Shadow Hound

Home was nice. I particularly like baths after spending the day at the beach. I know, I was wet most of the day and then I dried off to come home and get wet again. But bathwater is different. A bath is bubbles, and good smells, and just the perfect snuggly temperature. And it makes you clean. I loved getting cleaned up and Mom let me play with bubbles. I don’t get to spend a whole lot of time with just my mom. And this was one of those rare times even if it was an unusual reason for us to be home alone. Then she got me into my clean pajamas and fed me dinner.

After I ate, she unloaded the beach stuff from the car and took her own shower before packing a bag for herself. She wandered out onto the back porch we had spent so many fun barbeques on after working in the garden. I’d never seen my mom cry before. But there she was, sitting on the top of the picnic table, shoulders heaving in silent sobs. I walked up and nudged her to let her know that I was there if she wanted a hug.

“What am I going to do with him?” I knew Mom wasn’t actually asking me, so I didn’t say anything but leaned on her harder and she hugged me like I knew she would. “What am I doing? I’m being silly. Oh,” her tone brightened, and I looked up at her face to see her peering into the shadowy yard.

“Look, the bunnies are out early tonight.”

Following her pointing finger, I could see most of the family huddled against the fence furthest from the shed. They were inside the part of the garden that was fenced off and I wouldn’t have been able to reach them if I wanted. One of them wasn’t though. One bunny, much darker than I remembered the bunnies being, was just sitting in the middle of the yard a few feet from the steps. It nibbled the lawn as if it could not care less that we were there.

“Oh, you guys are never going to get to catch the babies as pets.” She was more disappointed than I thought she should be for someone who hadn’t wanted us to chase the bunnies, to begin with. “You want to chase it? Since this is the last chance you’ll get to play with the bunnies?” I could hardly believe my furry little ears. “Go on. You can do it.”

I hesitated only a few Moments, quivering with the excitement of the chase. Then I was off, my sleepiness forgotten in my delirious frantic dash for the bunny. It dodged and weaved around the lawn and before I knew it, I had followed it behind and around the terrible shed. As we came around for the second loop, it veered closer to the ramp, and I was certain that it was going to leap over the dead spot and then onto the ramp and over the bunny hole.

At the last possible second, it swerved away from the dead spot. My legs slipped out from beneath me as I tried to follow, and I splashed into the living shadow I had feared for so long. The thing had been waiting. Its bony claw-like fingers grasped my legs, and I yipped trying to get free.

“Sweetie?” Mom called from the back porch. She couldn’t see me in the shadow as I struggled against the ripping shredding tendrils that peeled open my legs and flayed them to the bone. “Are you okay? Come back to the house.” I whimpered in agony. It was impossible for me to get any more sound out and I desperately wanted my Mommy to come and save me, but at the same time, I didn’t want her to get anywhere near the danger waiting for her.

And then the struggle ended. I couldn’t move, couldn’t fight. The pain grew and grew until I couldn’t bear it any longer, and cold came. Freezing iciness engulfed my body as my mind was slowly pulled into darkness. I watched Mom through dimming vision as she took a tentative step off the back porch to come and get me. From the looming chasm in the soil behind me, something leapt over my head.

It was a dark amorphous blob that quickly solidified into a “me”-shape. It had stolen my shape and sent an imposter “me” to my mom. Part of me wanted to be outraged but I hadn’t the energy. I tried so hard, yet so feebly, to warn her, that it wasn’t me. She shrieked at the sudden appearance of the thing with my fur, my floppy ears, my cute little pajama dress.

“Oh Sweetie, you scared me so badly.” Mom bent down to pick what-she-thought-was-me up in a hug. No, Mama. No! I screamed in my head. The shadowy rabbit hopped over in front of my narrowing vision, and I saw that it wasn’t really a bunny after all. It had been a shadow thing, like the-thing-that-looked-like-me, that had tricked me into the dead spot where the thing could catch me and use me to trick my mom. Its shadow body oozing around the edges of the bunny body it had occupied.

Shadow-stuff me jumped into Mom’s arms and she gasped at the contact. Shadow flowed from the creature into Mom. Her body shuddered violently as her flesh absorbed the intrusion.

“Come Sssweetie,” the thing inside my mom now hissed. “Let’s go get Caleb from grandma’s houssse.” Her body jerked as she moved as if the flesh and blood fought whatever it was being commanded to do.

But Mom wasn’t in there. The eyes were dead. My Mom was lying on the ground, a soul without a body, staring back at me being slowly pulled down into the pit. She blinked in paralyzed horror as tentacles of the thing snaked from the hole toward her.

The story continues in....

Shadow Hound Book 2 - Into the Abyss