’t even know if any of you are going to believe it, but I am just posting it here to get all my thoughts down and see if there is any way for me to get out of this. I really do not want to go to jail so please tell me what to do.

My story starts with my neighbour, who I’ll call Lex. I don’t know exactly how old he is, I would guess he would be about ten years older than me. I don’t like admitting this, but I’ve always seen him as a bit of a fat shut-in. That makes me seem really cruel, but he’s one of those kind of right-wing guys where you’re never sure whether they were making a dark joke or really did vote for one nation. He was always trying to tell me about the latest cryptocurrency thing.

About a month ago he went away to Europe to visit family and asked me to watch his dog for him. I don’t have a lot of experience with animals, and I kind of didn’t want to, but he offered to pay me for my troubles and I accepted. It was a long, lanky thing, a greyhound or a whippet or something similar. Its name was Prometheus, of all things (like I said, Lex is a weird guy). It was really shy at first, and pulled away whenever I tried to touch it. When I did manage to pick it up, it would shiver like crazy. I almost wanted to buy a doggy-coat or something for it. Lex left me with a bag of dog food and a pooper-scooper. That was all I had.

The first weird thing that happened was when I tried to put its collar on to walk it, about two or three days into our time together. I touched its back and it winced, and craned its neck around to look at me, the folds of its grey skin creasing and twisting under its thin fur. I was struck by its beady, black eyes. That was the first time it occurred to me how different its eyes were from a human’s. It lunged out and bit me on my right hand, first securing me in place with its teeth, then clamping down with all its might. I heard a crunch and felt intense pain. I tore my hand away from it, and glanced at the damage before quickly looking away. I am kind of squeamish, so when I looked down and saw white amongst the red it was an effort not to vomit. I rushed off to my first-aid stuff under the sink and bandaged up the wound.

After the adrenaline wore off, I found that the injury was a lot less painful than I had expected. From the first look I had gotten, the thought crossed my mind that I would need stitches. Later that day I had another look at the wound, and it had already scabbed up. I am not usually one for dramatics (I have broken my pinky playing basketball in the past and walked it off), so the fact that I had overreacted so much at the time really made me doubt myself.

Maybe I put some sort of a revenge curse on that dog, because I swear what comes next I did not do on purpose. I need you to believe me, because what I did was the archetypal evil act. If there is any chance of you believing that I did it on purpose, you will lose all sympathy for me.

I’ve always been scared of driving. I hate the trance you have to put yourself in in order to forget that you are in a massive metal object hurtling down the road at a hundred kilometres an hour. I hate that one wrong move can kill you dead. Well, I didn’t have a reason to feel this way until about a week after Lex had left, when I pulled into the driveway and felt a thump under my front wheel.

The poor thing was dead on the scene. I picked it up and comforted it, felt its last breaths, but there was not time to get it to the vet. I hate to say this, but the shock and grief and sorry-ness was drowned out by the panic at the depth of shit that I would be in once Lex found out.

I intend to work on this in therapy if I don’t go to jail, but I decided to lie. My girlfriend, who we’ll call Alison, lives on the North Shore. Both our places back on to national parks, but her park has a creek that leads out to the sea, one of those lush rainforests tucked in between the suburban sprawl. I hid the body there, underneath a large rock, covered with large, dead fern leaves from the area. I don’t own a shovel, so it was the best I could do. With any luck, the rain would wash the bits away into the creek below, and out to sea. I planned to tell Lex that the dog had run away. I didn’t expect to get the money, but negligence was better than manslaughter when it came to saving face with him, I figured. I would never have done such a thing if it were a human, mind you.

In the weeks after that, I waited anxiously for Lex to return. I practiced my solemn monologue in the mirror, how I would break the news to him, how I would repent. If he was forgiving, perhaps I would take him out to Korean BBQ and we would make amends, and maybe even become friends, or at least better friends than the wary tolerance we had for each other before. All this practice was for nothing, because he never came back. He was meant to be in Europe for two weeks, he had told me. Maybe his trip had been extended. These things happen. I didn’t have his phone number, or any way of contacting him, really. In the intervening weeks it had occurred to me that that was something usually given to a dog sitter. Maybe he had planned to disappear? Maybe he was running away and changing his identity, but he didn’t want to leave his dog alone? If that was the case, then I had already failed him, but at least he would never find out. I decided to put these crackpot theories out of my mind, and operate on the assumption that his European caper had just been extended for however long, and that he could be back at any moment. Better to be safe than sorry, after all.

In these days of waiting I grew more and more paranoid. The spot on my hand where the dog had bitten me was swelling, I thought. A lump was forming in the flesh between my thumb and forefinger. It looked almost like a mosquito bite, red and welt-y. Maybe it \*had\* been a mosquito bite. Maybe I had made the whole incident up. The lump felt hard to the touch, as if a small, hard object was forming inside. I fidgeted, making X-shaped marks on the spot with my opposite thumbnail. I made a mental note to go to the hospital as soon as possible.

Have you heard of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? It’s where you start noticing something a lot more because you’ve been thinking about it, even though there’s no logical reason for you to be encountering it more often. I’m sure you know what I’m getting at.

Everywhere I went, they would stare at me. From the front yards and porches, tied up outside cafes, out on walks. I became transfixed with their eyes. On my morning runs, I found myself always looking at the dogs and not their humans, as if they were the ones in charge. I wish I could tell you that I didn’t find what I was looking for. They always looked back.

One occasion, as I was walking from the bus stop to my girlfriend’s house, a pack of dogs followed me up the street. Not a human in sight, I swear to god, there must have been five or six of the things, following me at a slow, skittering pace. They weren’t closing in or anything, but it freaked me out, and I had the feeling that if I decided to run, they would speed up and easily close that distance. I got to Alison’s verandah and turned around. I guess they must have turned around and left for some reason, as they never caught up.

That night was good. I debriefed with Alison, though I didn’t tell her everything, of course. My heart was pounding. I forget exactly which details I left in and which I left out, but I told her I was developing a fear of dogs, and getting that off my chest let the tension out a little. She told me she was also feeling weird, and had thought she had seen a ghostly white tree in the forest behind her house. We were able to laugh about our odd experiences and put each other in perspective, though we did close the blinds that night.
I’ll cut to the chase. Today, I came home to six holes having been dug in my back garden. Each one was deep, very deep. My blood ran cold. My first thought was that Lex had come back, somehow figured out that Prometheus was not in my house, somehow figured out I had killed him, and assumed I had buried him in my back garden. My heart was pounding. Lex had a gun collection, another reason I didn’t like him. He wasn’t here now, though, and he didn’t know where my girlfriend lived. He didn’t even know I had a girlfriend. I would be safe at Alison’s.

When I got there, I tried my best to keep calm and play it off as a surprise visit. I got inside, kissed her, we had a drink together, and I felt I was doing a good job of playing it cool. My mind was racing to come up with a story as to why I had to stay at hers, and what I would do about Lex, and plan after plan came tumbling down like a lot of houses of cards before I decided to come clean. Before I could, however, she smiled and shoved my shoulder.

“Oh, and by the way, you got me with your prank today” she said. I laughed and asked what she meant.

“Very funny. You’re not scaring me.”

I didn’t believe her. I asked again.

“You know, we had that whole conversation about dogs, and you sent that guy in the fur suit to my work to freak me out?..

He just stood there, across the street, staring, for like an hour. It was really freaky. Lisa almost called the cops, but then I remembered our conversation and figured you had sent him. You did send him, right?”

I said no.

“Oh. That’s kind of good, actually. I was kind of thinking it was a bridge too far, even for you-“

She trailed off, as her attention was captured by something behind me. I turned around. We were sat in her living room, which looked out onto the street through a glass wall. The street was dark blue in the night, the deep orange light from the house only shining out a few meters. Sat stock still on the verandah, the tip of its long grey nose only just illuminated by the house, was a large dog. It was too dark to see its eyes.

“Huh. That’s funny” she said, as she went to get up. I put my hand on hers, signalling her not to move. She looked at me with concern.

“Is that door locked?” I asked. I knew it was stupid, and so did she. She let me know.

“No, it’s not locked. The dog’s not going to get in, dumbass.”

She got up and descended the three steps down to the landing to close the blinds, as I could tell she was disconcerted. Perhaps I wasn’t projecting as much chillaxed energy as I had thought. As she took the string between her fingers, the dog stood up.

It bowed its grey head down into the orange light spilling from the front window. Its beady eyes reflected back at us. As it shifted its weight forward, it propped itself up on its hind legs and lifted itself into a standing position, curling upwards and backwards quite effortlessly. We saw it then, from behind the glass, an unnaturally hominid creature, taller than the both of us, saggy grey skin hanging from its thin frame, its large, empty eyes looking through the glass around the room, then at Alison, then at me.

Alison rushed back up to me and grabbed my arm, pulling me in close. Neither of us said a word to each other as the dog pawed at the door handle. Three or four times, the golden handle depressed, then bounced back into place with a chunk. The fifth time, it pressed down, kept a hold on it, and pushed. The door cracked open, and Alison and I wasted no time. We ran out of the living room, and into the kitchen. Alison rushed to the back door and slammed herself against it. Despite the neighbourhood of the house it was a part of, Alison’s kitchen door had a nasty habit of getting stuck. She had never gotten around to looking at the hinges, or the mechanism, or whatever it was that was causing the problem, despite my insistence that she did so. She slammed herself against the door again.

“Fuck!”

I grabbed one of the knives off the magnetic knife rack above the sink. It was the one I had seen Alison’s dad spatchcock a chicken in one slice with last Christmas. I wielded it with a shaky hand.

“What the fuck is that thing?!”

“I don’t know” I said. It was partially true. It was much larger than Prometheus ever was.
Alison slammed against the door once again. I could hear the dull, heavy clatter of a chair being knocked over in the living room. It was inside.

Alison slammed against the door one last time. That did it. The kitchen door became unstuck, and she stumbled outside, into the cold night air. She turned around to beckon me, and I saw her flushed face shrouded in darkness, the forest behind her completely blacked out. I turned to look at her just as a pair of jaws, the size of a small car, descended from above her and picked her up. They were slobbery, covered in thin white fur, rows of pointed teeth emerging from jet black gums. The first bite was gentle, instrumental, only done to secure her. The second was the one that did it. I looked away, and her scream was quickly cut off by a crunch that rang out across the neighbourhood. I heard the thud of, presumably, her lower half hitting the back deck. Then, frozen with fear, I heard the echoing footsteps, deep and thunderous, as the thing with Alison in its jaws ambled into the rainforest.

Slowly, I raised my head. The dog’s face appeared in the doorway, moving with inhuman grace towards me, its glassy eyes revealing themselves one at a time. Once its face was in the kitchen, so was its right arm. At the end of it, a mottled grey hand, humanlike, clutching a glimmering, silver scalpel. The rest of its lumbering frame loomed through the doorway and, in a moment of desperation, I lunged across the room. I sunk the kitchen knife into its leg, and didn’t stop to retrieve it.

I bolted up the stairs, slipping once in my socks. I scrambled to get up as the dog approached behind. At the top of the landing, I went into Alison’s bedroom and tried to slam the door behind me.

I was too slow. It wedged into the doorframe, and the struggle was quickly over. In the darkness of Alison’s bedroom, I could see nothing but the dog as it loomed over me, silhouetted by the light in the hall.
Slowly, and with balletic grace, the dog operated. It took my hand like a handsome prince kneeling for a kiss. My right hand, with the welt. It placed the scalpel on its apex and sunk it into my flesh until it felt resistance. It stung, but the panic rushing through me dulled the pain just enough. When the scalpel met with the hard object under my skin, it levered it out with precision and took the thing in its other hand, deftly holding it to the light.

It was a canine tooth.

The dog left quickly and without a fuss, like a tradie after a job well done, or like santa claus. I looked at my hand. The wound was deep and gnarled, blooming like a lotus flower. My thumb was hanging down, swaying gently side-to-side. I felt no pain.

Now I am in the hospital, on a ton of painkillers, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to prove what happened. I’m not even sure it did. Due to my personal history, I am very worried that I will be convicted of something I did not do. Please help me. Any advice appreciated.

Credit: Kuma Calliope