I spent all of last night and some of the morning at the police station answering questions. Let me just say, first of all, if you never in your life have to spend that much time around cops you can count yourself lucky. They knew perfectly well that I had nothing to do with anything that happened, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They know this because the gas station where I work the overnight shift a few times a week has cameras that actually work, and so they’ve seen the footage.
I guess what they needed from me was to make sure I gave a statement that confirmed the spin they’re going to put on the story: a panicky man was chased, and finally ripped to shreds by a huge wild dog in the BP station at the Druid Hills exit where I work. I answered the very leading questions they asked, and I answered them the way I thought they wanted them answered. It was easier that way. Besides, one of the reasons I pick up some shifts there is that I do a little business selling a few pills and, even though I’ve never done anything illicit out in the open and on camera, I still wanted to have a pleasant, perfunctory, cooperative conversation with the cops and for them to then go back to never noticing me again. I think it worked.
But before I take a shower and crash into bed, I do want to give a fuller and more accurate account of what happened. There’s no audio on the tape, so some of this the cops couldn’t have known and couldn’t have made sense of. Some other things–namely the size of the beast and the intelligence in its demeanor and the scent it left behind, for example–simply won’t find their way into a report that the cops want to file and forget.
It was a little after two in the morning and business was slow, even for two in the morning. I’d done the most half-assed job I thought I could get away with without being hassled by the morning manager at mopping the floor and kind of wiping down the glass on the coolers and had settled down to listen to a Pixies playlist and read some Philip K Dick short stories between customers. The bell on the door rang and I looked up to see who had come in.
A sweaty, balding white dude with a pained expression on his face stood just inside the entrance, next to the rack where we keep windshield wiper fluid. At first I thought it must have started to rain and then I realized he was sweating a river and that it was his own sweat running down his face and plastering what was left of his hair against his pale, fat head.
“Soap,” he said.
I put down my book and gave him my full attention. I’m sure I sounded irritated when I repeated back “Soap? What kind of soap, bro?”
“Strong soap. I need to wash something off.”
Jesus, did this asshole just kill someone? Does he need to wash off blood? But he wasn’t bleeding that I could tell. “I mean, like some ink or something?”
He looked grateful. “Yes. Like some ink.”
“Uh, I dunno. We sell Lava hand soap? That gets off pretty much anything I guess. Does well with grease and oil and mud anyway.”
The entire time we spoke he kept turning around to look out the big window I used to see the parking lot and the gas pumps. He was looking for something. I looked out too and realized that he hadn’t driven here. The only car in the lot was still my old, beat-up green Subaru. Had he run down the fucking interstate to get here? Broken down somewhere and hoofed it here? No wonder he was sweaty and out of breath.
“Someone chasing you,” I teased pleasantly while I walked over to the aisle where we kept hand soap, dish soap, small bottles of overpriced shampoo and sponges and any other personal hygiene products you might need desperately enough on a road trip to overpay for. I grabbed a bottle of Lava and noticed as I looked up to take it over to him that he was definitely not smiling.
He rolled up his jacket sleeve and the sleeve on his long-sleeve green tee shirt to show me something. It looked like a tattoo on his left forearm of a yellow crown.
“Bro, I don’t think this shit will take off tattoos?” Was he on something? Did he need to be on something?
“Not a tattoo,” he muttered, taking the Lava. “It’s a mark I got when I opened something I shouldn’t have.” Before he’d paid for the soap he’d ripped the plastic off of it with his teeth and opened the top and was rubbing it frantically over the weird yellow mark, trying to scrub without water, with his fingers.
“Uh. I think that works better with water? And like a wash cloth? If it’s that much of an emergency just go into the bathroom and I can ring you up when you’re done.”
I was alarmed when he paused to grab not a roll of paper towels or even an overpriced wash cloth but instead a scouring pad and then ran into the bathrooms in the back of the station. He shut the door and I heard it lock.
He ran the water and then he must have scrubbed frantically, demonically, because I could hear the goddamn scouring pad scraping his skin all the way at the register. Those things are good at getting caked-on dried condiments and shit out of plates or dried jelly and peanut butter off car windows (travelers with toddlers or little kids always have stories). They’re not gently exfoliating. Scrubbing hard on human skin must hurt like hell.
The door swung open and I almost lost my lunch into the trash basket behind the counter next to me. Dude’s arm was bleeding but that wasn’t the worst of it. The area around where the mark had been, in fact most of his forearm, was torn to shit. It looked like cotton candy, all fluffy and pink, mottled with patches of dark red blood. He was laughing.
“That should do it,” he said.
I must have grimaced because he said “What the fuck is wrong?”
What was wrong was that in the wound where he had rubbed his skin raw and taken it off in chunks I could see, very clearly, the goddamn yellow crown reappearing. In fact, it looked like it was raised now and if anything it looked brighter and more strident than it had before.
He looked down and tears welled in his eyes. “Goddamnit,” he wheezed but that was all he had time to say. There was a tremendous thud like a brick hitting the station window, and then a tinkling noise of glass breaking. I turned around and caught a spray of broken glass on my hands, on my face. At first I didn’t feel it but then it stung like a bunch of tiny wasps stinging me all over.
The biggest dog–I’m just gonna call it a dog–I had ever seen in my life had broken through the window. It was so skinny and angular that its bones were visibly jutting against the skin through its jet black fur but somehow this made it look stronger, lethal. It looked like an impossibly skinny, impossibly large Doberman. Big as, what, a pony I’d say. Feverish yellow eyes like saucers and it was growling and drooling.
I stumbled back and tried idiotically to hide under the counter, right in its line of sight, but the beast had no interest in me. I noticed that on his forehead, right between his eyes, he had the mark of a yellow crown exactly like the one the man had tried to scrape off his arm.
Everything happened so fast after that. I actually begged the cops to let me see the footage, because I was cowering and shaking and too afraid to really look at what happened next. To be honest, I think I’m lucky they told me Hell no.
I saw the intelligence and malevolence in the dog’s eyes. He stared me down, as if to say “Don’t fucking move.” I’ve been robbed twice on the overnight shift, by two guys I am sure were stone psychos. Their eyes were like cute, Disney animal eyes compared to the hatred and the threat this goddamn thing vibed.
The dog jumped. He covered the 15 or 20 feet between him and his victim in one bound. I hid. I heard yells of agony and growls and barks that seemed ecstatic. Someone was saying syllables I couldn’t really understand and I’m not sure it was the man. I looked up again and the dog was standing on the man’s chest. Blood pooled on the floor around his throat and head. I think he was already dead when the dog bit and chewed on his chest in a way that reminded me of a bird pecking for food on a cold, hard patch of dirt. Chunks of skin were flying off and then came the sound of jaws grinding bone and then the dog buried his head in the huge hole he had made in the man’s chest.
The last thing I remember before I started to scream was that the dog showed me the heart. His eyes looked happy and playful now, and his tail was wagging. I don’t know how he left–probably through the hole in the window he’d crashed through? I really don’t remember much of anything until I had come to my senses enough to take out my iPhone, which had survived me flopping and crashing around. I called the state cops.
Local cops, state cops, county cops started arriving five or ten minutes later and just kept pouring in. I guess it was the kind of scene cops like best–gruesome and fucked up and completely safe since the monster–the hellhound maybe although the only word I ever used with them was “dog”–had long ago run off.
The cops all noticed the smell, like rotten eggs and burning, that permeated everything and lingered in the air. Blood splatters were everywhere. The cooler doors were spotted with splashes of bright red blood (arterial blood, I heard one of the medics who showed up say knowingly) and darker, almost black blood. A county cop found a finger by the espresso machines. His left foot had been severed and lay close to the body. I don’t think they have found the right hand yet. I don’t suppose they will ever find the heart.
And that’s about that. I hope I don’t think about this too much, or dream about it at all. Like most terrible things I suppose it will seem less and less real as time goes on. I’ll move on and hope I never learn any more about what happened, or why. Eventually maybe it will be a story I tell friends over tequila shots. Right now I am shaking like a leaf and more than anything I can’t get that beast’s eyes out of my mind and I can’t stop hearing the snarls and the growls and those terrible human sounding syllables that were like no words in any language I have ever heard.