Invitation

After a loss few seem to understand or even notice, a young woman learns that both love and grief can manifest in the most uncanny of ways.

***Content warning: This episode deals with themes of pet loss, and may be upsetting for some listeners. Discretion advised.***

Cover image adapted from: A Belgian Malinois male named Intrepid's Chase, sired by dog "Veni Van Balderlo". © 2005 by D. Williams is licensed under A Belgian Malinois male named Intrepid's Chase, sired by dog "Veni Van Balderlo". © 2005 by D. Williams licensed under CC BY 2.0

In loving memory of Manfred von Katzstein, darkling prince of felinity.

Transcript

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[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Love is what drives us in every endeavor, gives meaning to our existence, whether that might be love of other people, other creatures, the land, an ideal or a dream… at the very least, love of ourselves.

When the object of that love is lost, it can shatter us to the very core of our being, and while that damage can heal, like a scar of the flesh, it is never truly erased. And while grief is natural and wholesome, grief that is buried and denied can lead us to very strange and dark places.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Eighteen: Invitation.

(Sound of dog barking)

NARRATOR

Harley wakes to pink and golden dawn light filtering through the slatted blinds of her bedroom window, falling obliquely over her face and shoulders. Rolling over with a soft groan, she tucks her head under the covers. The trailer is silent and empty but for her – once, such silence might have escaped her notice, but now it has become like a living, breathing entity in its own right, an unwelcome and speechless guest.

It's her day off, the one thing for which she is grateful. She has been able to call in to the bar and have someone else pick up her shifts, even though she really couldn’t afford to lose the pay. The tattoo parlor, though, is another matter. Darryl might give her the time, if she asked for it – she is still slow, still learning her craft, and isn’t paid yet for it anyway – but working the needle is the only thing that soothes the emptiness in her, that makes her forget the silence in her home.

A yellow warbler sings outside her window, disturbing the quiet but not breaking it. And that small disturbance is enough to shatter the delicate placidity Harley works so hard to cultivate, sends her reeling into inner darkness. She misses Shuck’s familiar padding, his claws clacking on the laminate floors of the hallway and the kitchen; she misses the way he would always come bounding up onto the bed when she first stirred in the morning, eager to greet her after the solitude of her sleep.

And she thinks of that final morning, when she had woken to find him curled up, stiff and cool, in his usual place at the foot of the bed.

She had tried to be grateful that his passing had come so swiftly, with such apparent gentleness. But death is death, and loss is loss, and she still feels trapped in that awful morning moment, unable to break her mind free from that eternally frozen instant.

Harley pushes her face down into the pillow, and cries.

(Gentle, sad music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

After yet another day of barely venturing forth from either her bed, or her living room couch and the nepenthes of the old analog television, Harley awakes to the alarm clock blasting its hateful clarion, heralding the return of obligation and necessity. Harley smacks it so hard that it falls off the little nightstand beside her bed and doesn’t bother to pick it back up.

Instead, she reaches for her cell phone and calls Rick, her manager at the bar.

Let me guess, he says flatly, without even giving her a chance to speak, you’re still sick.

Harley grunts in affirmation.

Great, then you can find another job, he replies, and hangs up.

She tosses her phone onto the bed beside her, and lies, staring up at the ceiling. The patterns in the ceiling tiles swirl before her blurry eyes, and keep resolving into familiar canine features, or a shape running through the grassy prairie and into the cornfields that had given Shuck his name.

Go to hell, she says aloud, and isn’t sure whom she is addressing; whether it’s Rick, or the world, or God.

And then an awful thought occurs to her: that she is cursing her beloved companion for dying. The oily, hot guilt that spreads through her veins at that possibility makes her feel nauseous, and she gets up and runs to the bathroom, retches over the sink. She isn’t sick, though, at least not in her stomach.

Staring into the flecked and rotting mirror, she babbles through her tears that she’s sorry, that she didn’t mean it, repeating them over and over in a barely coherent litany.

(Soft, tragic music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

That afternoon, after a thirty-minute drive into town, she pulls into the little parking lot behind the tattoo parlor. As she has so many times before, she looks at the sign and the inexplicable name upon it: Dank Ink Stank.

She has tried to tell Darryl, the proprietor and her mentor, that it’s an awful business name, but he is thoroughly committed and refuses to listen to reason.

Beneath the questionable business acumen and the rough manners, though, Darryl is a good soul, and one of the few men in her life that she has ever felt able to trust. And she is grateful to him for his patience, his kindness, in mentoring her. He has even promised to start paying her soon, before the already agreed upon term of her apprenticeship is up. It won’t be much, but now that she’s down one paying job, she’ll take whatever she can get.

She works on two appointments that afternoon under Darryl’s gentle guidance, one a complicated and large floral pattern of a bleeding rose, and the other a skull with a snake coiling through eye sockets. The woman with the rose tattoo is very friendly and pleasant – and cute too, Harley thinks – but the man getting the skull is loud and obnoxious and cluelessly, clumsily flirtatious. After the third time she gently turns down his invitations to dinner, he asks her if she’s a dyke, and when she asks him to repeat the question that she’s sure she misheard, he uses a more offensive term.

None of that shit in my shop, Darryl says firmly. Neither his expression nor his posture changes, and he offers no further comment, but the client sits quietly through the rest of the session.

Harley wants to thank Darryl afterward, but she knows he would pretend not to know what she was talking about, and she would feel awkward anyway. She is as uncomfortable saying thanks as Darryl is accepting it.

That sort of complementary imperfection, she thinks, is part of why they get along so well.

After the shop has closed up, and she is on her way out to her car and struggling to light a cigarette in the blustery wind, Darryl calls to her and hurries to catch up. She waits, hair whipping against her face, until he gets close enough to ask to bum a smoke. Trying not to roll her eyes, she offers him the open pack, and he deftly pulls one out, lights it easily.

Then he asks, very gently, if she’s doing okay.

She shrugs.

They stand there, sheltering their cigarettes against the wind, for a silent moment. Then Harley finally says that Shuck is dead.

Shit, is Darryl’s laconic reply.

Another silence passes, and then he asks her if she needs anything. She says that, unless he can bring the dead back from under the earth, there’s nothing anyone can do for her.

Yeah, Darryl says, and then tells her to take a couple days away from the parlor. Harley begins to say that it’s not necessary, but he waves that away, says she’s not getting paid anyway, so she might as well take the time.

Take a trip, he suggests, or see some family. Go camping, or something.

Sure, she replies, thinking that she has nowhere to go and no one to see.

Less than ten minutes later, as she passes under the last traffic light in the town and slips out into the dark countryside, Harley begins to scream into her windshield.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The emptiness of the mobile home is the worst. She takes to wandering the roads and the pastures during the next day, unable to bear the silence of the little trailer, the fading smell of the black Belgian Shepherd mix that will never return. The shadows of the living room corners feel like they are reaching toward her, trying to smother her.

But beneath the sun, in the cool wind, she feels cleansed. Not cleansed of her grief, but of its cloying, sickly shadow – morbid loneliness and isolation.

So she walks, and thinks, and tries not to think. Lunch passes, and even by midafternoon she doesn’t feel hungry.

She does feel thirsty, though. Not a healthy thirst, but the diseased kind she sometimes thinks she inherited from her father, and which she has not sated for almost fifteen months now. Her thoughts drift to the half full bottle tucked away at the back of her cupboard, and she suddenly feels very weak.

Her left toes catch under a large rock partially buried in the hardpacked earthen road, and she falls sprawling to the ground.

She lies there a while, her right forearm aching from a failed attempt to break her fall, her chest and shoulders sore from the shock of collision.

And then she feels it: hot, moist breath on the back on her neck, her ear. A soft, wet tongue on the back of her hands, the gentle pressure of lush fur against her cheek. Breathing Shuck’s name in mingled delight and disbelief, she turns to look at him.

But there is nothing there.

Slumping back down into the dust, gravel, and hardpan, she begins to weep, whispering: come back, come back, please come back.

After about fifteen minutes of lying there on the seldom-used country road, simply lacking the will to rise again, she hears the mounting rumble of a distant engine and finally forces herself to her feet. About a quarter mile away, the pickup comes to an intersection and turns south, heading away from her.

Harley turns back toward home, walking a little stiffly at first. Behind her, something dark flits between tall clumps of swaying grass.

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

After a hot bath and a half-hearted meal of a frozen burrito, Harley lies on the couch. The television signal has blinked out again, visual snow and white noise bombarding her senses, but Harley makes no move to turn it off. She is thinking again of the bottle, feeling that subtle but relentless tug that she had just about felt able to ignore, until Shuck died.

After about an hour of lying in this bleak stupor, she finally rises, turns off the television, slowly ambles toward the kitchen. Her loose pajama pants swish softly along the tiles of the kitchen as she moves toward the cupboard. Before it, she stops, hesitates, reaches slowly to open it.

With her hand upon the cupboard door, she stops, stares, lets the hand fall back to her side. Then she moves toward the bedroom, turning off the lights as she goes, even though it is not yet fully dark outside.

But even when midnight comes, she lies awake in bed, remembering those unmistakable feelings of that presence near her as she lay upon the road. And once more, she mouths, at first silently and then aloud: please, please come back, come home.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The next morning, she doesn’t even bother to get up. While the dimness of the house still feels oppressive, it feels less threatening somehow than the thought of going outside, of maybe meeting another pickup – or perhaps of meeting whatever invisible thing stood over her after her fall.

If, she thinks glumly, that was even real.

She is falling back into fitful sleep for the third time when Harley becomes aware of a faint sound from the other side of the trailer. Listening closely, she realizes it is a scratching at the front door.

Shuck, is her first thought, and her second, a wild animal. The third and unpleasant one is that she has an unwelcome guest of the two-legged variety, perhaps one of the desperate and unpredictable meth users which have become more and more of a problem the last few years.

Rising, she takes the Ruger revolver she bought years ago at a gun show from the top drawer of her bedroom dresser, opens the cylinder and loads four rounds from the little box beside it.

Then she walks out toward the living room, trying to be as quiet as possible.

The scratching grows louder, and she is almost sure that they are claws and not nails upon the wood. And then there is the whimpering that she knows so well.

She sets the revolver on the television stand, and rushes forward to open the door.

Shuck looks up at her from the front steps, tongue lolling and tail wagging furiously as he pants and grins his doggy grin.

Harley crouches and scoops him into her arms, crying and laughing and cooing words of pure joyful surprise all at once.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

All through the rest of that day, and the next, she cannot stop herself from looking at Shuck again and again, unable to believe that he has returned, that he isn’t simply another dog with an uncanny resemblance.

She remembers burying her darling boy behind the mobile home, after all, can still see the little, white-painted grave marker she made for him and read the careful black lettering of his name upon it.

But the dog in her home is exactly like Shuck, down to every little mannerism and vocalization, to every little favorite resting place in the trailer. He falls asleep at her feet every night and greets her every morning, just as he always did. And he responds to the name just as readily.

So when the day comes for her to return to work, she does so, feeling once more whole and strong. Darryl even remarks upon how great her work is looking lately, when she does some of the simpler detailing on three of the clients that day.

And when she later goes to the dive bar and firmly tells Rick that she can pick up a few shifts this week, he stares at her only a moment before nodding.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

She is happy again, Harley tells herself. Every piece of her life has fallen back into place, and now she appreciates it so much more than she did before.

Sure, she’s still single, still has a shit dad and a zombie for a mom, still can never get her brother Deke to call her back. And she still works mostly dead-end jobs and lives in a rundown, second-hand mobile home in the middle of nowhere.

But her boy is back, her truest friend and only real family.

Yet, each time she passes a window and sees that little white cross on the gentle slope of her backyard, sees how the soil of the grave is untouched where she packed it down over Shuck’s still and stiffening form, she cannot help but begin to have those uncomfortable, whispering doubts again.

And sometimes at night, when the shadows of the house grow deeper, she could almost swear that the black dog sitting beside her seems to flicker anytime she turns her gaze away from him, anytime he slips into peripheral vision. Then she begins to think that he is not only flickering, but shifting and growing, leering at her horribly with marble-white eyes and a mouth that is the wrong shape.

Then she looks at him directly again, and he is only Shuck.

Still, she begins to have trouble falling asleep again, with him curled up at the foot of the bed.

And then comes the day when she returns home to find he has started piling bones upon her front steps. Some of them look old, some freshly picked clean of flesh. Many are small but some are large, too large for her comfort.

Shuck sits before the door, grinning at her. The grin seems too wide, too knowing.

She clears away the bones, digging another hole in the barren patch near the edge of her yard and burying them there. Shuck watches her, still grinning, and he seems suddenly too long, too lean, to sit more tally than even a large dog should.

Harley feels like the blood in her neck is suddenly freezing, feels the skin of her calves tingle with the impulse to flee.

She falteringly speaks his name, more question than summons.

Shuck lets loose a howl that is unlike any sound he has made before, unlike any dog has made in Harley’s life. Taking the shovel in her hands like a wood axe, she moves toward the backyard, never turning her back on the thing that looks like Shuck.

When she stands over the grave, she hesitates. Then she sinks the shovel’s head into the turned soil.

That howl comes again, and Shuck is no longer on the porch, but crouched only a few yards away from her, seeming to have shifted impossibly through space and time. His eyes are the putrid pale of a thing days dead, and brown-tinged slaver drips from his open jaws. As Harley shifts the shovel once more, not taking her eyes from the dog-thing, it begins to make a rattling, deathly noise – she realizes it is growling, but not the way a dog does.

She pulls the shovel up, holding it between them as a meager barrier, and backs away.

The thing stalks nearer, still making that rattling sound, and now she wonders if it isn’t a growl at all, but laughter instead.

When it reaches the grave, it drools that brownish foam into the dirt, then begins to paw powerfully at it, ripping open the earth. When its brutish digging exposes a patch of black fur, thick with worms and beetles, she sobs, and then vomits thinly into the grass.

The thing pads forward and licks her cheek. Its mouth smells of all things corrupt and unwholesome, nauseously sweet.

(Skittering, sinister music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

She lies awake all night, waiting for the thing at the foot of the bed to climb on top of her and rip her to pieces, or perhaps worse, to curl up lovingly with her. It no longer looks like a dog at all, but like some fevered brain’s macabre caricature of a rotting wolf, with tendrils of snaking shadow that lash forth from its shape occasionally.

It doesn’t sleep. Mostly it simply lies there, waiting, but from time to time a scraping whine grates through its long, brown teeth.

She begins to weep silently in bed, trying to stifle her tears in the pillow, under the blanket. When she does, the thing whines louder, in what she thinks might be ecstasy.

When the grey half-light of the predawn hour comes, she can bear it no longer. Tensing, she wonders if the thing can sense the shifting in her muscles and bones, can hear the alteration in her breathing, but decides that it doesn’t matter. She has no choice.

As soon as she feels she has gathered herself, she springs out of the bed and runs down the hall, more quickly than she has ever run in her life.

That dreaded sound of long, bony feet and wicked claws upon the linoleum behind her shrills in her ears.

She has made it almost to the front door when the thing, with a ragged wet growl, slams into her, sinking its teeth into her shoulder. The wound seems to burn and freeze at once, and she screams from both terror and pain as it tosses her onto her back, pounces again atop her. Those rotten-grey eyes glare into hers as she feels long claws scoring at her arms, sees the jaws creeping toward her throat.

Please, she breathes.

Something pale and silvery rips itself from her chest and sinks into the death-thing. As they collide, a great howling fills the house, and a ripe grave-wind blows through the house interior, dank and chill. But in the midst of that awful howling, Harley’s racing and disordered mind clutches to one other sound, subtly interwoven with the chaos.

And then, the house is silent, and she is alone in the living room, bleeding onto the floor. Curling into a fetal position, she cries, tears mingling with the blood.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The rising sun finds her in the bathroom, cleaning her wounds for the third time with hydrogen peroxide, then bandaging them as best she can with gauze and tape. A half hour later, she is pulling into the county hospital in town.

When they tend to her wounds more effectively, she tells them that she was attacked by a dog on the road. The doctor seems a little skeptical at first, saying it must have been a freakishly big dog, but having no other explanation seems to accept it soon enough.

The other wound on her chest, though, that one baffles them.

Harley alone understands, having seen it in her bathroom mirror. It is the imperfect, ragged profile of a certain Belgian shepherd, seen from the front – the sort of shape that might be left from a dog leaping through something fragile.

When they have finished and she is alone again, they leave her lying on the bed in the sterile hospital room. The fabric upon the bed is cool and soft, and for the first time in weeks, Harley feels fully and truly present. 

She traces the largest wound on her chest with her fingers, wondering if it will scar, if it will stay with her, and decides that it will, always and forever.

Thank you, baby, she murmurs, smiling through her tears.

(Peaceful music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]