Something heavy impacts the inside of the wall.
For eighteen hours I’ve sat in this chair. It’s the only one I own, the only piece of furniture in the cave aside from that gruesome bed. That coffin floating on water.
I found the chair broken and rotting in the back alley of a shooting gallery, just like I was when they found my busted ass, broke ass, and knew it had to go home with me.
I sit in this chair because it isn’t comfortable, and is a place to fix up and then rest between hours of pacing. It’s not conducive to sleep, or anything other than sitting uncomfortably and keeping watch.
Two arms and four legs. Those four legs.
Black Shuck has been waiting behind the wall for eighteen hours, patient as a dead moon, looking for its way in.
I’m not letting it, and I can feel its rage.
A huge snout sniffs frantically in the corner of the room where the wall meets the ceiling like a panting dog on the spoor.
I remembered my Zora like others do Sunday school lessons, worming its way through all those shut doors and broken hallways to sit with me on the front porch. “Whut’s de mattah, ol’ Satan, you ain’t kickin’ up yo’ racket?” My God, was she my religion.
A whine comes from behind the wall. It’s a strange sound coming from what it comes from, filled with frustration.
“Fuck that old hound,” I say aloud, just to make sure I’m still real, that the room is the cave and isn’t a prison or the box inside my mind that closes on top of me. I repeat it, my voice sounding strange to my own ears.
“Fuck that old hound… Fuck that old hound…”
I keep this up for hours, until my voice goes hoarse.
Something heavy impacts the inside of the wall.
“Why do we scrap?” I say, tongue brittle as paper. “Why do we scrap, old hound?”
A small scratching sound comes from inside the wall. Slow and deliberate. Bits of metal pulled from brutalized bodies. Claws from an impossible beast.
“I don’t need your land, and you don’t need mine.”
The scratching stops.
“You stay where you are, and I’ll stay where I am. Everything’ll be cool.”
Something shifts inside the wall, pushing it outward, cracking the plaster from ceiling to floor.
“Put away your claws, and I’ll put away mine.”
Silence.
“We’ll leave each other alone.”
Silence.
“We were born to breed, to eat, and to run free. Each and all of us.”
The scratching sounds begin again, this time forceful, frenzied. Determined.
“We weren’t born to war, but war is what we made.”
The wall plaster buckles, pieces falling to the clean cement floor.
“Why do we scrap, old hound?”
A furred black paw pushes through the wall. I get to my feet as the chair splits and falls behind me. My hands ball into fists, my own claws dig into my palms, dripping blood onto the tops of my bare feet.
“Because we’re all fucking animals,” I sneer behind clenched teeth. “Me and you and you and me.”
The wall explodes outward into the room, chunks of moldering plaster and cheap lath skittering across the floor, pushed by a cloud of dust that billows like smoke.
“Fuck you, old hound. You ain’t nothing but a goddamn dog.”
The dust clears and Black Shuck stands before me, an obsidian boulder parting the cloud of dust swirling around bunched muscles and corded sinew. I can see it now. Now, I see the hound, and it’s terrible. But not as terrible as me.
“And I’m a fucking dragon.”
I open my mouth to breath fire, and Black Shuck opens jaws of its own. We run at each other, but my mouth can’t open wide enough, and its maw gets so much bigger. So, so much bigger. An eternity of black opening up in front of me. Things swirl inside that mouth, twisting down its throat. Galaxies, nebulae, all sucked into a slowly spinning black hole that roars in reverse, so slow and low it means to rip apart every tiny building block inside me.
Black Shuck snaps shut its jaws and all goes black. I am either asleep, or I am dead. Unmade. Stardust once more.
I’m diving into the swimming hole, the water taking my ten-year-old body in and hugging me tight as I glide through the murk, bringing me back to the surface before I even need to take a breath. Treading water, I wipe water from my eyes and turn back to the dock, where my brother stands, uncertain, bones quivering inside his skinny frame. Knees turning in on each other. I mock him. Me, the brave boy not afraid of the water. The hero who knows how to float.
He turns to leave, to get his towel and his shoes and head home, but I say something that turns him back around, to face me and the water. I say it again, because we’re alone, and I know exactly where to go inside him to find what I need.
His bones are no longer quivering, and his knees are straight. With an expression on his face that I’d never seen before, he steps off the dock and knifes into the water, feet-first. He sinks like a stone, and just like a stone, he doesn’t float back to the surface. Not until much, much later.
I wake up in darkness with a bag over my head, drawstring cinched tight around my neck. The inside of the bag is olive-green and is trying to eat through my scalp, chewing through hair and licking at my skin. Black Shuck is inside the bag, shrunk down but with the same teeth and rotten breath smelling like an east Texas feedlot.
My fingers claw at the strings around my neck and find that they aren’t there anymore, then rip off the olive-green boonie hat and throw it across the room. Black Shuck roars from inside the bush hat, its wrinkled green dog house, and I push open the door and flee the cave, needing to move my spider limbs, put some blood back into my extremities and get away from the River where my brother sank, that keeps pulling me back into its waters where I once floated like I invented the whole world. And I don’t want to sit in the chair and look at the wall anymore and feel the presence of the boonie hat and think about what’s inside of it, hidden by one fold that no one ever thought to open.
And I need a drink.
I’m strung out, worse than ever, the opium dragging me to sleep in the chair while the Dexedrine waits to fry my nerves when I wake up, if I can even tell the difference between the two. Waking or asleep. Live or dead. All too real or just one big fucking fake. I can’t take it anymore. I’m near the edge, and that’s a dangerous place. I could fall, right down the million-mile throat into the black hole belly of a hound.
I’m awake now, I think, and on the move, slicing through crowds that part before my blade. Have to walk off the shakes, and get a drink or two or seven in me to keep my mind together and move me back from the cliff.
Human contact. I despise it, fear it, but I know that I need it right now. Right now, after nights or days or days of nights like these, when the hound finds its way in while my eyes are still open and some of those doors threaten to open wide. I need to get away from the River. All of them, and everything that waits for me under the water, accusing me with wide open eyes.
Cut this crowd, feet moving like a fly to dead flesh. Had to get out of the cave. The water. Sleep is strongest in an empty room. So is madness, and so is Black Shuck. It wouldn’t dare touch me in a crowd. At least it hadn’t yet. Times can and do change. The gaping hole in my wall was testament to that.