Page 38 of Wrong Mail

She's barking.

Downstairs, at the back of the house, a sharp repeated bark she almost never uses. Not the doorbell bark or the squirrel bark. Something with an edge to it. I've heard it maybe twice in two years. I launch myself out of bed. The floor is warm. The rain is loud. I go out onto the landing. The whole downstairs is black below me, and the barking is coming up out of it. I stand at the top of the stairs, one hand on the rail. I tell myself it's the storm. Dogs hate thunder. That's all this is.

Then the barking stops.

Not trails off. Stops, mid-sound, cut clean. The silence after it is so complete I can feel my pulse in my deaf ear, a dull underwater thud. I stand there waiting for the barking to start again.

"David?"

I don't know why I say it. He can't be back yet. But I say it into the dark of the stairwell because the alternative is to say nothing.

I start down, one hand on the rail, feeling for each step with the edge of my foot because I can't see them. The rain gets louder as I go down into it. Then there's a smell that shouldn't be there. Wet stone and night air.

I get to the bottom.

"Luna?"

Something moves against my legs. I make a sound and nearly go over. It’s her. It’s only her, a warm shape pressing hard into my shins, shivering. I go down on my knees and get my arms around her and she's soaked. She's wet through, her coat cold and streaming, the smell of the lake coming off her. I hold her and my hands go still in her fur.

"What the hell. How did…?”

She was inside. In her bed. And now she's wet to the skin in a house I locked. My mind does the arithmetic slowly, the way it does everything now, and arrives nowhere good.

I get up.

The kitchen is almost black. At the far end, something gray moves. The terrace doors are open. One of them stands wide to the night and the rain is coming in across the floor in a fan. The curtain is lifting and falling in the wind. No, that’s impossible. I locked that. I stood there and turned the latch and felt it seat and said the word. I locked that door.

My eyes dart around. I go toward it. I don't run. I'm not thinking run. I’m thinking I've done something wrong, that I've forgotten again. I've been up half the night looking at pictures of dead people. There's wine in me, more than I meant to drink. I can hear David telling me to go easy on it. This is exactly what he meant. I've frightened myself. I've left a door open like a child.

I reach it. My hand closes around the cold, wet edge and I push it to. The wind fights me for it. I get it shut and hold it there.

"David?"

No response, just the rain and the quiet of the house.

I press my back to the door and think. Luna is at my feet, pushed against me, still shivering. I reach down and put my hand on her head and it steadies me. A towel. Get a towel. In the drawer by the sink. I'll dry her. I'll put the light on my phone and check the front door. It'll still be locked. It's just me, the same as it always is, my broken alarm going off in an empty house.

I find the towel by feel. I crouch and run it over her back, and she leans into it. For a second there's only the two of us and the rain.

Then Luna goes rigid under my hands.

She doesn’t flinch. She freezes, her whole body locking as her head comes around toward the hall. A sound starts in her chest that I feel through the towel before I hear it, low and continuous, a growl with no top to it.

I go still with her.

"David?"

I turn my head, putting the hall on my good side, and listen into the dark past the kitchen. There's nothing at first. Only the rain, the dog, the blood in my ears.

Then the dark at the end of the hall changes.

It isn't a sound. My body knows it before my mind does. A piece of the black has weight. It's closer than the wall beyond it, and as I stare, it resolves into a man.

He stands at the mouth of the hallway, still, unhurried, watching me on the kitchen floor with my hand on my dog.

I open my mouth but nothing comes out.

The lights come up.