Dog: I
The Lightning, The Transmission, The Hands
Before the dog could let out one of his clever barks, he had died. It was not a loud death for a canine companion. It happened as he was walking between buildings that were quite tall for any dog.
The sky split sideways, and the bolt of lightning struck him clean through the spine, electrifying the dog. His breath stopped, and his body convulsed, tail snapping straight like an arrow.
The death lasted three days. In that span, the dog dreamt of absolute doghood. Doghood is the operating system that runs on a dog’s hardware. Nose-first logic, hunger-logic, mate-logic. It is nature’s doing, the mechanisms crafted over millions of years of evolution. This was the general narrative of the dog’s dream. It was all he could think of the whole time, wagging his tail, posthumously.
After those three long days, something approached him inside the dream. It broke the coherence of everything the dog dreamt about thus far. It was big and walked on thousands of small feet with two long arms.
***
From above the sleeping dog, a sky chasm appears, and a pair of thin, long hands emerges. They are enormous in the dream and drip with crimson blood. The hands reach down, and without sound, they take the dog into the vortex. They take him up, placing him suspended in space.
Hands tear open the dog. The ribs tear apart, inviting in, and the amount of blood is equal to a full bucket. The being sees the dog, now split into two halves, and then presses those halves back together, leaving only a narrow gap between them. It then spits out tadpoles that flicker with lightning like eels, presses them into a squashed pile, and into the dog’s body.
At one point, the dog says, “Enough! I am already full.” The dog is shocked by himself, for how could he speak? What is speech even to someone like a dog?
The glowing tadpoles become the dog’s entrails. The dog is alive, still asleep, but it’s all incomprehensible to him.
The hands withdraw. The dog is whole again, gasping, yet still dreaming. He curls as if still sleeping and hovers back down toward the ground. When he hits the ground, he noses himself awake.
He opens his canine eyes, but now ventures deep underground. He implodes beneath the city, descending into the earth.
***
Mick leaned forward, his breath fogging with vanilla vape smoke.
The dog now lay on the coffee table, twitching softly, his limbs trembling. For a second, the scar along its ribs opened and closed like an eye.
Jenny stood by the window, smoking a Pall Mall cigarette; she didn’t notice the dog’s moving seam.
The apartment was a small, two-bedroom flat, about all that Jenny and Mick could afford.
“Come here, he looks full of somethin’,” Mick said.
Jenny shrugged. “Like you, you’re full of shit.”
“No,” he protested, crossing his arms. “You’re mean!”
“Maybe he’s not full of anything,” she replied.
“The hell does that mean? You speak in riddles?” Mick asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe I am just messing with you. I am sorry, hun.”
“He might have some parasites, Jen. He was gone for three full days.”
Suddenly, the dog’s entire side was moving as if something was lurching inside of him.
“Gotta take him to the vet, I’m worried about him,” he concluded.
The dog shifted, interrupting the conversation. He let out a soft beep, like a landline phone. Little did Mick and Jenny know that inside his belly, the glowing worms had already built a sophisticated system of tunnels, houses with streets, lights, and a judicial system to govern the dog’s body.
One worm slid halfway out of his side, through the wound, covered in something pulpy and translucent. Mick reached to touch it, then stopped, repulsed.
The phone rang, and the couple looked surprised. Landline calls were no longer a thing; if they rang, that didn’t happen very often. Jenny took the phone, jerking it. The phone didn’t like her yanking it this roughly; it winced in pain.
The phone made the transmission; its source was the dog. Jenny didn’t know that; she answered the call without saying a word. The voice on the other end was static until it wasn’t:
“You’re the couple,” a wild voice said.
“What couple?” Jenny asked.
“The couple. I don’t have much time; the transmission is through the dog. And they’re coming for you. Four of them in three to five minutes. Two baseball bats, a pistol, and a hatchet guy. Get creative. Survive this,” the voice continued, increasingly wild.
“Oh, okay,” Jenny said.
Clack.
She hung up the phone.
“What the fuck was that call about?” Mick broke the silence, lifting couch cushions and dusting them off. “Theology on the call?”
“Doubt it,” Jenny said, calmly walking to the kitchen and pulling the hammer from the drawer.
“Theology doesn’t usually send men with hatchets.” She looked at him thoughtfully.
“Wait, what?” Mick said.
“We got three minutes. Get ready.”
Mick nodded and said, “Well, we’d better prep then. I’m a prepper, you know me, Jen.”
***
The hallway lights flickered. The lights weren’t expecting this, and it troubled them. They had been living with Mick and Jenny for quite a while now, lighting up the staircase, the hallway, the lunchroom, and the bedroom. Something was about to disrupt their peace, and they knew it. The array of their minds mulled over this brightly, but, in the end, they wouldn’t know how to help out; all they could do was flicker on and off, dumbly, like on Christmas.
Lights aside, others were terrified, too.
The pipes, for that matter, had a bellyache—anxiety-induced IBS of water and rust. A long whine startled the pipes, and all at once, they dumped a rush of water through the boiler, a full-on diarrhoea fit. The pipes were terrified.
The air conditioning unit remained quiet for a minute or two. It was deeply worried about the entire situation, like its other colleagues. Its big electric heart was pumping the air in and out. It saw crouched figures of Mick and Jenny, and the dog underneath the table. The dog was ready to pounce. It would pet the dog if it only could.
The unit had a brilliant idea. It wanted to calm the couple down a little, even in the face of an incoming storm. So it turned down the temperature a notch, three degrees down. That was all it could do. Heat was bad for stress; it knew it, having gained all those years of experience from tinkering with temperature up and down, which had managed to modulate the couple’s behaviour the way it wanted.
It looked at Mick with its dead, knob-eyed stare. Mick was a big, brawny guy with a beard and a trucker hat. He used to be a carpenter before he started selling essential oils, earning a significant monthly revenue for himself. His face was as hard as stone; he was ready for whatever came next, a hardy man.
Then it looked at Jenny. Jenny had long, blonde hair, and she made handicrafts at home, including small figures, which she sold on Etsy. She now had a smirk on her face, and she almost seemed to be enjoying herself. The unit sensed some potential in that.
Then the dog. The dog was, strictly speaking, a good pal. His name was Dog, and he was a German Shepherd who loved smelling asses for a living, but now he had an infinitely more important job. Now, the dog was not only a family’s defender, but also a transmitter, and a clever one at that. He was happy to serve that purpose; two responsibilities are better than one.
But now things were about to get messy real quick, and he knew it.
Next on DOG: The apartment comes under siege, the lights and pipes panic, and Dog finds out what his new body can really do.
Third Eye Horror
© Maciej Sitko, 2025
All rights reserved.
Hi i'm starting the series all over again, now that I have a better grasp on your writing style, and I'm saying again that I like it.
I really liked how wild this was.