BY BEN H. WINTERS
Culver City
On the day the streamer ordered a second season, Jack Avril went ahead and bought his kid a dog. Little Jayden had been asking incessantly for at least six months, at least since his friend Paulie Weisberg got a little corgi for Hanukkah, but Jack had thus far maintained his position on the dog question, which was, in essence: hard pass. He was busy as hell with work, basically all the time, and his wife Angel was pretty tied up with all her charity stuff, plus the tennis. And Jayden, at the tender age of seven, was nowhere near old enough for the responsibility. But Jayden would not be discouraged, he really wouldn’t, even going so far at one point as to present a PowerPoint called “Why I Should Get a Dog.”
Jack had held the line, though, even when Angel got a little wobbly sometimes. “Maybe …” she would say. Or, “Maybe just a little dog …” Jack, somehow, stuck to his guns.
But after today? After the meeting, after the good news, Jack felt like, basically: let’s do it. And forget about a little dog. Let’s blow this kid’s mind.
Jack was flying—he was on top of the universe.
A trio of execs from the streamer had made the pilgrimage to his offices on the studio lot in Culver City, bearing the big news along with a box of blueberry donuts—his particular favorite and the subject of a long-running in-joke between himself and the suits. It was silly, but the gesture warmed his heart. Everybody shook hands. They ate the big messy donuts, and laughed and took pictures, everybody grinning.
Of course, Jack had been 99.99 percent sure that a Season 2 order was in the works. His agent had told him to expect it, and so had his lawyer, and in truth he hadn’t needed to be told. The Bleachers was a hit. Not a beloved-but-little-watched critical darling, not a buzzed-about cult thing, but an honest-to-God, out-of-the-park hit—and not a hit twenty years ago but a hit today, a hit in “the current environment,” where between network and cable and streaming and YouTube Red and friggin’ Facebook Watch, there were 400-odd pieces of original programming being aired on some kind of air every year, and twenty times that number in development at any given moment. It was such a huge volume of television shows that the average viewer had never even heard of most of them. In that context, the kinds of numbers The Bleachers was posting had guaranteed Avril a second batch of episodes.
But it was nice to hear the words. Nice to get the donuts. Nice, in a career so full of disappointed hopes, to experience on a beautiful blue Tuesday afternoon a genuinely life-changing event.
So why not roll that happiness down the hill?
Jack stopped at a breeder on the way home, a place on Doheny in Beverly Hills called Four Legs Better, which had been recommended by an old friend named Chick Stuart, who he’d worked with for a season on Justified about a million years ago. “You know, the whole thing with the breeders, it’s kind of an ethical gray area,” Chick had said, when Jack called for the name of a place he remembered him mentioning. “What animal people would say is, you know, go to the pound and get a rescue dog? But with a breeder, you know what you’re getting. And the experience—you pay for it, but it’s just easier, you know?”
Jack didn’t sweat the ethical gray area. He valeted his Lexus at Four Legs Better and found the place exactly as Chick had described it: all very professional and schmancy, all air-conditioned and clean, with each dog’s stats and pedigree on display, like they were prize fighters. He pointed to a big handsome Dogue de Bordeaux named Augustus Caesar, and the guy explained how, despite the size of the thing, it was actually a perfect dog for a young kid, a stalwart and loving pet. The animal cost a goddamn fortune, but what the hell—Jack could afford it, right?
For the next bunch of years, he could afford whatever he wanted, or wanted for his only child.
When they brought his car around, Jack wrangled this big beautiful animal—122 pounds is what they told him, at just two years old—into the backseat of the Lexus. In the car, Augustus Caesar looked even bigger.
At a stoplight on Santa Monica Boulevard, Jack turned and examined the newest member of his family: sleek chestnut fur and curving lips, slightly parted, and gleaming teeth, each a perfect white dagger. Small gray eyes that stared back at Jack, curious and calm.
He’d never been a dog person, really. He just loved his kid.
“He’s awesome, Dad!” Jayden kept saying, over and over, wide-eyed with excitement, panting with delight. “He’s awesome!”
He and Augustus Caesar became fast friends, right from go. The dog had bounded right in and bowled the little guy over, like something out of a cartoon movie about dogs, and Jayden had bounced up and wrapped his new pet in a big tight hug. “He’s so awesome!”
Angel came and wrapped her arms around Jack and stood behind him with her head buried in his neck. She was happy too, of course; as soon as he’d texted her about Season 2, she’d texted back and asked if this meant they could remodel the downstairs. Winking emoji. Kidding, not kidding.
“You’re a good dad,” she said into his back, and the two of them stood watching Jayden wrestle the dog.
“Oh, hey, guys,” said Jack. “The breeder called him Augustus Caesar. But we can rename him if you want. It’s up to you.”
“Jayden?” said Angel. “What do you think?”
“I like that name,” said Jayden, enthusiastic, guileless, full of love. “I really like it.”
And so Augustus Caesar he remained, and it made a certain sense. The dog was majestic. A dog of stature. An emperor of a dog.
Jack yawned, satisfied with the happy ending to his happy day, and walked toward the kitchen to pour himself a Scotch.
Augustus Caesar set its steely small eyes on Jack and bared its teeth as he passed.
The Bleachers was a show for teen audiences about the soul-searching, grief, and social realignments at an elite private high school in suburban Maryland, in the wake of a popular student’s suicide.
Jack Avril was the showrunner, executive producer, and cocreator, but the show had not, strictly speaking, originated with him.
It was adapted from a young adult book called Hummingbird High (terrible title—that had been Jack’s first note), the debut novel by a woman in Michigan named Genevieve Jackson. The book had pubbed in 2010 or 2011, made no ripple, and disappeared—except among some ultrasensitive book nerds, including a Vassar sophomore named Jessica Bailey—who, fast-forward three years, is a baby writer, repped at UTA, staffed as a room assistant on a Disney Channel show but hot to develop. Her UTA agent, a minimally talented clown named Benny Rocco maybe six months out of the mailroom, gets the book to a producer named Janet Ko, who has a deal at Fox on the strength of a briefly beloved family sitcom she’d developed called Lunchbox Sam. Jack Avril, at the time, was in the twilight months of a fruitless overall at Fox, and he was feeling a distinct lack of momentum. He fielded an incoming call from Ko, who basically said: “This girl Jessica has this book, it’s maybe something, but we need an adult in the room. You busy?”
Jack was not busy. He did a pass on Jessica’s pass, ditched the title and sexed up the character palette, moved the inciting suicide to the end of the pilot outline, and they took the thing to the town. Verdict: six no’s and one very soft yes: the streamer took a flier, said show us a draft and write the Bible and let’s see what happens.
And what had happened? They shot the pilot, they made a series, and the series exploded.
And suddenly, ol’ Jack Avril, ancient at thirty-eight, everybody’s favorite affordable EP, veteran of a thousand one-season stands, is the showrunner on this streaming YA thing turning the world upside down. People love the thing. Gen-Xers, millennials and post-millennials, and even—miracle of miracles—the actual target demo: young adults. They eat The Bleachers for breakfast. They’re dissecting the dialogue on Twitter, they’re setting up Instagram accounts for the characters, they’re doing podcasts where they argue about the show’s racial politics.
And yes, okay, there were some suicides.
The first one had been a girl, in Tampa, Florida, named Valerie Escobar. Well, actually, Valerie Escobar was the first one that people explicitly connected with the show, although there had been some concern, in some quarters, before the show had even aired; all the usual hand-wringing about the danger of vivid dramatization of self-harm, especially in entertainment aimed at young people …
But look, you couldn’t even say for sure that Valerie’s suicide had been directly related to The Bleachers, let alone inspired by it—although she was clearly obsessed with the show, as was attested by all her friends and plainly evident on her socials. There was also the unsettling fact that her suicide note had quoted heavily from the monologue Jack had written for Norman Dyson, the football player who hangs himself under the bleachers at the end of the pilot.
Inevitably, with the suicide of Valerie Escobar, there were more articles and more questioning, and even, from some quarters, outright condemnation. But with so many other outrages clamoring for the public’s attention, concerns about The Bleachers remained fairly muted—until the second suicide. This time it was a boy named Luke Worth, from Midlands, Texas, who snuck onto his school’s football field in the middle of the night and hanged himself under the bleachers with a bedsheet, just like Norman, on the show.
For fuck’s sake, Jack thought, when they called to tell him, though he immediately felt bad for thinking it. A little on the nose, kid.
After that, the streamer had felt compelled to add a Parental Advisory note at the beginning of each episode, along with a list of hotline phone numbers at the end, and they’d issued a somber statement, complete with a quote from showrunner Jack Avril: Our hearts go out to the Worth family. We at The Bleachers are proud to be participating in an important conversation about the pressures faced by today’s young people, and we urge anyone feeling suicidal…
And so forth. Something to that effect. Jack had approved his quote without reading it super closely.
What he felt, in his heart of hearts, was that a kid who was going to kill himself was going to kill himself. TV show or no TV show.
He felt bad, of course. Everybody felt bad.
One aspect of the whole thing that Jack found pretty interesting, which he had been told in confidence by a drinking buddy inside the streamer, was that the controversy attending the suicides had been one of the drivers of the show’s continuing popularity.
They had let Jayden stay up an extra hour or two to play with Augustus Caesar, and to set up the doggy bed in a corner of his room. Then Jack and Angel had celebrated properly, first with champagne and then in the bedroom.
Jack was yawning and humming and sipping coffee from his travel mug when he approached the studio lot the next morning, past the cluster of six or seven protesters who were gathered across the street as usual, marching in their silent circle, holding up their signs with simplistic, handwritten slogans.
They watched him as he turned right off Washington Boulevard onto the lot, beeped his security badge, and waited for the gate arm to rise. But Jack didn’t think they knew who he was—with a few exceptions, showrunners do not have known faces. The only thing that was better than fame and fortune, Jack thought, piloting the Lexus to the space with his name on it, was fortune on its own.
“Well, I’m gonna be honest with you,” Jack said, smiling as politely as he could, sipping a cup of coffee. “I don’t totally get it.”
Jack was taking pitches today. This had been a big part of his life the last few weeks, and would continue to be for the next few, until the writers room opened up for Season 2. Written into his first-look deal with the studio was the expectation that he’d bring in projects he hadn’t created, but to which he’d be attached as a producer; an above-the-title producer whose name attracts talent, and money, and—eventually, knock on wood—viewers.
So his agents had been sending him writers hustling projects of their own, who would sit in his office, reading from their pitch docs with various levels of nervousness or animation or plain terror, trying to get him turned on by their ideas.
Which were, sadly, generally, pretty terrible.
So, for example, right now he was listening to a very thin man named Todd something, who gesticulated alarmingly while he presented his drama about a family of trapeze artists, one of whom keeps getting badly hurt.
“So—you said it’s an hour, but this is a comedy, right?”
“No,” said Todd whatever, absolutely aghast. “Absolutely not! No.”
Jack texted his assistant Beth under the table: Next?
Diversity was in vogue, so a lot of the pitches had it, generally in transparent and superfluous ways, tacked on at the end like a tail on a Halloween costume. “Oh,” the writer would say toward the end of the pitch, “and I should mention that the couple we’re talking about is interracial.” Or, “It’s important to note that the chief of the fire department is out and proud.”
“Ah. Sure.”
Next.
During lunch Jack wandered into downtown Culver City for a bagel and cream cheese, and to watch a little video that Angel had texted him of Jayden and Augustus Caesar cavorting in the backyard. God, it was really such a big animal. So much bigger than the kid. In the clip, which was only a few seconds long, the dog launched himself into the air at Jayden, who stood with his arms extended, delighted by this huge monster about to crash into his chest. The clip cut off before the dog landed.
Jack watched it again, and there were tears in his eyes when the video was interrupted by a text from Beth: Need you back.
The last pitch of the day was from a woman named Darla Nunez, and it was a very cute, very meta idea called Peak TV. Nunez, heavyset and bald-headed, with big hoop earrings and jangly bracelets and a big nervous smile, explained that Peak TV was about floats.
“Floats?”
“Floating spirits of retribution. When one person causes the death or pain of another, that person’s spirit floats into another dimension, where it is washed—”
“Washed?”
“Yeah. No. Not literally. It’s like a spiritual washing—”
“Okay—”
“And then the floater returns to our dimension, where it seizes a physical entity in our dimension, so it can wreak havoc on the offending person.”
Peak TV, said Nunez, was about a misogynistic television producer who steals an idea from a woman—this was the meta part—who then ends up poor, and a junkieslash-prostitute, and gets killed by a john, and whose soul then returns as one of these floats.
“So the floats,” said Jack, “they’re basically ghosts?”
“No,” said Nunez. “Floats.”
“It really sounds like they’re just ghosts,” said Jack, and Nunez smiled nervously.
“Well,” she said, “if I called them ghosts, would you be more interested in doing the show?”
Lord Almighty, thought Jack. This town. What a bunch of hacks.
That night he met a movie star for drinks.
This was the sort of thing you got to do, Jack was discovering, when you were the genius behind a hit show. People wanted to meet you, even people with substantial clout of their own. They just wanted to see what else you were working on, see what was in the pipeline, see if there was any kind of alliance to be formed.
So he and the movie star, as astonishingly good looking in person as on screen, even with his hair buzzed close for the role he was currently playing (the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden), met at Soho House and shared a bottle of very expensive whiskey, for which no one ever asked them to pay. Jack diplomatically heard the star out about the show he wanted to develop, and star in, and write (oh God!), which was “a Bridges of Madison County kind of thing,” except set during the Mexican-American War.
“Well, huh,” Jack said, a lot of times. “That is really—huh.”
Then Jack drove his Lexus home unsteadily, weaving slightly up and then down Benedict Canyon Drive, and opened the door and was slammed against the wall of the foyer by the dog.
“Whoa! Jesus!” shouted Jack, confused, pinned under the huge snarling weight of Augustus Caesar, whose face was down near his, mouth open, bared teeth like a forest of knives.
Jack managed to get one hand free and pushed the dog’s face away from his, realizing as he did that he was still holding his keys in that hand, and now his house key had pierced the side of Augustus Caesar’s face, just above his mouth, and the dog, enraged, snapped his head back toward Jack’s.
Only at the last instant did Jack bring his other hand up to protect his face, and he felt a sting as the dog sank its teeth into his wrist.
“Oh! Shit! Shit!”
Jack kicked out and connected, his foot landing squarely in the dog’s thick midsection. Augustus Caesar tumbled backward, paws skittering on the tiles of the front hall, and Jack looked down at his arm. It was throbbing, with bright red blood blooming in a ragged line and oozing out ugly.
He struggled to his feet and stared at the dog, who was staring at him.
“Dad?” Jayden’s voice, tremulous. His little body in his white briefs, at the top of the stairs.
“Be careful, honey. Stay right there.”
“Are you okay, Dad?”
Jack looked down at his arm. It was actually barely bleeding. “I’m fine, I’m okay. Just …”
Augustus Caesar, meanwhile, was trotting up the stairs to Jayden, gently nosing his great head into the boy’s stomach, all nuzzly and fond. Jayden bent automatically and hugged the dog around the neck.
“It’s okay, Auggie. It’s okay.”
“Jesus. What happened?” said Angel, from the top of the stairs, completing a tableau: dog and boy and mom. She had gathered her bathrobe to her chest and stood holding it in place.
“Nothing,” mumbled Jack. “We’re good. All good.” Embarrassed. Tipsy. It wasn’t a big deal. “I surprised Augustus, I think. He nipped me a little.”
“Poor thing.”
Jack wasn’t sure if she meant him or the dog. But then she went to the bathroom for gauze, and came down and cooed over Jack. No rabies shot would be necessary, he knew. He had all the animal’s papers—it was clean.
But when Jayden had gone back off to bed, Augustus Caesar trotting sweetly at his heels, and he and Angel were in their own bed, the whole strange incident replayed in his head. He might have to go back to that breeder and raise a ruckus. He hadn’t paid five hundred bucks for fucking Cujo.
“I think that dog has got a screw loose, honey. I really do.”
Angel didn’t answer. She’d taken a Xanax. She was already asleep.
There were new protesters today. A lot more.
The streamer hadn’t put out a press release about season 2, but somehow or other Deadline had picked it up, and done a piece, with the predictable tidal wave of reaction on social media—excited, enthusiastic, and not so enthusiastic.
Among the several dozen people now across from the studio, marching in a quiet circle, was an older couple, plainly dressed, both holding giant poster-board photographs of Luke Worth: the boy in Texas who had killed himself under the bleachers of his high school with a bedsheet, just like poor Norman.
Those were his parents. The man very thin, gray-headed; the woman holding her poster with trembling arms.
Jack knew this, instantly. They had the radiant sadness of people who had suffered.
Jack drove past them, eyes straight ahead.
In her small office outside his larger one, Beth was reading an article on her computer. The picture with the article was the same as on the posters outside: a young man, fit and broad-shouldered, looking at the camera. All his sadness coiled up inside, hidden. Luke Worth. Tough, masculine, doomed.
Jack scowled. “Don’t read that,” he told Beth. “What are you reading that for?”
“Someone sent me the link.” She cringed. These assistant jobs were very easy to lose. “I’m really sorry.”
“Coffee, please,” said Jack, and walked past her. “I need coffee.”
***
That weekend Jack was unexpectedly blessed with a Saturday afternoon all to himself.
Jayden had been invited to a three-hour birthday party, and Angel had volunteered to bring him, and then take him to dinner with a friend of hers who had a kid the same age.
Which left Jack happily alone, sitting down in his home office, ready to start kicking away at Season 2.
No time like the present, right?
His MacBook screen glowed back at him. It wasn’t like he needed to do all that much. In a couple weeks he’d have twelve eager beavers gathered around a long table scarfing snacks and trying to impress him. All he needed was a broad outline for Day One.
He knew that the main character would still be Elle, the dead kid’s big-hearted ex-girlfriend, who at first had been widely blamed for his suicide, but who by the season’s end was understood to be the one person who very nearly kept him alive.
So what happens now? Jack asked himself.
What if she kills herself now? The girl—and what if it’s a copycat thing: she goes out to the bleachers, and then everyone blames Norman for having inspired her, just like some people were blaming Norman’s TV death for inspiring real-life ones?
Too much? Too “clever”?
Or maybe just kind of … awful.
Maybe the whole thing was kind of awful, after all.
Jack tilted his chair back, looking thoughtfully out the window at the pool.
The door of his den rattled in its hinges, and Jack jumped.
The door rattled again. Fuck. Jesus. He didn’t even remember having closed it. He got up, walked slowly over, and pulled open the door
It was the dog, of course. Augustus Caesar, staring at him, cool-eyed and big and sleek as a freight engine. Back on its haunches, the mouth slightly parted, teeth showing.
“Yeah?” said Jack. Absurdly, he realized, he was trying to sound tough. To what purpose—to impress the dog? “What the hell do you want?”
But the dog kept staring; the small hint of a snarl at the back of the mouth, yellow in the corners of its eyes.
Float. Jack didn’t think the word, really, it just appeared in his head. A visitor from another dimension.
That’s what she called them, that lady. Nunez. The writer. The spirits, they float. They get washed, so they can come back for retribution.
Oh shut up, he told himself, and then he said it out loud: “Shut up.”
Then he took a deep breath and leaned down and grabbed the dog by the collar. “I’m not scared of you,” he told Augustus Caesar. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”
The dog didn’t try to bite him this time. But neither did it submit pliantly to his grip—it wrestled and fought the whole way, as Jack dragged it away from the door of his den, and then slowly, laboriously, up the stairs, one by one, up to the second floor and then down the hall to Jayden’s bedroom.
“Come on,” said Jack, huffing and grinning, lugging this massive beast while it bristled and twisted its body away. “Come on.”
He pushed the dog into the kid’s room, where Jayden had set up a whole little area for it: a couple of fluffy pillows for nighttime, a water bowl, and a poster of puppies on the wall. Jack pushed the dog in and slammed the door closed. He breathed heavily, with his back against the door, listening to the dog scrabbling against the door and howling.
Panting, sweating, he stomped back down the stairs to his home office, and sat heavily back on his chair, and then turned and screamed.
Augustus Caesar was on the other side of the office. Majestic and upright, staring, teeth slightly bared, eyes narrowed to slits.
“Hi, Ms. Nunez?”
“Yes?”
“I have Jack Avril for you.”
“Oh. Whoa. Okay, great. I’ll take it!”
This was not a nice thing to do, and Jack knew it. Darla Nunez would be over the moon that he was calling—on a Sunday morning, no less. She would assume this meant she’d hooked him, and he wanted to talk turkey about her show.
What was it called again? Peak TV. Yeah. No. No thanks.
“Mr. Avril,” she said, and he could hear the nervous smile in her voice. There were kids in the background, at least two of them—Sunday morning at the Nunez household.
“Listen,” he said, “I have a question for you, about your pitch.”
“Absolutely. What can I tell you?”
Jack cleared his throat. He’d been up all night. He did not feel great.
“This thing, about the floating. The spirits of retribution. Is it real, or what?”
“What do you—what do you mean?”
“Does it come from a real thing, or did you just make it up? Where does it come from?”
“Oh. Um … so …”
There was a long silence. She was probably afraid he was going to steal her idea, which, the way the town worked, was not the craziest fear.
“Well,” she said finally, “there are a lot of myths like this, of course. The Greeks had something like it. So do the Koreans.”
“Right, right,” he said, feeling suddenly stupid. This was useless. This would do him no good. Jayden was outside in the backyard, with the dog. They ran together along the narrow strip of lawn.
“But as far as this thing,” she said, “I guess—well, I had a professor in college, I did a lot of anthropology, and I had a professor who told us about this idea of floaters. I wish I could remember. But it was definitely from South America. Or Central America, maybe. I just never forgot it. I never stopped thinking, This would make a good TV show.”
“Okay, but, Ms. Nunez …”
“Darla. Darla is—”
“How do you stop it?”
“Oh. Well, okay, so in the final episode of the first season—and this is totally provisional, I’m totally open to feedback on this—”
“No! Not in your show!” Jack was shouting. He heard himself shouting: “In life! How does a person stop it, if it happens in real life?”
“Oh. Well …”
A long pause She had no idea, this lady. She had no earthly idea.
Jack had a picture of Luke Worth up on his computer. Gray eyes, staring straight ahead, football helmet under his arm like a severed head.
Augustus Caesar was outside his office window. Jayden was throwing a ball and catching it, and his dog was staring through the window.
“You know what? It’s okay. Thanks,” said Jack.
“No problem,” said Darla Nunez, uncertainly. Somehow in her desperate aspiring-writer’s heart, she still thought this was a business call. “So shall I have my agent reach out, or … Mr. Avril? Hello?”
Jack blinked. The dog was on the other side of the lawn, beside his son.
So what do you do?
Jack lay awake in his bed.
He hadn’t slept.
He couldn’t sleep.
How could he sleep?
It was two in the morning now, Monday morning.
Nothing else to be done.
Let it float on then. Let it be freed to float away.
He had a gun. Since the presidential election he’d had it under the bed, convinced by a conspiratorial anarchist friend of his that some kind of political violence was imminent. But it hadn’t happened yet, and Jack had never learned to shoot the thing. Didn’t even know how to hold it.
He had a bat, though. The bat was easy.
He could hear the dog somewhere in his house, prowling and pacing. Nails clicking on the tile.
It was right outside his room. Or in the kitchen.
Or both. It was everywhere.
He laughed. Angel muttered and turned over. She’d taken a Xanax. She slept through everything.
The dog—that’s not what it was, it was no dog—it was floating around. In his house. In his life.
I didn’t kill anybody, he thought. We’re just—we’re contributing to a dialogue. We’re asking urgent questions about the way children live today.
It didn’t work. Those kinds of sentiments, they hold no force. Not in the middle of the night, with a dog on the prowl in your house. All those kinds of words blend with the shadows on the wall and disappear.
The bat was in the closet. He got out of bed and opened the closet door, as quiet as he could, and put his hands on it.
Fine then, dog. Augustus. Luke. Fine. I killed you.
I’ll fucking do it again.
Augustus Caesar was at the bottom of the stairs. The tile in much of the first floor was an unappealing beige. One of the things Angel wanted to fix in the remodel.
The dog sat on the tile, in a shaft of moonlight, staring up at him.
Jack screamed and ran down the stairs, swinging the bat.
The bat smashed into the hallway wall, and the wall exploded in a cloud of plaster and dust, and Jack felt the shock roll up his arm. But the dog, the dog, the dog was—
Behind him. At the top of the stairs, staring down.
He screamed again and dashed up, and it was running away, that coward, coward dog, bounding down the hallway, toward the bedrooms, Jack loping after, trailing the bat along the shag carpet like a caveman’s club. Shouting, hoarse.
“Come on, Luke! Come on, you bastard!”
It stopped outside Jayden’s room, big brown dog breathing evenly, just staring back at him, taunting him, and then he rushed at it and it disappeared and he slammed into his son’s door, wheeled around and saw the dog by the door to the master suite.
“Dad?”
The other bedroom door, behind him now, was creaking slowly open.
“Daddy?”
“Go to sleep, Jayden.” Not turning to look at him. Keeping his eyes fixed on the dog, at the other end of the hall.
“I’m gonna get you. I’m gonna get you, you son of a bitch.”
“Dad? Are you okay?”
Then the dog came running.
Racing down the hallway in great leaps, one leap and then two, and then it bounded into the air, and Jack put himself in front of Jayden and swung the bat, hard and fast, and connected with the dog’s head with a terrible crack, and the giant body dropped out of the air and landed with an ugly thud on the thick carpet. Blood pouring from the broken head.
Then silence. Jack heard himself breathing. He heard his heart pounding. He was exultant. He was trembling. Motherfucker, he thought.
Jayden was silent beside him.
“Sweetheart?” Jack said softly, and turned. The boy was staring at his dead dog, his eyes wide. Jack crouched slowly.
“Jayden, I don’t …” He let the bat drop, and gripped the little guy by both shoulders. “I don’t know how to explain this. But that was not a dog, okay? That was not a dog. That was the—it was a spirit, son. There was a boy named Luke Worth, and he—he—no—I … son, I …”
“No, Mr. Avril.” Jayden’s voice was different now. “That was Valerie.”
“What?”
“I’m Luke. That was the girl.”
And then Jayden was gone, and was behind him.