-1- 

John drove his minivan down I-75, trying to ignore the dead dogs he kept seeing by the side of the road. He came to a red light and looked back at his kids. “You two okay back there? You’re real quiet.” He couldn’t quite hide his lingering sadness on the word “two.” He saw his wife May flinch out of the corner of his eye.  

“Yeah.” Replied Cal, his oldest. “Just weird not sitting in the middle.” Cal was fourteen and in the 9^th grade. The middle had always been his spot before his little sister Rose had passed away. 

It had been a year since the funeral. John and May spent whole days just crying. Cal’s grades slipped. Nina, the middle child, rarely slept. Recently, John constantly felt frustrated that he wasn’t over the loss. He was always levelheaded; he never let his emotions get the better of him. Now he couldn’t be the anchor he always was to them because he was still awash himself. 

A few days ago, May made the executive decision to take them to a beach on Lake Michigan. “We’ve been just stewing in our grief for a year. No more processing. Time to clear our heads and get on with our lives,” She had said. It was the wake-up call they needed. They turned onto their exit in a kind of hopeful trance. Maybe now they could move on.  

-2- 

As they pulled into the hotel where they would be staying, John realized why the dead dogs had been so striking to him. When rose was alive, she had an imaginary friend she called Mr. Dog. She was attached to Mr. Dog more than any 7-year-old probably should have been. Rose never did anything without Mr. Dog. He was her protector, her friend, a coping mechanism, a boogeyman she could use against her bullies. But Rose’s biggest tormentors were the people she looked up to the most: her own siblings, while John looked the other way. Cal was never an empathetic person, and he was endlessly annoyed by Mr. Dog. Nina copied everything Cal did without thinking, including his tormenting of Rose. 

John remembered one incident that had stuck with him. Rose was petting Mr. Dog, running her hands over invisible fur, when Cal looked up from his phone. 

“You know he’s not real, right?” 

Rose paused for a split second. Her expression shifted slightly. Nina knelt next to Rose and put her hand where Mr. Dog had been. She waved her hand back and forth, as if to prove nothing was there. Rose looked down. She sat long after Nina and Cal had left, just staring. Abruptly, she stood up and began walking up the stairs. John, watching from the kitchen, felt uncomfortable for some reason he couldn’t place. He hated that Cal and Nina had hurt her feelings so deliberately, but someone was going to have to break the news eventually. After all, any imaginary friends she had were just that: Imaginary. 

-3- 

The hotel faced the water, looking out onto a shining beach that was so gold it seemed almost white. John opened the door to the lobby. The receptionist smiled as they entered, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.  “I’d ask what kind of rooms you wanted, but as it stands, we’ve only got two left. 067 and 364, both singles,” She said. May paused. “Well, Nina can sleep with us,” she said. “And Cal, you’d be fine with your own room, right?” Cal nodded. “You sure?” said May. “we’d be three floors away.” 

“Mom, I’m fourteen now. I’ll live.” Cal replied. May looked reluctant. “Come on, it’s getting late,” John said. “We should go unpack our things.” Nina and her parents piled into the elevator. Cal had already taken his room key and was walking away. 

Later that night, Cal lay awake. His face bathed in blue light as he doomscrolled. John was asleep. May was asleep. Nina was asleep. Cal scrolled past everyone he knew and some he didn’t, all their struggles and mistakes. Why didn’t he feel anything? 

Since the day he was old enough to think for himself, he had always been numb. He understood how the minds of his peers worked; he knew how to play people to his purposes. He was popular but had a reputation for being cold and ruthless. But the only time he ever felt an ounce of guilt was when his sister died. 

Cal felt near crying. He turned the phone off and away from him. He was prepared to try and sleep when he suddenly heard a strange noise, like floorboards straining against a weight, a massive weight. But it was past midnight… wasn’t everyone asleep? He turned his phone flashlight on and pointed it at the door. The creaking grew louder and was joined by a strange squelching, like stepping in roadkill. Cal’s heartrate spiked. A shadow of some huge doglike thing was spreading over the floor. Boards snapped as it closed its monstrous jaws around the doorframe, and slowly, almost delicately, ripped it from its hinges.  

A rotted, withered dog’s head with caved-in holes where its eyes should be forced itself into Cal’s vision. He screamed, and the jaws closing around him echoed two low, quiet words: 

“YOUR FAULT.” 

-4- 

 When May woke, for a moment she forgot that Rose wasn’t there with her, and she felt a kind of happiness she had almost forgotten she had. But then she remembered that her daughter was dead and she dropped back into the deep melancholy she carried with her. She walked into the stairwell and shouted down to Cal in the loudest voice she could muster: “CAL! BREAKFAST IN TEN!” There was no response, but after all he had just woken up.  

Suddenly the phone rang. John picked up and heard a shaken, dry voice on the other end. It was the receptionist. 

“Hey, um, whoever’s there, you might want to come downstairs. The room where your son was staying, it’s a little…” 

“Yeah?” said John. 

The receptionist was breathing shakily. “Just come downstairs.”  

As they rushed to the elevator, may felt her ominous feeling return. By the time they were at the ground floor, May’s mind was racing with horrific possibilities. They turned the corner from the elevator and saw the yellow shine of police tape, and a step later they were frozen in their tracks by what they saw. 

The door and frame were thrown against the opposite wall, jagged wood protruding from the corners. Floorboards were splintered, sheets were shredded and scattered. Police stared, puzzled. What possibly could have done this? 

John was stunned. The shock was so great he could barely breathe. But May was already moving.  

“I’m going to go look for him,” she said, marching towards the exit. John thought about stopping her, but he recognized the determination in her eyes. She wasn’t ready to lose another child. 

-5- 

John was back in the room, trying to comfort Nina. May was at the police station putting together an AMBER alert. John ran his hand over Nina’s back. She wasn’t crying, probably numb from the shock. Comforting Nina was all John could do. 

“You want to go for a walk? See the beach?” he asked. Nina nodded. He grabbed her hand and walked with her to the stairs. He decided they would walk around the second floor to calm Nina down, and once they reached the lobby, they would go down to the beach. Hopefully, this could keep her from breaking down until Cal was back. 

As they exited the stairs to the second floor, John heard a strange sound echoing from the stairwell down the hall. It was quiet, but distinct. It was squishy, almost wet. Cal paused as the sound grew louder.  

“Nina, let’s just take the elevator.” He dragged her to the elevator and pressed the button. Nothing happened. The sound grew louder. He pressed the button more rapidly. Still nothing happened. He turned around and walked quickly back to the stairs they had come from. The door was locked. He whipped around to face the direction of the sound. Something was emerging from the stairwell.  

John grabbed hold of Nina, opened the door to the supply closet, and hid. Whatever this was, it had to be related to whatever had happened to Cal. Nina opened her mouth to speak. John clapped his hand over her mouth and put a finger emphatically to his lips. John peeked out of the closet to see some strange rotted pink tendril probing the rooms one by one, tearing the doors off the ones it found locked. The ripping sounds grew closer and closer, Nina’s breaths heavier and more frequent. A flash of pink could be seen through the crack in the door. Relief washed over John. It was passing them by!  

But Nina was panicking. John looked down and shushed her, but it was too late. She ripped John’s hand away and let out a piercing shriek. Suddenly the pink thing was moving, retracting to the door, grabbing it by the doorknob and tearing. It wrapped itself around Nina, grabbing her from his grip almost effortlessly, and darted quickly out of sight, taking Nina with it. John heard two muffled words, too faint to make out, as the massive shadow of a titanic dog shuffled out of sight. 

-6- 

John drove down a dirt road at nearly twice the speed limit. He understood now, he knew what he had to do, and that was to find his wife and escape with their lives before the adrenaline faded. After Nina was eaten, he realized that the horrific animal that had been hunting them was Mr. Dog. The shock was the only thing keeping him going. He knew if he stopped to think, even for a second, he would break down, and there would be no one left who could save May.  

He swerved around another car, oblivious to anything but finding May. The police station came into view. May was outside talking to a police officer. John stepped on the gas even harder and was too late to notice the bus-sized shape crashing out of the trees at him, jaws agape. He swerved desperately, spun out of control, heard a muffled whump as his head hit the airbag, and blacked out.  

He came to fifteen seconds later. He was sprawled out on the asphalt. He could tell from the angle that his arm was broken, and there was blood dripping from his mangled nose, but he didn’t feel any pain. There was nothing on his mind except the gigantic shape towering over him. It was horrible up close. Its skin was a milky white film, riddled with holes and stretched thin over blackened ribs. It was unnaturally thin, but its legs rippled with lean muscle. The blackened cavities above its lipless snout stared more intensely than any eyes ever could have. John was ready to give in. May could take a police car, escape with her life. That was enough. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw May sprinting as hard as she could. But she was growing larger in his vision, not smaller. John’s eyes widened as he realized she was running towards him. Did she think there was anything she could do? There was no way to escape now. He had only one choice left. He mustered all his strength and leaped at the beast.  

“YOUR FAULT.” 

-7- 

John floated in darkness, an empty liquid womb. There was no light, no way to know how deep the pit went. He couldn’t move; his muscles and joints were paralyzed with formless fear.  

“DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE, JOHN?” The voice was quiet but echoed in John’s bones in a way he couldn’t place. He didn’t respond because there was no point. There was no point in anything anymore.   

“YOU ARE WITH YOUR FAMILY AGAIN, JOHN.” A painful acidic ache joined the echoing through his body.   

“YOUR CHILDREN DID THIS TO ME, JOHN. THEY ERASED ME FROM ROSE’S MIND, LEFT ME TO ROT IN HER SORROW.” Some dull realization dawned in the back of John’s mind but was lost in the growing fire in his nerves. 

“I ATE HER FIRST, ATE HER AILING MIND. I THOUGHT THAT WOULD BE ENOUGH FOR ME, JOHN. I TRULY THOUGH I WOULD BE SATISFIED.” It was with dull horror that he realized what was happening. His skin was melting off his bones, floating away into the acid. 

“BUT MY HUNGER STRUCK AGAIN, JOHN. I NEEDED SUSTENANCE, NEEDED TO REPAY MY MURDERERS.” John’s consciousness was going numb. Thinking was no longer a choice. 

“BUT AS YOU CAN SEE, JOHN, MY BELLY IS NOWHERE NEAR FULL. I NEED MORE. I DO NOT NEED REVENGE. I NEED SLAUGHTER”. John was jolted by contact with something soft. He had reached the bottom of the stomach. A rumbling laughter replaced the deep echoing voice. John’s reflexes slowed. Sensation slowed. His sight was gone, but there was no difference from before. John realized it was over. This fear, this melancholy, this pain, these would be the last things he would ever feel. A single tear rolled upwards from his empty eyelids.  

The end! Happy Halloween!