The Police Stopped Writing the Moment I Said “Aldermore”

“Emotionally scarred creatures. They have a way of helping each other heal.”

I looked at Dr. Mollah, waiting for him to finish talking.

“That’s why you should get a pet from the shelter. And trust me, you do need a pet. Living alone will only worsen your symptoms.”

I thanked him for his time and I took my leave.

I’d been seeing Dr. Mollah for three months at that point, ever since my breakup had left me in a state of functional paralysis. My depression wasn’t obvious on first glance, especially to my PhD supervisor. I was showing up. I was eating. I was technically working on my dissertation. But I wasn’t present for any of it.

The shelter was a forty-minute drive from my apartment. I have never had a pet before in my life. But I did have a dissertation due in a few months, and absolutely nothing to show for it. At that point, I would have followed any suggestion Dr. Mollah threw at me.

That’s when I saw her for the first time.

She was in the second-to-last kennel. A German Shepherd, black and tan, large and lean, with ears that stood perfectly upright. She didn’t bark at me. She just observed me with a kind of alertness you don’t see in animals.

When I crouched down to her level, I noticed the marks on her body. There were several of them.

They ran along her left flank and the inside of her front legs. Not scars from a fight. Not the random damage of a rough life outdoors. The patterns were too… deliberate. They were small, precise, and symmetrical. I asked the attendant about them. She looked briefly uncomfortable, and said they didn’t know the dog’s history.

I looked into the dog’s eyes and felt something. We were both scarred in our own ways. We both were in a rough shape. Maybe, just maybe, we could help each other after all…

I completed the paperwork that afternoon.

I brought her home and let her explore the apartment. That’s when I noticed the cord around her neck.

I don’t know how I’d missed it at the shelter. It was partially hidden under her fur. It was a knotted cord, dark and tightly wound, with smaller knots spaced along its length. It wasn’t a collar. It wasn’t a tag. It was the kind of thing you tie with intent. It felt wrong in my hand, in a way I still can’t articulate.

I took it off and threw it in the dumpster outside the building. It was clearly a sign of the dog’s past, and it had no place in her new home.

Then I went back inside and started making lunch. And by lunch, I meant spicy chicken curry.

While cooking, the smoke from the pan got ahead of me. It rose fast, and the dog noticed. She panicked and let out a wail. I followed her as she bolted across the room and collided with the bookshelf in the corner. The collision sent my only houseplant, a gift from my supervisor, crashing to the floor. The pot caught her behind the ear on its way down.

It was not a bad cut, but enough to bleed.

I rushed to my bathroom. I grabbed the first aid kit, crouched beside her, and pressed a clean cloth to the wound.

I expected her to resist. But she didn’t. She trembled once, then went still. Not the stillness of fear, but one of trust. She let me clean the wound, dress it, hold her ear between my fingers. She closed her eyes, and I felt her relax against my hand.

That was the moment I named her Asha.

In my native language, Asha means ‘hope’.

And for the first time in a long time, I actually felt hopeful about what lay ahead.

The few weeks that followed were an adjustment. Asha was withdrawn, cautious, and easily startled. But she was present. And somehow, so was I.

I noticed the first strange thing about three weeks in. Every morning, I’d find her sleeping in the same position, facing the same corner of the room. I told myself dogs had preferences. I didn’t think about it again.

The second thing I noticed was around week five. I’d gotten up for a glass of water at half past two in the morning. I found her standing in the center of the living room, completely still, facing the front door. Not growling. Not whining. Just standing and staring at a door without blinking. I watched her from the hallway for a few minutes. She didn’t move.

I went back to bed. I told myself it was residual anxiety from the shelter, which was probably true.

Probably.

The third incident was on a walk. She ignored every person we passed- joggers, couples, a man walking his bicycle. That was until she saw someone. He was a completely unremarkable figure, wearing a grey hoodie, who passed us on the pavement. Asha stopped dead. No growling, no barking. She just watched him until he rounded the corner and disappeared. Then she followed my lead and we walked home. She never looked back once.

Asha didn’t eat anything until the next morning.

The fourth incident occurred during Eid. I wanted to decorate the apartment for the occasion. So I lit incense- just a couple of sticks, nothing dramatic. Asha went to the front door, pressed her nose to the bottom, and backed away slowly. She spent two hours under my desk, pressed flat against the wall, visibly shaking. I put the incense out immediately.

I thought she’d had a bad experience with smoke before. Given what I’d seen of her past, it almost seemed reasonable.

Almost.

By the end of the second month, she was sleeping at the foot of my bed. We were playing catch every afternoon. We were watching Looney Tunes every night, Asha wagging her tail with joy. Meanwhile, I had drafted three chapters of my dissertation.

For the first time in almost a year, I thought I might actually finish it…

Until the fateful night they entered the house.

I don’t know exactly how they got in.

I woke to the sound of someone muttering in my room. Before I could sit up, there were hands on me, and something cold at my throat. There were two of them. Their clothes were dark and loose, and they wore multiple beaded necklaces. They smelled of something sweet and chemical. Even in the dark, they looked unclean and unwashed.

One of them grinned at me with too many teeth.

“‘Aven’t got all night, mate. Stop wigglin’.”

I tried to shout, but I couldn’t. Something was pressed to my face- a cloth soaked in a thick, sweet smoke. It moved into my lungs like a warm hand closing around my thoughts.

I lost consciousness soon after…

I don’t know how long I was out for.

When I came to my senses, my cheek was against the floor. My hands weren’t working the way I told them to. The room smelled of burnt wax and something floral, something I have no name for.

I turned my head.

Five candles were arranged on my living room floor, in a pattern I didn’t recognize. Four were already out, their wicks still smoking. The fifth was still burning. Asha stood in the center of the arrangement, completely still. Not frightened, not struggling. Just still like a statue. Standing in the middle of the room like she was waiting for something to be finished.

In the corner, a man in a pale shirt stood, writing something in a small notebook. His sleeves were rolled up exactly twice. He didn’t look up.

One of the men was crouched near Asha, watching her with an expression of unsettling satisfaction. The other one kneeled on the floor, eyes closed, chanting something I couldn’t decipher. The last candle went out on its own.

Asha dropped to the floor, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

“Oi Rafiq! That’s what I’m talkin’ abaht!” The crouching one stood and grabbed the other by the arm, laughing. “Best one so far, I tell yer. Aldermoor really ‘ave outdone themselves this time!”

The man in the pale shirt, the one they probably called Rafiq, closed his notebook. He walked over to me and crouched down, with the calm of someone performing a routine courtesy.

“I’m sorry about all of this,” he said. His voice was measured, warm even. “Truly. It was never meant to involve you.” He held my gaze for a moment. “As long as it stays that way, you have nothing to worry about.”

He stood and straightened his sleeves. Exactly twice.

One of the others crouched over me, with that same too-wide grin. I understood what was coming, long before it arrived.

“Alright. Time ter clean up. Yer ‘ouse…” A pause, full of theater. “…an’ yer MIND !”

The smoke hit me again. The last thing I heard was maniacal laughter.

I woke up to Asha licking my face.

It was six in the morning. The apartment was immaculate. No candles, no marks, no smell. Nothing broken, nothing moved. Just Asha, tail cautiously wagging, looking at me like I’d fallen asleep on the floor.

I called the police the next morning.

A senior inspector was brought in, who looked sharp and professional. He asked me to walk him through everything I remembered. I told him about the candles, about the smoke, about the man in the pale shirt. The inspector wrote things down and nodded. He then asked me if I remembered any names.

I mentioned **Rafiq**. I mentioned **Aldermore**.

He stopped writing. There was a pause- brief and almost undetectable. Then he excused himself, and stepped outside with the other officers.

They have been politely useless ever since. One of them suggested, gently, that the stress of my PhD might be affecting my perception of events. There was no evidence of forced entry. No evidence of anything, really.

I understood what they meant, perhaps more than I was supposed to.

I moved out three weeks later.

My new apartment has good floors. A window ledge that Asha claimed within twenty-four hours. I bought another houseplant, same as the previous one, and put it somewhere she couldn’t reach.

She was a different dog in the four months that followed. Playful and warm, in the small ways that make you love an animal completely. She’d steal socks and bring them to me like trophies. She’d fall asleep on my feet while I wrote, and I’d sit there longer than I needed to, just to avoid waking her.

I finished my dissertation on a Thursday morning. I submitted it at 11:47 AM. My supervisor seemed pleased. I sat very still for a long time afterwards, feeling genuinely grateful for everything.

Then I went home to tell Asha.

I called her name as I entered the house. I thought I heard her before I opened the door. A familiar movement, the sound of paws on good floors.

I expected her to come running towards me, barking playfully and wagging her tail.

For the first time in four months, that didn’t happen.

I walked to the living room looking for her, still calling her name. That’s when I found ‘it’, looking at me from the center of the room.

It was a German Shepherd, black and tan, large and lean, with ears that stood perfectly upright. It didn’t bark at me. It just observed me with a kind of alertness you don’t see in animals. There were marks on its body, several of them. They ran along her left flank and the inside of her front legs. The patterns were deliberate- small, precise, and symmetrical.

“Asha, there you are ! You okay, girl?”

My voice was childlike, as usual. I hugged my dog as usual, lifting it off the ground as usual.

And it took me less than ten seconds to sense something unusual.

The first thing I felt was the weight. It was close, but not quite right. Like lifting a bag you’ve carried a hundred times, finding it slightly lighter than you remembered. Your hand notices this before your mind does.

Then there was the smell. I know how Asha smells. Six months of shared space, of her sleeping on my feet, of her fur against my face when she’d push her head into my chest. This was close. Close enough that I stood there, telling myself I was imagining it.

That’s when I noticed the cord around its neck.

Dark and tightly wound. Smaller knots spaced along its length. I had seen that cord before. I had felt the exact texture of that cord before. I threw that cord in a dumpster six months ago. At an address where I no longer live.

I set the dog down carefully. It was silent, awfully silent. My Asha was never silent, not when I was around. There was always a bark, a whine, a huff, or a nudge. This was just silence, and stillness, and those eyes.

My hand, already trembling, moved the way it always did. Up along its jaw, behind the ear, to the place it always found without thinking. The place where Asha cut herself on the day I found her. The wound that never fully healed, the one that reminded me of the time we first warmed up to each other…

The skin was smooth. Unbroken. Unmarked.

I felt tears rolling down my cheeks.

They haven’t stopped since.

If anyone is reading this, please help me make sense of this. Because I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t know what is happening to me. I don’t know why any of this is happening to me.

I just know that Dr. Mollah was right all along. Emotionally scarred creatures really do help each other heal. My dog taught me how to smile again. She gave me a reason to live again.

I named her Asha. In my native language, Asha means ‘hope’.

And this evening, I called out hope…

I still don’t know what answered back.

Credit: Dr_AK_Myst

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