By Frampton Jones
Nearly a month ago, we lost Craig as he tried to protect us from mermaids. His death was, in part caused by an ominous black dog appearing on the beach. Folklorist Idris Po tells me that in some cultures, the black dog is seen as an omen of death and that this black dog may have been a manifestation of such mythology. Idris Po has been studying how folklore manifests here for some time, based, as I understand it on the knowledge that there are rather a lot of stories in which folklorists are the first to die from occult interference.
Megan already had one large, black dog of uncertain provenance. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, it behaved very much like a normal dog, aside from being more alive than is typical of our island hounds. This experience perhaps inclined her to think kindly of the black dog that appeared just before Craig’s death.
I grant you, it was a substantial and corporeal sort of dog, and not the kind of phantom Po tells me tend to presage death. It was however, also a rather hungry and slightly rabid dog. It greeted Megan with great enthusiasm, and promptly ate her.
“Normal dogs don’t tend to devour people whole in quite this way,” Idris Po said. “I saw the whole thing from a safe distance and am mystified. One massive gulp. It was impressive, but also disturbing.”
Friends of Megan intend to put up a sign warning people about the dog. Hopefully this will go better than Craig’s mermaid warning sign.
The Hopeless Maine Scientific Society intends to send a research party to investigate the status of the dog. And we all know what that means.
Idris Po says he thinks he’s doing well for a folklorist in a scenario of folkloric danger, but that kind of optimism means we can probably expect to hear of his demise shortly.
The Hopeless Vendetta 