Guardian

An elderly couple finds their new neighbor troublesome and strange, but they could never guess what dark secrets lie in wait so near to their home.

***Content Warning: This episode deals with themes of the abuse and genocide of Indigenous people, as well as animal cruelty. Listener discretion advised.***

Transcript

NARRATOR

Episode Forty-Three: Guardian.

(Sounds of eerie wind in grass)

NARRATOR

Šúŋka, it was called once, long, long ago. Before the white men came, before the fires and the stinking lightning that destroyed its people; before the land was broken and ravished and left to lie grey and dead, seeded with the tortured bones of those who had roamed upon it for millennia.

It has forgotten that time, forgotten the love and loyalty that it once knew, forgotten even that it ever knew a home. All that remains is its anger, so boundless, like an endless starvation that no glut can ever sate.

That hungering rage has drawn it over countless miles of the ripped and blasted prairie, over the fields and the towns of the white men that have spread over the land like rot on a corpse. Sometimes it feeds, and with its feeding its form and hatred grows, and sometimes it screams in the night and makes those who hear it tremble, but never, never, does it know either rest or comfort.

Everything is changed now, everything as red and raw as an open wound, exciting its urge to bite and tear and rend.

Then comes that clear midnight when a man, pale skin shining still paler in the bright moonlight, comes to meet him. And instead of fleeing in terror as so many have before, the man grins, teeth glistening like wet broken bones.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Lilah is roused yet again by the chorus of howling, barking, and baying that has now become so detestably familiar. Rolling over in bed, she peers blurrily at the pale face of the old windup alarm clock, squinting with the strain of trying to read it in the dark bedroom and groaning when she finally makes out the hour at just past two in the morning.

She shakes her husband Joe awake, and despite his ill-tempered growl, tells him that Colt’s dogs are at it again – unnecessarily, since he can hear the din as clearly as she can now that he is awake.

He asks how the hell that’s his fault, and why she felt the need to ruin his sleep as well as hers. Lilah implores him, as she has several times before, to talk to their neighbor Colt – whom they still think of as new, though it has been almost two years since he moved into the rundown little house a half mile down the road. They and Colt have barely exchanged more than a handful of passing pleasantries in all that time, and always at their own initiation – there is something in the younger man’s demeanor that disinvites longer conversation, or the expression of personal interest, some hint of generalized misanthropy and surly secretiveness.

Joe is not happy at the prospect, but also knows he will likely not be granted an uninterrupted night of sleep until he does. So he grumbles a few words about going over tomorrow, then heavily resettles his bulk and closes his eyes, sullenly refusing to speak any further on it and retreating slowly back into slumber. Lilah, though, cannot find sleep again, waiting in vain for the dogs to quiet. The canine chorus rides the August wind, clawing through the minute gaps and fissures in the house and chasing away her last hope of true rest. By four-thirty, she is up and fumbling tiredly in the kitchen, brewing a pot of coffee and staring out into the dead blue gloom of predawn with a feeling of hopeless misgiving.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Around seven, Joe rises, body stiff and mind foggy. After his wife woke him, he slept but fitfully, and felt Lilah’s early rising. Muttering to himself about asshole neighbors and thoughtless wives, he dresses himself and moves out into the kitchen, pouring himself mug from the pot which Lilah has already brewed.

He sits across the little square table from her, both staring out the window beside them while they sip black coffee from chipped old mugs. Joe wonders vaguely how long she has been sitting here, staring out at nothing, wonders whether this is her first or second pot – and then he notices the blue notebook lying open in front of her, the pages of scrawled writing. He feels a certain dread that she has written down exactly what she wants him to say to Colt, a message utterly against his reserved nature to deliver.

Lilah clears her throat, asks him if he’ll go over to talk to Colt this morning, and Joe pulls a sour face. He’d hoped to put it off until later, so that he could spend at least a good five or six hours in his shop, working on the writing desk that Mrs. Booker commissioned over a month ago. His wife never respects his work or his time, he thinks, never appreciates how busy he keeps, or that it’s the only reason they still live so comfortably after her retirement from the hospital.

But all he says is that he guesses he will, after he finishes his coffee. Perhaps sensing his annoyance and trying to ameliorate it, Lilah rises and begins to fry sausage and eggs, both from her brother’s farm in the next county over. The appetizing smells rising from the stovetop do indeed improve Joe’s mood somewhat, and when he is walking out the door about forty minutes later, he feels almost unconcerned about the looming confrontation… almost.

Briefly, he considers walking the relatively short distance down the road to Colt’s place, but he is no longer young, and something about the prospect of going on foot makes him feel too vulnerable, too exposed, and he instead moves toward the blue and white ’72 Ford F-100 parked in the drive.

The apprehension begins to grow again just above his stomach as he nears the little house, densely encircled by guardian elms and green ashes, grizzled holdovers from an earlier generation of settlers that still refuse to surrender to the merciless wind and sun, the eternal thirst of the Western prairie.

In the darkling yard beneath the trees, there is a sense of dismal neglect, a smothering shadow. As Joe parks his truck and silences the weary old engine, he rolls his shoulders, trying to dislodge the tension that is gathering there, and chides himself for the uncharacteristic fancifulness that clouds his thoughts and feeds his anxiety.

Hesitating only a moment longer, Joe opens the pickup door and clambers out, walking slowly but purposefully across the cluttered and overgrown yard toward the little house whose coat of off-white is chipped and peeling, revealing a weathered, mousy grey beneath.

The front door opens while Joe is still several paces away, and the heavy, unkempt face of Colt Heide scowls out at him. Aside from looking unhealthily bloated and pale, Colt looks like he has not slept or groomed himself in several days, with white flecks that Joe almost hopes are crumbs speckling his scraggly beard and hair.

It seems to Joe that a faint hint of sour rancidity wafts from the open door, just on the very edge of his olfactory perception, so that he cannot be sure whether it is real or a mere embellishment of his less-than-charitable imagination.

Sullenly, Colt asks what brings him, his voice as hard and spare as the gravel on his ill-defined driveway. Joe offers an awkward good morning, balking somewhat before the younger man’s growl and feeling ashamed of it. When that brings no response, he begins to haltingly articulate the concern that has brought him.

Colt’s dull-eyed expression doesn’t shift at all as the older man speaks, and he remains silent for a long moment after Joe is finished. Just when Joe feels he can no longer repress the urge to fidgetingly twist and crack his fingers, Colt finally says that he’ll do his best to keep the dogs quiet, but he can’t make any promises. They are, after all, very willful and restless beasts.

It is all Joe can do not to audibly sigh with relief at this response, feeling finally able to retreat without dishonor. Though gruff of temperament and willing enough to grouse at Lilah, Joe has always loathed real confrontation, and he is uncomfortably aware of how much slower and frailer he has become with the years.

Joe nods and says he appreciates that, and that he wouldn’t have even bothered Colt about it if not for his wife. She’s a light sleeper, Joe says, hating how apologetic his voice sounds.

Colt shrugs indifferently, and offers no further words. He does not move, only continues to stand in the doorway and scowl a wordless challenge. Discomfited, Joe again says that he appreciates it and falls back to his pickup, starting it up and having to consciously force himself to drive at a reasonable speed out of the somber, secretive little yard.

Just as he is turning out onto the road, he glimpses out of the corner of his eye some hint of movement in the large kennel pens behind the house. Slowing and turning to follow it, he sees only the hindquarters of a dog disappearing around the corner of a shed, but the proportions are entirely wrong.

He brings the pickup to a complete stop and stares for a full thirty seconds, waiting for the dog to reemerge. It doesn’t, though, and as he waits an irrational apprehension grows, a feeling that if the dog does step back into view, the sight alone will be too much for him. In his mind’s eye, he again sees the dog’s tail and legs rounding the corner out of view, and judges that the beast he saw would have to be at least as large as a fully grown cow, far larger than any dog breed he has ever heard of.

Shaking his head, he growls aloud at himself that he’s losing his nerve and his senses in his old age. Yet on the short drive back, the mental image of the mostly unseen dog lingers in his mind, as do those odd words of Colt’s: willful and restless beasts. And he thinks, too, of how he heard no sounds of dogs during his visit, cannot remember ever hearing them during daylight hours.

He parks the pickup less than a minute later, and walks slowly toward his house, feeling far more keenly than he ever has before the full weight of his 72 years.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

He is roused from a pleasant dream in which he is some forty years younger and far richer than he has ever been by Lilah’s insistent shaking. He asks what the hell time it is, which she ignores, instead saying that the dogs are at it worse than ever before.

It’s true, he hears at once: drifting upon the wind is a distant baying, far bassier than any dog’s he has ever known. The sound makes sleep fall away from him entirely, and his heartbeat feels now a little too quick and a little too shallow, as he remembers the unpleasant morning visit to Colt’s place.

Trying to mask his dread with irritation, he asks what the hell he’s supposed to do about it.

I thought you talked to Colt, she chides. I thought you said he’d keep them quiet.

They’re dogs, he replies gruffly. If they want to bark, they’ll bark.

A few moments of silence pass between them, broken only by the low notes of the distant baying, and then Lilah says quietly that she guesses she’ll have to go talk to Colt, and turns over, with her back to Joe.

A disgusted aw, hell, is all he can muster, and he too turns away from her. But tonight, it is Joe who remains sleepless as his wife’s breathing slows and deepens, and he thinks again of that repellently dark yard and what cannot truly live in its deep shadows.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

On the aging back patio of her sister Jean’s house, Lilah sits sipping iced sun tea – unsweetened, in true western Plains style.

Jean ashes her cigarette in a cracked coffee cup that sits beside her wicker chair, the words World’s Meanest Sister still barely legible on the weathered black ceramic. In her tobacco-harshened growl, Jean says she’d shoot the damned dogs, if it were her.

Lilah half-heartedly laughs this off, but in truth, she’s had similar thoughts. She’s never learned how to use a gun, though; Joe tried to teach her once, over thirty years ago now. She hated it so much that she never asked to try it again, and he never offered. Something about the raw, deafening lethality that she felt in her hands, contained in such a small, convenient package, terrified her more deeply than anything else ever has, made her feel more keenly how fragile and unpredictable life truly is.

With a grim smile, Jean says that she could do it for Lilah, if she wants. Thin and a couple years older than her, Lilah assumes that it is a joke – Jean only owns a pellet gun for the occasional raccoons or unruly stray – but cannot be entirely sure.

Lilah says that she just needs to talk to Colt, make her position clear. Smiling sardonically, Jean asks if her husband didn’t already try that, and they both laugh at his expense.

The rays of the westering sun tint their tea golden, and a momentary silence stretches between the sisters.

Then Jean says that Lilah should do that sooner rather than later, stamps out her spent cigarette, and stands. Surprised, Lilah asks if she means right now, and Jean nods. Waiting won’t solve anything, she says.

They both move around the house and into Jean’s battered old Jeep Wrangler, Jean taking the wheel and driving them out of the little town, across the countryside toward Colt’s house. Lilah’s resolve is steeled by her sister’s company, and she dares to hope that this worry might soon be laid to rest.

But when they near the house, Jean slows the Jeep at the sight of nearly a dozen vehicles parked in and around the tree-ringed yard. Pulling off onto the shoulder of the road, Jean kills the engine and rolls down her window, listening. The sounds of loud conversation, laughter, and excited shouting reach their ears, along with other sounds that it takes Lilah a little longer to recognize: snarling, jaws snapping, flesh ripping, a piercing, pitiful whine.

The sisters turn and look at each other, eyes wide and mouths slack with mingled surprise and revulsion.

Christ on a crutch, Jean breathes, absently lighting another cigarette.

Dog fights? Lilah asks, unnecessarily, and her sister does not answer. They sit there a moment longer, and then, reaching a silent accord, Jean turns her Jeep around and they drive back the way they came.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

For the fifth time today, Joe moves to the old landline phone, hesitates, picks it up and starts to dial, only to hang it up again. Lilah, watching him from the couch where she sits folding laundry, tells him to shit or get off the pot, sounding for a moment like her blunter older sister in a way that sets Joe’s teeth on edge.

It’s not the neighborly thing to do, Joe protests.

What they’re doing down there isn’t right, Lilah replies.

He stands there and she sits, neither quite looking at the other. Neither of them moves to pick up the phone again.

Outside, the wind carries the voices of the distant dogs, and Joe wonders if they number less than they did the day before, or if the loser was one of the visitor’s dogs. But he knows that he alone in this house remembers the image of the impossible thing he saw beneath those wild elms and ashes.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Three days later, when they spy a sheriff’s department truck driving into Colt’s yard, disappearing into the trees, Joe cannot help but ask Lilah if she reported him after all. She shakes her head, frowning at the implication that she would have concealed it if she had.

Then he asks if it was Jean, and Lilah has no answer.

Though they do not say it, they are both relieved the decision has been made for them, absolving them of responsibility.

But when the truck departs less than thirty minutes later, a lone figure emerges from the trees and walks a few paces up the road, toward their house. Standing in the middle of the unpaved county road, Colt raises and holds his arm in a strange, protracted salute.

The sight makes Joe’s stomach curdle. Though there is nothing overtly threatening in the gesture, he cannot shake the intuition that it contains a dark, wordless promise.

(Foreboding music)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

Despite Lilah’s occasional disapproving comments, Joe takes to watching the Heide place from the windows with a pair of binoculars he’s hardly touched in the past two decades. He has forgotten altogether Mrs. Booker’s desk, spending all his free time surveilling Colt’s house, though the screen of the trees renders this endeavor mostly fruitless.

After a few days of muttering in frustration, there is at last a visible development. The vehicles begin to arrive in the last hour of daylight, parking first in the sheltered yard, and later haphazardly around the trees. He counts eleven in total, and watches a few of the occupants lead pit bulls and mastiffs and even a German shepherd into the yard. The sounds of intermittent barking and shouting sometimes reach his ears, but for the most part this procession transpires with appalling silence. The sun sets and night falls, and only thanks to the clear sky and the bright new moon is he able to discern the first of the visitors emerging from the trees and moving toward a vehicle. One by one, the vehicle headlights come to life and depart, and though his aged eyes strain in the darkness, he is sure that none of the dogs he saw earlier emerge again from beneath the trees. At last only one vehicle remains, on the edge of the trees closest to Joe’s vantage. Almost a quarter of an hour passes before another shape emerges from the trees, but from the silhouette Joe is sure it is not the original driver, but Colt Heide. He moves toward the pickup, alone, and as he reaches the driver door he turns and looks toward Joe and Lilah’s house.

A sharp chill seizes the back of Joe’s neck, and he feels certain, despite its impossibility, that Colt knows he is there. Once more, Colt slowly raises his arm in a silent, simple gesture, and now Joe wonders if it is as much invitation as threat.

As Colt enters the pickup cab and drives it into the sheltered yard, Joe turns away from the window, and sets the binoculars on the kitchen table with shaking hands.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Friday morning, Joe sits reading the local weekly newspaper with his coffee, as is his custom. After paging through the usual smalltime news, of interest only to locals, he comes to a short and sparing article about a missing young man. It tells him only that the man was a recent transplant from southern Missouri, with no close relations and few friends in the area. As he sets the newspaper aside, he thinks of that extra pickup truck from the last round of dog fights, the one which Colt drove out of sight.

It is only after his wife picks it up and reads silently for a while that he learns at all about the still sparser article, regarding the drastic increase in the number of missing animals, both pets and livestock, in the county over the last year, as of yet unexplained. And after Lilah finishes relaying this information, Joe wonders if anyone else in the whole county would see a connection between these two stories.

The thought of calling the law about Colt and the suspicions he and his wife harbor about the man, but this time, it isn’t concerns about neighborliness that stops him. He imagines the disbelief his full story would invite, and he thinks too of the brief previous visit from the sheriff’s department, wonders if Colt hasn’t found a friend among the deputies.

He spends the rest of the day finally trying to work on the Booker commission, but ends up mostly staring at the wall, lost in dark imaginings of what might happen if Colt ever decided he and his wife were maybe a little too troublesome.

A few evenings later, his wife calls him into the living room to watch a story on the six o’clock news. In a town a hundred miles to the southeast, a farmer discovered human remains in a field – bones, not old, but picked clean and in a state of disarray. After cutting away from several shots of a lush cornfield and yellow police tape, the anchorman says that the police have determined that certain teeth marks on the bones indicate scavenging by large canids, probably stray dogs or even hybridized coyotes.

Lilah and he stare at one another with horror as the news program breaks for advertisements, and she falteringly asks what they should do. He still has never told her of what he thought he saw in Colt’s large kennel pens, has not dared both for fear that she would doubt his sanity, and for fear that speaking it aloud might make it true. No doubt she is only thinking of some sordid murder among the dog fighters, perhaps a squabble over winnings gone sour or a flaring of tempers over some vanquished prize fighter.

In this moment, she is the only one who even begins to understand his growing terror, but even she cannot know its fullness.

Slowly, he says that they have to be smart about their next moves, that they must be sure before they do anything rash and that, more than anything, they must be cautious. If their worst suspicions are correct, after all, their lives might be in great danger.

Lilah’s eyes betray misgiving, but she offers no word of argument, and he feels confident she will not act alone. Despite his fear, or rather because of it, he almost wishes she would, that she would free him from his own indecision. He feels paralyzed, as before the hypnotic gaze of a snake in silly old folktales, caught in the power of something which will swallow him whole.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Jean wakes up late, past eleven, as she often does now in her retirement. She groggily brews coffee and smokes at the little kitchen table as she waits for it to finish.

She is thinking about her sister’s last visit, about how frightened she had seemed when Jean coaxed at last from her the suspicions and doubts Lilah tried so hard to explain away.

Damn that useless Joe, she thinks.

Her thin body is wracked by a series of savage bronchial coughs, and when they finally subside, she squashes her cigarette into the overfilled ashtray and stands, moving unsteadily toward the phone and forgetting all about her coffee.

If Lilah’s bumbling husband won’t do anything to help her, Jean will.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

A white pickup truck roars along the road, raising a trailing cloud of dust behind it. Lilah stands from the thankless work of her perennially disappointing, thirsting garden to watch it approach. Her breath catches when it passes Colt’s place and continues up the road that ends in their driveway.

Joe steps out onto the front steps, though whether because he noticed the coming visitor or merely by chance, Lilah doesn’t have the chance to find out. His eyes fixing on the nearing pickup, now close enough to plainly make out the sheriff’s department lettering on the side, he calls for Lilah to get inside the house. This annoys her, but rather than arguing, she does move to the steps and stands beside him, as the vehicle slowly comes to a stop in their drive, the gravel and hard-baked dust crunching and crackling under its heavy tires. The engine stutters and goes silent, then the door opens and a deputy, a fellow she believes is named Wilner, emerges and walks crisply across their yard. Waving, he calls a friendly greeting as he draws near, which Joe returns warily.

Deputy Wilner halts just below them, places his right foot on the step and leans forward with his crossed arms resting on his knee, looking up at them with an easy smile. The smile, Lilah notes, does not touch his eyes.

In a leisurely drawl, he says that he understands there’s been some trouble between them and their neighbor, Colt Heide. Joe cautiously replies that there hasn’t been anything worth calling trouble, just a minor difference of opinions, the sort that always springs up between neighbors, given enough time.

There is a pause, and the deputy’s voice is much lower when he next speaks, though the smile lingers. That’s not what he’s heard, he says, and then, adding a special emphasis, adds that his cousin Colt told him his new neighbors have been harassing him, even spying on him.

Joe begins to protest, but is forced to step back as the younger, taller man climbs up the first and second step. Wilner asks if Joe means to tell him his cousin has been lying.

Joe fumbles for words, his voice coming out unusually high and quavering. He begins to say that it’s all a misunderstanding, but before she even knows she will do it, Jean asks sharply if the deputy’s cousin has also told him about the illegal dog fights he’s been hosting on his property, and how it would go over if the rest of the sheriff’s department, or even the whole county, found out that Wilner had turned a blind eye to it when it was brought to his attention.

The smile falls right off Wilner’s face now, and his face darkens stormily. He says that such an accusation would be very serious indeed, and that anyone making it would need very strong proof – and would be inviting danger to their front door. Then, donning a chillier, tighter version of his earlier smile, he says that he hopes there will be no further trouble in the future, and that they will respect their neighbor’s right to privacy.

Turning, he stiffly descends the steps and marches back toward his truck. He turns around and pulls out of their drive a little more quickly than is safe, then speeds down the dirt road and out of sight.

Lilah and Joe exchange a look, and he asks her softly what the hell they’ve gotten themselves into. She has no answer for him.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

They are sitting to a modest supper of ham sandwiches and potato salad when their second visitor of the day arrives. Jean’s Jeep has barely pulled into the yard before she is out and walking across the lawn toward the front door, a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth. Leaving their food untouched, Joe and Lilah meet her on the porch, and at once Jean begins rasping about the pushy young shit-heel of a deputy that came to her house, about his arrogance in daring to threaten her under her own roof and believing there would be no consequence.

Lilah meekly tells her that he paid them a similar visit, just a few hours before.

Son of a bitch, Jean spits, punctuating the utterance with a lengthy exhalation of tobacco fumes.

Yeah, Joe agrees noncommittally, staring at the boards between his feet.

Lilah says resignedly that there’s not much they can do about it, but she’s barely finished speaking before her sister erupts again, saying that it’ll be a cold day in hell before she lets some dick-swinging little shit like him tell her what to do.

Joe looks at his sister-in-law with a mixture of exasperation and admiration, asks timidly what she intends to do. Returning his gaze evenly, Jean says that she’s going to figure out just what Wilner and his cousin are up to, and then she’ll make sure that it comes to light and bites them both right in the ass.

Lilah begins to say that sounds dangerous, but Jean begins to cough loudly and waves her to silence. When the fit subsides, she glares at the couple, and says that they can either help her or keep quiet, but that her mind is made up.

Lilah looks at Joe, and Joe stares at the floor, offering at last a slight shrug. Sighing, Lilah asks her sister to tell them more.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Joe crouches in the trees, feeling like a fool and half certain that each new moment will bring Colt crashing through the dense growth. Or worse still, that Joe won’t hear the fatal shot, or see the hidden blade that ensures his joining of the disappeared.

His old joints creak, and despite the sweat accumulating on his brow and palms, he feels cold. He wonders anxiously what is delaying the women, just when he hears their steps upon the gravel of the road. He waits torturously for them to knock upon the door, barely hears the terse exchange between them and Colt. Panicking, he now begins to see a dozen fatal flaws in their plans. But at last, he does hear the doors of Colt’s battered old Ram open and then slam closed again, then the engine roars to life and slowly rolls down the road. With everything seeming to go as they’d hoped, he stands and moves as quickly as his aging body allows toward the house, out of cover and toward the back door. Nearing it, he dreads that he will find it locked, a rare thing in the countryside – but then, Colt was not born here. The handle turns readily under Joe’s touch, and he breathes a sigh of relief.

The interior of the house is dim, the light fixtures not only sparse, but many seeming to contain burnt-out bulbs that Colt has simply never replaced. He passes a small room absolutely buried in unwashed laundry and a cramped kitchen whose sink and small counter are stacked with dirtied and foul-smelling dishware. A muted sound of buzzing flies reaches his ears, and Joe scrunches his nose in disgust.

Passing into the living room, he finds there are very few furnishings within: a wobbly, filthy little table stacked with emptied cans, bags, and boxes of food and drink, mostly beer, set before a single, sagging couch. On the opposite wall is a narrow bookcase, not tall enough to contain more than a few dozen books, yet nevertheless seeming utterly incongruous in its surroundings. Feeling an unexpected surge of pity for the occupant, Joe wonders what sort of disability or interior desolation could cause a man to voluntarily live in such abject squalor and deprivation.

Stepping carefully over a broad, sticky stain upon the floor, he moves toward the bookcase and scans its contents. A few actual books rest on the bottom shelves, but the rest are lined with notebooks or journals, some seeming many decades old. Picking a random volume from the middle shelf, he opens the aged leatherbound cover to a page headed with the date June 11, 1949. The entry beneath makes no sense to Joe, seeming to consist of impenetrable combinations of letters, numbers, and brief phrases, possibly a personal code or shorthand that he has no real hope of cracking in the limited time that the sisters’ ruse of a Jeep breakdown has bought him.

Setting this volume aside for the moment, he stoops with a slight groan of discomfort to examine the published works below. He picks out Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Adaptation and Natural Selection by George C. Williams, Haldane’s The Causes of Evolution, and a couple of more obscure-looking titles, Breeding Perfection and Mendelian Heresies, both by a Dr. W. D. Wellborn.

Feeling drawn to one that seems out place amongst the others, he reaches for a thick tome with the engraving of a dog in profile under the gold-lettered title, Canines in History and Myth: Guardians, Guides, and Ghouls. Yet before he even touches it, the front door judders in its ill-fitting frame, then pops open to reveal the slouched form of Colt. The two men stare at one another in silence for a moment, Colt’s face betraying no surprise at finding an intruder standing in his home.

Joe asks what Colt has done to the women, surprised by how little fear he feels, now that the worst has actually happened.

Nothing, Colt replies, then adds accusatively that there was nothing wrong with that Jeep.

No, Joe shakes his head. He doesn’t move, waiting to see what the younger man will do. Colt takes only a couple short steps inside, and gently closes the door.

You came for the dog, he says at last.

Joe stands, leaving his answer, and his many questions, unspoken.

When Colt speaks again, it is in a low and unexpectedly dreamy voice. He asks Joe to imagine that, once, there were people who lived upon the land not so very far from where they stand now, and that maybe dogs lived among them. And maybe to these people, a dog was not merely a dumb lower lifeform as so many now see them, but a spiritual creature, respected and even revered. And then, perhaps, strangers came, and brought a new kind of war, absolute in its destruction, and wiped the earlier people away from these lands. Perhaps one day, these newcomers, dressed in blue uniforms, fell upon a village, killing not only the warriors, but elders, women, children… even the dogs.

Colt’s eyes shimmer in the dim room as he asks Joe what he thinks might happen if a guardian spirit were to find what it protected suddenly erased, or scattered to the four winds, or rewritten in boarding schools soaked in blood and fear. What if, he asks, all that was left of the protective instinct was the rage, the hunger, the urge to kill?

Wouldn’t that, Colt breathes, now stepping just a little closer, be the absolute apex of deadly perfection?

Joe’s mouth has become dry, so dry he cannot speak an answer to this bizarre line of questioning, nor even swallow.

Colt steps to the bookcase and picks up the displaced old journal which Joe set aside, begins to flip through the yellowed pages without looking at them, instead cocking his head in an attitude of intense listening.

My grandfather, he says, his voice huskier and less dreamy now, was a dog breeder all his life, from boy to bones. He was always trying to breed the perfect fighter, the perfect killer. But no matter how good the stock he paired, no matter the training or diet or conditioning he applied, he was never satisfied with the result.

Then, Colt exhales, she found him.

And the more he fed her, in flesh and in fury, the more perfect she became, larger and stronger and more terrible.

Joe laughs, unexpectedly. There is no joy in the sound, a squeaky, choked titter, an eruption of terrified incredulity.

Colt stares at him dully, and once more, Joe is struck by the dearth of emotion in that heavy face. Only the eyes seem to hold any life, a faint gleam of predatory expectancy. And Joe has the unaccountable and whimsical insight that maybe even this smallest hint of feeling does not truly belong to him, but to the thing which Colt serves.

Rather than acknowledge Joe’s outburst, Colt asks if Joe would like to meet her.

There is a brief pause as Joe weighs the odds of survival should he refuse – or accept. The thought keeps repeating in his head that Colt must be insane, but on that thought’s heels comes the recollection of that glimpse of massive, bestial hindquarters disappearing behind a shed, and the weight of three generations of accumulated, arcane documentation o the bookshelf beside him.

Joe asks falteringly if Colt is saying a dog has truly lived for over a century.

Colt offers a wan, fleeting smile, and says that he doubts anything could ever bring a true end to a creature like her.

Okay, Joe says after another moment’s consideration, his voice scarcely more than a whisper. Let’s see her.

Colt shows him out of the house, through the front door this time, seeming to feel no apprehension or even anticipation of the possibility of Joe attempting escape. With a little bitterness, Joe reflects that perhaps the younger man believes such an attempt would be destined to fail, and that he might be right in thinking so.

The two men move around the house, toward the backyard with its tall, sturdy fence and kennels. Joe notices a profusion of bones, all stripped bare and many gnawed and broken, scattered about the pen, and is unpleasantly certain that it comes from a diverse mixture of species: canine, bovine, equine, even human.

Colt unbolts the gate, saying as he does so that it is to keep others out rather than hold her, since no fence was ever raised that could hold her if she truly wanted out.

She knows she’ll be fed here, Colt offers his first real expression, looking back at Joe. It is the faintest of smiles, somehow far ghastlier than his previous sullen silences, with something hungry and inhuman in its cast.

Then Colt is gesturing him through, and Joe, against his better judgment and every fiber of his screaming instinct, steps into the large pen beyond.

From the doghouse that he took for a shed, she emerges, standing in the dying light of the day: Colt’s idol of lethal perfection. She is even larger than Joe thought, bigger than a great bull bison. But far more horrible than its impossible size are the many snouts that snap, snarl, and growl at him, the many sets of red-gold eyes that regard him with slavering malevolence. Some of the heads are fully canine, others horribly human, and a few are hellishly intermediate. All are gaunt, almost skeletal, but the body is bloated as though fatted on a million corpses.

Joe falls back, whimpering, and Colt laughs hollowly, saying that Joe isn’t enough of a meal to interest her. Joe, swallowing hard and struggling to find his breath, babbles fragments of several stillborn questions. Finally, he manages to ask what Joe means to do with him.

Colt simply shrugs. There seems to be no malice in the gesture, no intended cruelty – the other man seems to truly have no definite idea. And maybe, Joe thinks, it is not Colt who will decide. As if to confirm this, Colt moves closer to the impossible dog-thing and strokes the largest of her heads, whose jaws dribble copiously. In a low voice, he asks her what he is to do with their uninvited guest.

All of her fiery eyes fix upon Colt, and Joe would swear that they begin to pulse with a dull, ruddy inner light. Colt nods as though the beast has spoken, and as though that were wholly natural and expected. Then, addressing Joe in a tone that is almost polite, he bids the older man to come with him.

Once more, Joe thinks of running, and almost feels his legs snapping at the thought of stumbling in a hole or over a branch in the swiftly fading twilight, and instead follows Colt toward whatever fate has been selected for him. Colt leads him toward a pickup, hidden amidst the densely growing trees that girdle the yard, and Joe recognizes it as the leftover vehicle from the night of the dog fight he watched through binoculars.

Colt tells him gruffly to take it home, pulling the key from his pocket and jamming it into the older man’s hands. What Joe does with the pickup afterward, he says, is entirely up to him.

Knowing he may be dooming himself, Joe asks if he isn’t afraid that he might turn him in.

Won’t matter, Colt replies deadly. We’ll be gone by tomorrow.

Joe hesitates only a few seconds longer, then opens the door to the dead man’s pickup. Unable to resist a final question, he turns and asks Colt why, if he can’t kill the thing, he doesn’t just leave it and make a real life, a life for himself.

Colt looks almost sad as he says that he simply cannot.

Joe climbs behind the wheel, closes the door, and drives away, hitting almost seventy before he reaches the familiarity of his own yard. Yet the sight of his home, and of the Jeep safely parked in the drive, brings him no comfort, with only a half a mile between him and the awful, dark, haunted yard he’s fled.

Jean and his wife come out of the house to meet him, and when they say they should all stay with their brother in the next county over for tonight, Joe feels the first faint hope of relief. He leaves the pickup behind, not caring to deal with it just yet, and they all squeeze into the Jeep. Jean drives far out of the way to avoid passing the Heide house, and the cab is filled with terrible silence. Joe is grateful that he need not lie to the women about what he has seen.

As the Jeep rumbles over the wash boarded country roads, putting miles between them and the thing that bays with many mouths at the rising gibbous moon, a new thought slices razor-sharp through his mind: that maybe the bloating of that unnatural form was not, as he’d thought, the result of plentiful feeding, but of the kind that presages birth.

Joe collapses on the backseat, and whether the wail that fills his ears is his own, but the screeching of those more human mouths as the beast runs free through the wide pastures, he no longer can say.

(Sounds of distorted snarling and barking)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

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[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]