Weredog?

I generally finished my shift at the theatre some time between 12.30 and 1am, and the ten minute walk home was usually very quiet because it fell in the lull between the closing of the pubs, theatres, concert halls and cinemas, and the later rush that happened when the nightclubs and casinos finished. And so it was that night.

The first part of the route home was a two hundred yard walk downhill on the main road, before crossing over and turning right into Victoria Street on which I lived. There were no vehicles or any pedestrians to disturb the peace until I approached the end of my street, at which point I saw two men walking uphill on the other side of the road and approaching the same junction.

Their staggering walk indicated they were drunk, which irritated me a bit because drunks have a habit of doing irritating things – like barging into you and throwing up without warning! I hoped they would cross the end of Victoria Street and continue uphill so I wouldn’t have to get too close to them. One of them did, but the other turned left – which meant I would be following him once I turned into the same street. I crossed the road, came around the end of a high wall, and turned into Victoria Street, expecting the drunk to be a few yards ahead of me.

There was no drunk. Instead, in just about exactly the spot where I expected him to be, there was a big dog. At least, it looked vaguely like a dog, but unlike any dog I’d ever seen. It was about the height of a German Shepherd and looked something similar to that breed, except that it had a substantially broader head and shoulders. I confess to thinking that it looked like something not of this world, and it was standing in the middle of the pavement, facing me and staring coldly into my eyes. Apart from the two of us, the street was deserted.

I stopped for a moment and considered the facts. The timing of events and the layout of the properties precluded any possibility of the drunken man having entered a house, and there was nowhere else he could have gone either. I looked at the dog again, which was still blocking my way and fixing me with that devilish stare. What was there to do except take the risk and walk around it? There was no way of escaping the beast had it wanted to attack, and it was showing no obvious signs of aggression anyway. It looked very spooky, but not necessarily vicious, so walk past I did. It walked alongside me all the way home, occasionally nudging my leg with its outsize head. When I reached my front door I pointed along the street, said ‘go home now,’ and it trotted away quite happily.

I wondered later whether the two men I’d seen approaching the junction were not two men at all, but one man and a dog. I threw the idea out. The road is well lit, and the dog wouldn’t have been the height of a man even if it had been standing on its hind legs. Besides, I’d seen the second man turn left and walk into Victoria Street. Could I really have mistaken a dog for a man on a well lit urban street and at a distance of less than a hundred feet? I hardly think so. I wasn’t tired and hadn’t had a drink. So where had the second man gone?

As for the dog, all I can say is that I lived on that street for nearly ten years and it was the only one I ever saw loose. I’d never seen it before and I never saw it again. And it was certainly the oddest looking dog I’ve ever seen. In fact, the memory of it stayed with me and I had it vaguely in mind when I described the demon in the wood in Odyssey. And isn’t it a bit strange that it should have been standing on the very spot where the drunken man should have been? So, as the station master in The Ghost Train famously said:

‘If it be a natural thing, where do it come from, where do it go?’