8-7th century BC. Mythology.

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I spent the majority of my childhood in Bumfuck, Nowhere, Missouri. I lived in a little house nestled up beside a small forest full of sinkholes, bramble bushes, and ticks. I would spend hours exploring the part of the woods my parents owned, usually with The Three Musketeers, the first 3 dogs I'd ever owned. My sister hated when I did it; she was always afraid I'd get lost or hurt or worse. I wasn't afraid. I had my friends, I knew what areas to avoid, and the moment I found myself somewhere unfamiliar, I found the nearest fence post and followed it back to the house.

I would never go there at night, though. The woods were, despite being mostly uncharted territory, my happy place during the daytime, but that always changed when the sun went down. Night was when the woods became the coyotes' domain, and despite how little they wanted to do with humans, they wouldn't be against eating a 10 year old boy who stumbled across their hunting party. I like coyotes, but I was raised to see them as dangerous pests. They killed neighbor's chickens, they stirred up the local deer herds, and there was always the chance they'd make a snack out of some little dog or outdoor cat.

There was one night when I, motivated by the onset of precocious depression and a craving for adventure, ran away from home. I grabbed a blanket and a jacket (must've been fall at this time) before climbing out my bedroom window and venturing into the forest. My dogs dutifully followed behind - I think they considered it babysitting - as I brushed through the tall grass that separated the yard from the woods. I could hear the local coyote pack singing and yowling among themselves, and I noticed that it sounded different then usual. Instead of being high-pitched and hollered with reckless abandon, it sounded more like squealing. Imagine children playing make-believe screaming in jest, but without the playfulness.

I'd barely entered the woods when I noticed 2 pairs of eyes, shiny and reflecting the sparse moonlight back at me, wavering in the air just a few feet before me. I thought it was two coyotes who I'd caught at the wrong time, and that was scary enough, but then I realized that these things - no, wait, it was actually one thing - wasn't your average wild dog.

It was a dog, I think, but it was unlike any dog I've ever seen. It looked like a Chihuahua proportionally, but it was as tall as a Great Dane. Its sides were mottled with bruises (why didn't it have more hair?) and stitches and scaly, flaky bare skin (why is its skin greenish??). It did indeed have 4 eyes, but not in the way I'd expected. Two tiny heads resembling malformed Pug dogs, each with greyish, gummy skin like that of a maggot, protruded from where the dogthing's eyes should have been. It was only when I looked at them that I noticed each mouth the dogthing had was dripping with foam.

I realized that my own dogs weren't beside me anymore. I felt a panic attack, something I suffered frequently as a child, coming on. My vision became spotty as I began hyperventilating, and my fingers twitched and curled in on themselves as I felt hot tears streaming down my face. The dogthing looked right at me, its nostrils flaring, its four tiny, glassy eyes struggling to focus on me. I fell hard onto my knees. It took a step towards me.

"What was that?" it chuffed in a deep, uneven voice. The pitch of its voice shifted to piercingly high as it once again said, "What was that?"

Looking back on it, I doubt it understood the meaning of what it was saying. There was no rhythm to its voice, just a constantly changing pitch and hum that emphasized the wrong words and syllables.

"What was that? Is that you? What was that?"

I don't remember anything else that happened that night, but I do remember waking up. I was in the mud, my knees caked in dried, black blood. My mother was hunched over me, shaking me desperately and saying my name. When she saw that I was awake, she pulled me into a powerful hug. I noticed that she'd been crying, probably for a little while.

"Beck," she sputtered in between sniffles, "What the hell are you doing out here? What happened? Oh, you're hurt!"

The Three Musketeers were surrounding us, trying to stuff their muzzles against us and soothe the tension of the situation. No one besides me seemed at all injured, and I breathed a shaky sigh of relief. My ma helped me up off the ground, and it was only then when I noticed just how much my knees hurt.

My father worked nightshifts at the hospital, and he wouldn't be back for a few hours, but we agreed not to tell him about where I'd gone. Doing so would've made him sick with anxiety, and would've cost me my free reign of the woods besides. My sister had been the one to discover I'd gone missing, and when she saw me hurt but definitely not dead, she wrapped me up in another tight hug and soaked my shoulder with tears and snot.

I was scolded and grounded for running away and scaring the daylights out of everyone, but once the initial fright of my having gone missing had died down, it was a mostly normal day. Conversely, it was one of the worst nights I've ever had. I had no blinds on my window, and the forest's treeline was just barely in view. I hid my head under my pillow so as not to be tempted to look and see if you-know-what was still out there in the woods. Would it stay in the woods? Would it eventually come into the yard?

My stomach kept twisting into knots when I remembered what it had looked like, what it had sounded like. The viscera was almost less disturbing then the implications behind the animal's appearance, behind its lilting, unnatural voice. I never saw or heard the creature again, but I believe it's still out there. I'm certain it was still around all the while my family lived in that house. After I'd met it, I never again heard more then one coyote howling at a time.

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Concept art training. AI generated imagery + photobashing + 3D modeling + digital painting. Sorry for the shitty creepypasta. Guess I had an itch.