It wasn't long before I stood at the edge of a huge and menacing jungle, soft sea breezes laden with the scents of salt and rain stinging my nose and making my eyes burn and itch. The trees creaked ominously and all of a sudden I felt not just lost but very small.
"Don't go in," I muttered, swaying much like the palms in my drunkeness. The weird shell seemed to weigh a hundred pounds in my paw, burned the cuts it had already inflicted with an eerie coldness.
Where the hell had I found it? More importantly why couldn't I put it down? I wanted to, I knew. Yet I wouldn't.
As I entered the trees I found a memory, a flash so vivid it couldn't have been imagined. Dingo, safari hat, the brim above one of his eyes buttoned up. It was a brilliant blue. It was startling too, I recalled, to search that gaze and find the other eye was green as polished jade, glittered flat and predatory in a stroke of lighting.
"I used to know you Walter," the Dingo says as he lifts a massive rifle. I realize it's an elephant gun, double bored, its dark length making my heart skip a beat. He points it at my chest and I know if he pulls the trigger it will blow a hole in me larger than a dinner plate.
"Are you going to kill me?"
"I ruddy well should. You've lost it mate. You're a fucking monster now."
It starts to rain, a light soaking that usually precludes a deluge in this part of Florida. "Please don't. I...can't remember. I don't know what you're talking about."
The Dingo bares his teeth. They're very white and very sharp, glint wetly."Of course you don't remember. You're-"
It's then that a huge shadow rears up behind him without a sound. I point at it and take a step back, my hackles going up and a whine rising in my throat. "There's something behind you," I whisper.
Those mismatched eyes, filled with hate, narrow. He shows me a lopsided smile as the hammers of the huge rifle snick back. "Nice try. It won't save you Walter. End of the line."
A split second later the shadow moves, faster then anything I've ever seen, so fast that in one instant it's merely framing the dingo, the next the dingo's head is torn from his shoulders and caged in the claws of a hulking silhouette. The carnage is indescribable. I've never seen so much blood.
I fall to my knees and vomit. The world is spinning, spinning. Part of its the whiskey, part of its the subconscious certainty that I just lost a friend, even if I couldn't name him to save my life. Most of it is horror, sheer and pure.
I look up, sobbing, heart racing.
His body is still there, as is the gun, lifeless in dripping ferns soaked red. The monster is gone, as is the Dingo's head.
Another flash of lightning and-
The clearing was empty. I stood alone. No headless corpse, no gun, nothing but shadows and the swishing susurrus of palm trees in the winds of the gulf.
"It didn't happen," I said, firmly, surely, gripping my strange shell tight and licking my lips. My mouth felt dry and my ears were flat against my skull. "It didn't. All a nightmare."
I had to get home, get some rest. Something was telling me to go deeper, that home was there. I didn't understand that really, logically it made little sense, yet of a sudden I realized I was on a well worn path. It cut through the brush straight as an arrow. It had to lead somewhere.
I began to walk. I didn't look back.