The dog came out of the mist at quarter past five in the morning, just as the first weak November light was beginning to slide across the cracked parking lot of the Sunoco on Route 9. Later, Dale Ransome would remember three things about it.
First: the smell. Not wet dog. Worse. A rank septic smell like meat forgotten in an unplugged refrigerator.
Third: the sound its paws made on the pavement. Wet slapping sounds. Like a barefoot man running through blood.
“Oh Jesus Christ,” Dale whispered.
His voice steamed out in front of him, his words rendered air-light and opaque by the icy morning.
The dog stopped under the arc sodium light.
Its hide hung in strips. One ear was gone entirely. Something black and glossy protruded from its ribcage and pulsed there slowly, obscenely, like the world’s nastiest heartbeat. Thump. Thump.
Dale felt gooseflesh crawl up both arms.
For one crazy second he remembered being eight years old at the Harmony Hill dump, finding a dead deer full of white wriggling maggots while his older brother Tommy laughed and smoked his stolen Pall Malls nearby.
Life is a wheel, Tommy had said. Then again, Tommy had drowned in ‘78.
The thing beneath the streetlight opened its mouth. By Christ, it spoke.
“Dale,” it said, in a voice like dead leaves blowing across dry pavement. “You ought not to have buried that boy.”
Something cold and huge dropped through Dale’s stomach.
Back in town, where the church bells would soon begin ringing six o’clock and old Mrs. Flaherty would be making scrambled eggs while listening to WABI on the radio, terrible things had already begun to wake beneath Castlerockshire Lake.
Things older than the town. Older than America. Maybe older than God Himself.
Ayuh, and they were hungry.
