The pack leader trotted to the place where she had been standing and sniffed the ground. The others circled, growling, waiting for the signal to give chase.
Victoria looked around desperately, hoping to see a branch she could use to pull herself to safety. The trees were all birch and Scots pine, straight and slender with no low boughs. All she could do was try to put them between herself and the dogs. Twigs cracked beneath her feet as she started walking, backwards, as quickly as she could. The pack leader was nosing at the undergrowth through which she had retreated. Victoria breathed deeply, panting, filling her lungs for flight. As she did so, a sudden storm-surge of fresh adrenaline coursed through her body, and instinct took the initiative.
As the lead hound raised its head and howled gleefully, signalling the start of the hunt, she flung her phone back towards the road. It flashed like a tumbling satellite, falling end-over-end towards the dogs. Before it hit the ground, she was running.
Shadows solidified into tree tunks in front of her and she veered around them, arms windmilling to keep her upright. Her feet were slashed by stones and splinters, but terror obliterated the pain. Behind her there was an angry commotion as the dogs forced their way through and over the roadside thicket and came scampering after her through the underwood.
As she careened drunkenly around obstructions that loomed suddenly out of the darkness, she thought she saw a faint, steady point of light in the distance. There it was again—but it was so far away! Then it was lost, between the trees. At the last possible moment, Victoria managed to bring her hands up to prevent herself from slamming headlong into another stout trunk. She pushed off it in a new direction, heart pounding and mouth dry, a small sob escaping her throat. There was the light again, artificial and wholesome, but very much further away than the dogs sounded. She ran towards it anyway, trying to find enough breath to scream for help.
Suddenly the light was gone, blotted out as a vast figure stepped out between two trees directly ahead of her: a towering, hooded shadow that spread it’s arms in benediction as she ran towards it. It raised its head, and she caught a glimpse of long, curved teeth, parting in greeting.
Victoria squealed and changed direction again, her eyes welling with tears. To her left, she caught a glimpse of a dark shape streaking between the trees—one of the dogs, maneuvering to cut her off. She could barely see where she was going now, the forest just a shimmering shadow through the tears. All she knew was that the tenebrous spectre was somewhere behind her now, and that she would rather take her chances with the dogs.
A low branch caught her a sharp blow above the eye and brought her up short. Stunned, she grabbed at it to prevent herself from falling over. The pounding of paws behind her gave her no time to think. She leapt, springing off the trunk of the tree to haul herself onto the branch. The dog, about to spring at her neck, was left with no choice but to skid to a halt in the leaf litter. Foam flew from its champing jaws as it reared up against the trunk, desperate to reach her.
There was another branch she could step to that was higher. From there, she heaved herself up onto a main limb and worked herself into a cleft of the trunk, a good twelve feet from the ground. She was lucky! The pine must have been young when the reactor melted down. Radiation had interfered with its growth signalling, causing it to retain its bare, lower branches even as a mature tree.
The woods rang with barking as dogs threw themselves against the trunk of the tree and scrabbled at it with their claws. Much to her relief, they seemed unable to scale it. As she began to get her breath back she almost laughed, but a surge of pain in her bloodied feet choked it to a whimper. She could feel blood dripping down her cheek, too, running from the cut on her forehead.
The dogs suddenly fell silent and skulked backwards to lie in a ring around the tree. Victoria watched them warily. Was that it? Were they just going to wait for her to ripen and fall? Was she going to have to spend the whole night up a tree?
They were quivering, she noticed. Their bodies cringed, heads down, throats bared in submission. Then she heard it, too. The ponderous tread of something approaching through the woods, dried twigs crunching beneath its feet.
Nausea and vertigo made her clutch the trunk more tightly, her fear rising by octaves with each leaden, advancing footstep. “No, no, no.” She murmured the word over and over as the impossible shadow lurched into view. More than a shadow, in fact, something all too corporeal, that scuffed dirt into the air with every halting step.
The dogs began to whine piteously as the thing crossed their circle. Nine feet tall, at least. Cadaverously thin, its tattered black robes rippling in the breeze. The air in the glade was filled with the stench of dog, overpoweringly strong and growing stronger as the terrible apparition took another pace towards the tree. Victoria clapped a hand over her mouth and nose to block the odour, and to stifle the scream she could feel building in her throat. As the thing raised its head and its hood fell back, she lost control and let out a screech of abject, psychotic horror.
Panicked and confused, she shinned further up the trunk, bark scraping against her skin and clothes as she climbed as far as possible from the beast beneath. Under the cowl, glaring at her with three black, pearlescent eyes—breath steaming, jaws running with slaver—was the head of a monstrous hound.
Victoria stared at it, terrified, uncomprehending, paralysed by the insanity of what she was seeing. Faced by a thing she had never imagined to exist, an unrehearsed horror for which nothing in life had prepared her, she regressed to a state of infantile stupefaction and froze, like a mouse in the shadow of a snake.
She was dimly aware of the stink of musk and rotten meat that rose from the thing, as long, whiplike fingers coiled around the lower branches and lifted it towards her. Its three eyes stared vacantly upwards, its black jaws wide apart and steaming, and drawing closer. She could hear the dogs below barking rhythmically and in unison, joined in celebration of the superior predator’s ascent.
Even as dread closed like a fist around her amygdala and her consciousness began to fade, she knew that the sight before her was not real. Knew that the dog-headed, Anubian being was only a disguise, a Gestalt: reality’s attempt to render a thing that did not fit the world.
As the yawning jaws stretched and quivered, a succession of dull cracks echoed through the woods. They sounded like gunfire. Someone was shooting. Victoria lost her grip on the tree and fell. She was unconscious even before she hit the forest floor.
When she came to she was too scared to open her eyes. Her bloodstream was still thick with adrenaline, her skin still damp with sweat. There was a fiery pain in her shoulders, and she was moving. Bouncing, her head lolling around as she continued to feign unconsciousness. Was she in a car? Reluctantly, she opened her eyes.
Not a car: a wheelbarrow. She was being pushed through the forest in a large wheelbarrow, her legs dangling off the front of it. Who, then, was pushing her? She tilted her head back.
A grim-faced man, his stubbled cheeks inflated with effort, was leaning into the task of forcing the overloaded cart through the detritus of the forest floor. He looked down and gave her a curt nod. “Pryvit.” His voice was clipped, his concentration focussed on pushing the barrow without spilling her onto the ground. “Nearly there,” he assured her, as an afterthought.
‘Nearly where?’ wondered Victoria, but she was still too traumatised to ask. He seemed to know what he was doing—and he didn’t have the head of a dog. Had that really happened? She could still feel gritty particles of bark on her scraped hands, could still taste the appalling animal stench that had emanated from the haunter of the woods. It had happened, there was no doubt.