Title: Eyes in the Dark
Character(s): the black dog
Folklore From: British Isles
Rating: G
Summary: A person who doesn't believe in any of the old wives' tales comes face to face with one.




Eyes. Eyes in the dark. Red eyes against the white of thick fog.

You learned the stories. You learned the truth while you were still a child.

"Don't go into the graveyard," they told you. "Stay out of there, especially after dark. The black dog roams then. It will eat up your soul."

But as you got older, you didn't listen. No, you turned off your ears and mind to them. Black dog tales and superstitions were only what the old used to scare the young into behaving.

"Be good, or the boogeyman will come get you from out of your bed."

You didn't believe that. Not since you realized that you had been bad, and there had been nothing hiding in your closet ... nothing coming from under your bed ... nothing to drag you off. In fact, when it had never actually happened to anyone that you had spoken to ... or to anyone that they had personally known ... you stopped believing. When you sat around with your friends, and retold the stories, it was always a "friend of a friend" that had been dragged away, but no one could actually give a name of who was taken, or tell you where they were from.

So, you would scoff at them when they warned you; laugh when they told you the dangers. And you walked blind to everything that was around you; consciously blind because it took too much imagination to believe.

And when the stories started again about the black dog in the graveyard, you laughed, and accused those who had seen it of imagining things ... or drinking too much ale. It never occurred to you that there was really something there to see.

You said that you would prove them wrong, by staying a night alone. And you sat smugly, with your back propped up against a tombstone for most of the night, secure in the knowledge that the worst that would happen would be a chill and sleeping on the hard ground.

The only time you got nervous was when the fog rolled in. But you rationalized that what worried you was not being able to see what was coming toward you. And when you first saw the eyes, you tried to talk yourself into believing that they were just lamps in the distance ... even though the coloring was completely wrong for firelight. No, they were the red of Hellfire.

Eyes the color of Hellfire, and they were looking directly at you ... boring directly into your own eyes. You wanted to look away, to not have those eyes open you up from the inside, but you could not turn away from them. They held you and wouldn't let you go. But even then, you tried to deny what they were.

It wasn't until you saw the outline of the dog, surrounding those eyes, that you started to let panic creep fully into your mind.

And when it got close enough for you to actually hear it's growl, you knew that you should have paid attention to the warnings, because you knew that it was too late.