I Am Black Dog

I am eternal. In a universal sense, I always have been and always will be here, though I did not always walk amongst you humans, nor even have need to walk at all. At first I simply was here to do the bidding of a harsh God, and He named us Archangels, that we might rule over mankind in all sorts of ways. Metatron, who you might call God’s mouthpiece, I think once said it best. As he led the holy prophet Moses through the Seventh Heaven he remarked on me and told the man, “This one is Samael, who takes the soul away from man.” But little did he or I know that soon that very soul would be damned.

At first there was Lilith- you may never have heard of her, or certainly not with honesty. She was the fair and cunning consort who I took in after Adam, God’s much-loved first “man,” deserted her for another. As the world was forming and I took to my task of delivering those souls of men both good and wicked, I also laid with Lilith, and for this a fool was I, for I let the wretched she-devil bear me sons.

Of course when He found out the Creator was furious, for He feared our offspring might destroy all of humanity itself, but naturally who did he curse more cruelly? It was I. He took away my strength and sent me hurtling down to forever be tormented in the Lake of Fire as a demon, even as my sons were left to walk the earth. If this isn’t evidence enough of an angry and unjust God then it’s no use trying to convince you further. All I have is my tale- and let it be a lesson.

I am a fighter. It was many, many forlorn and excruciating human years before finally, triumphant, I broke through the surface of your world and took the shape of man. It was a populous and dark place where I was first born human, near the area called Dublin, and my name was Olocher. I might have now finally had a chance at some room to breathe, some place to call my home, but the hours upon hours upon hours of unceasing torment had burnt upon my very spirit an evil stirring within me. I thought of Lilith, she that had caused my downfall, and I thirsted for the blood of harlots.

I took pleasure in the pain and terror on the farm girl’s face as I mercilessly ravaged her only to strangle her when the deed was done, and just like that, I was an agent of death again. I waited until nightfall for the innocent and weak to sate my blood lust. But man is so petty, so very compelled to follow what God passed down as law, and so I was branded a murderer and rapist of women, sentenced to a dungeon far better than the ones I had seen in Hell. Black Dog Prison, a curious name I thought, and ironically I was condemned to die not long thereafter.

I am unafraid of death; after all, once I had come into a mortal being, I had the ability to move, to change. As my sentries at the prison were particularly irritating to me, I took great pleasure in hanging myself to rob them of their execution just hours before its time, and I went aloft in search of another vessel. I suppose I might be sentimental, or just truly enjoy a turn of phrase, because I became a loathsome, black dog-like beast. Now free, I terrorized the maidens of the city, snarling and biting at them with snorts of excitement and thus was hunted as a great black hog. Oh, it truly was a sight to behold, those men who thought they were so brave take up pitchforks and wooden clubs, and beat down any pigs, boars or black beasts they could find, all while I hid myself inside a cave and waited for the inevitable- for my beast self to be declared defeated, at which point I decided to move on.

My new host would be one much more beloved by man- a true black dog, small, and with a countenance of such sweetness and charm that a fortunate family ferried me across to bountiful England. I accrued so many new names while lying low in those early years- Barghest, Black Shuck, Dip, Church Grim. Humans have such a fascination with names. I never took any particular notice of the ones I came across, until I entered the city of London and found a man there who took me aback.

This man, a doctor by trade, was the son of a son of many other sons, of my OWN. God had NOT made my efforts all for naught- my ancestors still lived! I realized that with some of my own blood flowing within him, I could control this unhappy man, in a sense. Even as a mongrel fading into the shadows of the rancid gutters and curling up at night I held sway over this mortal son. And I too became miserable- Whitechapel was nothing more than a disgusting set of alleyways overflowing with debauchery and filthy sinners of the flesh. Once I had taken power over a man’s body again, and felt the life flow from a woman just as her blood dribbled out onto the streets, I knew that I could not go back to mere foolishness and cheap scares again.

I am ever the adventurer. The affair in London inevitably had to end, as I had no plans to become imprisoned further, and so I shook off the dog’s form and briefly took hold of an immigrant bound for sweet, plentiful America. Once again good fortune struck and another one of my blood descendants presented himself on a street in Chicago as I again roamed a canine. Inside his body I shivered with thrill as the women screamed with no one else to hear them, sealing them into rooms and later opening and studying their lifeless husks, as it gives me joy to see God’s beautiful work so barbarically undone. Again my spirit was restless, and it fled the city on four legs in search of another son, who himself was truly demonic.

I relentlessly pounced on the innocent women and panted with excitement as I sacrificed their bodies, still wriggling and crying to escape me, to fearsome alligators in a swamp. That was another time I was quick to flee, as the police were onto me, and so in my haste I shot myself to avoid capture, and although I mourned the loss of yet another son of a son of mine, had no choice but to move along elsewhere to one of my dear black dogs. There I was free to roam the countryside and seek my next target, my next beloved son, a tortured young man I found on the wide stretching plains of Wisconsin.

I am always the curious hobbyist, and in search for new thrills I wished to better understand the female anatomy, perhaps to see all the ways in which they beguile and damn the souls of men, as well as all the ways that I might pay them back, in pain and in blood. It seemed now that humans paid much less attention to the abuse of corpses, so I would often wander out at night to retrieve the freshest from the graveyard and… experiment. It truly amuses me how useful, say, human skin can be, or even the tiniest of bones or fingernails. But as all thrill-seekers eventually do, I suppose I began to lose interest.

After all, I was taking nothing from these women other than fragments and bits- they had no pain to give, no blood, no suffering, and so when they locked my curious mad scientist up for his little nighttime “excursions,” I resolved to seek out the one thing humans seem to prize the most- love and companionship. If I could find it, then I could destroy it, and revel in its annihilation. Even now one of my greatest joys is having never been caught for my next round of slayings- sneaking up on the weakest and most naive of couples in the prime of romance, only to cut them down in a year of carnage I reveled in with wild abandon. I even began a campaign of correspondence with the police investigating, for it gave me a certain glee in knowing that I would never truly answer for these murders. Alas, one is bound to get bored, and so I once again decided on a change.

I am nostalgic. I longed for a simpler life, maybe a decade or so of rest to settle the fire in my figurative belly, and so I once again assumed the form of man’s best friend, living quietly with an everyday sort of human. You can imagine my surprise, then, when a rather pitiful vessel of a man came along. Descended from my own blood, he was one so weak as to be nearly possessed by my mere presence. And so I waited to see with this strange man, and by scarcely doing more than speaking to his mind, sending dark messages through the core of him, the man took to the kill.

Again, I targeted love- and soon every young couple in all the Burroughs of New York were stricken with fear over this mysterious shooter and his deranged ramblings. I suppose the latter was much of the reason why, after a time, the man was arrested and I gave it up for a while. After all, it isn’t very often that a human, the man named Berkowitz, not only recognizes my true nature but also KNOWS the demonic force that I am.

And so for now I watch, and I wait. But don’t rest on your laurels, mankind- for I am simply calculating my next move. Searching day by day for yet another special son. And when that day comes, you will think nothing of the havoc wreaked by the human who knew of my true self- the one they call “Son of Sam.”

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Credit: TheJinx

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