Jax: A Halloween Story
[This story is a sequel to Cannonball.]
“I turned off the headlights when I was a few hundred feet from the parking lot because there was a sign saying the park closes at dusk. The area around Bicentennial Woods is thickly wooded as well, but there are some houses along that road. One sits right beside the parking lot. I’m sure the people who live there can see any cars that pull in at night. Hell, if they were listening, they could’ve probably heard my tires rolling over the gravel in the parking lot. But I needed those damn keys or I wouldn’t be able to get into the office the next day. And I’d just gotten that job after a stretch of unemployment that had gone on a bit too long, so I didn’t really feel like trying to explain to my boss that I lost my keys already because I was a dumbass and tripped over a root while doing a trail run.”
We all remembered Tom’s stint of unemployment, so we understood his motives in going back for the keys. Still, hearing him describe the situation for the third time in as many years, I wondered how much of his willingness to go back for them had to do with simple curiosity. That’s the nature of these stories about haunted places. If we play it safe, if we never travel to scary locations, then there will be no stories to tell.
“Once I’d parked and cut the engine, I opened the door and just waited for a few minutes. I wanted to see if anyone would drive past, if they’d raise some objection to me being there. There were no lights on at the house nearby, at least not that I could see. And there wasn’t a sound aside from the crickets and the breeze passing through the leaves. The silence was both a comfort and a cause for concern, you know, because right then I realized I was completely alone, and I was about to go trudging through the forest at night.”
Tom’s eyes went vacant, as though he couldn’t help reliving the experience. I played with the idea that he cut something of an Ichabod Crane figure, gangling and loose-limbed. But really he’s too solid for that. With his serious bespectacled eyes, a beard that practically grows before your eyes, and a forehead that protrudes almost aggressively from under a receding hairline, he looks like a cross between an Olympic diver and a civil rights attorney, at once strong and assured but also guilelessly expressive.
“The first thing I discovered was that, after my eyes adjusted a bit, I could see my way around. I mean, not well, since there were plenty of little turns and cresting roots and whatnot that I didn’t see until they already had me stumbling around, but it wasn’t pitch black. If you went slow and paid attention, you could make your way alright. Of course, the spot where I tripped was all the way at the back of the nature preserve, so I’d have to cross the bridge and climb the stairs. But I thought, if I can see halfway decent here, why would it be any different farther into the woods, especially if my eyes keep adjusting?”
“Dude, you never heard the stories about those woods?” Chris said, as if they were discussing the incident for the first time.
“I only heard those stories after I started telling people what happened that night. I honestly don’t know if it would’ve made a difference. What was I going to do, just leave my keys in there?”
“I would have.”
“Maybe I should have. Maybe if I’d just left and come back the next day, I’d still have my old favorite running trail. As it happened, though, I kept going. I figured I could be in and out in twenty-five minutes, and none the worse for wear. And here’s the thing, it was beautiful. I’m not kidding you. It was one of those surprisingly profound experiences you remember throughout your life—and I was thinking that even before what happened later. You could see stars overhead whenever the canopy of branches and leaves opened up. The air was cool and it was like—I don’t know—like something primal took over. When I got to the bridge over the creek, I stood there for what must’ve been a few minutes staring at the moon’s rippling reflection on the water, like a thousand tiny silver sparks winking in and out of existence. Seriously, I was already planning a return visit some night when I didn’t have to work so early the next day.
“It was when I was going up the stairs on the other side of the creek that I started getting—not freaked out exactly, but apprehensive. That staircase isn’t all there, so even in broad daylight it takes some effort to climb without stepping into one of the gaps where the planks have broken. Even with the flashlight on my phone, I found myself probing with my toe every time I took a step up, and all that concentration on the space directly in front of me left me wondering what was going on everywhere else around me. Maybe it was just the distance from the parking lot. Maybe my imagination had simply had enough time to start working on the dark spaces around me. Whatever the reason, the tone of my little adventure changed as I neared the top of the rise.
“The spot where I’d tripped was still some ways off. I had to go along the edge of the hill and then circle down to the other side to where the trail runs alongside a marsh. It was close to where the trail curves toward the other side of the rise, after I’d turned my phone off to save the little remaining battery, that I first heard the whispering. Though by the time my brain got around to figuring out that’s what it was, I think I’d already heard it three or four times. The first time I caught it distinctly, I turned around and said, ‘What’s that? Who’s there?’ I said it in a loud whisper of my own. Then I immediately regretted opening my mouth.”
“What were the whispers saying?” Maddy asked.
“At that point, I couldn’t have told you. But I heard it three more times before I’d had enough and got my ass out of there. And each time it came from a different direction, so I was sure whoever was doing the whispering, they had me surrounded.”
“So what did they say?”
“‘Be quiet. He’s coming.’ That’s what I heard. And though it came from different directions, I was sure it was the same voice each time.”
We all fell silent. Tom had recounted this story at our Halloween parties in the past, so I knew how it ended. After last year’s party, though, I couldn’t help feeling like all these stories we’d been sharing over the years were pointing to something consequential, something more than a source of rejuvenating thrills.
“Did you hear those words distinctly?” Maddy asked. “I mean, before you knew the story?”
“I heard the story from a guy after I told him what I heard. Yes, those were the exact words I heard.”
My dad entered the room from the kitchen, where he must’ve been listening while preparing his drink. “What’s this story you keep referring to?” Since he’s my dad, his presence has always loomed large for me, but my impression is that he has a way of stopping people in their tracks when he enters a room even if they’ve never met him before. How do you describe your own father in light of how the signature blend of authority and kindness you see in him is likely derived from your being his daughter? My dad is self-effacing but assertive, goofy at times but ever on the ready to take charge whenever chaos rears. He can go too far in his teasing and playful argumentation, but just watch how fast he backs off once he senses he’s hurt someone’s feelings. Physically, he seems tall despite being no taller than your average man. His hair is still impressively thick and dark despite its turn to silver. His expression is usually wry, like he’s got an inside joke with himself for every situation. But you can see the whole gamut of emotions in his face, if you know how to look for them.
He scanned the faces arranged about the room in the ensuing silent hesitation. I’d encouraged him to attend this year’s gathering because he kept asking what my mom had told all of us last year that had created such a stir. Every year, our group gets together around Halloween to share our stories about encounters with the spooky and mysterious. Last year, this had led to a good-humored debate about the meaning of these stories, driven mainly by Mom. After telling us one of the most impressive stories to date, she went on to claim she didn’t believe there had been any hidden agency involved in what had happened to her. Now, awakened to the prospect of learning about aspects of my parents’ lives I’d never known before, I wondered what Dad would make of all this. Had he even heard Mom’s story about our old husky-malamute Kea?
“You haven’t heard the story about the Stevenson girls Mr. Caldwell?” It was Chris who spoke up at last. Of course it was Chris. Hyperanimated, fastidiously groomed, attention-hungry, fun-loving, only sometimes annoying Chris.
Dad flashed one of his grins that only spreads over the left side of his face. For an old guy, he’s still got a look of hardness that makes it impossible not to cede him the floor, kindly though his expression tends to be. “Oh, if you mean the incident when those two girls went missing, I actually followed the story in the news pretty closely back then. I would have thought that was before your time.”
“On the contrary,” Chris said, “we grew up hearing about how Bicentennial Woods is haunted, and we’ve all made pilgrimages to those woods to see for ourselves. Oddly enough, though, Tom is the only one of us who’s ever experienced anything strange out there.”
“Probably because I’m the only one who’s been out there at night.”
“I’m curious,” Dad said. “What’s the story you all heard growing up?”
Chris took it upon himself to fill Dad in. “The twin girls lived with their mom in one of those houses you drive past to get to the nature preserve—we never knew which one precisely. When they were just toddlers, their dad was killed, in a car accident I think, and their mom remarried a few years later. Well, the girls had been just old enough to remember their dad, so they never really liked the new guy. They made several attempts at running away, but each time they were found in the woods around the nature preserve, having set up tents and made little caches for food. One day, the stepdad happened on the girls in the garage as they were packing up for another expedition into the woods, and he grabbed one of them by the wrist, which the other one didn’t like at all. She grabbed at whatever was nearest to hand, which turned out to be a shovel, and hit him over the head with it. Seeing him crumble to his knees, they panicked and bolted into the woods.
“Now, that’s the official story. They ran off into the woods and were never seen again. Supposedly, they kept running until they managed to get beyond reach of the searchers. Some people said they ended up in foster homes somewhere. But most people believe something else happened entirely. See, there were rumors that the stepdad was abusive. Given these rumors, the story about the girls getting caught making ready to run away again struck everyone as suspicious. What most believed was that the girls had finally had enough and threatened to tell their mom what was going on. Then the stepdad in turn threatened something else.
“As kids, you used to always hear the part about how the girls were hiding together in the woods, in an arbor that happens to have been right where Tom was when he lost his keys, and trying to keep quiet because their stepdad was right on their heels. They heard him approaching but then he must’ve stopped moving because they couldn’t hear anything anymore. So, they waited. It was then that one of the girls started crying.”
“Ah,” Dad said. “So, that’s where the whispering comes in. ‘Be quiet. He’s coming.’ Ha ha. Spooky.”
“That’s right,” Chris said. “According to this version of the story, the stepdad found the girls, murdered them, and buried their bodies in those woods. So, if you get stuck out on the trail after the sun goes down, you can still hear the girl whispering to her sister.”
Dad laughed heartily. “Wonderful. Wonderful story.”
“So, Mr. Caldwell, are you a skeptic like your wife?”
“Oh no, not me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure most of these stories you hear are highly embellished, and if you could go back and see what really happened, it wouldn’t seem even half as inexplicable. But I’m also convinced there’s something going on in the universe that most people aren’t aware of, the types of things religions try to get at—even though, in my opinion, they all fail miserably.”
“Then why do you laugh at the story of the Stevenson girls?”
“Because those girls were found with their dad—their biological dad, who wasn’t dead—about four years after they went missing, alive and well as far as I recall. Like I said, I followed the story in the news—”
“—Wait! What? Are you serious?”
“I’m looking it up right now,” Chris said. “What year would that have been?”
“I was probably in my mid-30s,” Dad said, “so that would mean they were found thirty years ago, after going missing thirty-four years ago.”
“Missing Girls Discovered with Father after Being Presumed Dead for Four Years,” Chris read aloud from his phone. “I’ll be damned. He’s right.”
All our attention wandered back to Tom. His eyes darted around sheepishly, as if he’d been caught in a fabrication. “Well, what the hell? Why didn’t anyone tell me that part of the story?”
“Don’t feel too bad,” Dad said. “I suppose it’s a bit like those crazy scientific findings that all the news sources pick up. ‘Gene for musical genius discovered,’ or whatever. Then, when the finding fails to replicate, or when other researchers find flaws in the methods, no one bothers to report on it. I remember when those girls went missing, it was all anyone around here could talk about. And you heard all kinds of weird stories—including the one you heard—all within a couple years. Then they find the girls out in New Mexico or wherever, but by then minds were made up and people had stopped paying any attention. The stories had already taken on a life of their own.”
“But I really heard those whispers. I heard someone say, ‘Be quiet. He’s coming.’”
“Maybe you weren’t alone out there. Maybe they were talking about you. Think about it, you weren’t supposed to be out there, and neither was anyone else. I imagine you would have hidden yourself had someone approached. So would anyone else who was out there.”
“Well, that’s kind of creepy too,” Cindy said, laughing her demure little laugh. “You have to wonder who would’ve been out there with you?”
“It could have been kids smoking weed.”
“He would’ve smelled it.”
“Mushrooms then.”
“Or meth! Does meth have a smell?” Mike said.
“Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know.”
We all laughed, except Tom who looked equal parts perplexed and aggrieved. As if trying to save him from further embarrassment or give him time to figure out what to say, Chris jumped in to say, “So Mr. Caldwell, you said you believe in the supernatural. Was it an experience you had that made you a believer? Mrs. Caldwell told us quite a story last year, but she insists these occurrences don’t really prove anything.”
“What was the story she told you?”
Feeling a strange sense of ownership, I beat Chris to a response. “It was the one about how Kea saved her from some guy who got scary after she brought him home and changed her mind about having him there.” I spoke haltingly, reading my dad’s response, trying to see if he knew which story I meant.
I was getting ready to call Mom in from the kitchen when Dad, after a thoughtful pause, nodded and said, “Well, that isn’t even the best story about those damn dogs—not that she knows anything about what happened with Jax.”
I felt my mouth fall open. “Jax?”
Dad went quiet, his eyes focusing on nothing. “Jax was only around for a couple years. He died just after you were born.”
Chris, Cindy, Mike, Maddy, and Tom were all at my house for this year’s Halloween party. Through most of our twenties, we’d done costume parties, but now that some of us were settling down and starting families, we found ourselves more interested in sharing stories. Last year had been a real doozy. Mom, who was attending for the first time, had revealed she’d had a boyfriend who’d died a year and a half before she started dating the guy who would be my dad—the guy I’d pressed to attend the party this year. Some months after her boyfriend had died, she succumbed to a fit of recklessness and brought a guy home from a bar. When the guy started getting pushy, and then started trying to force himself on her, Kea showed up in the bedroom upstairs, even though she’d been trained not to go upstairs. When Mom used the dog’s appearance as a pretext to try to escape down the hallway, the guy ran up behind her and tackled her at the top of the stairs, wrapped a cord around her neck, and may have killed her. Just when she was about to pass out in her desperate effort to roll out from under the guy, Kea bolted past, knocking the guy off balance just enough to allow Mom to roll on her side, reach back, and push the guy down the stairs. The strange thing was that Kea didn’t attack the guy; she just ran past him, in a way suggesting she was responding to a cue from Mom’s boyfriend, the guy who’d died months before, the one who’d trained Kea the first three years of her life.
“So, you do know the story about how Kea saved Mom, though?”
“Oh, believe me, I heard plenty about Jim and his special bond with Kea soon after you girls were born. I heard all about her little cannonball trick and how she knocked that degenerate scumbag over so your mom could push him down the stairs. Let’s just say your mom is a wonderful lady, and it didn’t take me long to fall in love with her. But there were times when I was close to calling it quits over her never-ending obsession with her ex—her deceased ex.”
“So you got another dog? How come I don’t remember it?”
“Well, we were planning on having a baby, so we thought we should get Kea a friend to keep her company when we couldn’t pay her the attention she needed. But, yeah, it was my idea, and I have to admit it did probably have a little something to do with how annoyed I was with Jim’s ghost and how it was kept alive by our precious Kea. Anyway, you don’t remember Jax because we only had him two years before he died. We think he was at least ten when we got him.”
“Why did you get such an old dog?”
“We were probably lied to about his age. He was a rescue. We wanted a dog that would have energy like Kea’s, but who wouldn’t demand a bunch of time and training. So, we got an older dog.”
“Well, Mr. Caldwell,” Chris broke in, “are you going to tell us this story about Jax that’s supposedly better than Mrs. Caldwell’s story?”
Dad leaned back into the couch and looked up at the ceiling. Folding his arms, he donned a pensive expression. “You know, I’ve never told that story before. I mean, I had a couple friends who knew most of it. But I don’t know quite where to start.”
“Before you tell us—I’m curious—what do you think about your wife’s story?”
“Today, I can honestly say I love that story. When I first met your mom, she wouldn’t talk about Jim—not a word. So, I didn’t hear the story about Kea until around the time she first got pregnant. I remember I kept trying to assure her it was okay to talk about him, but she simply wouldn’t do it. Then, when she finally ended the silence, well, let’s just say it wasn’t long before I regretted encouraging her. I think Jim was overly attached to that dog. You know how some people get a little weird about their animals, like they don’t understand they’re not humans. Your mom was actually frustrated with him over it, but, after he died, she took it over for him, if you know what I mean. So even though I hadn’t even heard any of the stories yet, I would get annoyed myself at how much we had to go out of our way to make sure the damn dog was happy and well provided for.
“I love dogs, don’t get me wrong. But by then we had kids, and things were hard enough, you know. So, when I first heard what Kea had done to that guy, I dismissed it. I thought, so the dog snuck upstairs and got riled up when she saw two people wrestling, and she made a dash from the bedroom doorway to the loft. And that makes her some kind of savior? It just seemed like an excuse to keep spoiling the dog—and to keep talking about Saint Jim.”
Chris broke in, “You didn’t think the part about the dream, how she dreamt Jim was talking to the dog, meant anything? Your wife assured us nothing supernatural happened, but the whole cannonball husky thing was… interesting, don’t you think?”
“I can’t pretend to know. I heard the story years after it happened, and I have a hard time believing almost any old story maps onto actual events as they really occurred. Some details had to have changed. But I’m perfectly willing to accept something supernatural may have been at play.”
“How much have you and Mom talked about that whole thing?”
“We talked about it a few times, but that was a long time ago. Like I said, after some time, I started to like the story. What she told me was that, even though she knew it didn’t prove anything, it made her happy to think about it because it meant Jim was still alive in her memory, and in the dog’s mind too—even if it didn’t mean he was still around in the world outside, you know.”
“But you think he may have still been around in the external world too?”
“I can’t rule it out. And I don’t know for sure if your mom is completely convinced one way or the other. She just knows the odds favor a mundane explanation as opposed to a supernatural one. They always do. The way I see it, though, just because something is more likely doesn’t always mean it’s also true.”
“So, what happened with your dog Jax? Was that what convinced you there might be something to the supernatural?”
“At that point, I didn’t need all that much convincing, but I’d never had anything like that happen to me. So, if I had needed convincing, that would have done it. It started before we even brought Jax home. Like I said, we were looking for an older dog that wouldn’t need much training, a dog who could keep Kea occupied while we were dealing with a pregnancy and a baby. When we heard there was an older husky at the shelter, we were there the next day to meet him.
“Now, at the shelter they told us Jax was aged between 6 and 8. Later, I’d start thinking he was probably closer to 10. I guess shelters do that with older dogs sometimes. They said he was old enough to be calm most of the time, but still young enough to play, which was exactly what we wanted. I have to say, though, I had my doubts about him. He just had a way of looking at people that made me think he was leery for some reason. But your mom made the final decision.”
“Kea made the final decision,” Mom said as she stepped into the room from the kitchen. “Kea put her ears down when she met him, like she does when she greets people. There were only a couple of other dogs I remember her greeting like that. Then the way she crept around him—I took it for intense interest. Later, I came to think it was concern for poor Jax, like she knew something was wrong.”
“You know, I never told you most of this,” Dad said to Mom as she lowered herself onto the couch beside him, “but if you remember, the weird stuff started even before we brought Jax home.”
“That’s right, we almost didn’t end up getting him at all because Kea started having problems.”
“What, like health problems?” I asked.
“We didn’t know,” Mom said. “She started barking and whining in the middle of the night—and that was strange for her. She was usually so good about sleeping straight through till morning. But something really had her spooked.”
Dad picked up the thread. “When I went downstairs to check on her that first night—this was before we just started bringing her upstairs with us—she looked, I don’t know, panicked. I let her outside and she freaked out and ran around from one end of the yard to the other and back a few times. When she came back in, she was panting but still hyper, still anxious. And, though she normally slept in the alcove between the front door and the closet, now she wouldn’t go near that spot. The front door was part glass, so I wondered if she’d seen something outside, which you can bet freaked me out too. But I went out and checked and there was nothing. I went back to bed after a while, but I couldn’t sleep. Finally, I went back downstairs to check on her—”
“—You try to act like such a hard ass,” Mom cut him off to say, “but you loved that dog as much as anyone.”
“As much as you did? I doubt that. But I admit she won me over eventually. Anyway, when I went back down, she was sleeping all the way back in the kitchen, hiding between the fridge and the island. And she’d puked in three big piles spread over the tile. I was afraid she’d been poisoned. I slept downstairs on the couch for the rest of the night. She paced around a long time, but finally went back to sleep.
“In the morning, she was still agitated but seemed mostly alright. She ate and did fine on her walk. Then she came home and took a nap, which I would have liked to do myself since I was up most of the night.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Mom said, shaking her head with a half-hidden grin.
“I called the vet the next day even though she seemed to be doing alright. We got an appointment, but it was two days away. And Kea called me downstairs again both those nights. The one place she felt safe was in my car. I actually slept out in the garage in my front seat for a couple hours one of those nights. The horrible part was we just couldn’t figure out what was spooking her. We thought maybe there was a mouse somewhere in the walls, so we put out a bunch of traps. Six months later, though, I picked them up—all empty. Our next thought was maybe the air coming out of the vent had been pushing up the edge of the rug, making it move around and scaring her. But she wasn’t a skittish dog, and that didn’t seem like it would be enough to scare her that bad.”
“What did the vet say?”
“Ha ha. She said, ‘Well, that would freak me out. It’s like someone’s outside your house.’ I thought, thanks a lot. I’m trying not to think about that. She ended up prescribing Kea an antinausea, which put her to sleep for a day and a half. After that, she started sleeping through the night again, but it was months before she went back to her spot behind the door.”
“And you never figured out what had her so scared?”
“To this day, I still don’t know.” Dad put his hand on Mom’s knee, as he is wont to do, and she put hers on top of his. He looked at her and smiled. “So, do you want to hear the rest of the story?”
“Well, I think I know some of it already, but I’d love to hear the rest. I’m wondering, though, why you didn’t tell me when it was going on.”
“When it all started, I wanted to get to the bottom of it before I told you—because to be honest I thought I was going crazy. After that, I didn’t say anything because you were pregnant. Then, after that, I went back to worrying I might be crazy.”
“Oh, honey, we all know you’re out of your gourd. It doesn’t mean we don’t love you.”
Dad smiled another of his playfully magnanimous smiles. “You better reserve judgement until you hear the story. So, Kea seems okay after her big mystery fright, and now I’m back to trying to get another dog for her to play with. Jax was still at the shelter, though we were assured there were other people interested in him. We brought Kea to meet him again, and they seemed to get along, though they didn’t do much playing there in the shelter. We talked it over and decided to bring him home.
“Nothing crazy happened right away. Jax wasn’t comfortable in his new home, but that was understandable. The only problem as far as I was concerned then was that he stood around staring off into space all the time—not playing with his new sister. She would sniff around him, nudge him with her nose, and then wander off to harass me when he didn’t respond.”
“Kea harassed you because you always responded to her.”
“Be that as it may, you remember us talking about how we had two dogs to entertain now instead of one, so we were afraid our little plan had backfired. Gradually, though, Jax started to relax, and after a while they would play a bit. Not enough to keep me from having to walk them all the damn time, but we felt better leaving Kea at home for longer now that she had some company.”
“I don’t get it,” Cindy said. “You said Kea annoyed you, but it sounds like you were ridiculously attentive to her needs.”
Mom laughed. “It’s only recently that he’s started admitting how much he loved that dog. He used to go on and on about what a huge pain in the ass she was. But he took such good care of her—he gave even Jim a run. See, some people love dogs. I love dogs. But some people can hear dogs, if that makes sense. I don’t mean they’re like the guy in that horrible ‘dog whisperer’ show who’s always spouting nonsense about how you need to be the alpha. These people can’t communicate with dogs like that guy supposedly could. They just have a better intuitive sense of what they need. Doug can hear dogs, better than I can anyway. I loved Kea like crazy. Honestly, though, she was far more attentive to me and my needs than I was to her and hers. Somehow, she knew Doug would take the time to figure out what she needed, because when he paid attention, he was capable of puzzling it out. I even remember Jim talking to Kea a few times, saying he knew he’d trained her to look at him and watch for cues, but the way she stared at him and tracked his movements all the time freaked him out sometimes. When I saw her following Doug with her eyes just like that, I knew. Actually, I think I can truthfully say that was one of the reasons I fell in love with him. He complained all the time because she always came to him, but he almost always responded so you can’t blame her.”
“Great! So, the damn dog chose me too. Oh, she was a great dog. I have no problem admitting that I loved her too. At the time, though, it was a bit overwhelming. And she wasn’t my dog, you know. I was truly annoyed, but yeah, I guess I rewarded her for annoying me. What was I going to do, ignore her? Back then, I may have thought that was the thing to do, but now I’m glad I didn’t.”
“So, you get Jax home and weird stuff starts happening?”
“The first thing we both noticed was that at night he’d go to the corner of the yard and just sit there staring at the fence. Or that’s what we thought he was staring at anyway. You know how when you’re training a dog, you try to get him to come to you, sit in front of you, and wait for your next command? That’s what it looked like. It was actually you who pointed that out,” he said turning to Mom. “You said it looked like he was sitting there listening for the next command from someone—but obviously there was no one there in the corner of the yard where he was facing.”
“Oh, that used to creep me out something awful when Jax did that.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you about all the other things that happened.”
“Do I even want to know?”
“Let’s just say it got creepier. One night, I went out back and Jax was sitting staring in the corner again. I called him in, but he didn’t come. Typical husky, right? But when I went to get him, he had blood all over his mouth. My first thought was that he attacked Kea, but she’d come in the house a minute earlier when I first called them both in and she looked fine. So, I started looking all over the yard for whatever Jax had killed. Sure enough, there was a dead raccoon lying halfway between where Jax was sitting and the corner. When I saw it, the tingles crawled all up my back. I got a flashlight from the garage and went searching all around the house and outside the fence. We had four trees, none of them very big, in our backyard. There was a pond behind our house, but the area around our house was mostly other yards and houses. We kept our garbage bins in the garage. I’d never seen a raccoon anywhere near our house.”
“Well, that’s not so strange, is it?”
“No, it was like the thing with Kea getting scared of her sleeping spot all the sudden, strange but not so inexplicable that we were ready to call a priest or anything. By now, though, Susan was asking what I was doing, so I had to hurry up and get Jax in the garage to clean all the blood from his maw.”
“What did you do with the raccoon?”
“I had to get rid of it fast so Susan wouldn’t find out, so I tossed it in the pond.”
“You did not. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I was taking care of it so you wouldn’t have to is all.”
“So, what else happened that you didn’t tell me about?”
“Well, the raccoon was only the first of three critters Jax sacrificed to the corner of the fence. Now, why the hell would a dog keep killing animals and dropping them in the same spot in the yard, a spot close to where he sits staring at nothing? I actually called Gary, our trainer, and he said he’d never heard of anything like it.”
“What kind of animal were they?”
“That’s the other weird thing. One was a gopher, a big one. The other I think was an otter. Now, gophers and otters live around here, but you don’t see them very often. And I’d never seen any of either anywhere near our yard. The pond behind our yard was nowhere near big enough for an otter to live in it.”
“It almost sounds like someone was trapping them and throwing them in the yard for Jax to hunt down,” Chris offered. “After he killed them, he brought them back to the spot where whoever it was tossed them over the fence.”
“Yeah, the same person who scared Kea through the glass of the front door,” Tom said, finally breaking his daze.
“You guys, stop,” Mom said, lifting her hand to her face.
“Okay, so what happened next?”
“I got a call from someone at the shelter saying Jax’s owner had just been released from prison.” Dad paused to enjoy the effect.
“Wait—does that mean the guy may have actually been coming to your yard and giving Jax critters to chase?”
“I had that thought at the time, but all three of the incidents when I found a dead animal happened before he got out.”
“Are you being serious?” Cindy asked. “Please tell me you’re not having us on.”
Before Dad could respond, Chris asked, “Why did the guy at the shelter call you? Did he think there was some way this guy could find you?”
Dad took a slow breath and turned toward Mom. “I never told you a lot of this before, because I knew it would scare the hell out of you. This guy—Craig Avery was his name—he was arrested after the police were called to his house for a noise complaint. He kept playing music with bass drops that neighbors could hear for miles around. When the police got there though, they found dozens of animals in cages, and he got arrested because he was violating a bunch of ordinances. His house wasn’t out in the country; it was right on Illinois Road, like three quarters of a mile from I-69. So, his ritzy neighbors were understandably not too happy. Now, I got all this information from an old friend who was cop. But what I found out from the guy at the shelter…”
Dad trailed off, his eyes lost to a daze, as though he were weighing whether to go on. “Here’s something I’ve learned in my long sojourn here on Earth,” he said at last. “There are three types of crazy person you need to watch out for. I’m sure there are other types, but these are the ones that get scary. The first is the type who’s unstable. One minute they seem fine and nice and normal. The next they’re blowing their lids. This type is dangerous because you never know what’s going to set them off, and once they’ve snapped, they don’t care who you are. They’ll lash out at you as soon as anyone else.
“The second is the type whose ego is as volatile as a powder keg. Whether they’re narcissistic or psychopathic or whatever, they need you to recognize how important and how great they are. And if that recognition isn’t forthcoming, they can’t make it to DEFCON 1 fast enough. The scary thing is that blowing up everything and everyone around them is for them a matter of principle. And no matter what you’re prepared to do to fend them off, they’re always willing to go one step—hell, ten steps farther. Like they just have nothing to lose.
“But it’s the third type that’s scariest to me personally. These are the people who are driven by some set of beliefs. They can be conspiracy theorists, cult members, radical ideologues, religious fundamentalists, or anything else that makes them paranoid and self-righteous and superior. Like they think they have the secret no one else has. For these guys, abusing other humans—or animals—is not only justified, but sometimes required. Hurting others supposedly serves their god, or helps to bring about some utopia, or both. Their crazy beliefs dictate that they be terrible to some other group of people.
“I say all this because the guy at the shelter told me Jax’s previous owner was a member of some strange cult, and he’d come to the shelter insisting that he needed to find Jax. The dog, so this guy Avery said, played a critical role in his rituals. Of course, the guy told Avery that Jax had already found a new home, and he couldn’t legally give him any information about who adopted him. Avery responded with a bunch of threats. So, the guy at the shelter called to warn me. He said something like, ‘He won’t get anything from us here, but I don’t know if there’s some other way he might be able to track you down.’ Naturally, that freaked me out, so I called my cop buddy to see what else I could learn.”
“Your friend couldn’t pay this Avery guy a visit and let him know he was being kept an eye on?”
“He may have, but I was told Avery violated his parole and failed to check in. At any rate, he left the residence he was supposed to be staying at, and the police didn’t know where he was. That means if he turned up anywhere, he’d be arrested. Apparently, though, his crimes hadn’t been serious enough to warrant a manhunt.”
“Okay, that would scare the hell out me. Did you consider taking Jax back to the shelter?”
“Huh? … You know, I never did. But that does kind of seem like a logical response.”
“Not for you,” Mom said smiling.
“I did get one good piece of information from John, my cop friend. I found out where the guy lived before he got arrested. Like I said, it wasn’t anywhere off the beaten path. It was actually only a few miles from where we were living then. The place was scheduled to go up for auction because Avery had defaulted on the mortgage. Understandable considering he was in prison for a while. It was right next to a big construction site where they were building a new subdivision.
“I put both dogs in the car one Saturday and went to check it out. It was just a big white house, set back into the woods. From the front, all you saw was the graying façade. As we drove around the gravel circle drive, though, I noticed some sheds in the back, which were barely visible through the trees.”
“Please tell me when you went it was broad daylight.”
“Oh, yeah. I wanted to look around, so going at night wouldn’t have made much sense. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find—I was just curious. If I hadn’t brought Jax, I wouldn’t have found anything but an old house and a couple of sheds out back. I peeked through the windows and saw the place had been pretty thoroughly stripped. The sheds had some wood piles and big stacks of old newspapers, but nothing out of the ordinary. The whole time I was looking around Jax kept stopping and staring at me. Kea was being Kea, just sniffing around and being excited to explore a new place. But Jax was acting weird. Every time he stopped, I just pulled him along. Then, as I was finishing up my survey of the property, I started paying him more attention. And it was as clear as if he’d opened his mouth and spoken it to me in plain English: he was pleading with me. He wanted me to do something.”
“Oh my God. Did he want you to take him in the house?”
“Well, I didn’t know at first. So, before going back to the car, I just stopped for a second and watched him. I said, ‘What’s up buddy?’ and waited to see what he’d do. Sure enough, he turned and started walking toward the far corner of the yard. I gave him enough slack in the leash to lead me and Kea wherever it was he wanted to go.”
“Oh no, what did you find?”
“Nothing at first. In fact, after we walked through the underbrush for a while, I was about to stop Jax and go back to the car. That’s when I saw that we’d made it to a trail that had been grown over. It led farther back into the woods. The thing was, though, those woods weren’t that deep. I knew if we kept going, we’d eventually end up in somebody’s yard. But every time I hesitated, Jax would turn back with those pleading eyes. So on we went.
“Finally, he stopped and started sniffing in a spot that at first glance couldn’t have been more nondescript. My curiosity was piqued, but I was also getting impatient. My best guess was that he was following a path he’d been taken along for his walks back when he’d lived there. So I wasn’t really expecting to find anything all that interesting. This was just Jax going down memory lane.”
“But you did find something?”
Dad turned to look at Mom beside him on the couch before turning back to the rest of us. “Oh yeah, we definitely found something.”
“Not a dead body. Please tell us it wasn’t a dead kid or something.”
“Well, in point of fact, it was a dead body, but not a human.”
A shiver spread from my spine across my shoulders and over my scalp as I imagined what the inhuman thing could have been that my dad and his dog discovered all those years ago in the woods. I turned to see every last pair of eyes in the house fixed on him, every mouth agape.
“Jax went from sniffing to pawing to digging through the leaves and the surface dirt. When I saw what was unmistakably a bone sticking up through the side of the hole he was digging, I let out a sound before I could stop myself by clapping a hand over my mouth. Suddenly, I was in a panic, afraid I’d be seen and caught by someone out here. By who, I couldn’t say. I was just terrified someone was out there and now that I’d shouted, they knew exactly where I was. It didn’t make much sense. But I was turning to look in every direction, my eyes roving around frantically.
“Time was at a standstill, so I couldn’t tell you how long it took me to notice it. The trees nearby were all tiny, with thin trunks barely as tall as me. There was undergrowth all around, but all the bigger trees were some distance away. It hit me that I was standing in what, some years ago, had been a clearing. Coming back to my senses a bit, I rushed over to Jax and squatted down to help him uncover the bones. I figured if it did turn out to be a human, the next step would be to call the police. It didn’t take me long though to figure out it wasn’t a human. It was a dog. And it would have been about the same size as Jax.”
“Ooooh, so Jax was a ghost dog.”
A tidal wave of tension-releasing laughter crashed over the room.
“Believe it or not, that possibility never occurred to me. I’m pretty sure the bones had belonged to Jax’s friend, possibly a sibling. The next question that sprang to my mind then was what the hell had this crazy fuck Avery done to this poor dog. With some help from Jax, we excavated the rest of the skeleton. It wasn’t even buried really. There was just a light covering of dirt and leaves. By now, Kea was excited to help too, but Jax let it be known her help wasn’t welcome. She wandered off and sniffed around elsewhere as we completed the task. That’s when I made another discovery. Sifting through the leaves, I kept finding stones and beads and other sundry objects that didn’t look like they belonged there. It took me some time, but I eventually saw the stones were arranged in lines radiating out from the spot where we found the skeleton. I felt sick. I tried to tell myself that Avery may have simply performed some funeral rites after this dog died from cancer or something. But I’m reasonably certain the fucker killed Jax’s friend as part of some perverse ritual.”
Dad went quiet, dropping his gaze to the floor. He seemed to have fallen into a trance, but no one wanted to speak up to encourage him to continue. Finally, I said, “Dad, what did you do with the bones?”
“I gathered them up in the flannel shirt I was wearing over my t-shirt and brought them back to the car. But before we left, I went back to the big sigil—or whatever the hell it was—Avery had arranged over the ground and scattered the pieces as far and wide as I could. I got myself worked up into a fury as I did it. I even had the thought that I wouldn’t mind all that much if Avery managed to find out where Jax ended up, because then I could have a word with him.”
“And did he ever find you guys?”
“I never saw him. But I have a feeling he and Jax were reunited briefly.”
Mom had been looking disturbed. Now she said, “Doug, what are you talking about?”
“This is the main part of the story I didn’t want to tell you about. You were pregnant at the time—and I just didn’t know what the hell to say about any of it.”
“Just tell me what happened.”
“You probably remember the night. You were a couple months pregnant. There was a big storm.”
“I remember you said Jax got out. You both came in drenched. And you worked late that night, didn’t you? I was already in bed by the time you came upstairs.”
“I didn’t work late. I was actually at John’s house. That’s my cop buddy,” Dad turned to tell the rest of us. “We were talking about what I might do about Avery being out of jail and his whereabouts unknown. I was racing the storm on my way home when I got a call. I remember I forgot I’d added the number for the animal shelter into my contacts list, but it appeared on my phone. It was a good thing too because otherwise I wouldn’t have picked up. I still almost ignored it. I thought it was probably about a fundraiser or something. But when I picked up, it was the kid who’d warned me about Avery, and he was frantic. The first thing he said was, ‘You need to understand he threatened me.’ I didn’t say anything. It took me a couple seconds to register what it meant. He’d told Avery where I lived. Avery was on his way to get Jax—on his way to my house, where my pregnant wife was—to get a dog there was no way in hell I was going to let him take.”
“Did you really not know any of this happened, Mrs. Caldwell?”
“I never told her,” Dad said before she could answer. “But I’ll get to that. Anyway, I’m flooring it now to get home. The kid at the shelter said Avery had only left a minute ago and that all he’d told him was my name. That meant I might have a little time. As soon as I hung up, I called John and told him what was happening and then I just concentrated on getting home as soon as I could.
“The kid said Avery was threatening him, but he didn’t say anything about a weapon of any sort. Still, I would have expected to be more scared than I was racing home. What I felt instead was pure rage. From what I could tell, this guy had already killed one dog, and now he wanted Jax for something. Well, that wasn’t going happen. He wasn’t going to get anywhere near that dog. And, if he came close to my wife, there’d be no saving him. I was gripping the steering wheel and clenching my teeth, planning to get home first and be ready for him when he showed up.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I did. I called and asked what you were doing? You said you were tired and that you were going to go to bed a little early. I asked if you were upstairs and you said yes. Then I asked where the dogs were. You said Kea was with you and Jax was outside, but you were about to go bring him in. I told you to wait, not to worry about the storm because I was almost there, that I’d get him inside before it hit.”
“Hmm… I almost remember that. I guess you didn’t want to worry me if you didn’t have to and that’s why you didn’t tell me some criminal was on his way to our house.”
“I definitely made some decisions that night I would later question. The most likely scenario, as I guessed it, was that we’d never hear from the guy. Or he’d show up and I’d send him away, with John’s help if need be. If he pressed matters, I was fully prepared to fight the guy. I figured I could hurt him bad enough for him to get the message. What I didn’t plan on was getting home and finding the backyard empty.”
“What? I remember both you and Jax coming inside soaking wet that night—if I’m thinking of the night you’re talking about.”
“That was the night.”
“You got sick. You stayed home from work for a week after that.”
“I stayed home. But I wasn’t sick.”
“I see. Just tell me the guy wasn’t at our house.”
“When I got there, nobody was there except you and Kea. Not even Jax. After looking in the backyard, I came in the house to ask if you’d brought him in. Instead, I met Kea standing at the top of the stairs, baring her teeth and growling at me. She growled at me sometimes when Susan and I were arguing, but never like this. She stopped me in my tracks. That’s when I knew for sure something was wrong. Jax would have come to see who was there if he’d been in the house. So I bolted back outside. I checked the backyard again, but he wasn’t out there. I ran to the gate and saw that it was still latched. I was running around outside the fence when the rain started. By now, I was less worried about waking you up, so I started calling for Jax, knowing his recall sucked and he probably wouldn’t come anyway.”
“But you said you had him until he died, so you must’ve found him.”
“I caught sight of him in a flash of lightning. He was sitting, facing the opposite direction, on the hill that separated our yard from the pond. The thunder drowned out the sound of my voice when I called him, but I was already sprinting to where he was. He didn’t budge the whole time I was running up to him, shouting his name. There was just enough light from the surrounding houses for me to see the blood.”
“Was it his?”
“I didn’t know for a few very long moments. I was like, ‘Jax buddy, are you alright?,’ patting him all over, looking for a wound. Then another flash of lightning showed me that he was sitting in a huge pool of gore, one that trailed off down the hill.”
“Trailed off?”
“As in there was what I thought was a big circle of it where Jax was sitting, and about a two-foot wide trail of it leading down the other side of the hill. And Jax’s maw and chest were warm and sticky with it.”
“You never saw Avery?”
“I looked in all directions as best I could, but no, I didn’t see anyone. So, my first task was to get Jax out of the storm. I was running up to the garage when I saw John’s car parking in the street. He must’ve known something was up, because he jumped out in the downpour and ran up to me. I told him Jax must’ve bit someone, mauled him really, because there was blood all over the hill behind the house. He ran back there with his flashlight to search. I put Jax in the garage and then went back out to help him look.”
“I never even knew John was there that night.”
“He slept in his car out front the whole night, and a few nights after that.”
“You never found Avery? Did you call the police?”
“We never saw or heard from Avery again. As far as I know, no one else did either. John told me he either died from blood loss, which is likely given how much blood was on the hill, or he crawled away, got medical attention, and then changed his identity to avoid cops looking to serve a warrant. He told me it wouldn’t make much difference if I called the police. They would send someone to sit out front that night, but that would be about it. Since John offered to stay anyway, and since I didn’t want to stress you out if it could be helped, I figured it wasn’t necessary to give a statement. The other thing I was worried about was what might happen to Jax.”
“Do you think he killed Avery?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. I have a hard time seeing how any other scenario would have played out.”
“And after all these years you’re just telling me now.”
“Like I said, I took a week off work, saying I had the flu. That meant I had to stay away from you too—since you were pregnant and all—which meant I could stay downstairs in case anything happened. The police were already looking for Avery, and John stayed out front a few more nights after the first one. Really, though, the main reason I didn’t get the police involved officially was that I was almost certain Avery was already dead.”
“Oh my god. He crawled into that pond and died, didn’t he?”
Dad didn’t respond.
“Wouldn’t you have smelled the corpse decomposing or something?”
“This was in the fall. The storm was blowing hard, and it was pouring most of the night. By morning, there was no blood, no trace of any sort. There was frost on the ground almost every morning by that point. But, yeah, I have to say, I was worried for a good long while about his damn bloated corpse poking out of the cattails. We got through the winter, though, and nothing. I mean, it wasn’t like that pond smelled like lavender all the time anyway. There were times the next spring and summer when I was out mowing or playing with the dogs when I thought I caught a whiff. But that was all it ever was.”
I got the sense from looking at Mom that Dad was in for some rough treatment when they left the party. I could understand his reasoning though. “But Dad, why didn’t you tell Mom later, like after Christa was born?”
Dad threw back his head and laughed. “Pure cowardice. I figured she’d be real good and pissed I hadn’t told her before. Even now, I’m getting the sense she’s not too happy about how I handled things.”
“You left a dead body in the pond behind our house. We’re lucky our kids never found it. Hell, you’re lucky you didn’t end up in prison.”
“John assured me that wouldn’t happen. No one could even prove Jax ever had blood on him. I spent an hour that night scrubbing out his fur. I never even saw Avery, so how could I be liable for his death in any way?”
“You should have told me—we’ll talk about it later.”
“Yeah, tell your pregnant wife that her dog just killed the cult member who sacrificed its friend to some damn tree god or whatever the hell it is those nutjobs worship. At first, it seemed perfectly reasonable not to tell you. Later, I started having doubts about my decision, but I couldn’t see any benefit to telling you by then.”
“You said Kea growled at you inside the house. Do you think she saw Avery? How did she know something was going on?”
“That’s only one of several weird aspects to the story I can’t explain. Why was Jax just sitting there on the hill after his former owner dragged himself bleeding down the hill? How had Jax known where his friend was buried behind that abandoned house? What had Kea spooked those nights before we brought Jax home? Those damn dogs seemed to know all kinds of things they shouldn’t have.”
The room went quiet again as everyone processed what they’d heard. I felt intensely worried, as I had after hearing Mom’s story, even though everyone who had been in danger was safe in the room with me—or safe in the ground. I considered my dad’s story from start to finish. The question that came to mind wasn’t about any of the particulars, though; it was whether Dad’s story really was better than the one Mom told last year.
Cindy might’ve been thinking along the same lines, because she was the first to break the silence, saying to Dad, “So you do believe Mrs. Caldwell’s story—I mean the part about how Kea was responding to someone who wasn’t there when she bolted down the hall and knocked the guy attacking her off balance?”
Dad looked at her and said, “Let’s just say, it’s not hard to imagine either of those particular dogs picking up on something like that. Not hard at all.”
I said, “But Mom says she doesn’t believe anything supernatural happened.”
Dad’s brow furrowed as he sat thinking. Finally, he said, “There’s a quote from Einstein that helped me understand your Mom’s position on these things. It’s not something I necessarily agree with, but he said basically, ‘There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.’ You see, Susan has a mind that’s more efficient than mine. She’ll do some math in her head to tell you the probability of this or that rare occurrence. With some effort, I can follow her calculations, but afterward I’ve got nothing left. She can figure out that something is quite possibly a coincidence instead of a miracle and still have enough mental energy left to be curious about the implications. She sees science as magic enough. But it costs me so much energy to follow her reasoning that when I get to the point of realizing no miracle took place, I’m too exhausted to be fascinated. All I am is disappointed. Honestly, I have to say she’s probably right about there being no benevolent force operating beneath the surface of nature, no miracles, but I can’t say for sure one way or the other, and since there’s some uncertainty, I take that to mean I have a choice in what I believe, a choice in how I live. And I kind of just prefer to live in a world where there’s some magic.”
“It’s all magic dear. And I think it’s doubtful Einstein ever said that.”
“Like I said, for you the plain reality is magic enough.”
“That’s because there’s nothing plain about reality.”
“Yeah, like I said. I’m just saying I don’t have the mental capacity to fully appreciate the intricacies of that reality. That’s why you’re the most magical thing in my life.”
“That’s very sweet dear. We’re still going to have a talk later about you keeping what Jax did from me all these years.”
“One question I have,” Tom said, “is what did you do with those bones, the ones Jax found at Avery’s old house?”
“This is where things get really interesting. I buried them in the same place I would eventually bury Jax himself. It was one his favorite places in the world—Kea’s too.”
“On the hill by the pond in your backyard?”
“Ha ha. Nope, it’s a little place called Bicentennial Woods. You see, there’s a storied arbor on the far side of the ridge overlooking the creek. Rumor has it, that place is very haunted. It’s always struck me as a beautiful place to visit. I still go back once in a while to reflect and reminisce about our time with Jax in our lives.”
Dad went silent again, his eyes losing focus. Then he turned to Mom and said, “Don’t worry honey, I know Bicentennial coming up twice tonight is only a coincidence. Still, what an interesting one.
“Now I have a question for you Tom. Did you ever find your damn keys?”
Also read: