Dogman -

The last thing I write in this journal is a single line, scrawled in the dark: It wants to be seen. And I looked.

For twenty years, I told myself it was a deer. A sick coyote. The power of suggestion. I moved to the city, became a forensic psychologist, and buried the memory under case files and coffee. I diagnosed schizophrenia, dissociative disorders, and the occasional delusional parasitosis. I never once diagnosed a monster.

Then the amber eyes swallowed the light.

Edmund was transferred to solitary after he bit an orderly. Not to escape—to get away from the window. "It's watching," he kept saying. I humored him. I moved his bed to the interior wall. That night, I stayed late to review his case files. At 2:17 AM, the power went out. DogMan

I look out the motel window. It's dusk. The edge of the forest is fifty yards away. Something is standing at the tree line. Not on two legs. Hunched on all fours. Its eyes are not animal. They are amber. They are knowing .

He told me the rules. The DogMan is not a pack hunter. It is a solitary alpha. It doesn't chase you. It herds you. It appears on rural roads at dusk, just at the edge of your headlights. It lets you swerve. It lets you crash. Then it walks the perimeter of the wreckage, never attacking, just circling. It feeds on the panic, not the flesh. The deaths—the torn throats, the claw marks—those are accidents. The real kill is the terror of the moment you realize that what you're looking at has human intelligence behind its eyes.

He looked at me for a long time. His eyes were the same color as the creature's. Amber. "To be seen," he whispered. "And to be forgotten. But mostly, to be seen." The last thing I write in this journal

Then the bus lurched forward. I turned to tell my friend Billy, but Billy was busy picking a wedgie. I looked back. The cornfield was empty.

And they are looking right at me.

The current cluster began last month.

I pick up the phone to call for help. The line is dead. The hum starts again, low and vibrating in my molars.

I made it to my car. I didn't look in the rearview mirror. I drove two hundred miles without stopping.