The Adventures of Dead Dan: The Old Religion
by John Rossi
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Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 |
Dan Collins has lived for nearly a decade in a waking dream of denial but has at last accepted that he is Undead. He doesn’t really understand what he is or can do; he tries to blend in with the mortal world as best he can by attending faithfully to work, friends and, above all, family. And yet a question haunts him: might other supernatural beings be walking among the living? Might they be beneficent or malign? Would they even be human in any way? Dan is not sure he really wants to know.
part 1
“Come here, Chubby,” Dan called out. “Come here boy.” The pug he was so desperately trying to coax over to him with an expensive, new, dog treat refused to comply. Instead, the small dog stood off from him pressed against the kitchen wall as though it was trying to push through it. Its back was hunched up and it actually had its hackles raised, which was something Dan didn’t think pugs could do. The dog’s large round eyes glared at him with obvious fear. To Dan, the poor thing looked like it was doing the most ridiculous impersonation of an angry cat he had ever seen.
He sighed. He stood up and looked down with disappointment at the rescue he and his mother had adopted over three weeks ago. Up until now all his plans had gone exceedingly well, and his attempts to seem human were subtle yet effective. Every morning before he left for work, he would make a cup of hot, steaming coffee. He would press his lips to the mug and warm them up before he would, on occasion, kiss his mother goodbye, giving her the impression his circulation was improving because of the new medication he wasn’t actually taking.
He would order lunch at work at least once a week, always trying to look like he had eaten some of it, and then he would seemingly take the rest home to finish it off and just dispose of it in the local gas station trash can just like the coffee.
Sadly, he had discovered the hard way that he could not eat without becoming violently ill. Despite that fact he gave the best impression he could that he did all the normal things that breathing people do. He even went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet for several minutes every day with his pants down.
That had been the point of Chubby the rescue pug, to make it easier for him to seem human when he was at home. It hadn’t turned out the way he had hoped. He had always wondered for the last nine years why his sister’s cats and her German Shepard hated him so much. Now he knew. Obviously, the legends and old wives’ tales were true: animals were able to sense the supernatural.
He wondered if silver bullets killed werewolves and vampires feared garlic, too, if they actually existed. The whole concept of all those old myths had seemed so ridiculous to him. At first he had rejected them out of sheer obstinacy. Now he knew that disregarding folklore wasn’t wise.
Once he discovered that Chubby was afraid of him, he had banked on one thing he knew from his youth when he had owned two pugs before: there may be no greedier a creature in all of creation then the pug. Some might say the pig could rival the legendary voracious appetite of the pug dog, but Dan believed if you shrunk a pig down to pug size and let them have an eating contest, the pug might just win.
When the pug’s previous owners had given him up for adoption, he had been morbidly obese. The adoption agency had done a marvelous job of slimming him down. Dan had hoped that the greediest of greedy pugs would always be hungry enough to take food from him. That would have made it easier to pawn off a couple of meals to the furry, little eating machine in furtherance of his ongoing ruse. Sadly, it wasn’t working out.
Trying to seem more human had not been Dan’s only motivation for bringing Chubby home. When he had been a teenager, he and his mother had loved their previous pugs dearly. They had called them their snorting little babies. He had hoped somehow, some way, to get them back. It would seem a stupid hope to any normal, breathing human being, but it wasn’t to him. To sit down and watch TV again with a beloved pug by his side, as in his youth, would have made him feel like something in his life was normal again. Even if it was a lie, it was still a lie he wanted. Unfortunately, he was beginning to realize that forklift operators who were walking dead could enjoy nostalgia only at a premium.
“Are you harassing Chubby again?” his mother called out from her bedroom.
“No, he’s being a jerk,” Dan retorted.
“Well, you have to give him time to get used to you. He’s only been here a couple of weeks.” She stated as she came into the kitchen. Chubby immediately ran over to his mother and began jumping up on her while wagging his tail emphatically.
As his mother bent down to pet her new pug, Dan wondered if he should invest the money he was supposed to be spending on his medication on anxiety medicine for the dog.
That’s when the paper lying on the kitchen table caught his eye. The Headline read: Pine Barrens Mauler Strikes Again, Third Workman Killed on Gas Pipeline Project.
“What’s this?” he asked as he picked up the newspaper.
“Oh, God, it’s horrible!” his mother replied. “A third person was attacked. No one is even sure what it is. Most of the news agencies say it’s a bear, but some swear it’s a wolf.”
“A wolf,” he repeated incredulously. “In Jersey?”
“Well I didn’t say I believed that. Channel Seven News thinks it’s a bear, but the authorities haven’t been able to really figure it out. Daniel, you really should pay attention to the news. There’s more to life then Saturdays out at the bar with the boys and work.”
His recent efforts at normalcy also consisted of hanging out with his old friends a lot more and trying to blend in at public places. He even started playing a little MMO on his PlayStation again.
He smiled sheepishly at his mother’s remark before turning back to the paper. One of the things that had bothered him in the last three months since he realized what he had become was the prospect there were others like him out there. People being attacked by wolves in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey was not normal. He wanted to write this off as just what it seemed to be, a serious of unusual animal attacks. Stranger things had happened. It was historical fact that the Jaws movies were based on horrifying shark attacks that took place right in New Jersey back in 1916.
He contemplated the possibility these attacks could be preternatural in nature. Could werewolves be real? he wondered. Then he suddenly had the ridiculous image in his head of doing battle with some Lon Chaney knock-off under the light of the full moon in the eerie darkness of the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
He decided the notion was just too ludicrous to take seriously. He put the paper down, feigned sipping his coffee and kissed his mom goodbye. “I’ll see you tonight,” he said as he left for work.
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Copyright © 2021 by John Rossi
