Trembling With Fear 06/04/2017

What the Dog Tells Me

When Aunt Martha leaves, I watch Atlas.

Atlas is a Great Dane whose head reaches the middle of my chest when he is on four legs. He is slow and cautious, a shadow that lurks in the corner of my sight and watches me from behind corners and the backs of hallways. For a long time, Atlas does not approach me. Does not trust me. He does not make a sound. His growl is low and shaking, a rattling fear that crawls along my lower spine like spider-legged paradise. When I sleep I imagine I hear him outside my door, his heavy open-mouthed breathing an infernal, lingering pantomime.

But in the mornings Atlas is silent and impassive.

I know I am imagining things.

Aunt Martha’s house is big and lonely, deep into suburbia where she has cut herself off from any relationship with her neighbors. Her house is full of photographs of a family that has grown old and apart; sons who speak only through email, daughters who send Christmas cards, pictures of grandchildren who she has only held once before. They stare out of their glossy two-dimensional lives and look into the vast now-emptied home that they left behind.

Atlas is in some of these pictures, but he always looks the same. No grey hairs, sagging jowls or sad eyes from the living shadow whose puppyhood is as ill-documented as the rest of his history. My cousins do not talk about the dog when I see them, nor do any of them have funny or cute stories which people so often ascribe to their animals. Instead they shrug, change the subject and say that Atlas has always been around.

I come under the impression that Atlas is not watching me out of suspicion but instead out of curiosity. As I water the plants and clean the shelves I feel his eyes on pressing on my shoulders shoulders, a physical weight which I can only take so long before my back is breaking. When I turn, I see a black silhouette retreat back into a place unseen. I cringe and whistle my fears of Atlas away. Increasingly I believe that he hates that I am here and am filled with the unnatural sensation that I am not the master in this house.

He watches me while I eat, sitting almost as tall as I stand, silently observing from across the room. I keep the television and radio off because the hair on the ridge of his back stands up when they speak. Atlas enjoys silence in his home, and in its totality he watches me until I lock a door. From the other side of my sanctuary I sleep uneasy in the knowledge that he is awake, sitting laying silently on a couch with his eyes open; waiting for me to unlock the door so that he may continue his persecuting vigil.

In the hazy moments between sleep and waking up, I believe I see him peering over my bed. He is massive in the dark fog between dream and reality, reaching the ceiling and bearing down on me with burning red eyes. His breathing his hot and infernal against my face.
I wake up in a sweat, and venture out to make sure Atlas is asleep.

But I cannot find him.

I do not sleep for the rest of the evening. It would be good, I imagine, if he were to leave. He is not a natural thing. But I know that he will be there in the morning, watching me as I reluctantly come out of the bedroom. I will need to eat.

And so will he.

On the fifth day, he finally speaks.

His eyes slide aside to reveal panels of shimmering white light. A horse moan issues from his long mouth, a tantric chant that begins with a guttural grown and crescendos in a man-like scream of rage. His meaty paws come down on my chest, and in a moment I am paralyzed under him as his teeth come closer and closer to my nose.

“Leave.”

And after that he is off of me. I wonder the house in a daze, splashing water on my face from the kitchen sink. I feel his stink still on me, and I wonder if he truly said anything at all. I wonder if Aunt Martha’s hollow estate is really a good place for me. It is lonely here, and I am uncomfortable. I recall the words of one cousin who from the rim of their whiskey glass told me that he never wanted to go home. That there was a reason that his father left Aunt Martha.

That the house was haunted.

My breathing is heavy and labored, my hands shaking as stammering weeping comes out of my mouth. I am on the verge of real weeping, remembering that I had schedule interviews for the week I was to return from Aunt Martha’s. If this is not real, if I am so disturbed as to so vividly imagine the low, metal-on-metal grating of his voice, then I know I am in no shape for interviews.

Then I feel Atlas’ stare, and I wonder if I have ever been anything but insane.

In a delirious moment, I imagine the house is laughing with him. Then he shakes his head and leaves. I understand how hopeless I truly am. I clutch myself and cry on the kitchen floor.

When I wake up, he is peering over me.

He calls me horrible things, obscenities and slurs that are so foul that they cannot describe a human being. He tells me of the awful things he wants to do, the profane and abominable sins he wishes to unleash on me, on the world. He dips his head to my ear and begins to sing a song: He sings that the worm eats the man, that the worm grows the dirt and that all things walk on a bleeding planet. I begin to weep and he bites into my shoulder, telling me to stop my worthless screaming and that if I will do one thing right in my life it is to listen when he speaks.

Atlas tells me of the world that has been woven into ours, about the evil men that live under the clear surface of water, the twisting snakes that crawl under the gnarled bark of trees. He sings about the black planet that moves closer and closer into our solar system, carnivorous and wide he says it will swallow us all. I feel warm and Atlas roars with laughter.

Men, he says, are incapable of dealing with fear in a rational manner.

I open my eyes and Atlas is gone, the house is quiet.

Aunt Martha will be home tomorrow.