Despite not missing him one bit, everyone agreed that it was great to see John, great to have him back from his travels, and no one could wait to hear where he’d been or what he’d been up to, for which he was happy to fill them in. He’d texted his mates while in the air, letting them know that he was on his way back home and to get ready for a session. Most people would visit family first when getting back from time away, especially if it had been a year, but John was not like most people and his pronouns were me and my, with his family as an afterthought.
So on his first evening home after travelling around the world, he was back in his local pub, drinking English ale and regaling his adventures. His mates feigned interest as he droned on, and when one of them couldn’t listen any longer, to make the one-sided conversation more interesting, and knowing that John was a bit of a bullshitter, he asked him about his love life while he’d been away.
“No, no love but there was this one girl I met in Osaka that I thought had something going for her, until I realised she was bat shit crazy.”
John then went on to describe how he’d met Kazumi in a bar and had spent a whirlwind two weeks with her, seeing the sight and brushing up on his Japanese. He glossed over their time in Osaka together, visiting the tourist sights and heading for local spots that were off the beaten track, went on at length about their time in Tokyo where John increasingly felt he was being used only for his money, and then finally of their time visiting her family in a small village on the southern island called Hidaka.
“So it must’ve been serious if you went to meet her family. That’s like a sign in Asian culture that you’re gonna get married, when you meet the family, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” John replied, grinning like the idiot that he was. “I had no idea she thought we were that serious and with me paying for everything I thought that she was using me. Anyway, we fly to the southern island and then it’s a two hour drive to her village. I was expecting them to be there at the airport when we arrive but turns out Kuzumi was expecting me to rent a car, so another £100 later we’re in this tiny yellow Suzuki Swift heading to meet her family.”
As the drinks flowed and John kept getting the rounds in, he described meeting his future mother and father-in-law, then being taken over the road to a small house directly opposite where her grandma lived alone. Once inside, John noticed that the grandma collected dog figurines and with Kazumi acting as translator, they had a chat and John told his future grandma-in-law that his grandma also collected dogs. After hearing this, she insisted that John take a dog and send it to his grandmother to add to her collection. She then hobbled over to her collection and returned with a small figurine of a friendly looking dog with tan fur and black around the eyes and snout. With its mouth positioned to look like a grin, it looked like a large but harmless dog.
“This is a Tosa Inu, a strong and noble dog from Japan. Please be sure to give it to your grandmother. I will be happy knowing that it has a good home among her English dogs.”
“So I thanks her and takes the gift then puts it on the floor next to my shoes and other stuff, I thought nothing of it at the time. Her grandma was really nice and I’m sure I was really polite, but later that evening I went for a walk with Kazumi and we had a row about my so called lack of respect when receiving the dog or something like that, and she’s literally screaming at me like a lunatic so I left her and walked back to her house. She calmed down when she returned but I knew I had to get out of there so I went to the bathroom and booked the last flight out that night and when I had the chance I grabbed my stuff and headed back to the airport. That was the last I saw of Kazumi. I spent a few more months in Japan but the magic that the place once had had evaporated and I felt it was time to come home, plus to tell you the truth, I felt on edge thinking I might bump into her any second, or she might be out there somewhere looking for me…come on, sup up and we’ll move on to the club.”
The night continued and John and his mates danced and drank until the small hours until one by one they went back to their homes and John was left alone when the music stopped and the lights came on.
John was stopping with his Grandma Jones - whilst he was off travelling his dad had got a new job in the city and had sold up and relocated. John would be spending a week in his hometown before heading down to London to join his family and start university just outside the city. John spied a full bottle of beer looking all lonely on a table near the exit so he concealed it under his shirt and
belt, then headed outside. It was a cool night and it wasn’t far to walk to his Grandma Jone’s house, so John fished the bottle of beer out from being tucked in his pants and drank it as he stumbled home. By the time he’d got to his Grandma Jone’s, he’d finished the beer and was beginning to regret it as his balance faltered and his feet wavered. After a good five minutes looking for his key, then looking for the keyhole, then looking for the key again, then fumbling with the light on his phone, the key, and the lock, he managed to open the door and quietly made his way into his grandma’s.
The first thing to hit him was that old familiar smell of Dove soap, second hand tobacco smoke, and fried onions, all intermingled to smell like Grandma Jones house. The second thing to hit him was a pang of guilt at not coming to see his Grandma Jones first, before going out to party with his mates. He kicked off his
shoes, being sure to keep the noise down. Not that it mattered, for his grandma slept like the dead and was fully deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other. Still, he quietly kicked off his shoes and then noisily fell head over heels in the hall as he tried to pick his shoes up and put them out of the way so his Grandma Jones wouldn’t accidently trip on them and break her other hip. Mission finally accomplished, John climbed the stairs to the spare room, turned on the light, plopped on bed and took a look at room that he’d played in ever since he was a child.
It was fairly large for a spare room, and sparse of furniture so that there was plenty of floor space for kids to spread out around a board game. Square with two windows, one overlooking the back garden and the other looking out onto a small jennel that ran between Grandma Jone’s house and next door’s. As you walked in, the window to the jennel was on the left and the window to the back garden on the back wall, the single bed pushed right up to the back wall, with a sky blue duvet with black paw prints covering it, and stacks of boardgames underneath it. Beside the bed was a small bedside table with a reading lamp on top and balls of wool that would never get used in the drawer.
Directly to the right as you enter and flush to the front wall was a display cabinet made of a series of over 30 shelves, made bespoke to house his grandma’s dog collection. John sat on the bed and looked straight ahead at the display, which was a lot smaller than the one that had seemed to tower over him as a kid. Still, it was quite impressive. Easily four metres long and as tall as the room, which he guessed was about two and a half metres, the shelves had been arranged in
geometric steps, with each shelf housing about ten dogs, mostly arranged by breed, but sometimes by material or colour. In the top-left were the metallic and stone dogs, mainly brass. These were joined by any handicraft dogs, with some made of seashells, modelling clay, pipe cleaners, lego bricks, and those carved from wood. To the top-right was a collection of famous dogs, cartoons and characters for popular culture, plus lots of toy dogs for kids to play with.
John had been fascinated with the dogs as a child, but seeing them also brung back memories of John not being allowed to play with the dogs and John recalled that he was only allowed to play with the plastic toy dogs at the top of the display, and even these were kept out of reach from him so that he always had to ask for them; had they been kept on the bottom of the display, he wouldn’t have been half as tempted to play with the forbidden dogs, especially what John considered to be the viscous dogs that Grandma Jones displayed centre stage in her display. Taking up four central shelves that formed a pyramid, there were a couple of dozen or so porcelain dogs that were slightly bigger than most of the rest, a lot more realistic looking than most, and from the most dangerous breeds out there. Starting on the lower shelf and working up you had the American pitbulls terriers, staffordshire bull terriers, American and British bulldogs, then the akitas, chow chows, Alaskan malamute, wolves and wolf-hybrids, then moving up you had the guard dogs - the rottweilers, german shepherds, doberman pinschers, and the boxer, then finally, taking pride of place was a cane corso, on a shelf of its own that now sported two broken front legs that had been expertly stuck back together so that you’d only be able to notice if you knew what to look for and got close enough.
John was older now and adamant that he’d touch any god damn dog he likes. As he approached the display, his eyes working their way up, taking in each of the viscous dogs until he got to his old nemesis the cane corso, he saw something that stopped him in his tracks and made him instantly sober up.
There, taking pride of place where the cane corso should have been was the Tosa Inu from Kazumi’s grandma’s collection.
“Well I’ll be damned,” John thought as he rubbed his eyes and stared at the ornament, thinking of how it could’ve possibly followed him halfway around the world. Common sense quickly took over. “There must be thousands of these. It’s
just a coincidence that my grandma also has one” he thought to himself as he turned away from the display and made his way back to the bed, no longer wanting to pick up any of the dogs, just sleep and one of his Grandma Jone’s full English breakfasts in the morning to get rid of what was sure to be a stonker of a headache. He fell onto bed fully clothed, not even bothering to brush his teeth or get under the duvet. As he was reaching to turn the night lamp off he remembered it was the big light on and so he continued to turn the lamp on then got out of bed and turned off the main light, before stumbling back to bed. He was just reaching to turn the lamp off when he noticed the box sitting on the floor, just to the right of the dog display and hidden from sight with the door open.
His heart jumped all the way to the back of his throat and he felt the need to vomit at the same time as the need to breath and found himself choking, not from the sight of the box, but the unmistakable Japanese characters that covered the box. He closed his eyes and tried to calm down, waiting for the panic to wash over him so that he could breathe, and once again, common sense told him that the box had probably been in the house for years, it was probably just an old box and of course he’d notice it now that he could distinguish this from other foreign scripts, and could even read and write his own name in kananga.
Putting his fears to rest, he went over to the box to inspect it more closely. No sooner had he picked the box up, then he dropped it again; the dog could be a coincidence, so could the box with Japanese writing on it, but the handwriting was undeniably that of Kazumi. There was no common sense explanation for this one; sure, he’d left the damned dog when he’d walked out on Kazumi, and he’d definitely not told her his own address, nevermind his grandma’s, so how was it that the do had made its way to it original intended destination?
“That crazy bitch” John thought, coming to the conclusion that Kazumi must’ve gone online and somehow found his grandma’s address. Looking at it written on the box, he got a sense that it had been written in anger. It did not need an expert in handwriting to know that this had been written by a raging hand. There was nothing on the surface that would make you think that ink had been laid down in pure hatred, but the longer you looked at the writing the more unsettling it made you feel and John found that he could not look at it for more than a second or two at a time. It took him a whole minute to read the six lines of text, a name and address that he knew by heart, and he imagined the person at the post office
sorting office having the same problem, not knowing why but feeling a sense of pervading wrongness in the owner’s penmanship. This sense of evil seemed to leach from the ink and contaminate the box, for John suddenly was overcome by a revulsion for the thing in his hand and he had no choice but to drop the box.
As it hit the floor, he was again visited by that gruesome script, this time scrawled savagely across an envelope that fell out of the box. There was the final nail in the coffin, John’s own name written in the identical script, but red ink this time instead of black.
John had a good mind to leave the letter and get the sleep his body needed. The jet lag was catching up with him and he was starting to regret that last bottle of beer, thinking that it could’ve been spiked and now he was starting to feel the effects as his vision and mind were surely playing tricks on him. He liked this train of thought and so left the letter, went back to bed and turned off the light.
“I’m tripping”, he said to himself as he closed his eyes and let his body sink into the bed whilst his grandma’s spare room started to slowly to rotate. “I’m tripping and I’m fine, just go to sleep and enjoy the ride” he thought as he drifted, “Enjoy the ride, enjoy the ride, enjoy the …” and he was asleep, all thoughts of Kazumi gone from his head.
That was until around twenty minutes or so later when John was awakened by the sound of barking that roused him out of his sleep. As soon as he opened his eyes, the barking stopped and John sat up on the edge of the bed in confusion. He was sure that the barking had been coming from inside the room; it was so loud and clear he had imagined that it was right next to his ear but when he turned on the lamp, there were no dogs in the room, save for the 300+ in Grandma Jone’s display.
His attention was once again turned to the letter, as though somehow drawn towards it and John knew that he would get no sleep for the rest of the night until he knew what Kazumi had to say. He knew that it wouldn’t be anything good and he also knew that he deserved to feel bad about how he’d treated her, so the only thing for it was to get it out of the way and move on with life. For a split second he considered burning the letter there and then, but he didn’t have one and his grandma’s was probably downstairs on the table next to her chair and he
was too lazy to go and get it. So instead, he retrieved the letter with his foot by sliding it along the floor until it was within reaching distance, picked it up, opened it up and braced himself for what were sure to be acerbic contents. Inside, written by a different hand on a small piece of black card the size of a business card was the following text in white:
命のための命は死に等しい
John read the parts of the text that he knew out loud but the meaning of the words eluded him, as did the pronunciation and meaning of the Hatakana characters, so John set about trying to decipher the text using google translate and after an hour he knew it had something to do with life and death both being equal. At 5:10 the sun was showing itself for the first time and with only 5% left on his phone’s battery, John finally cracked the code. Holding the piece of card in his left hand, her read aloud both the Japanese and English translation:
“Inochi no tame no inochi wa shi ni hitoshī…life plus life equals death… what the…” he felt something sharp prick his hand and looked down astonished that he had the Tosa Inu held tightly in his right hand. He felt a strong revulsion for the feel of the dog in his hand, so quickly put the dog back on the display and inspected his hand to see a small pin prick with a small sphere of blood coming from the tiny wound. John wiped his hand on the duvet and collapsed back into bed, dropping the original letter and the card to the floor.
Not surprisingly, John dreamt of dogs and before long dreams and reality intermingled and filled John’s head with the sound of dogs barking, starting inside his head, then a pack outside the window joined in, then another pack from the front of the house, then finally a pack inside room. The barking got louder and louder as the packs outside joined forces with the pack inside the room and the pack in John’s head, making him go crazy until all the packs’ barks combined into a single bark that morphed into a howl that woke John up.
John would’ve continued his descent into madness had the barking ceased as soon as he woke up in a soaken tangle of sweat-drenched clothes and duvet, which was now on top of him. He struggled to break free from the duvet and
breach the surface but after a minute of fighting he decided that it was quite snug tangled under the covers, and he was just nodding off for the second time when a low growl interrupted his reverie, almost imperceptible at first but gradually increasing in volume until it was definitely audible, and unmistakingly the sound of a dog growling, a big dog, dripping with anger and pulsating with hatred, just on the other side of the duvet.
“This is no dream,” John thought to himself as he curled up in a fetal position under the duvet and made the bed even damper. “It’s right there, just on the other side of this flimsy sheeting, inches away from my face ready to rip me to pieces''.
Thankfully frozen in paralysis, John knew he had to get a grip of himself and see what was lurking on the other side of the duvet, but all he could do was lay there listening to the steady growling that was definitely coming from either his head or in the room. Either way, there was no way that the growling was coming from
outside. It was in this room, either right next to his bed waiting for him to show his face or in his head. He opened his eyes and held his hand in front of him, waving it back and forth in the dark, trying to see if his vision was clear or if he was hallucinating. As he moved his hand back and forth, willing it to turn into a butterfly or leaf or to sprout more fingers, all he saw in the dim light under the duvet was his five digits going back and forth, until his vision became blurred by his tears. So John stopped waving his hand around like a madman and scrunched up his eyes. As the tears flowed freely and joined with the rest of his bodily fluid, he curled himself even tighter into a ball and imagined himself as small as possible, willing his overactive mind to go to sleep until his continual sobbing made him start to convulse.
And then the growling suddenly stopped and a split second later John hurled the duvet from on top of him and jumped out of bed, ready to face the beast within the room.
But there was no dog there, just the ones on Grandma Jone’s display.
Including the Tosa Inu. John turned on both the bedside lamp and the main light, and seemingly oblivious to the current sodden state of his clothes, he went over to the Tosa Inu and picked it up to inspect it.
Just an ordinary ornament, but when he held it close to his ear he could hear the unmistakable gutteral sound of growling. He turned it around, inspecting it for the small unmistakable holes used for speaker electronics. But there were no holes for speakers and no place to put batteries, just an urge to put the damn dog down. Unsettled, he put the dog back on the display cabinet and was just about to go back to bed for the final time that night when he noticed a light glistening off the dog’s mouth, and sure enough, ever so slowly a bead of saliva fell from the open dog’s mouth. As if that wasn’t weird enough for John to process, even weirder still and more horrifying was the fact that the dog’s mouth was now open, the ornament seemingly frozen in attack mode, with a viscious snarl captured on the mutt’s ugly mug. He thought back to when he’d first seen the dog and sure enough, it had looked like friendly, caught in a sort of grin, nothing like this terrifying display of viscous teeth.
Backing away from the display, John noticed that the two doberman pinschers to the Tosa Inu’s left also looked menacing, and the family of four Rottweillers to the right were also all positively furious.
Turning his back to the display, John darted for the bed and made it his own island retreat, holding the covers up in front of him as protection and hiding behind them. That was until he heard light thumping noises coming from the direction of the dog display and mustered the courage to take a look. Something about the display had changed since he’d last looked at it. What had changed though, John couldn’t quite put his finger on and try as he might, he couldn’t spot the difference. Then, it became quite obvious that the Tosa Inu was alive and moving, steam seeming to rise from its body as it breathed in and out and John could see the rise and fall of its chest.
Next, the Rottweilers bristled to life and their growling joined the Tosa Inu. Then, the German Shepards, the American Pitbulls, the Staffordshire Bull Terriers, and the Cane Corso, until all the dogs on the same shelf as the Tosa Inu came to life. John remained motionless on the bed, jaw dropped as he watched in equal parts horror and disbelief as the dogs surrounding the Tosa Inu came to life, first those
on adjacent shelves, then spreading to the outer shelves until the entire display had come to life and was practically vibrating with pent up aggression.
They say that dogs can sense fear and if that is the case the signals coming from the bed could not be any stronger; the bed reeked of blood, sweat, piss, tears, and fear, as did its occupant who was still motionless, mouth agape and face gaunt and weary with a fresh coat of sweat on its deathly pallor.
In spite of the situation, or probably because of it, John found himself in hysterics and burst out into fits of uncontrollable laughter, for there in the top right of the display was the meanest looking Goofy you’d ever seen, alert and stood to attention next to Snoopy and Clifford. He quickly scanned the display for the dog he’d made Grandma Jones for her birthday when he was 4 or 5 and sure enough, there it was, nothing more than four sticks of modeling clay stuck to a body, and a ball shaped featureless head stuck on top, looking angry as hell even though it had no face.
The sight of this long forgotten creation now come to life jerked John out of his current state and the cogs in his brain started up again. It appeared that although the dogs would surely rip him to shreds in a matter of minutes if they got hold of him, they were all stuck on the display; even those on the bottom shelf with only a drop of 5cm or so seemed trapped on the display, either unable to move from shelf or unaware that they were able to do so. “If I can make it to the door, I’ll be safe” John thought to himself as he looked at the distance he’d have to make. The door was directly to the right of the display diagonally opposite from the bed and the distance from the nearest corner of the bed to the door was about three metres, or two big strides from the bed. He was about to make a break for it when he regained his senses and thought things through for a moment, before deciding it’d be best to see if the dogs could actually move. No sooner had he thought this than the Tosa Inu lept from its shelf and started pacing from guard dog to dog, touching each rottweiler, german shepherd, and boxer on the nose and after each interaction the other dog started pacing back and forth on the shelves, with eyes constantly targeted on John.
Soon, the Tosa Inu had made its way from shelf to shelf and interacted with every dog, so that the shelf was teeming with movement, but still it looked like the dogs couldn’t or wouldn’t leave the display.
Back to his test, John took some of the duvet and placed it on the floor, creating a path from floor to bed for any dog brave enough to take a leap of faith from the
display. Not enticed by his offering, John put even more of the duvet onto the floor creating a wide path for the dogs to climb up, but none did.
He was about to make a break for it when he thought of another test, so he retrieved the duvet, piled it on the bed to make sure none of it was overhanging, then swung both legs out and tentatively placed both feet on the floor, ready to pick them up at the slightest sign of a dog jumping off the display. Ten second later, his feet were still safely on the floor and the dogs hadn’t pounced for him. “Maybe they’re smart” John thought as he scooted along the bed so that he was closer to the door. Then, he put his feet down on the cool laminate again, all the while scanning the display in front of him, ready to jump back into bed at the slightest movement. But the dogs didn’t move; it was as though there was an invisible barrier in front of the display and the dogs were itching to burst through it, as though they were able to attack at any moment and were primed and charged, bristling with pent up energy, wound up to the maximum but were waiting for the green light from the Tosa Inu, who remained ever vigilant of John’s every movement and was staring directly at his feet. “He’s waiting for me to stand up before he pounces” John thought, then to test the theory he did a bit of a shuffle with his feet then stood up and down quickly before withdrawing his feet back on the bed then hastily putting them back on the floor, all the while watching as the Tosa Inu did not move.
Emboldened by the lack of movement, John stood up but did not move, facing off with Tosa Inu, caught in a stand off, each waiting for the other to make a move. Then the Tosa Inu gave a short sharp bark, some sort of a signal not intended for John but for the other dogs. But none of them moved.
John was the first to buckle, literally as with his first step he immediately started to fall like a log as his legs gave way. In the time that it took for him to hit the floor, a number of things happened. First, the Tosa Inu flew from the shelf, shortly followed by the other guard and bully breeds. Then, John felt something lacking in his lower legs, or more specifically the back of the heels were missing some vital function for movement. Then, movement caused his gaze to shift from the display to his feet, and he noticed the doberman pinschers racing to meet his face with his own blood covering theirs. He was halfway to the ground, falling like a felled tree when the Tosa Inu landed on the floor. A quarter of the way to the ground, the Tosa Inu was in midair with a timed jump that would strike John the
moment he landed; the other dogs were not far behind. By the time John landed it was too late. Try as he may, he couldn’t get back to his useless feet as jaw after jaw clamped on to whatever they could and savagely tore away clothing and flesh. Frantically batting away the dogs, John heard a satisfying crunch of smashed porcelain and with renewed hope he started battling in earnest, first rolling around on the floor then smacking himself all over, all the the satisfying sound of broken porcelain.
Bleeding profusely, but momentarily free of dogs on the upper part of his body, John answered the dogs’ own incessant growling with a roar of his own, and he somehow managed to get upright onto his knees. He frantically looked around for a weapon that he could use to fend off the next attack but there was nothing around him now but angry dogs ready to pounce, pieces of broken porcelain, scraps of clothing, torn bits of flesh, and small pools of John’s blood. His thoughts turned from the door to the bed, which had moments ago been both a prison and a place of solace, but as he turned his body to retreat, he saw his path blocked off by the Cane Corso, waiting on its own, seemingly confident that it could handle business on its own.
During a momentary standoff, John looked back at the Tosa Inu and thought to himself, “This can’t be happening!” which led him to think, “This must be a dream, some bloody nightmare. I’ve had too much to drink, I’m exhausted from jetlag, I’ve been spiked and this is just a nightmare. If I pinch myself, I’ll wake up” but then he made a sound that was not a laugh, and not a cry, but a combination of the two at the sick thought and dawning realisation, “Pinch yourself! You’ve already been pinched a fair few times by the pinschers. This is no joke, you’re gonna bleed out and die or worse get eaten alive by Pluto and Snoopy. Think, god damn it, think, think, think, think, think…yes…maybe, it could possibly work. Makes as much sense as the last couple of hours. But how could he take out the leader? He had no weapons at hand and he was surrounded on three sides by hundreds of dogs moments away from closing in on him and attacking.
With his last throw of the dice, John lunged at the Tosa Inu, all the while thinking to himself, “why didn’t I just escape out of the window onto the back garden.”
…
In the morning, Grandma Jones noticed his shoes at the bottom of the stairs, his jacket hung up on the banister, and the spare room door closed. In the afternoon, the door was still closed and Grandma Jones decided that John must be really jetlagged and she’d let him have a lie in. It wasn’t until the evening, just before she was going to bed that Grandma Jones decided to check in on John. When she opened the door and entered the spare room it was as she’d left it before John’s arrival, except a few things were missing. Puzzled, she turned to leave wondering why John would steal the paw print duvet and about a third of her dogs but leave his shoes and jacket, which she checked still had his keys, wallet, and phone in them. Bewildered, she took one last look at her display and left the spare room.
After she got in bed and slowly drifted off, she thought about her grandson. “He’s always been a bit strange what with his tattoos and piercings, and notions of travelling the world, but why on earth would he steal my dogs? Must be on the drugs.” As she finally drifted, her last thought was about her display, and how the missing pieces somehow made the remaining pieces seem bigger.
…
Two weeks later the remaining dog figurines, some of which were now the size of small puppies, were packed into boxes ready to be sent to a large charity’s sorting warehouse, where they would be put in storage with thousands of other figurines, waiting to be sent out and sold to eventually find their way into new homes. All except the Tosa Inu, who mysteriously upped and vanished one day, just like Jon and Grandma Jones.