He came to me in my most desperate moment. He appeared to me as a black dog standing at the edge of the alleyway. He was blanketed like an angel in the orange streetlight and the black of his fur looked almost blue. My attacker was yanking my skirt down and his hands caught on my hips; pressing so deeply that I was certain he would leave a bruise. I screamed as the dog watched silently; an onlooker to my tragedy. I stared into his canine eyes as the horror gripped me; the beast was no simple mutt, there was something buried in it’s eyes, something sentient.
“If you want help all you need to do is ask.” The dog said and I wondered if I was going crazy. I’d had a lot to drink and my attacker had no doubt seen the drunken tilt to my walk and saw a jackpot. “Just say yes. Please. I will help.”
I bit a hole through my tongue as the attacker struggled with my skirt zip. I mouthed it. Desperately. Help.
Then I remember nothing.
I woke up in my bed the next day; tucked under the sheets with care and precision. There was a glass of water on the bedside table and a series of worried texts from Natasha. My head was bursting and I began to consider that it had all just been some horrible dream; my attack, the dog, all of it just some nightmare that would pass with the years. T’was not to be so simple.
“Calm down there. Everything’s alright. IThat rotten bugger is dead. He’s burning now in the fiery pits where he belongs.” An oddly familiar voice came from the corner of my room. It had a northern tilt, an accent I couldn’t quite place but was warmly familiar. To my squinted eyes, I thought at first the mass was just my overflowing laundry hamper but I quickly realised it was the dog - the black mutt from last night. “I know what you’re thinking. Gee. This is weird. A talking dog? How did I get home? What the fuck happened. All very normal questions, but I’m not certain you want the answers.”
“Oh but I do.” I groaned, groggily pulling myself up. “Have I lost my marbles?”
“Unfortunately not. I’m Gilmartin, I’m not really a dog. You got a taxi home if you must know. That awful attacker called you one and carefully put you in it before he quite unfortunately lost his head in a rather bizarre run-in with a falling nightclub sign” Gilmartin slipped up onto my bed and pointed his nose at the glass of water. “I got you the water. I’m quite a clever dog.”
“I’m going crazy then.” I mumbled. Everything was a bit of a blur. It’s easy to imagine how you might handle something strange, but when it’s staring you in the face it’s all too easy to become numb to it’s absurdity. “What do you want?”
“Nothing much. We’re bound together, you and I. You accepted my help and so the link is formed.” He spoke casually. “Tell your parents I’m a stray that you picked up off the street. Feed me, and not that awful kibble stuff, give me water. That’s all I ask. Now, how about you scratch my ear?”
I accepted the absurdity with defeated resignation. I had a new pet, Gilmartin the talking dog. I was the only one who knew that he could talk. He made a good show of being a simple mutt when we were in public or in front of my parents, however whenever we were behind closed doors he was a different beast entirely.
“It was simpler, you know, when there weren’t so many of you.” He spoke nonchalantly at the edge of my bed. “When you used to live in caves, not buildings higher than mountains. You were more predictable, more prone to believing in me. Hannibal only crossed the alps because I told him so, do you know that?”
“You’re full of shit.” I mumbled. I looked at the petulant mutt. “Why me? Why not bind yourself to the president or Britney Spears. I’m just a university dropout who goes clubbing on the weekends.”
“We all need a little R&R - Hannibal was fun and all but he’s tiring. You’re boring. Boring is what I need right now. I’m getting quite old.” He wagged his tail. “I only get to be here for a few decades at a time then I get sent back down by my tyrant of a boss. I just want to be your dog, is that so bad? be looked after a little, and have my ears scratched.”
“Back down where? Hell?” I enquired incredulously. He was silent. “You scare me.”
“Lots of people are scared of me. The man who attacked you was scared of me.” Gilmartin chuckled. “ There’s a tug in your gut isn’t there? You feel it sometimes when the room is quiet, that unease twisting at your intestines and filling your stomach with butterflies. The hairs stand up on your arm when you say my name and when you itch my ear it feels like you’re touching some awful spider that will bite you. Fearing me is coded into your DNA. It’s evolution.”
“You confuse me.”
“That’s why you failed university.”
I did fear Gilmartin. It was as he said; an instinctual fear, that I had every suspicion was an incredibly well-placed consternation. There was something malevolent about him and sleep came with great difficulty with him coiled around at my feet.
Our lives together was dull. I’d feed him, water him, and take him for walks sometimes. I could tell he was getting bored, I could see that he was growing weary of the dullness with which I lived. Gilmartin wanted more.
“I like you.” He said one day as he turned his head from the window. His black fur had turned grey around his mouth. He looked with judgement at my XBOX and my unwashed Burger King uniform. “You could be more than this, you know.”
“Mum says I lack ambition.” I grumbled.
“You’re father says your a waste of space and your mum regrets having you. Natasha’s tired of hearing you moan about your job and everyone that loves you is disappointed in you. Natasha also slept with your ex-boyfriend last year, Craig Hornwood, who thinks you were the worst shag of his life. He also spread some rather compromising photos of you around his work group chat for a laugh” Gilmartin chuckled. “I hear it all, I see it all. Everyone is laughing at you. Everyone except me.”
“You’re making it up.” I asserted. I knew deep down he wasn’t lying,
I felt it, I felt their hatred, and it made me angry. I felt my rage coil in my stomach, I had suppressed it so long and suddenly here he was - Gilmartin - confirming every insecurity and suspicion.
“We could always teach them a lesson.” Gilmartin offered. “We could start with Craig…”
It happened again, like before in the alleyway. My consciousness was syphoned away from me and everything went black.
When I opened my eyes I was in a dark warehouse. There was water dripping from a leaky pipe in the corner and there was a light, dim and flickering, providing limited visibility. I could see Gilmartin, sprawled like a cat, on the wreckage of a blue toyota. Then I saw it.
Him.
Craig Hornwood, my first and last boyfriend. He had taken my virginity in the back of his volkswagen beetle and wrote me crap poetry on valentines day. He dumped me in a starbucks because I had gotten too fat and according to Gilmartin hooked up with my best friend.
He didn’t deserve it. Not really. I hadn’t wanted this - I hadn’t-
He was leant over a lump of scrap metal. His knees were bare and bruised from a struggle. His head was pointed downwards at the wet concrete floor. I had never seen lungs before. I didn’t know they were so purple. The skin of his back had been flayed and hung like wings on thin chicken wires. His lungs had been torn out from his back and lay delicately over his shoulders.
“You wanted this, in that carnal part of your brain, you needed this.” Gilmartin rubbed his fur along the back of my legs hauntingly. “You asked for this.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t want this.” I snapped.
There was a loud gasp and I saw the lung shrink and inflate.
He was alive.
“He-he-ha-help!” Craig said, his voice barely formed, it was caught somewhere in the slick red sinews of his throat. “Puh-puh-lease.”
“The vikings used to do it this way. The blood eagle they called it. A beautiful death, painful and agonised. They don’t do it like this anymore, there isn’t any heart left in humanity these days, no creativity.” Gilmartin strolled around the room like he owned it as my heart thudded against my chest.
Thud. Thud. Thud. I could hear my heartbeat, I could hear it mingling with Craig’s.
“There is a kinder way, if you have the stomach for it.” Gilmartin suggested coyly. I looked down at my hands, already sticky with red blood and clutching at a knife, scarlet at the tip. My fingertips were shaking and my feet were jittering. “Do it.”
“Tell me who you are. Who you really are and I’ll do it.” I found my head in the chaos. Craig shook with fear and I almost forgot he was there, suffering, as I argued with a dog.
“If you have to ask my dear, you already know.”
Craig’s body thudded to the ground and his fleshy wings fell with a loud slop after him. I felt relieved. As his body fell and my knife with him, I felt a thousand tonnes drawn off my shoulders. It felt good to stand tall above something that hurt me. I felt the fur of Gilmartin brush my shins again and he seemed almost proud.
“Aren’t I a good doggy?”