Dale followed the research trail to Plutarch. The ancient historian had written:
By Anubis they understand the horizontal circle, which divides the invisible, to which they give the name of Isis; and this circle equally touches upon the confines of both light and darkness, it may be looked upon as common to them both—and from this circumstance arose that resemblance, which they imagine between Anubis and the Dog, it being observed of this animal, that he is equally watchful as well by day as night.. . . This much, however, is certain, that in ancient times the Egyptians paid the greatest reverence and honor to the Dog, though by reasons of its devouring the Apis after Cambyses had slain him and thrown him out, when no animal would taste or so much as come near him, he then lost the first rank among the sacred animals which he had hitherto possessed.
Dale read on, following the maze of connections through the available books and then onto the Internet, using one of the library’s surprisingly new computers. In all the sources, Anubis emerged as a psychopomp—the creature charged with ushering the souls of the dying from this world to the next. It was Anubis who mummified and prepared the corpse of Osiris. It was also the jackal god who assisted Maat in judging these souls for truth and was considered the primary messenger from the underworld. Anubis was the Opener of the Way, presiding over the oval gateway to the realm of the dead—that gateway known to the ancient Egyptians as the Dat, or Duat, or Tuat. Dale blinked at this, realizing that the Egyptian gateway to the dead was in the form of a vagina—that portal both to and from this life.
“Twat,” he said aloud, appreciating the etymological geneology, and then realized that an elderly woman at the next computer was scowling fiercely at him. Dale smiled wanly and went back to his study carrel.
He realized that it would take days to track down the provenance of all the other spirits and gods mentioned in his short e-mail message, but he stayed at the books long enough to confirm that the “Constellation of the Thigh” was now known as the Great Bear and that the “Tchatcha,” or spirits, of “Kesta, Hapi, Tuamutef, and Qebhsenuf” were the chosen from the Seven Spirits whom Anubis had appointed as guardians and protectors of the dead body of Osiris. The goddess Hetepsekhus, he discovered after two more hours of reading, was “the eye of Ra.” He had no idea what that really meant, although it sounded like a sunbeam to him. He was getting tired.
Dale returned the Egyptian books to their shelves and looked at his crumpled paper. He looked at the first line of the first message he had copied:
gabble retchets yeth wisht hounds
Dale checked a library clock. It was after 6:00P.M. The library closed at nine. He was starving. Sighing, unwilling to give up the hunt just yet, he went back to the stacks.
A moldering old book with a surrendering spine, a book that had, according to the still-used checkout stamps glued in the front, last been checked out on June 27, 1960—exactly the kind of book, Dale knew, that would have long since been thrown away by any “modern” library—provided him with the jackpot. The book was titled English and Cornish Regional Myths and Folktales. The “Yeth or Wisht Hounds” were, as he thought, Heath Hounds—demonic dogs given to wandering the moors. Hounds of the Baskervilles. Always black dogs. It turned out that demonic black dogs, phantom dogs, spectral dogs, had quite a history in Lancashire, West Yorkshire, Cornwall, and the Quantock Hills of Somerset.
At Brook House, Snitterfield, in an ancient home formerly called the Bell Brook Inn, during World War II, guests and locals observed a big black dog haunting the grounds. The dog had red eyes, and it left no footprints in the freshly tilled garden.
In 1190A.D., near the Welsh Marches, a chronicler named Walter Map wrote of spectral black hounds, huge and loathsome, haunting the fields. These spectral hounds invariably presaged violent death in the area.
On Sunday, August 4, 1577, the parishioners of the church in Bungay, Suffolk, huddled against a memorably violent thunderstorm. In several written accounts it was told of a terrifying black dog that suddenly appeared inside the church, slavering and howling, roaming the aisles while the faithful cried out for divine help. Three people touched the hound: two of them died instantly and the third shriveled up “like a drawne purse.” In separate accounts but on the same August day in 1577, the same or similar hounds appeared in the church in Blythburgh, seven miles away, killing another three people there and “blasting” others.
Dale skipped ahead to 1613 a.d. when “a blacke dogge as bigg as a bull” suddenly appeared during services at Great Chart in Kent, killing more than a dozen people before demolishing a wall and disappearing.
Dale pulled down more old books, tracking the Black Dog legends all the way to Beowulf —learning that Grendel was primarily lupine, “him of eagum stod ligge gelicost leoht unfaeger”—“from his eyes shone a fire-like, baleful light,” before watching the legend disappear into the mists of prehistory via the Frankish Lex Salica, the Lex Ripuaria, the legends of Odin’s wolves in Grímnismál, and the Eddic poem Helreith Brynhildar, which spoke of the hrot-garmr, the “howling dog” that ate corpses and breathed fire. All of the black dogs in all of these legends seemed to be associated primarily with corpses, the dead, funeral grounds, funeral pyres, and the underworld. Dale was reminded that the warg was “a worrier of corpses.”
Dale realized that he could make a doctoral dissertation out of this crap, given the proper primary sources and a few years. It looked as if the connection between spectral black dogs and the “realm of the dead” ran through Indo-European mythologies into prehistory, through Vedic, Greek, and Celtic myth, offered hellhounds in such epic Scandinavian poems as Baldrs draumar (Balder’s Dreams), left paw prints through American Indian legend, and offered death-bound devil dogs romping through Altaic shamanic ritual and pre-Classical Greek thought and the Hindu Mahabharata, while all of it pointed straight back to old Anubis and his Egyptian underworld pals.
It gave Dale a headache.
He shelved the last of the books, realized that he was the only person in the building other than the librarian, saw with a shock that it was three minutes before 9:00P.M., and went out into the cold night to his truck.
Dale was halfway between Oak Hill and Elm Haven when his cell phone rang. The sudden noise startled him enough that he almost drove off the dark county road. He grabbed the instrument from the passenger seat, where it had been lying for days.
“Hello?”
Silence on the line, but a sense of presence. In a wash of emotion that made him pull the truck to the side of the empty highway, Dale knew that it was his lover Clare on the line—Clare calling him after more than a year—Clare telling him that his life and reality could resume once again.
“Daddy?”
For an instant Dale felt only vertigo. The voice, the two syllables—all lacked context.
“Daddy? Are you there?” It was his older daughter, Margaret Beth, Mab, away at Clermont College in California.
“Mab? What is it, baby? What’s wrong?”
An exhalation through the receiver. “We’ve been going crazy trying to get in touch with you, Daddy. Where have you been?”
Dale shook his head in confusion. A pickup truck drove past him in the night, an old man’s face checking the Land Cruiser to see if Dale needed help.
“I’ve been right here in Illinois, kiddo. Right where I told everybody I’d be. Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s all right here, Daddy. But you don’t have a phone number there and you never answer your cell phone number. Katie and I have been trying to call you or write you. Did you get the letters we sent?”