The Eyes in The Woods

Lainey POV Travis left for his first shift at nine. He looked good. I'll say that. He had ironed the uniform shirt himself, and he stood in the hallway with the radio clipped to his shoulder and asked me if the badge was straight. It was. He kissed me at the door like a man with somewhere to be. I stood on the porch and watched his taillights go, and I felt nothing but relief. Three hours later, it was midnight, and I couldn't sleep. It was strange being in the house by myself. I hadn't known how much noise one other person makes until it was gone. There was no television and no snoring. There was only the refrigerator humming, and the woods outside, and me, lying in the middle of the bed with my eyes open. So I got up and did something useful. I unpacked the last four boxes. I found the forks, finally, in a box marked BATHROOM. By the time I was done there was a stack of flattened cardboard by the back door as tall as my hip, and a bag of bottles beside it that I didn't want to look at in the morning. The bins were out by the shed, at the back of the yard. I didn't think about it. I got the cardboard under one arm and the bag in my other hand, and I pushed the screen door open with my hip. It was cool out, and bright enough to see by. The moon was nearly full. The grass was wet on my bare ankles, and the bottles clinked with every step. My keys were on the kitchen counter, with the pepper spray. I thought about that roughly halfway across the yard, and I kept going, because it was forty feet and I was a grown woman. I dropped the cardboard by the shed. I lowered the bag into the bin as quietly as I could, which was not very. I had turned back toward the house when something moved behind me. It wasn't a loud sound. It was one twig, and then the hush of something big shifting its weight in the leaves. I turned around. The eyes were back. They were at the edge of the trees, low and pale gold and perfectly still, exactly where they had been the first night. I hadn't dreamed them, and that was not a raccoon. There was a shape behind them this time, darker than the dark around it, and it was huge. I took a step back. My heel came down on the edge of the cardboard, and the whole stack slid out from under me. I went down hard, on my hip and my elbow. My arm raked across a dead branch and I felt it open the skin from my wrist halfway to my elbow, hot and quick. I cried out. I couldn't help it. It came out of the trees. It came fast, and all at once, straight across the grass at me. It was a dog. It had to be a dog. It was the biggest dog I had ever seen, bigger than the mastiff that used to drag its owner through the clinic door, with a black coat and shoulders that would have reached my chest if I had been standing. My brain said a different word, a shorter one, and I refused to hear it. I was on the ground with a bleeding arm, and it was ten feet away and still coming. "No!" It was the front desk voice. I hadn't used it in months. It came up out of me on its own, the one I used to keep for ninety-pound Labs who had just spotted a cat carrier. "Sit! Stay!" It sat. It didn't slow down first. It stopped dead and dropped its whole back end onto the wet grass, six feet from my bare feet, so fast that it skidded. Then it just stayed there, exactly like I had told it to, looking as shocked about it as I was. Neither of us moved. I could hear myself breathing, and I could hear it breathing too, quick and heavy from the run. Maybe it is a dog. It had to be. Wild things don't sit. Nothing that lived out in those woods on its own was going to drop its rear end in the grass because a woman in pajama shorts told it to. Somebody had taught it that. Somebody had fed it, and brushed it, and said "good boy." It was just a very, very big dog. I pushed myself up a little to get a better look at it. I used the wrong arm. The ache went all the way to my shoulder as soon as I put weight on it, and I sucked in a breath through my teeth and looked down. It wasn't deep, but it was long and ragged, and it was bleeding in a thin, dark line that had already reached my palm. "Damn," I said out loud. The dog whimpered. It was a small, high sound, and it had no business coming out of something that size. Its ears went flat. Its whole head sank down between its shoulders, lower and lower, until its chin was nearly on the grass. It looked at my arm, and then up at me, from under its brows. I had seen that look a hundred times across the front desk. It was the look of a dog who had knocked something off a table and knew it. Then it started to creep. It didn't stand up. It stretched one front paw out, slowly, and dragged itself forward about three inches on its belly. It stopped. It checked my face. Then it slid the other paw out and did it again. It was the size of a loveseat, and it was trying to sneak. "I can see you, you know," I said. It froze with one paw in the air.