Rose Creek: A Collection of Short Horror Stories

III: Dogman

Photo by Vincent Boulanger from Pixabay

III. "Dogman"

Reservation on the Thames

Sam Kent - 1994

I moved to Rose Creek with my father when I was fourteen years old. I was an only child, and I've lived with my father for as long as I could remember. My father refused to tell me much about my mother at that age, only that she got "sick", and had to be placed into a special home.

"You'll understand better when you're older." He'd always tell me.

As a result, I never met my birth mother, or learned what happened of her until much later in life. From the pictures of her I saw as a kid, I only remember thinking she was very beautiful, and wanting to meet her, but whenever I brought her up my dad would get upset. I'm twenty-five at the time of writing this, and I found out that she was placed into a mental asylum after having an episode one night which almost resulted in her killing me as a baby. Yeah, it's pretty disturbing to think about, so I prefer not to. I no longer live in Rose Creek at the time of writing this because of the events that transpired when I was fourteen. When I was eighteen, I packed up my things and moved away for good. My father decided to stay back in Rose Creek, since he had nowhere else to go, but just two years after I left home, he died. I always felt bad, I felt like I abandoned him and left him to die alone, if I could've done things differently, I would have. At the time, I just couldn't take the idea of staying in that place one second longer. I cannot confirm whether or not my father's death had anything to do with what I'm about to explain, and I guess I'll never know, I can only have my suspicions. So like I said, my story begins when I was fourteen, and back when I met what I called, the "Dogman".

I remember the first day of the move in like it was yesterday. It was a cloudy day out; I remember the overcast made me feel even more depressed about moving to this place. Now that I try to recall, I don't think it was ever sunny in Rose Creek. We had moved from up north from the big city of Toronto; my father could no longer afford to live there since he lost his job. So, he found work just outside of a native reservation in Rose Creek, the Reservation on the Thames. I remember being really upset about moving here as a kid, I was just about to start high school, and instead of starting it in the big city with all of my childhood friends, I had to start school living in the middle of nowhere with no friends. Our property was pretty desolate, fields surrounding the property with a large bush behind our backyard. It was a twenty-minute drive to the nearest grocery store, and cars rarely went by. We were completely isolated and alone, with the exception of our one neighbour who lived a few minutes down the road. The realtor told us that it was an elderly native woman who lived alone named Nina.

My father already had me enrolled in the nearest high school which was right outside of the reservation, and I had to go the very next day after moving in. I remember how much I dreaded it, and I think my father truly felt bad for me but there wasn't much he could do. The first day of school was terrible, everyone already had their groups and cliques formed from previous years of going to elementary school together, and I spent the entire day alone without talking to a single kid. This loneliness continued for the entire freshman year of high school and contributed a lot to the depression I still have today. However I did make one friend that year, and it was Nina. After about two weeks of living in Rose Creek, I was walking home from school one afternoon when I passed her house, and she called out to me. She was sitting on her porch in her rocking chair, rocking back and forth. She never did anything while she was out there, she just sat there and watched into the open fields in front of her house, it must've been a lonely lifestyle.

"Boy!" she hollered out, "Care to give an old woman some company?"

I was hesitant at first, but decided I had nothing to lose. I walked up her porch and she offered me a seat next to her. She was very old looking, she had to be at least in her nineties; her hair was white and thin, she had a large blanket that she kept wrapped around her, and while her face showed definite age, her eyes always looked sharper than mine.