Trigger Warning

There was a smell, which intensified as the hole grew bigger, a stink of old rot and mould. It smelled like meat sandwiches gone bad. Shadow saw her face first, and he barely knew it as a face: the cheeks were sunken, the eyes gone, the skin now dark and leathery, and if there were freckles they were impossible to make out; but the hair was Cassie Burglass’s hair, short and black, and in the LED light, he could see that the dead thing wore an olive-green sweater, and the blue jeans were her blue jeans.

‘It’s funny. I knew she was still here,’ said Oliver. ‘But I still had to see her. With all your talk. I had to see it. To prove she was still here.’

‘Kill him,’ said the woman’s voice. ‘Hit him with a rock, Shadow. He killed me. Now he’s going to kill you.’

‘Are you going to kill me?’ Shadow asked.

‘Well, yes, obviously,’ said the little man, in his sensible voice. ‘I mean, you know about Cassie. And once you’re gone, I can just finally forget about the whole thing, once and for all.’

‘Forget?’

‘Forgive and forget. But it’s hard. It’s not easy to forgive myself, but I’m sure I can forget. There. I think there’s enough room for you to get in there now, if you squeeze.’

Shadow looked down at the little man. ‘Out of interest,’ he said, curious, ‘how are you going to make me get in there? You don’t have a gun on you. And, Ollie, I’m twice your size. You know, I could just break your neck.’

‘I’m not a stupid man,’ said Oliver. ‘I’m not a bad man, either. I’m not a terribly well man, but that’s neither here nor there, really. I mean, I did what I did because I was jealous, not because I was ill. But I wouldn’t have come up here alone. You see, this is the temple of the Black Dog. These places were the first temples. Before the stone henges and the standing stones, they were waiting and they were worshipped, and sacrificed to, and feared, and placated. The black shucks and the barghests, the padfoots and the wish hounds. They were here and they remain on guard.’

‘Hit him with a rock,’ said Cassie’s voice. ‘Hit him now, Shadow, please.’

The passage they stood in went a little way into the hillside, a man-made cave with drystone walls. It did not look like an ancient temple. It did not look like a gateway to hell. The predawn sky framed Oliver. In his gentle, unfailingly polite voice, he said, ‘He is in me. And I am in him.’

The black dog filled the doorway, blocking the way to the world outside, and, Shadow knew, whatever it was, it was no true dog. Its eyes actually glowed, with a luminescence that reminded Shadow of rotting sea-creatures. It was to a wolf, in scale and in menace, what a tiger is to a lynx: pure carnivore, a creature made of danger and threat. It stood taller than Oliver and it stared at Shadow, and it growled, a rumbling deep in its chest. Then it sprang.

Shadow raised his arm to protect his throat, and the creature sank its teeth into his flesh, just below the elbow. The pain was excruciating. He knew he should fight back, but he was falling to his knees, and he was screaming, unable to think clearly, unable to focus on anything except his fear that the creature was going to use him for food, fear it was crushing the bone of his forearm.

On some deep level he suspected that the fear was being created by the dog: that he, Shadow, was not cripplingly afraid like that. Not really. But it did not matter. When the creature released Shadow’s arm, he was weeping and his whole body was shaking.

Oliver said, ‘Get in there, Shadow. Through the gap in the wall. Quickly, now. Or I’ll have him chew off your face.’

Shadow’s arm was bleeding, but he got up and squeezed through the gap into the darkness without arguing. If he stayed out there, with the beast, he would die soon, and die in pain. He knew that with as much certainty as he knew that the sun would rise tomorrow.

‘Well, yes,’ said Cassie’s voice in his head. ‘It’s going to rise. But unless you get your shit together you are never going to see it.’

There was barely space for him and Cassie’s body in the cavity behind the wall. He had seen the expression of pain and fury on her face, like the face of the cat in the glass box, and then he knew she, too, had been entombed here while alive.

Oliver picked up a rock from the ground, and placed it onto the wall, in the gap. ‘My own theory,’ he said, hefting a second rock and putting it into position, ‘is that it is the prehistoric dire wolf. But it is bigger than ever the dire wolf was. Perhaps it is the monster of our dreams, when we huddled in caves. Perhaps it was simply a wolf, but we were smaller, little hominids who could never run fast enough to get away.’

Shadow leaned against the rock face behind him. He squeezed his left arm with his right hand to try to stop the bleeding. ‘This is Wod’s Hill,’ said Shadow. ‘And that’s Wod’s dog. I wouldn’t put it past him.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ More stones were placed on stones.