The Invitation

I wake up to the sound of Jecht whining from beside the bed. The room is dark when I open my eyes, late afternoon having bled into evening sometime during my nap. It wasn’t unexpected. I’ve been feeling sick and took some NyQuil a few hours ago to try to sleep it off before the weekend was over. I feel groggy when I push myself up, and my head rings when Jecht barks his approval, but I pull myself out of bed anyway. He needs to go out for the night. It’s the only reason he ever wakes me.

“Alright, alright,” I mumble, rubbing my hand over his head as I shuffle toward the kitchen. None of the lights are on in the house and I leave them off as I wander through, unwilling to risk the headache of turning them on with my head pounding like that already. Jecht follows, like he always does. He’s the definition of a Velcro dog, has been since I brought him home from a rescue up north when I moved out here a year ago. I was hoping the company would be enough to keep the old country house from feeling so empty since I lived alone. Most nights, it worked.

“Go on, then,” I say as I pull open the sliding patio door off the kitchen, running a hand through my sleep-mussed hair as the night chill rolls in. It’s fall in Wisconsin; comfortable during the day, but the temperatures drop as soon as the sun goes down and stay low until midday usually. It’s too cold for me to want to step out for a smoke, but I’m supposed to be quitting anyway.

Jecht looks up at me for a second before realizing I’m not going out with him and bolts out the door. He barks from somewhere in the yard, and I reach for the light on the wall beside the door… but then I think better of it. Jecht doesn’t need light to see out there, and I don’t need to watch him anymore. He’s a smart dog. He knows his boundaries despite the lack of fence around the property, and, more than anything, he’s a grateful dog. He isn’t going anywhere he can’t find his way back from. Sure, he tries to chase squirrels and chipmunks occasionally, but he’s a dog. It’s to be expected, and if he ever goes too far all I have to do is whistle and he comes running back.

That’s not to say he doesn’t love his freedom, though. If he had it his way, he’d explore every inch of the property every time he went out to piss if he could. I pull the door closed to leave him to it tonight, reminded by a growling stomach that I need to put something in it before I head back to bed. There’s nothing out there but deer and raccoons anyway, so I’m not worried about him running into any trouble. At 120 pounds, he’s too big a target for the supposed coyotes that wander through the neighborhood sometimes.

I pop open a can of Chunky noodle soup and dump it into a bowl to heat up in the microwave, too fuzzy in the head to mess around with the stove. I just want to eat and go back to bed since I can barely keep my eyes open as it is. I don’t even sit down to eat once the microwave beeps, I just lean against the counter to eat in the light of the stove lamp. For some reason my mind wanders to the thought of my grandfather while I eat. How he’d tell me stories as I sucked down the soup my grandmother made when I was sick like this as a kid. He had the best stories… They all feel exaggerated now that I’m an adult, but he was a master storyteller. I liked the scary ones growing up, the ones my cousins hated to listen to because it made them afraid to go to bed at night.

He was a proud Apache, so some of his stories came off more like ancient wisdom or something. It’s hard to sort the real from the embellished ones, even now… Some of them were so random, like making each other spit on the broom if we accidentally swept someone’s feet while we were cleaning up, or burning the hair from our combs and brushes so the birds didn’t get to it. My personal favorite was keeping a screen on all the doors and windows so ghosts couldn’t get inside. My grandmother swore they had to count every hole in the screens before they came in, so they’d waste the night counting the holes until the sun came up and they had to leave. 

I can’t help but crack a small smile as I walk back over to the sliding door, remembering some of the superstitions – because that’s what they are, old-world superstitions – rubbing my blurry eyes as they adjust to the dark again since I switched off the stove light. Like evil things only came out at night… After working in law for the last seven years, I know better than to fear ghosts or demons. There are scarier monsters in the files in my office, and they aren’t beholden to some holes over the window or salt around the door.

I can see Jecht’s eyes reflecting the moonlight of the waning crescent overhead, but that’s it – he’s a big black dog in the country night, and it’s overcast to boot, so I can’t even see an outline. He doesn’t move, just stares at me for a moment from across the yard.

“Jecht,” I call, nodding inside like he understood the gesture. He’s a bit further out than he usually goes, I notice, but chalk it up to him having free rein for the last ten minutes. He doesn’t come, but I hear a low whine of protest in the darkness. So I whistle.

“Let’s go! Inside.”

The eyes flash as Jecht obeys, and I step aside as his large black silhouette crosses the threshold into the dark kitchen.

“Good boy,” I reflexively praise him, running a hand over his head once more. It’s wet – I guess it must be drizzling out there – and there’s a slight smell when I run my hand through my own hair again to pull it away from my face as I shut the door, but I pay it no mind. Wet dog is a thing for a reason. I’m tired. I just want to sleep.

Jecht walks beside me as we head back to the bedroom. I climb into bed as the sleepiness tugs at my consciousness, excited to slip back into my NyQuil coma since my bed hasn’t lost the warmth of my body heat yet. My head falls back against the pillow and I shut my eyes, eager for sleep, but something is off… I try to ignore it, but I feel like I forgot something important. Did I forget to shut off the stove? No, I used the microwave. I’m pretty sure I closed the patio door, too. Maybe I forgot to lock it… but I wasn’t worried about that sort of thing out here. It was quiet. Safe. That was the reason I moved to this neighborhood in the first place.

My eyes fly open for some reason, and I realize Jecht is still standing at the door, just two blue eyes reflecting in the black. It’s a little unnerving, but that’s just a knee-jerk reaction. He’s a sweet dog, just likes to be close to me. If I’m in the living room, he wants to be in the living room. If I work from home, he naps in the office while I take my meetings. He sleeps at the foot of my bed every night. He’s a good companion. I’ve gotten used to having him around, quietly keeping an eye on me all the time. He’s never so much as bared teeth at me, and to be honest I don’t know if I can sleep peacefully without him at this point. Like the soup, he’s a comfort when I feel like this.

“Come on, Jecht,” I say, patting the bed, “Time to sleep.”

I whistle again for good measure. Jecht comes.

I feel his weight, slowly and deliberately, climb up onto the bed with me. I mentally make a note to give him a bath tomorrow as the smell comes back, and it smells a bit more rank now – like he may have gotten into something while he was out there, a dead possum or something – as I turn over onto my side to sleep. The feeling that I was forgetting something continues to keep me up for a few minutes, but it’s no match for the doxylamine, and I slip into sleep before long.

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

My eyes roll open to a dull scratching sound. When I look over at the clock, it reads 3:33am exactly – so I was out for a few hours. I shut my eyes again and lay there, listening to the noise repeat itself for a while, trying to ignore it and go back to sleep. It was just some branches against the window, or some squirrels in the attic, or something perfectly ignorable at 3 a.m. Jecht isn’t reacting to it either, so I brush it off as nothing…

Until I hear a familiar whine in the distance, and I realize the sound I’m hearing is Jecht throwing himself at the patio door, wanting to be let inside… The thing at the foot of my bed stirs, slowly rising onto two legs as it stares down at me in the dark, like it knows. Jecht barks from outside, scratching wildly at the glass and I suddenly remember what I forgot earlier. It was something my grandfather told me when I was young…

He told me never to whistle in the dark.