Question: Can the bark of a dog be said to “mean” anything? We might, for instance, have reasonably considered the yelps of the dachshund below the window to connote something like “Leave this place, intruders; you are not welcome within these walls.” But the dachshund then being quieted with sausage links offered from our pockets, was it not also reasonable of us to revise our interpretation such that the same yelps were seen to have connoted something more akin to “Strangers, I demand tribute. My voice shall not be stifled until my belly is sated.” Detached from context, the yelps can signify nothing; yet the silence in which they furiously resounded imbued them with more meaning than any response possibly could.
“Hello?” we called then through the gaping shop door. A slight echo was the only response.
The howls of Garm, though not far off, had already ceased when my father fell face-first into the snowbank of the sidewalk.
“Pa, are you all right?” I knelt beside him and tried to turn him over, but he wouldn’t move.
“I am fine, dear thing.” His words were muffled by the dirty snow. “There is nothing for you to worry about. Leave me be.”
“I should have taken you to a hospital.”
“No, no. I need no hospital. I will have no such thing.”
“I need to turn you over, Pa.”
“The snow is cold. It is like clumsy whiteness numbing my face.”
“That’s why I need to turn you over.”
I attempted to roll him again, and this time he allowed me.
“I saw his face,” he sputtered, blowing snow from his lips. I wiped more from his eyes. “Yes, yes, thank you, that is fine. I saw the face of Surt, dear thing, despite much snow in my eyes and my vision blurred.”
“…”
“Emily was there also. She was in danger. We must find her without delay.”
“Oh, Pa, how did you get so bad all of the sudden?”
He snorted derisively. “It is not I who am bad, dear thing. Surt is the bad one, as always. But we have wasted too much time in dallying here while he has time to disguise his handiwork. Let us go.”
He started to get up and I helped him the rest of the way. “All right, Pa, we’re just going to pick up Garm, then we’ll all head home and plan the next step from there, all right?”
“Hmm… Yes, that sounds like a reasonable plan.”
“Hey there, strangers!” At the end of the block Constance Lingus was yelling in our direction.
It is this morning and I have been awake all night, breaking more things and screaming in the empty and otherwise silent bedroom unfilled with Shirley’s snores. I have been scratching at scrawled-over words in Shirley’s journals and musing on the missing pages. My fingernails are blue and my eyes are red. Overheated coffee has numbed my tongue, but I say her name.
She called her coffee “phlogiston.”
I am a fish. This the central line from the Two-Story House,[26] I know, but what is it doing here amongst her notes on Denmark? What happened there?
Sometimes I really want to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX {illegible/scrawled-over}.
There is much that I do not understand.
All my words shall be stallion, not a workhorse among them. We must create incomprehensible things in order to have an analogy for our incomprehension of the universe. Obscure reality to make it more attractive. We must keep secrets, so that others may have the pleasure of uncovering them: wow.
She succeeded in creating many incomprehensible things.
Trying to chat with the shopgirl while the son was off taking a piss and the father was still busy “niggling,” I suddenly realized just how strange it was to be in a place where I couldn’t understand the local language and no one would speak to me in English, so I just shut up and headed outside. The father was already standing outside the shop door, smoking another cigarette. This time I didn’t even bother to hint that I wanted one.
The son took his time, but eventually he came out, and I followed him and his dad through the turnstiles and down a long unlit tunnel. And then we entered the first major cavern, which—according to my guidebook—was known as the Hall of Foxes.
I have never had much fondness for hounds. When I was a young boy I had a hound. He would often chew things that I did not want him to chew, and though it was I who answered for his crimes, he refused to learn from my instruction. I had but a small fondness for him.
My wife has a fondness for hounds. This increases my ill feeling toward the creatures, for I am selfish and Emily’s fondness could be devoted all the more strongly to me were she to refuse it to them. I have told her this often. Though it was a hound that first brought me to my Emily. The Fenris Dachshund is a good hound, as hounds go. I do not always object when he licks my face. Hounds have their place in this world, but that place is mostly not within my fondness.
Every dog has his day, and a bad dog might have two.
It is last night and I am reading Shirley’s journals for the first time since her death.
She kept no record of dates. Her habit was to open journals at random and write her words wherever her pen first found empty space. This renders her story difficult to follow. It was her pleasure to be cryptic.
I can’t tell Blaise about this.
What cur was this of which she could not tell me? What deed was it for which Shirley deemed him a “bad dog”?
The portions of the journal which aspire to relate particular events tell me very little. Her shorthand was overly honed.
Clement weather, meeting tonight, café with bad Turkish phlogiston. Ugh. Consistency like: mud? K. Order something else. Or at least know next time not to drink the dregs.
But I know my wife better than this. The surface of these entries is not where her story is to be read. I know her tricks, for she was always too eager to explain them to me. I see from this last fragment, for instance, that I was the cuckoo—what happened in Denmark?—and I begin the journals yet again with this new view in my mind.
“It’s good to see you,” Constance Lingus said as we met her halfway down the block. She looked a bit ridiculous with her short ginger hair and puffy red jacket framing her cold-flushed freckled face. “I figured you wouldn’t be far from your dog.”
“Where!” I grabbed her and my father each by an arm and dragged them back in the direction from which she’d come.
“Well, what is the cause d’aventure today, then?”
“I’m just looking for my dog.”
“I am only too delighted to show you the way to your missing pup, but I thought that perhaps you could be enticed to answer a few—No need to pinch, now! I can better lead the way if you unhand me.”
“Sorry… I’ve been worried about him all morning, though. I just want to make sure he’s okay.”
She rubbed her arm over-dramatically where I’d been holding her.
“Well, you need worry no more. He looked to be having a very good time, bounding through the snow in pursuit of some canine companion. I hesitantly suggest that we can safely slow to a saunter without endangering his life.”
“I don’t want to lose him.”
Constance murmured something snide to which I chose not to reply.
“Addressing Mr. Ymirson, now,” she continued, “I wanted to tell you that I overheard the police call about your library. I’d been on my way there to make sure that no one had fallen in the way of harm when I happened across first your dog and then the two of you. As we head away from the fire, might I ask if its source has been determined yet?”