Old Cases

The possibility that I had met Sara before kept poking at my mind, so I dug through my old case files to find the log on the incident she’d mentioned. It took far longer to search through all those boxes of old papers than it should have. The biggest reason I’ve switched over to this online format is so that I can have a computer organize things for me, instead of relying on my traditional method of throwing everything into the closest available box.

Just like she’d said, it had been a case involving the Black Dog. I’d been hired by the man who owned the land the bar was on; apparently he was a tad upset about this giant beast stalking the place at night and scaring away customers. He wasn’t concerned about why the Dog was there, he just needed it to leave.

The way I described Murphy’s in the log, it was just as much a dump a year ago as it is now. There had been six people inside that night, including Sara. Just like she’d said, her hair had been green back then. I’d felt a thick air of fear amongst them all the moment I’d entered. They’d all seen the monster waiting outside. The Black Dog wasn’t even trying to hide its presence.

I gave the briefest explanation I could. Big supernatural thing outside, I know more about this than any of you, do what I say and things will probably be alright for most of you. I phrased it more diplomatically back then, of course. The next step was questioning everyone inside the bar. It took over an hour of me interrogating everyone before I figured out which one was the Black Dog’s target. After that, it was just a matter of convincing him that his best chance for survival was to slip out the back door and run for it.

I doubt he made it five feet before the Dog got him. But I was being paid to get the Dog to leave, not to save any victims. Once the Dog got who it came for, there was no reason for it to stick around, and I could collect my paycheck. Besides, Black Dog victims have a tendency towards stubbornly refusing to be rescued.

Reading about that case brought to mind another forgotten memory. Not really a memory, but the absence of a memory that had a similar shape in my mind to this one. I went searching through more boxes until I found the log I was looking for. This one was one of the oldest papers I had stored away. When I saw how yellow the pages were getting, I was worried that it would tear apart when I picked it up. This was one of the first jobs I had ever taken.

The client had been the mayor of a small city in the Midwest. He’d been followed by the Black Dog for a month, and had hired me to deal with it. Being the naïve greenhorn I was at the time, I gave him what I thought was an easy solution: come clean with all your secrets. The Black Dog holds power over people through their secrets and the weight of the emotions they give them. I figured all he needed to do to break that hold was stop treating whatever secrets he had like such a big deal. After all, I assumed that none of them could be worse than the threat of death.

He’d called me a fraud and demanded his money back. When I refused, I was thrown out the building. Three days later, the news reported that the mayor had died in mysterious circumstances. I suppose he thought his secrets were more important than avoiding death. I’m not sure I can understand his choice. Letting other people find out about some dark secret is far better than dying.

Then again, not all secrets are things we hide from others. I think we all have something in our past we try to keep secret from ourselves.

And I can understand why someone would choose death over confronting those.