Days passed and flesh knitted. The last stitches came out, and the low, gray skies of winter settled in. Thanksgiving came and went, and Christmas began its low, flat descent. He had nightmares sometimes, but less often. He had moments of profound and crippling fear that came like bad weather and then moved on. His doctor put him on antidepressants, and they seemed to help some.
The morning he didn’t call a taxi was a Wednesday. He’d been online the night before, looking at his bank balance, and when he woke up, he just didn’t make the call. He drank his coffee. He ate his eggs. He walked out into the cold, biting air with a scarf wrapped around his neck. The dog park was empty, the grass brown and dead, the trees leafless. Walking across the parking lot where it had happened was like going back to an old elementary school; the place was so much smaller than he remembered it. It was like someone had come and taken the old place away and brought in a scale model. The fear he’d expected didn’t overwhelm him. It was just asphalt and sidewalk. It didn’t mean anything. Or maybe everything it meant he carried with him anyway, so the location added nothing. He reached the bus stop with its green roof and advertising poster walls for the first time, pleased with the accomplishment, and spent the whole day at work exhausted and unable to concentrate. He wound up staying late to finish things he should have had done before his afternoon coffee break.
The evening streets were dim and empty, the daytime world of downtown already closed down. A dull red between the skyscrapers to the west marked where the sun had been. The shopfront displays glittered and shone for nobody. Alexander pushed his hands into his pockets and scurried toward the bus stop, his mind already skipping ahead to a cup of hot chocolate liberally spiked with rum and an early bed. Maybe he could see if anyone had left a message for him online. Or if there were any decent movies on. At the stop, he sat on the formed plastic bench and pressed his hands between his thighs. The city had put a programmable sign marking the time until the next bus, and he watched it count down to nothing and reset without any actual bus arriving. A few cars hissed by.
The dog came out from an alley to his left, its claws clicking on the pavement. The blackness of its coat seemed to defy the light. It trotted down the street toward him, moving in his direction with a distracted air. A mastiff. A rottweiler crossed with something huge. No fat cushioned its skin, and the muscles working under the fur were as large as a man’s. Its breath steamed past stained teeth. Alexander pressed himself against the back of the bench, heart racing, the metal taste of fear in his mouth.
The dog angled toward him. The clicking of its claws was unnaturally loud, drowning out the sounds of traffic. At the curb, it sat, looking into the street as if it was waiting for the bus too. It turned to look at Alexander, its black eyes expressionless. For a single, horrible moment, Alexander imagined he saw blood on its muzzle. The dog chuffed once and bent down to lick itself, the unself-conscious intimacy threatening and obscene. Alexander could already feel its teeth on his neck, smell its piss in his face, even though it hadn’t so much as growled at him.
Four out of five, Erin said. Only two in ten ever bit anyone. Ever mauled anyone.
Lights glowed white and red and green in the growing dark. Any moment now, the well-lit bus would lumber around the corner. Safety would come. The streetlights changed and cars moved past, hurrying away on their own errands, oblivious and uncaring as birds. The dog stopped its obscene licking and looked up at Alexander again.
The dog’s broad head bent forward a degree. The bus didn’t come. The dog grunted, not a bark, not a growl, just a sound low in its throat, and Alexander smiled at it, trying to act like he wasn’t scared, trying to imagine how someone who wasn’t scared would be. The seconds stretched out into years.
“Good doggie,” he said, his voice weak and thin as a wire. “Good doggie, good doggie, good doggie…”
For quite some time I’ve been fascinated by the old Grail legends that developed in several countries of western Europe but today are largely associated with England. The legends illustrate how our stories and beliefs evolve over time, for the Grail originally had nothing to do with the Christian mythology that got stapled onto it in later iterations.
Modern scholars have filled many pages trying to figure out the pagan origins of the grail, most notably Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance that inspired portions of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Since several scholars have suggested that the grail was of Celtic origin and in fact may have been Dagda’s Cauldron—a far cry from the cup of Christ—I could not resist the opportunity to explore that idea in “The Chapel Perilous.”