A Hard Days' Night

a hard days’

night

Feedback (good, bad, indifferent, just want to bother me, whatever) is appreciated. Please write to: theangstguy@yahoo.com

Synopsis: A serial tale that describes what actually happened during the Daria TV show that the network did not show us, as narrated by an important background personage having first-hand knowledge of events depicted in the show’s third season, a time the narrator feels was quite taxing for the necessity of saving both his family and the earth, not to mention keeping his very skin intact.

Author’s Notes have been moved to the end of the story, except to note here that this serial tale appeared on both PPMB and SFMB from July through September 2007.

Acknowledgements have also moved to the end. Enjoy.

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things!”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed in as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Chapter I:

Karma and Dogma

Right, first things first. As much as I love humans, and despite my cynicism I truly do (some more than others), it pains me to point out that they have certain blind spots in common that must be tolerated if one is to get along with them, as there is so little chance of seeing improvement in those areas in this lifetime or any other. One of my—excuse the phrase—pet peeves is how little humans actually know about the world around them, and in particular how little they know about their so-called companions on this grand old earth. I include myself in the latter category—the pet category, to be specific.

For example, a lot of people think the phrase, “It’s a dog’s life,” means dogs have it made. First, that’s not what the phrase means, and second, nothing could be further from the truth. People who think dogs have an idyllic existence have severely limited powers of observation. (Bluntly, they couldn’t smell a squirrel if one was hanging from the rear end of the dog in front of them.) Dogs have all sorts of problems, and I would know, as I am a proud member of that distinguished species, being first and foremost a stout English bulldog (a brown brindle, white legs and belly, white spot on my muzzle, handsome in the unconventional way bulldogs are). Granted, I was born and raised in America, but I am cognizant of my distinguished heritage. Granted, too, I am a bit up in years (nine plus two months) and creaky in the joints, and some might think me portly (fifty-five pounds, thank you for letting it go at that), but if I may say so I am also one of my kind’s better representatives. My role as a family guardian is a source of great pride to me, I am loyal as the year is long, sweet tempered, and . . . well, best to let it go there or else I will bore you. (And tenacious, I should mention that before we move on.) Also, I am the only canine I know of who can type 40 words a minute and use the Internet properly. You may call me J.B., since everyone else does. (The initials probably once stood for “John Bull,” but everyone, including my best human friend Dawn, has forgotten that, so I will do the same.)

Going back to my original point, a dog’s life is full of trials and tribulations, and my life is no exception. A guardian must be ever vigilant, ever ready for anything that comes. “What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens,” as Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1837. (I am fond of quoting him in my e-mails.) No time better illustrates this point than the junior year in high school of my best friend, Dawn, when the boundaries weakened between the real world and those worlds beyond, and unimaginable chaos threatened to loose itself upon the earth. It did not, of course, or else you would not be reading this, but it almost did, and I live to tell the tale. And I meant the word “unimaginable” in a literal sense. You may believe you have heard nonsense before in your life, but (to paraphrase the Red Queen in the Looking-Glass World), I’ve seen and heard nonsense compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary. (I am also fond of quoting Carroll in my e-mails, but who isn’t?)

A hint of what was to come was afforded me about the same time that school began, in mid-August 1998, when I had just turned eight. I believe it was a Wednesday, and around four o’clock that afternoon I had let myself out of my family’s backyard to stretch and take a whiff of the neighborhood (squirrels here, cat there, pepperoni and bacon pizza scraps about two streets over) when I saw this stick on the other side of the street. Not just any stick, mind you, but a great stick. Another dog would know what I mean. I saw this stick and right there made up my mind to carry it around the block for a while and show it off, incidentally implying to all the other local dogs that I was in such good standing with my human family that I was allowed to wander about as I please without a leash. That was a bit overstated, of course, as it was closer to the truth to say my human family had no idea I had even left the yard. However, the fact that they left the back fence in such poor condition argued in my favor, for if they didn’t trust me, they would have fixed the fence, correct? The defense rests.

So, there was the stick and there was I, and I was walking across the street to get the stick, as any right-minded dog would do, when the next thing I knew there was a dreadful screeching of tires close by, and the front bumper of this positively enormous sport utility vehicle was parked next to my right ear, close enough that I could have licked it if I had wanted, which I of course did not. Now, to be sure, I had heard a vehicle coming toward me from the right, and a fairly loud one at that, and despite some problems with my peripheral vision I had even seen it in the corner of my eye, moving in an erratic manner with many changes of direction and sudden stops and starts, but the perfection of the stick occupied my attention and what was I to do? I trusted of course that the humans in the vehicle would see me in time, as it was a clear day without rain or fog, and that they would take appropriate action, like stopping well back from me until I had finished retrieving the stick, or, if they were in a great hurry, going well around me through one of the many front yards available for that purpose.

It never once occurred to me that they might actually continue driving toward me until they were on the verge of striking me for no reason at all, as if I were a Bad Dog, which I hasten to say I was not even if I was out of the backyard and in the middle of the street when I wasn’t supposed to be, but we have already dispensed with those issues and should move on. I confess to having a certain anxiety when I noticed my trust had been betrayed: the vehicle was close enough that escape from it was grossly unlikely, and I would be forced to rely upon divine providence for my survival. I shut my eyes and winced, expecting a blow far more painful than a rap on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper—

—when the vehicle screeched to a halt by my ear, as previously noted, and I was spared. Divine providence (by which I mean the innate good judgment of the humans within the vehicle as well as heavenly intervention) had come through! Praise God and humanity! My continuity thus ensured, I retrieved the stick and got up on the opposite lawn to see who had come so near to giving me a catastrophic thump with a multi-ton object, and why.

There were two people inside the vehicle: a young frightened-looking girl who wore those odd eye-enhancing frames that some people are fond of using, and an older woman who looked to be the girl’s mother. The terrified younger girl was the driver of the car, and from her nervous demeanor I deduced that she was being trained to drive and had likely failed to notice me in time to stop properly. A failure on the part of her peripheral vision, no doubt thanks to those eye-frames. Poor little pup, she was clearly more distressed at the idea of hurting me that I had been of being hurt. The girl’s mother pointed at me, indicating that I had survived the encounter intact, and the girl’s subsequent look of relief was as clear as my food dish at suppertime. I forgave her on the spot, gave her a wag and a bark—though the latter proved difficult with a stick in my mouth—then bounded off to let her recover in peace.

Being so blessed, I vowed to enjoy my reprieve and dwell no further on the issue of my destruction. As I rambled through the neighborhood, however, I reflected on my good fortune and thought how sad it was that I could not share it with my family, specifically with my best of all human friends, the incomparable Dawn. To mention a word of this episode would reveal my petty sin of leaving the yard, and I most assuredly did not want the fence to be fixed and so prevent any further exploration of the neighborhood on my own, even if I had already explored it as thoroughly as any dog possibly could.

These ruminations deepened, and I began to reflect upon whether my close call with the SUV was some sort of omen, a warning of events that were even then on their way toward intersection with my life and the lives of those I cared about. Dogs are more superstitious than you would believe, and for good reason, but we will take up the why of this later. In any event, it was difficult to shake off an anxiety about this, and my unease began to open mental doors I wished had been left closed. Why had I not noticed the vehicle on its approach? My senses were top-notch for an eight-year-old bulldog, except of course for that peripheral vision problem, and since I was a pup I had known enough to stay out of the road, and at least to check for dangers if I decided I had to cross. So, all said and done, why had I not noticed the—no, that is not right—why had I not reacted to the SUV’s approach as I should have? I knew it was coming. I knew I was in its way. Why, then, did I ignore it and keep going?

At this mental thunderbolt, I stopped dead on the sidewalk and put down the stick, giving it a long look. It no longer seemed such a fine stick. My desire for it had almost caused my death. Why had I wanted it so in the first place? Did it have to do with my wanting out of the yard, looking for any excuse to get away from home for a while and enjoy a little time by myself? Was I a Bad Dog? I much doubted that; I had gotten out before without incident, so the sin itself was of no importance. (“Little things affect little minds” —Disraeli.)

As I contemplated the stick, another answer came to mind, a gut feeling more than anything thought out. I became convinced that the entire event with the stick and the car had been an omen. Some Power in the larger scheme of things had used the stick as a lure to give me a warning, a head’s up. It had happened to me before (a tale for another time), and I had wisely learned to attend to seemingly random occurrences. Yes, something of undesirable consequence was coming, a thing that threatened not only me but those over whom I claimed guardianship. Most importantly, if I wasn’t focusing my attention on the world around me, as I have so often accused humans of doing, that destructive event would flatten me out as that SUV had almost done—and it would take my loved ones as well.

Though paranoid in flavor (one learns to think like that as a true guardian), that assessment felt right. I stared at the stick a moment longer, then went home. I entered the house as I usually did, through the secret basement window after giving a woof for identification, then down the slide to my basement study, then to the dumbwaiter to reach the first floor, as my joints were not as supple as they once were and climbing the stairs had become a chore. Being rather overheated from my ten-minute walk, I was grateful for the air conditioning; I have long believed air conditioning was proof that humans had divine favor, as I notice that God did not give air conditioning to any other species. True, any exercise is good exercise (“The wise, for cure, on exercise depend” —John Dryden), but I am a bulldog and not a greyhound (“There is moderation even in excess” —Disraeli again).

Dawn finally got home ten minutes after I did. I knew her from the way she opened the front door and dropped her backpack before wandering into the family room, where I lay in repose on the old sofa, on which I am allowed to do as I wish (not so on the new sofa, but I digress). She blew me a kiss when she walked in, then sat down next to me. I opened my eyes just enough to make out her blurry form: a moderately stout (“well nourished,” in human parlance) teenager with a round face and a pleasant manner as befit a classic Libra, clad in a jacket and jeans with her noisemaking apparatus—earphones, I mean—attached to her head and operating as per usual. She smelled of sweat from her phys-ed class, spinach lasagna from lunch, breath mints, and a meatball sub and cheese fries, the latter a result of stopping by her favorite pizza hangout with her friends after school. Her scent was glory to me, because Dawn was the only one in the family who spoiled me in the manner in which I had become accustomed: rubbing my back, scratching behind my ears and around my neck—if you have a dog, you must know the drill. One could not hope for a more loving and dependable companion as she. It was paradise.

That day, though, I was unable to completely surrender myself to her kindly ministrations. The accursed episode with the car lurked in the back of my consciousness, and I began to worry that, if my dark premonition proved correct, this idyllic time would come to an abrupt end, perhaps sooner than I dared imagine. I reflected upon this and knew fear, though I did not betray any sign of my concerns to Dawn. I did lick her hand once or twice, but not for the meatball taste, as much as I appreciated it. A lick is the closest thing to a kiss that any dog can manage, and a gesture not to be shared with just anyone (at least, not by me). I pledged myself then and there that I would do anything possible to protect and defend my gracious queen, my Dawn, and I would do the impossible, even give my life, if it were required to keep her safe and happy. “Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions,” wrote Disraeli, and I would like to think that applies also to dogs, where appropriate.

Alas, I admit that as I lay there upon the old sofa, I still clung to a secret optimism that such sacrifices would not be required of me; surely all would turn out well. Fate, however, was not intending to feed my hopes, but had instead prepared for me a banquet of nightmares as could not be envisioned even by the insane. You know the outcome, but you do not know the fight, the descent into the dark gulf that not even I could have foretold. Here is my tale.

Chapter 2:

Hounded by Trouble

My intuition that a novel set of difficulties was winding its way in my direction proved sadly accurate, if dreadfully understated. “Variety is the mother of Enjoyment,” wrote Disraeli, but the variety I began to experience did not pertain to any sense of the word “enjoyment” with which I had previously been familiar. Following the first outburst of unseasonable, world-threatening perils in and around my home town, I felt a strong need for a different kind of companionship than the magnificent Dawn could provide (no fault of her own, I hasten to assure you), so I collected my frayed nerves and once more let myself out of the backyard to visit my second-best friend, in the adjacent subdivision. I recall it was an overcast Thursday evening in mid-September; my family had left to go shopping. My second-best friend let me in through the back door after I buzzed him. A minute later I was in his private study, collapsed over his ottoman with none of my four paws touching the floor.

“You worry too much, old boy,” said my second-best friend. He leaned back in his leather executive chair, clad in golfing clothes with his tennis shoes propped up on his cluttered desk. We were surrounded by great shelves of books that reached to the ceiling, between which were crammed diplomas and certificates covering what little wall space was left. My second-best friend was toying with an origami bird he had just made, the kind that flapped its wings when you pulled its tail.

“What, me worry?” I replied, rolling my eyes. “That must be a kind of humor peculiar to humans. You must explain it to me sometime. After all that’s happened, now you tell me that I shouldn’t worry.” (If I failed before now to inform the reader that I can speak as well as type and use computers, I beg forgiveness. Bulldogs have a short muzzle that is a magnificent aid to vocalization, which I should have mentioned earlier as one of my good points, but I wanted to avoid boring you.)

“Look at how well you’ve been doing,” my friend said, unfolding the paper bird as he spoke. “Last month you broke into those abandoned quarry tunnels and discovered the secret particle-beam accelerator that Metalmouth was using to guide Hurricane Bonnie toward Washington, D.C.—not to mention Baltimore and Lawndale—and you pulled out the plug and deactivated the accelerator so Bonnie gave us only a glancing blow before heading out to sea. That was magnificent! And that was on top of discovering the aerosol projector inside the Giant Strawberry that the Grey aliens were using to spray psychotropic chemicals over the suburb before the storm hit. You’re a hero a thousand times over, J.B. They’d give you the Congressional Medal of Honor if only you’d own up to it.”

“And I would be taken away for study by government scientists and lose Dawn in the process,” I finished. “No, thank you. And you were as responsible as I was for stopping Metalmouth and his allies. Why aren’t you applying for that Medal of Honor?”

“You know how I hate the D.C. bureaucracy,” he replied mildly. “Isn’t worth the trip for any medal. Country clubs—now that’s where real power lies!” His fingers folded and refolded the paper. “Artie did his share in stopping the invasion too, of course. He could go claim the medal for all three of us, though I doubt anyone would believe him. Boy doesn’t know when to shut up. Everything that comes out of that young man’s mouth makes him seem more delusional than before.” He grimaced. “Shame about his skin getting stolen, though. He says that synthetic skin the Greys grafted on him makes his forehead feel too tight.”

“I should emphasize that the Giant Strawberry device did spray Lawndale,” I put in, not finished with my sour mood quite yet. “That was entirely my fault. I couldn’t get it shut off in time because I had to find Metalmouth’s secret lab and crawl through the ventilation ducts to get to it.”

“And what harm was done as a result? None.” Andrew Landon held up the origami bird. He had refolded it in a new way so that when you pulled its tail, it not only flapped its wings but opened its mouth as if cawing. “So everyone in town got to sing and dance a bit. It’s good exercise. Michele and I cut the rug ourselves when we’re in the mood. And those chemicals muddled everyone’s memories just enough to keep them from later on wondering why they’d been participating in an off-Broadway musical while a Category Three storm was bearing down on them. Aside from a few sore throats and sore feet, everyone was fine.”

“But if I’d only figured out the particle beam’s location a little sooner,” I moaned. “Poor Jodie—”

“Jodie took the antidote like Michele and I did, so she was singing and dancing of her own free will while she was keeping an eye on the students, making sure they didn’t get hurt. She had four years of ballet in grade school, did I tell you that? Wanted to be a ballerina, but—”

“The damage, the chaos—”

“All the tree limbs have been cleaned up, the roofs have been repaired, and the flooded basements drained. Get Dawn to give you a tummy rub when you get home. You deserve a break.”

I adore Andrew for his optimism, even if I find it intellectually impossible to take his point of view. “What about the satanists in High Hills Park? What if they start reanimating the dead again?”

“The worst thing their zombies can do is jaywalk, you know that. It’s not like that three-hundred-year-old witch over in Burkittsville is helping them.”

“Oh, thank you so much for bringing her up again,” I muttered, glaring at him. “I had almost forgotten about her. And what about the carnivorous plants that escaped from last year’s expo and infested the unstable landfill? What if they attack the home of the director of public works?”

“That weed killer I gave to the local lawn-maintenance companies is keeping them down.”

“And the cannibal grandparents at the Better Days Retirement Home, the ones who claimed they helped Doctor Lechter escape from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane?”

Andrew tossed aside the origami bird, which now laid paper-wad eggs when you pulled its tail. Or maybe those weren’t eggs. “Now I know you need a vacation,” he said. “Ever since you almost got nailed by that SUV, you’ve not been yourself. Where’s that loveable, fun-loving J.B. who used to beat the pants off me in Missile Command? Are you sure that car didn’t give you a bump on the old noggin?”

“My noggin doesn’t need any new bumps,” I grumbled. “It has plenty already. Times have changed, Andrew. We’ve never encountered this many paranormal manifestations before, not to mention the abundance of peculiar mundane events. I literally cannot imagine what’s next on the disaster roster.”

“Mmm. We have been fairly busy of late, but things could be worse.” He spread his hands and began to sing one of his favorite Monty Python tunes: “Always look on the bright side of life—”

“Stop!” I howled. “Please stop this instant! I’ll be forced leave if you don’t—”

Andrew chuckled and rolled his chair over to me. His huge hands began to gently scratch behind my ears.

Against my will, I began to relax. “No fair,” I muttered as I closed my eyes. “That’s cheating. I want my bad humor back.”

“Resistance is futile,” he intoned. “Old boy, you and I have taken on the worst of them, and we’ve always come out on top. You’re the best partner I’ve ever had in this business. There isn’t a serial puppy kicker around who won’t think twice before tangling with our team.”

“I just wish the serial puppy kickers would go away,” I whispered, half awake under the gentle massage. “I wish they’d all go far, far away.”

“‘Everything comes if a man will only wait,’” said Andrew.

I gave a half-hearted growl. “Mere waiting accomplishes nothing, and I’m the one who quotes Disraeli around here, I’ll have you know.”

“Very well. How about: ‘What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight—”

We finished the saying together: “‘—it’s the size of the fight in the dog.’”

“Eisenhower,” I added before he could. “May I ask you a personal question?”

He kept scratching the back of my head. It was marvelous. “Fire away.”

“Does origami really help you conceptualize the fourth dimension?”

Andrew laughed and wheeled away from me, heading back to his overflowing desk. “It does seem to help,” he said, picking up the paper bird and studying it. “My father taught me how to fold paper after he got out of the Army, back in the fifties. He was stationed in Japan and picked it up there. Man, I must have made a thousand grocery sacks full of little birds and dinosaurs and things once I caught on to it. I was always good at math, topology especially. It just came naturally to me.” He smiled at me. “It didn’t hurt that it helped me create that folding coffee cup. The Army liked it well enough to put one in every MRE kit, and the rest—” He waved a hand at the well-to-do surroundings “—was history.”

I knew the story of the folding coffee cup already, but I was tolerant of Andrew’s enjoyment in repeating it, at least as tolerant as he was of my compulsive need to complain about everything. “So,” I continued, grateful for the change in topic, “you say you can see four-dimensional objects in your head, like tesseracts or—um, those jar things, I’m afraid I forgot—”

“Klein bottles.” He picked up a small hand-blown glass object from the chaos of books and papers on his desk. It looked like a clear ball with a curved handle. He regarded it with a solemn expression. “If I can find a way to crack through to the fourth dimension, we might be able to resolve that local weakening of spacetime that’s giving you, me, and everyone else in the Chesapeake Bay area so much grief. I think you’re right that we’ve had far too many of these disturbances lately, supernatural or otherwise.”

He put down the Klein bottle and turned to one of his bookshelves, reaching for an egg-sized object that looked like the inside of transistor radio with the cover removed. “I had an idea for a kind of supernatural-event detector,” he said, “something like that PKE meter from the Ghostbusters movies, only I can’t get it to work properly.”

I raised an eyebrow. “A ghost detector?”

“More than that. I got the idea a year ago from reading about wormholes. There’s a kind of radiation that a wormhole should emit, especially an inter-universe type going from parallel world to parallel world.”

“From a ghost world to this world, for instance.” I was following him as best I could. Quantum mechanics was never my strong suite, but I’d had only eight years of proper schooling.

“Possibly. I got to thinking that a wormhole would of course produce instability in localized spacetime, and a natural consequence of that would be tachyons.” He looked uncomfortable, not meeting my gaze. “I can skip over the theory involved—”

“Please do,” I sighed.

“All right,” he said, as relieved as I was. “In short, this little device should detect tachyons out to a twelve-mile radius, giving us a leg up on any cross-universal invasion taking place, maybe even that old bitty in Burkittsville, assuming she’s concealing herself in—”

“Andrew, please, can we not bring her up any further? My nerves.”

“Well, you know what I’m talking about.” He shook his head, frowning at the device. “Can’t get it to work, though.”

The tachyon detector looked like junk to me, but most human inventions do. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s . . . it seems to be picking up tachyon radiation all the time, but it shouldn’t. I must not have set the sensitivity right. Maybe I’m getting superbradyons or something.”

“Picking up radiation all the time?” I repeated.

“Yeah.”

I thought for a moment. “As if there was a wormhole open somewhere nearby?”

“Yeah, but that’s not possible. Wormholes aren’t stable, not even a traversable one. The amount of energy to keep one of those open would be tremendous.”

“Pardon? What kind of wormhole?”

“Traversable, a wormhole you can walk through, travel through.”

A dreadful thought struck, and I shivered involuntarily. “That witch in Burkittsville—”

“Thought of that, but it can’t be. She’s over thirty miles west of us, out of the detection range.”

“Thank God for small favors. Aliens, maybe?”

“Aliens have UFOs; they don’t need wormholes. They don’t even like the East Coast, except to try to get rid of us or pick on Artie. Poor kid.”

I nodded at the device. “Does that thing measure signal strength? If you put it in your car and drive around, will it make more noise or whatever if it’s near the source of the tacky-whatevers?”

“Good idea, but I haven’t tried it. Still think it’s messed up.”

I studied the device. “Could I carry that around attached to my collar?”

“What?” Andrew eyed me, then the device. “Don’t see why not. I could fix up a little earpiece for you, so you could hear it click. It’ll sound like a Geiger counter, the tachyon strikes registering like little clicks. You want to try hauling it around?”

My ears perked up. “I could. It might take my mind off everything else, and maybe we would learn something from it. ‘Ignorance never settles a question.’”

Andrew snorted. “You’re going to run out of Disraeli quotations one of these days, and then what are you going to do?”

“Quote Gladstone. Why don’t you go ahead and put that thing on me? Dawn and the rest of the family went to the mall to shop for clothes, so I’ve nothing else to do. If they’re true to form, they won’t be back until nine, and I can get it off and hide it under my bed pillows before they get in.”

Andrew had the device attached to my collar in under ten minutes. The weight was uncomfortable, but well within tolerance. The earpiece took a little longer to fix, but he managed to jerry-rig a suitable wireless device so I wouldn’t have an obvious cord going into my ear from the detector.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to try to get a close look at the tachyon detector,” said Andrew when he finished. “I wouldn’t want to put my face next to a bulldog’s mouth just to peek at his collar.”

“I’ve always been the perfect gentleman,” I sniffed. “I’m coura—”

“—courageous, loyal, sweet-tempered, tenacious, yada, yada, yada.” He checked his watch. “I’d better head out and pick up Jodie. She stayed after school for a student council meeting, and I promised to take her for ice cream before she did her homework. She’s a great kid.”

I gave him a doggish smile. Andrew was a demanding father, but he loved his children. A real brick, through and through. If it weren’t for him . . . well, for all my attempts at heroism, if it weren’t for Andrew, none of us would be here. I wouldn’t have so many of my dog-adapted tools, like my computer, or my excellent backdoor entry system at my home. Dawn’s father worked at Andrew Landon’s light industrial plant as the security foreman. The items Andrew made for me were given for free. It’s a complicated arrangement and will have to be discussed here another time, if at all. We’ll just say for now that I was originally supposed to be an “informal experiment.”

I left Andrew’s home by the back door and headed out at a leisurely pace. My joints haven’t been the same since I turned seven, so it took time to warm up to the walk. Click-click, click-click, click-click—the tachyon detector spit a random string of echoed hits into my left ear, sounding like a ping-pong tournament. At first the sound was interesting, then less so, then rather boring. I began a large circle around the subdivision, hoping to detect an increase or decrease in the noise of tachyon hits, if that was what they were, before my legs gave out. The sun was about to drop below the skyline, but I had about an hour after dusk to roam about before I had to go home to greet my family—assuming they hadn’t already arrived home and found my presence wanting. Wouldn’t that herald a jolly time for one and all.

As I went I was careful not to step on any cracks in the sidewalk—an old habit learned from humans, as you might guess. I did say dogs were superstitious, and for good cause. We normally sense a bit of the invisible world, the realm of ghosts and spirits and all unwholesome things that should have stayed in the grave but did not. We could detect abnormal odors, the scent of the supra-mundane, the whiff of those not of this world. We could hear whispers where humans heard only the wind, note the crack of a trodden stick on a soundless night. Little wonder we often bark at seeming nothing: we see threats everywhere that humans almost never do. Perhaps it’s better that way, perhaps not.

I reflected on my vision as I walked. If only my eyesight was as grand as my other senses: a poor peripheral sense and mild nearsightedness that were my nemeses only, and of course the red-green colorblindness all dogs shared. I could see a little color, of course, colors that Andrew and I had determined were what humans knew as a muted yellow and blue, different from black, white, and gray. Humans and I saw the same blue sky and blue sea, the same bright sun. Beyond that, I would never know the legendary hues that humans called red, orange, green, or purple—not even the brown everyone tells me is the color of my coat. In my favor, my night vision was terrific, vastly better than human—within range, of course—and I had fine movement detection, too—when I was paying attention, which wasn’t as often as I would like. Plus there were the usual bulldog issues with eye infections, irritations, allergies, what have you. Overall, a negative balance. A complete pain, that’s what it was, but what can you do? What—

Clickclickclicklclickclick. I stopped and frowned more than I usually did. I was on the northwest side of the subdivision, and the hit rate had picked up considerably in mere seconds. Beyond the edge of the housing area was a commercial district along a boulevard: shops and stores, restaurants, car lots, the usual. I looked around, but noticed nothing out of the ordinary . . . except for a new scent in the air. It was unfamiliar, almost electrical, and made my nose wrinkle and my nerves twitch and the hair rise all along my back. I had smelled it before but never under benevolent circumstances. My heart skipped a beat, possibly two or three.

Others were here. Creatures not of this earth had found their way to Lawndale. I sensed their presence as clear as daylight, of which very little was left.

For all my talk about bulldogs being stout and brave, I confess there are times when it is exactly that, mere talk. In that awful moment when I knew there were Others about, I nearly wet the sidewalk like a whimpering pup. It was the scent that had been on the zombies raised by the cult in High Hills Park, the smell around the Greys’ aerosol sprayer in the Giant Strawberry, the stench of the invader. I had to flee at once and call Andrew for help—

Slowly, the blood began to move in my veins again. Or, I thought, I could also find out what the matter was, do a bit of investigating on my own so I could give Andrew a more accurate report. No sense going off half-cocked, as they say. “The secret of success is constancy to purpose” —good old Benjamin Disraeli. My resolve thus strengthened, I moved onward with exceeding caution. To avoid attracting any further attention, I got off the sidewalk and went through a row of bushes, which put me on the edge of an access road and a line of parking lots that ran behind the businesses nearby. The gathering darkness would serve to conceal me from casual view. I still regretted that I could not carry a radio or cell phone with me, but Metalmouth and others had buried sophisticated electronic eavesdropping systems all about town, and we could not risk giving away our plans.

I remember thinking that with any luck at all, the scent would lead me to a jaywalking zombie that had gotten separated from its fellows several weeks ago when we sent the rest of its kind back to the grave. The zombies had not been overly destructive, though they had a nasty bite and tended to rush you as one, making it difficult to—

Low voices echoed ahead, stirring me from my reverie. I crept forward until I peeked around the side of a parked car, behind a Chinese restaurant whose smell was familiar, as Dawn was fond of its pork fried rice. Despite my nearsightedness, I could see extraordinarily well in the twilight, even better than in the full light of day. Score one for canine eyes.

A cluster of teenagers dressed in unusually outlandish and disturbing fashions stood next to a dumpster, the latter pushed against the back wall of the restaurant. The tachyon detector took in so many hits that the earpiece gave off nothing but sustained static. I realized I was very close to an open wormhole, though I saw nothing out of ordinary except the teens . . . who collectively smelled of the Other. It was them that I had been seeking. They were the invaders. I swallowed and shivered.

Teenagers, though? Perhaps my fevered imagination had grown overheated. It stood to reason that not every invader from another dimension or universe had to be a foe. Despite their off-putting clothing, tattoos, piercings, and what have you, were they any worse than the teenagers with whom Dawn attended secondary school? Logically not. I was seized with the impulse to walk out and greet them, welcome them to our world, and give them a chance to put the right foot forward.

It was then that one of those otherworldly teenagers grabbed another from behind, pulled out a knife, and slashed open the victim’s throat from ear to ear.

Chapter 3:

The Melancholy Days Are Come

The unfortunate youth fell with a gurgling noise that tried to become a scream. A computer keyboard slid from his hands and clattered beside him on the asphalt. He struggled for a second to rise, then yielded to the inevitable and relaxed against the bloody pavement, quiet and motionless. A dark pool crept out around him and glistened in the streetlights. His eyes remained open, glazed with shock.

The other teenagers stood with their eyes locked on the body. One of them, a girl, had gasped as the horrific deed was done, but not one of the five standing cried out or made any attempt to run. I had the impression that they were—there’s no decent way to put this—they were fascinated by what they had witnessed, morbidly drawn to drink in every moment of horror. I am sure my heart did not beat at all during that grim episode or for half a minute afterward.

“Wow,” breathed the girl standing next to the murderer. She was about five and a quarter feet tall, hair braided in cornrows, wearing a skin-tight minidress that barely covered her ample mammaries and buttocks. (Humans are curiously built, but this is not the place for a digression.) The girl then turned to the killer and said, as best as I could make out at a distance, “Why’d you do Wye?”

The murderer was a tall young man with wiry muscles, wearing a pulled-out T-shirt, dirty jeans, and scuffed cowboy boots. The T-shirt had the name of a long-ago punk band stenciled across it, the Dead Kennedys. (It was not a group with which I was overly familiar, nor did I want such familiarity.) His face was the part of him that arrested my attention—bland, for some reason that word comes back to me, it was bland and unremarkable, shallow and unaffected. It was as devoid of humanity as the empty space between the stars. That emptiness frightened me more than anything else about him.

When the girl asked the question of him, the murderer shrugged. “Didn’t like ‘im,” he said, his voice as bland as his face.

“You didn’t like him?” repeated the girl in the minidress.

The tall youth knelt and wiped his bloody Bowie knife across the dead boy’s pants before standing. He tucked the long blade into a sheath hanging from the back of his belt, then pulled his T-shirt down to conceal the weapon. “Talked too much,” he elaborated as he grinned.

The girl looked taken aback—then burst out in a wild peal of laughter. Of the other three present, only the humongous, bare-chested wrestler-type joined in her glee; he positively roared with mirth, the sound loud enough to echo for blocks. I have no idea why the noise did not attract anyone’s attention, unless the listeners were understandably afraid to investigate. The lad was six and a half feet tall from his black leather boots, black pants, and nail-studded belt, on up his massively muscled chest and tree-trunk arms covered with tattoos and piercings, to the top of his shaved, glistening head. An open black vest completed his clothing, though he had a delightful nose ring, earrings, and a dozen other metallic ornaments scattered about his person, imbedded in his skin. I noticed that he also wore a thin gold necklace of some sort, as indeed did all of the five who still lived.

The two silent members of the group included a young man who appeared to be completely wrapped in a dull gray metallic foil that made a soft creaking sound when he moved. He had no other covering or clothing, not even boots, except for a pair of thick black goggles over his eyes and the aforementioned necklace. The dull metal foil covered his nose and mouth as completely as the rest of him, but he showed no distress at being unable to breathe.

As appalling as the rest of the group was, it was the last one who caused me the most apprehension. She was, if my estimation of human standards of pulchritude is accurate, a shockingly, even preternaturally beautiful young woman, so striking and perfect she could have been a living work of art. Yet as I watched, I saw that she also had a peculiar facial tic: every few seconds, her flawless face would twitch, and in that instant her beauty would vanish and her skin would shrivel like the visage of an aged, withered corpse. Her lips would pull back to reveal teeth set in a ghastly rictus; her eyes would turn into hollow sockets; her cheeks would melt away into fleshless bone. This nightmarish transformation did not appear to trouble the diminutive young woman in the slightest.

The shortest of the group at just over five feet, the beautiful young woman bore a waterfall of long, thick hair so densely black it was without detail; it was cut in bangs across her white forehead but otherwise fell freely down her back and along the sides of her head, perfectly framing her face. Her soot-black lips and long-sleeved, square-necked gown were as featureless as her hair, and her bottomless onyx eyes had been highlighted with Goth-like makeup to emphasize their mysteriousness. Though her hands, face, neck, and the top of her chest were alabaster white, they were as featureless as the darker parts of her. She had no trace of grayness nor hue of color, not anywhere on her—only dead black, dead white, and nothing else. I tore my gaze from her with the greatest effort to follow what the rest of the unearthly group was doing.

“You know what’s gonna happen now, right?” said the girl in the minidress to the young man who had slain their companion. “I mean, you know what ain’t gonna happen?”

“What?” said the youth after a beat. His tone made it clear he did not care one whit what would happen.

“There ain’t gonna be no day for Wye now,” she said. “His day ain’t gonna come. All that stuff Wye was talkin’ ‘bout, crashin’ the ‘net an’ all that, it’s not gonna happen now ‘cause he’s dead. You killed him in the real world, so Wye’s dead for good, an’ so’s his day.”

The bland-faced murderer stared at her, then snorted and glanced around the group with a little smirk. “Too bad,” he said.

The girl in the minidress and the leather-clad wrestler laughed uproariously at this bon mot. The metal-foil man and black-and-white girl looked on in silence. My lungs were about to burst from my unwillingness or physical inability to breathe.

“Oh, wow!” said the minidress girl at last, catching her breath and wiping her eyes. “You’re so freakin’ funny! You know, I even told Wye to watch out ‘cause you might get him, but he didn’t listen! He didn’t get it at all!”

“Huh?” said the murderer, staring at her again. His grin was gone, his face empty and dangerous.

The girl snickered without looking at him. “I said to Wye, ‘Beware the Ides of March,’ but he didn’t get it! I told him you might do it!” She then noticed the killer’s stare—and instantly flew into towering rage. “Don’t you start in on me!” she shrieked at the murderer. “Ain’t nothin’ happenin’ to you, so get the hell over it! Don’t you dare look at me that way!”

The murderer’s gaze lingered on her a moment more, then he appeared to withdraw from the confrontation. He looked away and began scanning their common surroundings. I pulled further back behind the parked car, fearful of discovery, but the killer did not appear to notice me. “So,” he asked as if nothing at all had happened, “where’d your big sister go?”

“Hell if I know,” the girl said. “Weenie goes where she wants. Bitch thinks she’s all that. She’s such a holiday whore. I don’t do that freakin’ trick or treat. This devil wants a night out first, and I like real tricks.” She made a reaching motion in the air with her right hand and suddenly had a lit cigarette between her fingers. “Thinks she’s all that,” she muttered, looking down at the dead teen at her feet, then she put the cigarette to her full lips. The ashen cigarette tip burned like the sun.

“Dev,” said the wrestler with a faint Germanic accent that reminded me of Arnold Schwarzenegger, “wheh ah we going?”

“Anywhere we want,” she said, blowing out a long cloud of smoke. “We can go anywhere we wanna go.” She looked back at him. “Where you wanna go, Wulf?”

The wrestler grinned broadly. His teeth were like the grillwork on a battered semi tractor, with a couple of gaps visible. “I like to fight,” he said slowly. “Anywheh iz good.”

Dev in the minidress glanced at the silent members of the group, specifically at the black-and-white girl. “Frye, you an’ Trin wanna hang with us, or you got stuff you wanna do?”

The black-and-white girl glanced down at the body in the pool of blood. “We’ll clean up,” she said. Her voice was beautiful even in my ears, but beautiful in a way that made your heart ache and stomach turn over. “You guys go ahead.”

“Whatever,” said Dev with a trace of annoyance. She turned to the killer. “Ides, you goin’ with Wulf an’ me?”

Ides ran a hand over his combed-back hair, smoothing it down. “Sure,” he said.

“Cool,” said Dev. She gave Wye’s body a last look, kicked it once with a high heel, then waved at Frye and Trin. She, Ides, and Wulf sauntered off, heading around the side of the restaurant for the main boulevard. As Dev walked off, her arm came up and she snapped the cigarette away. It flew through the air and landed in the open dumpster bin behind the restaurant.

Frye looked at Trin, who gazed down at the body. As soon as the others were gone, she bent down and reached for the dead boy’s neck. Her fingers curled around a bloody chain, and she jerked it free and lifted it to her face. A medallion swung from the end before her black eyes. Her face twitched and became skull-like for an instant, then was beautiful again. A few seconds later, she flipped the necklace away from her without a glance as to where it went. As fate would have it, it came in my direction and landed on the pavement not two feet from my forepaws. The bloodstained medallion was actually three gold capital letters that were linked together into one unit: Y2K.

Rising to her feet, Frye said, “Go for it” to Trin, then turned and took half a dozen steps away, where she crossed her arms in front of her and waited without moving. Behind her, a curl of smoke rose from the dumpster where Dev’s cigarette had fallen.

Trin glanced back at her, then looked down at Wye (“Y”) again and reached for his goggles. He lifted them up to his forehead—and I had to shut my eyes, as a retina-burning blue radiance came out from the two holes where his eyes should have been. The radiance fell upon the body of the dead youth they had called Y; the body began to smolder, then without warning the corpse became a brilliant mass of white flame. Oily black smoke boiled up from the cremated body into the night sky. The vilest of stenches, one hailing from the lowest pit of the Inferno, assailed my nostrils and my gorge. I choked on it and nearly ran, but I held my ground at the last moment to see what would happen next.

The white bonfire dimmed and died. Smoke rose from the black-burned body, then the smoke too faded into darkness. The youth known as Trin had replaced his goggles by this time. After a pause, he stuck out a foot and toed the body. Y’s remains instantly collapsed into a featureless pile of ashes. Not even his computer keyboard remained.

“Ready to go?” asked Frye. Trin nodded, still looking at the flash-burned remains of Y. Flames now leaped from the dumpster behind the Chinese restaurant as Dev’s parting legacy.

“Oops,” said Frye in a gentle voice. For reasons I could not fathom, a thrill of terror ran through me at that one word. The black-and-white girl soundlessly turned in place until she was looking

right

me.

“Here, little doggie,” she said. “Here, boy.”

My vaunted bulldog courage shattered on the spot. I spun on my paws and ran—but was jerked to a neck-breaking stop scarcely an instant later. The accursed tachyon detector hanging from my collar had become snagged between the tailpipe of the car I was using for cover and the bottom of the car’s rear bumper. My windpipe was squeezed shut by the twisting of the dog collar; I wheezed and gasped for air even as I fought to escape, my paws scrambling over the asphalt but accomplishing nothing except to strangle myself in matchless terror. I threw a mad look behind me—and saw Frye was only twenty feet away, then fifteen, then ten, pacing toward me as soundless as smoke. Her face twitched second-by-second between that unearthly heartbreaking glamour and that accursed ghoulish façade. The medallion on her golden necklace now was clear to me. It was the number 13.

“Poor little doggie,” she whispered as she knelt beside me. “Are we having a bad day?”

She reached for me with a featureless white hand.

The buckle on my leather collar snapped. Free at last, I bolted from her touch like a bat loosed from the roaring flames of Hell. I vaguely recall leaping and clearing two parked cars in my flight, crossing several busy thoroughfares where tires squealed and horns blared all around me, headlights coming at but never striking me, and finally tearing through a maze of dark brush and undergrowth until, I later learned, I struck a massive tree and knocked myself wholly insensible. For all the injury that wild escape did me, for all the aches and cuts and bumps and bruises, I was grateful for every bit of it. And as for my cowardice, I had no shame about that at all—not until later, anyway, and even then, I admit, not much.

Chapter 4:

However Long and Hard the Road May Be

The most peculiar dream came to me as I lay unconscious, in which I found myself in a courtroom charged with excessive public referencing of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations in the first degree. I protested that Bartlett’s was intended for such use, but the prosecutor—who looked disturbingly like William Gladstone, nineteenth-century British Prime Minister and Liberal Party member who was usually at odds with Benjamin Disraeli, separately a Prime Minister but of the Conservative Party—the prosecutor said my bias toward quotations from Disraeli violated the spirit of the book, and I should be fined 1,000 British pounds and imprisoned for ten years in a low-class kennel. My defense attorney—Winston Churchill, as it turned out—said this was all nonsense and he would introduce evidence proving that I was nowhere near the hydroelectric dam on the night of June 31st. I was puzzling over what if anything the dam had to do with the charges when the courtroom doors swung open and a petite young woman composed entirely of black and white walked in. A terrifying radiance spread out from her person like a mist; everyone in the room tried to escape it but failed, writhing on the floor in unspeakable torment until they arose again and stood erect, each one of them a lifeless skeleton.

“Poor puppy,” the black-and-white girl whispered, her black gaze fixed upon me as she advanced up the center aisle. “Don’t you know who I am?”

I was paralyzed with terror. I would have given anything to have run, but no movement was possible. She came nearer to my place on the witness stand. “Today’s Friday,” she said in a soft voice. “That ring a bell?” Her face turned into a dark, bare skull with long black hair. Her jaw moved as she spoke. “Today’s Friday the—”

The dream snapped and was gone. Daylight stabbed my eyes as I came fully awake, possessed of a roaring headache and having not the faintest idea of where I was or what I was doing there. Then I remembered the damnable girl in black and white, and I struggled to my feet—and collapsed at once, overcome by dizziness and the blinding pain in my head. Gritting my teeth, I sank down on the grass to recover my wits before trying to move once more. It was then that I heard footsteps and voices.

“It’s a perversion, is what I’m sayin’,” snapped a man with a distinctly Irish accent. “It’s a crime against nature, a mortal sin, an’ those who indulge in such wicked practices ought to be whipped!”

“Dude,” said a heavier voice that reminded me of a California surfer, “NABs aren’t all that bad.”

“What are ya sayin’, ya big winged lummox?” shouted the Irish fellow. “That nonalcoholic beer ought t’ be legal? That innocent people ought t’ drink it? I canna be hearin’ ya right! It’s ten Hail Marys an’ off t’ confession with ya!”
“Whoa,” said the laconic surfer, coming to a halt. “There’s a dog.”

“Stop tryin’ t’ change the subject!”

I looked up and tried to focus on the large blurry figure before me. It seemed to be a chubby college student wearing a toga. I’m afraid I had a lapse in judgment at that moment because I decided to speak, but my straits were dire. “Help!” I gasped. “Help me!”

“It’s a talking dog,” amended the surfer, as if long accustomed to such sights.

“Of course it’s a talkin’ dog!” cried the Irish fellow, who appeared to be barely five feet tall. He wore a hat and a shirt with a cloverleaf pattern on it. “Ya disturbed the natural order with yer wicked heresy! Next we’ll be havin’ a plague of locust an’ a rain of frogs!”

“I think he’s hurt.” A giant pair of pink hands came down and gently lifted me into the air. I squinted and tried to see who had me. I could make out a peaceful round face with sun-bleached hair. “Whoa, it’s a bulldog. He’s pretty messed up.”

“It’s an English bulldog! Put it down an’ wash yer hands, man!”

“F-f-f-Friday,” I managed to squeak. “Friday . . . Thirteenth.”

“Nah,” said the surfer. “Today’s Friday, September eighteenth. Close, though.”

“She’s here.” I shivered, desperate to tell anyone. “Friday the Thirteenth is here.” I blinked at the big fellow and regained a scrap of my composure. “Who are you?”

“Cupid,” said the big blonde guy. “But Friday the Thirteenth didn’t come with us. She goes to that alternative school, Hope High. She’s not allowed out.”

“They ought t’ send Guy Fawkes Day there,” grumbled the Irish teen. “The bastard. Lock ‘im up with the rest of the hoodlums, I say.”

“Oh, my,” I said, recovering very quickly. “I’m frightfully sorry if I gave you a turn; I shouldn’t have spoken. I—” I winced from my overpowering headache “—I didn’t mean to, um—”

Cupid—or whoever he was—began to hum a tune. In moments, my headache vanished and my head cleared. On top of that, every injury I had sustained was gone. I was flabbergasted. It had to be real magic—and good magic, for once.

“There you go, little dude,” said Cupid, and he put me down on the sidewalk. “Nothing like a morning-after from Maureen McGovern to set you straight. You can head home now.”

Wide eyed, I took in the toga-wearing Cupid and his frowning Irish friend. Cupid had enormous white wings as well. “Why are you dressed like that?” I asked, wondering if the wings actually worked.

“None of yer bloomin’ business, ya damn English mutt!” shouted the Irish guy.

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Cupid told me. “He’s got issues. Oh, we’re dressed like this ‘cause we’re holidays.” He jerked a thumb at himself. “I’m Valentine’s Day, like—you know—duh, and he’s like the leprechaun of Saint—”

“An’ stop tellin’ the dog our secrets, damn it all!”

“Chill out, dude,” said Cupid in his surfer drawl. “It’s just a talking dog.” The big guy in the toga looked down at me and smiled. “We gotta go find someone at the local high school to help us talk Christmas, Halloween, and Guy Fawkes Day into coming back to the island. They kind of like wandered off a week ago to start a band. Long story. Anyway, ciao.”

Stunned, I watched the two of them turn and walk off down the sidewalk. In my newfound clarity of mind, however, it came to me that they knew who I had been talking about: an entity named Friday the Thirteenth. They had to be exactly who they said they were, Valentine’s Day and Saint Patrick’s Day. I had encountered so many bizarre creatures over the last few years, especially in the last two months, it was absurdly easy for me to swallow the idea that I had been in the presence of the human personifications of two of the most popular public holidays. Only supernatural oddities such as they would regard a talking dog as unremarkable. Either that, or I was having the most amazing hallucination.

“Wait!” I cried, hurrying toward them. “A moment of your time, please!”

They stopped and waited for me. “Well, okay, but we can’t stay,” said Cupid. “What’s up?” Saint Patrick’s Day (who was too tall to be a regular leprechaun) grabbed at his hat and stamped his foot in frustration at the delay.

“Are there more of you here?” I asked. “More holidays?”

“Just me and him and the other three,” said Cupid. “Nobody else came through the wormhole. Um, I think.”

“But definitely not Friday the Thirteenth, you say.”

“Definitely.” Cupid shook his head. “She’s kind of like in this special school for problem days, pretty heavily guarded. Nobody could get out of there unless they were like some kind of computer geek or something, which she isn’t.” As I listened I thought for a moment about poor Y2K, and instantly knew why he had been traveling with the other group. Ides of March must have been covering the escapees’ traces in killing him.

“She’s in a reform school for holidays gone wrong?” I asked.

“She’s not a real holiday, dude. She’s like the opposite of a holiday. Nobody celebrates Friday the Thirteenth. Not to get all judgmental about it, but she’s like one of those bad days, the—”

“The suppressed days, the wicked days!” interrupted the over-tall leprechaun, getting quite red in the face as he shouted. “The un-holidays, do ya get it now? She’s one of the days everyone tries t’ forget or pretend don’t exist anymore, the days everyone’s scared to death of! Now, be off with ya! We canna be wastin’ time talkin’ with pets even if they can talk back! We’re on a mission!”

“Sorry, but he’s right,” said Cupid with a shrug and a farewell wave. “Later, little dude.”

This time I let them leave. I had entirely too much to think about. Friday the Thirteenth was here for sure: possibly the worst non-holiday of them all, as so many people worry about the date and it can appear more than once a year. And there were those appalling movies, too. But who were the others with her? The girl in the minidress who said she was Weenie’s sister . . . Weenie must be Halloween, and the only bad day associated with Halloween was the night before, Mischief Night, October 30th, also known as Devil’s Night (or “Dev”), the time for arson and vandalism, chaos and crime. And the Ides of March, the 15th, made famous by Shakespeare’s play about the killing of Julius Caesar, the personification of murder, betrayal, and assassination—a date no longer acknowledged as relevant and certainly not celebrated, but one whose influence reached into the present day in ghastly ways.

And Lawndale was their new home! The very idea was monstrous. I had to prevent it from happening by any means possible.

But who, then, were the dull-witted muscleman with the accent, and the silent one clad in soft gray metal whose eyes glowed? They could not possibly be good days. I racked my imagination but came up empty. I had to get back to Andrew Landon’s house as soon as I could and—

Gods! I was staggered to realize I had not gone home last night! What would my truest friend think, my precious magnificent Dawn, the queen of my domestic life? Was she frantic with worry? Crazed with anxiety? Had she called the police and the fire department and the FBI? Was she even now crying in her bedroom, so grief-stricken that she had given up eating and drinking and going to school? How could I have let her down so cruelly? I mean, aside from being chased through the night by villainous supernatural demigods bent on my destruction, but was that any excuse?

I hung my head. Dawn would throw me out when she saw me, so angry would she be at my perfidy. I would have to live like a coyote on the fringe of society, eating out of garbage cans—perhaps only those in the Crewe Neck subdivision, though, as they had a better quality of garbage—and living in storm sewers like the albino New York alligators in those entertaining urban legends. I deserved no less. With the weight of the world bearing down on me, I sighed and began my sad walk home.

That was about two seconds before a flexible loop went around my neck, a loop attached to a long stout pole held by a muscular Lawndale Animal Control Officer. (I no longer had a dog collar or dog tags, I realized too late. Friday the Thirteenth’s curse was effective indeed.) I was then manhandled into a wire-and-plastic cage, placed in the rear of an Animal Control van, and taken to the local pound. Valiantly did I resist, but the officer was experienced in handling the likes of me and it got me nothing but neck burn from the loop.

The humiliation of it was more than I could bear. Me, a (mostly) purebred English bulldog, courageous and incorruptible, faithful and valiant, the living symbol of strength and endurance; a member of the illustrious breed personally spoken of by Abraham Lincoln (“Hold on with a bulldog grip”); mascot of Yale and the United States Marine Corps, not to mention Mack Trucks; baiter of bulls and defender of children; one of the breed written of by the Bard himself, the great Shakespeare, in one of his plays about British kings, though I have had some difficulty locating the exact reference. Me, caged like a common opossum in the back of a van that smelled like cat urine. Death should have come before this dishonor. I discarded the possibility of talking my way out of it, as I would likely never see home again if I did; God knew where calculating, greedy men would take me next. They might even force me to do dog-food commercials. I lay down my head and waited for whatever Fate had in store for me.

The Lawndale County Animal Shelter was nothing but one enormous warehouse of insane barking and meowing and screeching and howling and what have you, a deranged cacophony that would drive even the local satanists’ zombies mad if the odiferous nature of it did not slay the undead first. I put my paws over my head to cover my ears, tried not to breathe too deeply, and made an effort to fill my mind with cool thoughts, imagining a river running to the ocean, far from that dreadful spot. I had gotten only as far as picturing my dog dish full of water, back at home, when a door at the end of the great room opened and Andrew Landon walked in behind the officer who had captured me.

I stood immediately and pressed my face to the wire bars, trying not to wag my tail too energetically. Andrew was led to my cage, whereupon he said, “That’s him,” and paid my animal-control fine of $50. I was fitted with a new collar and a leash and led out of the building. Once in the parking lot, Andrew took off the leash. “I had to miss a millionaires’ golf game today, hosted by Terry Berry Barlow,” he muttered. “You’d better have a good explanation for this one, old boy.”

“We’ve been invaded by villainous supernatural demigods bent on the destruction of the earth,” I replied.

“Good enough,” said Andrew. We got in his blue Jaguar and left at once. I lay on the floor of the passenger side in front and explained everything as he drove and listened.

“I wouldn’t have believed a word of this if you weren’t a talking bulldog,” said Andrew, highlighting yet another of the reasons I so adored him. “I’ll have to build another tachyon detector when I have time. Shame about the other one and the earplug, but what can you do. Before then, however, I think we’d better call in the Irregulars and come up with a plan.”

“Can you call Dawn and let her know I’m safe, at least?”

“I’ll have Jodie do that.”

“Isn’t she at school today?”

“Oh. Um, right. Well, I’ll call the office and have someone there do it, one of the interns. You and I have real work ahead of us.”

“Let Dawn know it wasn’t my fault.”

“Absolutely.”

“Thanks.”

“Not a problem.”

We drove back to Andrew’s home and went in through the garage. I nervously cleared my throat as I came in, peering left and right for a different kind of threat. “Won’t your wife be displeased to discover my presence?” I whispered, remembering that she was not fond of seeing animal hair on her furniture or carpets. To say that Michele Landon has a temper problem is like saying Mount St. Helens made a noise when it blew up and took part of Oregon with it.

“She took little Evan to her mother’s for the day,” he said, striding toward his study. “The girls are in school, so we have the house to ourselves.”

The reader will understand when I say that this news did not ease my concern, as Michele might have at any moment appeared at the door in search of a diaper bag or lost sunglasses, but I did relax enough to allow Andrew to fill a paper plate for me with leftover hamburger and fried chicken (no bones), which I devoured at once. It was no time to quibble over nutritional values.

Andrew then turned on his wide-screen TV and set it to a local station to see if there was any news. Indeed, as a soap opera prattled on, a line of ticker-type scrolled across the bottom of the screen, naming the locations of a curious series of car accidents and arsonist attempts plaguing Lawndale at the moment. I called his attention to that and suggested we mark the spots on a map. I had an idea