Dogman < Tested & Working >

I made it to my car. I didn't look in the rearview mirror. I drove two hundred miles without stopping.

"What does it want, Edmund?"

I grabbed a flashlight and ran to Edmund's cell. The door was still locked. The slot was open. I shone the light inside. DogMan

For twenty years, I told myself it was a deer. A sick coyote. The power of suggestion. I moved to the city, became a forensic psychologist, and buried the memory under case files and coffee. I diagnosed schizophrenia, dissociative disorders, and the occasional delusional parasitosis. I never once diagnosed a monster.

I found the pattern. Every twenty to thirty years, the sightings would cluster. A spike in missing persons in the Upper Peninsula. Then silence. Then another cluster. As if the creature hibernated for a generation, then woke up hungry. The last cluster ended in 1993. The year after I saw it. I made it to my car

"It's not a werewolf, Doctor," he said, picking at a loose thread on his gray jumpsuit. "That implies a man who turns into a beast. A curse. A full moon. This is different. It was never a man. It's a thing that learned to walk like one."

Then the amber eyes swallowed the light. "What does it want, Edmund

Then I got the transfer request to the Northern Michigan Asylum for the Criminally Insane. My new patient was Edmund Croft.

Then the bus lurched forward. I turned to tell my friend Billy, but Billy was busy picking a wedgie. I looked back. The cornfield was empty.

The current cluster began last month.