“What’s going on?” she can hear her sister shouting from the kitchen. “Lela? What’s wrong?”
Hemingway lunges in between the two, his tail rigid and his ears flattened and his snout peeled to show his teeth. The man rears back. His boot strikes the dog’s breast with such force that Hemingway lifts several feet in the air before collapsing on his side, yelping and scrambling helplessly.
There is a small pink recliner with the shape of her niece worn into it. Lela darts behind it, gripping its back as if it were a weapon. The man edges one way and she another, so that they are circling the chair slowly, close enough to see the pores on his nose but not close enough for him to grab her. He tries. And then seizes the chair instead and flips it over.
She backs away as he continues his approach, matching him step for step. He seems in no hurry now, intentionally lingering, as if this were some terrible foreplay.
“Lela?” Her sister’s voice is closer now, coming down the hallway.
“Stay back! Call 911. Now.”
Lela debates racing for the kitchen to yank a knife from the block, but she doesn’t think she’ll make it. And that would bring the man closer to where Hannah rests in the living room. She retreats three fast steps, and in doing so her buckle chimes. She bought it at a flea market, an oversize brass rectangle that carries the shape of an elk anchored to a leather belt with a basketweave pattern. She twists off the buckle, slides the belt from the waist loops, wraps the leather around her knuckles once.
“Where is the skull?” he says, and she says, “Fuck you.”
His hands are open, and his arms spread to either side of his belly, ready to catch her if she runs, but not ready to stop the buckle when she snaps her arm, whips him across the face with it. He cries out and brings a hand to where his mustache split, revealing broken teeth and the red gleam of gum beneath. She does not wait, lashing him again and again, across the shoulder, the skull.
He goes low and barrels toward her and jams a shoulder into her stomach and smashes her into the wall. She feels the plaster crack and the breath whoosh from her lungs, making her go limp enough that he can argue her body into a hold that bends both arms painfully behind her back.
But Hemingway has recovered enough to attack again. The man cries out—his hot breath in her ear—and she looks down to see the dog’s jaws clamp down on his calf and shake hard enough to rip the fabric and the skin beneath.
The man releases her. He punches the dog in the snout, wrenches an ear. She stumbles away and retches from the bruised pain in her abdomen. Just as the man balls his fist and readies another blow to the dog, she swings the belt at such an angle it loops his neck—and she stations herself behind him and twists the supple leather so that it cannot be easily unbound. She leans back, putting all her weight into the knee that prods his spine. He claws at his neck and at her, trying to find his breath. They fall back onto the bed and the frame cracks and he makes swampy choking sounds.
He gets a grip on her hair and snatches out a handful, but she does not loosen her grip, not until Hemingway limps toward them. For a moment she fears her own dog—the wrinkled snout, the ire boiling in his gut making him unrecognizable—and then the fear gives way to relief when the jaws snap at the man’s groin, then his belly. He tries to kick Hemingway away, but there is no stopping the dog. It has succumbed to something base and frightful, the back-of-the-brain response Lela can very much relate to now.
There is a squelching sound as the dog snatches and tears and burrows his triangular face into the man. His body no longer writhes. One of his hands dangles at his side. She tells Hemingway to stop, but the dog won’t. She struggles to stand.
The man’s body flops away from her and thumps the floor and still the dog growls, bites, claws. She says it again—“Stop, stop!”—and only then does Hemingway pull back, his face a red mask. The dog licks its chops and pants and waves its tail hesitantly at her.
“Oh no,” her sister says. She stands in the doorway with a hand over her heart. “Oh Jesus.”
Lela spots some movement out of the corner of her eye. Outside the window, another figure stands, this one smaller, appearing like a child, round-headed but with an old man’s face. He wears a black turtleneck. He opens his mouth to reveal his tiny pebbly teeth—and then hisses at her before darting off into the night. She can hear his footsteps slithering across the grass and then pattering along the sidewalk until they are no longer discernible in the nighttime groan of the city, and only then does she relax and pull Hemingway into a whimpering hug.
Both their hearts are sprinting. She pets him and cries silently, and it takes a moment, through the smeared lens of tears, to understand what is happening. Her hands—as she roughs her fingers across Hemingway, scratching her thanks—should come away damp and tacky with blood. Instead she feels like she’s combing clots of dried mud from him. She wipes off her tears. Hemingway studies her with a cocked head. His snout, once red, is now gray, as if pasted with ash.
“Did you call the police?” she says to Cheryl.
“The line,” her sister says, her voice cracking. “The line was cut. Do you want me to use yours? Your cell?”
Then they observe something Lela likens to time-lapse photography. The black-bearded man is no longer young but old. A slow exhalation comes from him, and with this he appears to deflate and wither, a kind of hurried dry rot setting in. There is a sound like thousands of termites chewing their way through rotten wood when his skin grays and tightens and cracks and crumbles, everything sloughing away, so that his teeth and then his bones rise out of the mess, until they too yellow and fissure and crumble to a chalky residue, and then there is only a smear of ashen waste in the shape of the man who once filled these vacant clothes.
“No,” Lela says. “Don’t call.”
Her sister whimpers and covers her mouth, and the dog goes over to sniff the remains. Lela closes her eyes and opens them, and the scene remains the same. Just like that, as if a switch has turned, her entire belief system changes. She’s always said—show me proof, where’s the evidence—and now here it is. Maybe the feeling won’t last. Maybe this night will fade like the bad dream it seems. But right now, she believes. The New Testament, the Qur’an, the Tipitaka, the Book of Mormon, the ?ruti and the Talmud and the Tao Te Ching. All of it. Everything is true. Anything is possible.