I’ve been working at the humane society for about six months, every shift there’s one person working since most of what you have to do is feed and water the animals and occasionally take them outside. I had no problems with this since the animals were all pretty content and played with the small toys they had in their cages. One day a woman came in with a black and white sheep dog on a leash. It looked perfectly healthy but the woman looked paranoid.
“Ms, this dog showed up in my yard. It has no collar and it doesn’t belong to any of my neighbors. Is there room for him?”
She asked with almost pleading eyes, I assumed she was afraid of the dog by the way her tone was. I nodded and she looked happy before rushing home. I took the dog to one of the larger cages and strangley it walked straight inside. Most of the animals would either put up a fight or try to get away from it, but this dog walked in and sat down. I had the morning shift the next day, I greeted Samantha, my coworker before walking out of the small building. She was fairly new to the humane society but was hired because she had a passion for taking care of animals and was trusted alone with them as well.
The next morning, I arrived at seven. I checked on every animal and put food and water into their bowls. Some of them barked or hissed while others were still sleeping peacefully in the small bed in the corner of their cages. When I went to the sheep dogs cage, the thin metal bars looked like they had been bent apart with greater force than what a sheep dog could have.
I made the stupid mistake of assuming this was because he was nervous of the new environment and carried on with my shift, a cat and two dogs were adopted during the day. Them already having names from the shelter made me realize I didn’t write a name for the new dog. I went to his file and wrote “Kujo” since it was the only thing I found fitting. I never seen Kujo interact with other animals in outside time, he would sit and stare at the animals that played.
Kujo’s been at the shelter for two months now, everytime someone looked at him the bright blue eyes threw them off and they would get another dog or cat instead, one day though, his eyes were brown and weirdly human looking. I thought that Kujo was sick, I called Samantha in to help me get him on the small medic table that we normally used to get flea spray on them without disturbing the other pets. He was a large dog too. We put some sleeping medicine in his food so he could be sleeping before he was brought into a different place, since most dogs got irritated in new places. While I went to get a magnifying glass I hoped that maybe allergies had caused the change and Kujo wasn’t too sick. As I searched in the drawer I heard Samantha scream suddenly.
I quickly turned to her and the dog to see a large zipper on his stomach, it didn’t look like it was glued on but it looked attached to it. I stared at the dog before slowly unzipping it. It revealed a bare stomach of a human, if was malnourished and an eerie pale color. If I’m being completely honest, I froze for a moment. What would I do? I’m not a vet, and this has never happened before.
After what felt like hours, we took the dog suit off. That’s when the bright blue eyes fell out of one of the legs, they were glass eyes. The man in the costume looked extremely sick, his ankle was tied to his thigh making his legs shorter to fit in the suits. His arms were bent forcing his hands near his face. His head was shaved besides patches of brown hair sticking in it. Samantha and I looked at eachother and simply called the police.
When the cops came, they woke the man up. He looked around frantically and lunged at Samantha, because of this he was taken into interrogation. It turned out that Samantha had a very obsessive and abusive ex boyfriend. After she broke up with him he spend months trying to act and look like a dog since she liked them. To get to the shelter, he came to my town and started digging in the garbage to get the woman’s attention.
The man was psychotic, it almost made me vomit when I realized for two months straight he ate dog food. He did his business in a crouched position outside. From that day I decided to quit my job at the shelter, of course all animals were checked for anything odd but luckily there was only one. I moved towns recently and developed a strange phobia of big dogs. Now I do a part time job as a cat-sitter.