Epitaph: The Necromancer Thanatography Book Two by Shane Simmons

Author:Shane Simmons [Simmons, Shane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eyestrain Productions
Published: 2019-06-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Divine Intervention

“Did you hear a dog barking late last night after you got home?” Rebecca asked me at the crack of noon, once I’d finally rolled out of bed.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“Like a really big dog.”

“The biggest.”

“Wait, is that...?” she began, making the connection to my recent tales of woe.

“The hellhound, yeah,” I confirmed.

Leaving town for a convention was seeming like a better and better idea all the time. If that ravenous creature had tracked me to my neighbourhood, perhaps even to my specific apartment building, how long would it be before it came barrelling through the door as it had done at Oliver’s?

“Doogie!” enthused Gladys from her desk in the office, reiterating her sentiment from the previous night.

“What’s it after?” Rebecca asked.

“My head,” I said. “He wants to eat it.”

“Good boy!” Gladys praised.

“Me or the hellhound?” Like I had to ask.

“Heel-hund, duh! He good doogie.”

“I thought Gladys was a cat person,” Rebecca commented.

“Apparently she swings both ways.”

“I meet heem in da clookroom.”

“You met him?” I asked Gladys. “Like socially?”

The idea that the hellhound had been in the Algonquin Tower with us, just a short distance away from the opening, prowling though the cloakroom, while the city’s elite obliviously choked down party snacks as easily as the beast might have choked them down, seemed unlikely.

“All da lites go oot an I heer beeg doogie cam sneeffin arund,” Gladys elaborated. “I leek doogies. He good doogie. I tell heem dat an he jast sneef me an go awee.”

“What does it mean, Rip?”

Rebecca had understood Gladys’s fractured account as well as I had. It was the significance of this tidbit that was elusive.

“Nothing good, I’m sure,” I said, which was the best guess I had to offer.

● ● ●

Rebecca wasn’t wild about me leaving her behind with a man-eating dog hanging around the hood, but she felt better about it when I assured her it was only after me, and would probably hunt me wherever I went. Suddenly the farther away I was going, the better.

The church on Weatherly was clear across town on a block that was full of pawn shops, cheque-cashing services, and liquor stores. They all seemed to be doing well. The Presbyterian, however, had only been selling salvation, and there were no buyers. The place had been shuttered for ages, with no offers to develop the property, and not even enough interest to demolish it to make way for another pawn shop or three. I could see the holes in the roof from the subway exit across the street. The masonry at street level had become a canvas for spray-can artistes, and half the district seemed to have stopped to carve their initials into the heavy wooden door. Whatever stained glass hadn’t had rocks thrown through it by vandals was preserved by the pressboard panels that had been nailed over every window. They, in turn, had been carved up and painted over as well.

I wasn’t going to be so brazen as to kick in the front door, though no one passing on the street would have cared, I’m sure.

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