by Aylya Mayze
© 2021 Wittily Writ Publishing
Little Jimmy Roe had the biggest, baddest, black dog. The thing was the size of a lion and sometimes, looking at him straight on, you’d see a sort of reverse halo – dark where it should have been light – around his head like a mane. His eyes were a shifting kaleidoscope of red, yellow and orange, like flames were flickering inside them. When he walked he made no sound – not even over dry leaves or broken glass – and I never heard him bark but once. That once was enough, though, to chill me to the bone. The sound was kinda hollow, but it warn’t so much that as the fact that it withered your skin like a bitter, snow-blowing wind. It left me shivering for a week.
I don’t know the dog’s name. Maybe he never had one. He warn’t the kinda dog you’d call for or send to fetch. No one ever tried to pet him either. You could just tell he’d bite. He always had a look like he was hungry to know how you’d taste. He was Jimmy’s protector and, I figured, Jimmy needed one. Jimmy Roe was a tiny boy, as timid as a mouse. He kept his eyes to his toes and would startle if anyone so much as said hi to him. He was just the sort of boy our local bullies liked, but with that big mountain of a beast shadowing him wherever he went, no one dared mess with him.
That dog went everywhere with him. It would lie at his feet in class and run by Jimmy’s side at PE. It even followed him into the bathroom and Mick Halverson, the only other kid who ever talked about the dog, swore to me it went right in the stall with Jimmy. Unless the boys’ stalls are bigger than the girls’ I can’t imagine how that dog would fit.
Jimmy had three older brothers. Nathan, my age, was three years older than Jimmy. I asked him one time, when I was about 12 years old, about their dog, where they got it and all, but he just looked at me weird and said they never had a dog and never would. His daddy didn’t like dogs and, anyway, Jimmy was allergic to all animals.
“But I’ve seen it!” I said.
He shook his head. “You’re hallucinating.”
He had me blushing mad that he would play such a mean game with me. I’d never figured Nathan for the kind. In fact, I had kinda liked him before that, but anyone who’d lie to me – right to my face – so obviously…What kind of a fool did he take me for?
I was still fuming about it when I went to tend old Mrs. Gregor’s garden that afternoon. She’s the one who lived in the pretty, blue-trimmed farmhouse right across from the fancy Victorian where the Roe’s live. I could see Nathan and his older brothers playing soccer in their front yard. I watched Jimmy come home with that big, black dog at his heels. The boys stopped their game when Jimmy walked by them. They stood still and tense, glaring at Jimmy like he might be some bully come to start a fight. They didn’t even breathe until Jimmy and his dog disappeared inside the house. Then they went back to their game like nothing had happened. They’d been right scared, those three, big boys, and don’t try to tell me they were frightened of meek little Jimmy!
“What you muttering about, Jo?” asked Mrs. Gregor, peering over my shoulders at the pile of pulled weeds I’d made. I startled, not expecting her.
“Nothing, ma’am.”
She frowned down at me.
“Don’t lie to me, Jo, or I’ll tell your mother. I saw you staring at the Roe house. You got some problem with that family?”
“No ma’am, I just…” I looked up into her kindly eyes, soft brown like my grandma Sarah’s, and before I knew it I had told her all about Nathan calling me crazy and trying to make me think they didn’t have a dog, when everyone knew they had!
Mrs. Gregor squinted at the Roe house then looked back to me.
“You see a dog, do you?” she asked.
“O’ course I see a dog!” I exclaimed. “How can anyone miss it? What? Are you gonna tell me now that you don’t see a dog?”
“I’ve seen a dog,” she hurried to assure me. “And sometimes it’s a pig, a mean ol’ boar, and sometimes it’s just a feeling – like the willies. I’ve seen it about that house long before the Roe’s moved in. You’re not crazy girl. It’s just…not everyone can see it, you know?”
I shook my head, bewildered.
“What’re you telling me?” I demanded. “You saying it’s not a dog?”
“I’m saying you keep away from it and anyone it follows!” She bent down, painful cause of the arthritis in her back, and whispered. “There’s evil things, dear, and that old dog you see is one of them. Stay as far away from it as you can.”
She began to cough – all hunched over like that and with the dust and the weeds and all. I jumped to my feet and helped her inside, but she kept talking between her coughs like she was afraid if she didn’t say it now she’d never get another chance. She gasped something about a man coming out with his hair all turned white after just one night in that house and maybe it was because the family who built the house had all been poisoned by their crazy daughter or maybe the dog had made her crazy. Mrs. Gregor’s grandmother had told her about a big, black bird with a crooked beak who used to perch on the tree that was now in the Roe’s front yard before the house was even built.
I finally got Mrs. Gregor to take her medicine with some tea. Then she got real quiet. Thinking she was sleepy, I got up to leave.
“Now I’ve told you,” she said softly, staring at the empty teacup on the table in front of her. “Now you know and it’s yours to carry. But you’d seen it already, so I guess it’s no matter. Just keep it to yourself, girl. It’s like Adam and Eve’s apple – no one should bite lest they have to.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said, though I hadn’t a clue what she meant. I excused myself and left her to rest.
Next day I heard that Mrs. Gregor had died. Mrs. Bellot, her housekeeper, found her body in her bed torn apart as if by some kinda animal, only no hint of a beast was to be found.
I did what she said and kept away from Jimmy Roe and his dog as best I could. When I was grown I moved out of town and forgot about him until one day I saw his name in the newspaper. He had poisoned his parents and three brothers, their wives and kids at a family reunion and lived for a week in that house eating his own meals with their rotting corpses still sitting at the dinner table before he was finally discovered. It had taken that long, I guess, for anyone to dare arrest him with his dog around.
The End