If I remember correctly, Shadow ran off when I was seven. The story I always heard about how he came into our lives was that my dad brought him home from a coworker who had tried to train him up as a hunting dog. Apparently Shadow didn’t display the correct instincts. It makes sense — he was a husky / labrador mix, so he leaned a little bit into the willful side of his lineage.
Everyone else remembers Shadow as the prototypical family dog: loyal, loving, protective. But I have different memories.
Even though Shadow was a family dog, it was pretty clear from early on that he was most strongly connected to me. The thing is, I was always afraid of him.
He’d follow me all around the house nudging me this way and that if I wasn’t doing what he wanted. I didn’t want to be alone in my room with him, but he always managed to corner me in there, and wouldn’t leave when I told him to.
More than once I’d do something bad and I’d swear it was because he told me to do it. I’d always chalked it up to my childhood imagination, but I remember specifically once when I was maybe five years old and my sister was standing at the top of the stairs he told me to push her down.
“No. I won’t,” I said.
My sister who was a few years older said, “Won’t what?”
Then Shadow stared at me and I heard his gruff voice speaking. “If you don’t push her down the stairs I’m going to go into her room tonight while she’s sleeping, and I’m going to rip her throat out.”
My sister didn’t get seriously hurt, but she did take on quite a few bruises, and I think that’s when our relationship started to deteriorate. It’s never really recovered.
I got in a lot of trouble, rightfully. And my parents kept a better watch over me for quite a while. Of course they didn’t believe me when I told them Shadow made me do it. Who would?
“You’re going to bang your head against this shelf until your parents come to check on you,” the dog told me.
“I don’t want to.”
“I can hear them downstairs right now. I can smell their blood. Do you know how easy it would be for me to kill them? Maybe I’ll kill your mom first. Everyone will think you did it since they all think you’re a little serial killer already. Then, after someone takes you away, I’ll kill your father.”
I nearly knocked myself out banging my head against the cabinet.
Shadow liked to come with us on errands. Everyone that saw him said he was the most beautiful dog. “Majestic,” they say. “Gorgeous dog that one,” or “Where did you get him? I’d love to have a dog like that.” And to be fair, he was always the perfect dog for everyone else: calm, well mannered, came when called.
We’d be at the ice cream shop and all the teens working there would crowd around him to give him pets and a complimentary bowl of whipped cream.
When they praised him he’d look over at me with his beautiful, dichromatic eyes — one blue, one brown — as if to say, “See, nobody will ever believe you.”
Nobody believed me about anything.
I guess when I was young I would tell really fanciful stories about when I used to be an adult. I had this whole life built up with a whole other family and career in the post office, and once I told my parents about it enough I think they decided that I was simply one of those kids who couldn’t tell reality from imagination. They got mad at me with how long it went on.
My mom tells me once, specifically, I’d awakened her sobbing saying “The bad man. He kiwwwed me. He bwoke in the house and kiwwwed me with a gun.”
Apparently she had to be up early for work that morning, so she was especially angry. “It’s just a dream, silly bug,” she said, practically dragging me back to my room.
I was a little older when I started hearing the babies crying outside. Not every night, but maybe once every couple weeks. I’d awaken in the middle of the night, afraid. Then I’d hear it, a baby crying outside.
My mom threatened to lock me in my room at night if I didn’t stop waking her up every time I had a nightmare. And where had that dog gone, she thought if he was in the room I’d feel protected and wouldn’t have to wake her up every time I had a nightmare.
I was at brunch with my mom recently when the topic came up about how I was always so imaginative as a child, and she filled me in on some information I wasn’t aware of. When I was being awakened by those crying babies there had actually been a string of child abductions in our city that have gone unsolved to this day. Apparently it drove a bit of a satanic panic in our community that escalated until a mob from a church tried to burn down the house of a comic shop owner who sold dungeons and dragons materials.
My mom always thought that I’d heard some snippets of the news and decided to make up a story about it.
That’s also part of why they were so thankful for Shadow’s connection to me. They knew as long as he was by my side nothing bad could happen to me.
Then one day he just disappeared.
I was about seven years old and hadn’t heard him speak for months, and he seemed less and less interested in me.
My mom drove around searching every night for weeks. We put up fliers on posts and fences, called the pound repeated, and did everything we could to find him. But he was just gone.
My family thought someone probably grabbed him from our yard since he was such a gorgeous dog.
From then on I’d had a more or less normal childhood.
I’d forgotten all about him.
Then he showed up inside my house today. I was walking upstairs to check on my son who was napping in his crib, and there he was in the room, gazing at my child.
Every hair on my body stood on end.
It’s definitely him. I even found an old family photograph and compared it to him. But how can a dog be nearly forty years old, and how did he find me after all these years?
My wife thinks I’m overreacting. It’s just some dog that happens to look exactly like him. But the way he was looking at my son, that everyone always thought was protective, it’s the same exact way he used to look at me.
I think there is something evil in that dog, and I don’t want my son raised with an animal like that.
[Part 2] https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/142ze2g/my_childhood_dog_showed_back_up_to_my_house_after/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3