In 2020, I helped edit an anthology raising money for the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand titled Black Dogs, Black Tales. We read hundreds of horror stories featuring black dogs that don’t die. It got me thinking about the intersection between mental health and horror, and this was the story I wrote in response. I was thrilled when it made the final cut for the anthology. It’s now been reprinted in Year’s Best Hardcore Horror Volume 6 (it’s not really hardcore, don’t worry), my debut short story collection Alt-ernate, and is forthcoming in Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy Volume 3 from the awesome Paper Road Press. It was also a finalist for Best Short Story in the 2021 Sir Julius Vogel Awards, which was ultimately awarded to the stunning and beautiful For Want of Human Parts by Casey Lucas.

And here it is for you to read for free! Not to be reproduced without permission, please.

Trigger Warnings: this is a horror story with graphic, gory descriptions that deals with the horror our brains, and society, create for us.

Synaesthete

By Melanie Harding-Shaw

The first time I remember noticing a flash in someone’s eyes was the day I started preschool. The shadow of black and red in the teacher’s eyes matched the feathers lining the korowai cloak of the girl sitting next to her who was leaving that day to start school. I thought that was clever. The flashes had always been there, of course. In the eyes of my parents and the adults who came to visit. When I was old enough to wonder, I thought they must be spirit animals. Guardians, perhaps. I was oblivious in the way that many children are. Or maybe I just didn’t want to see.

I can remember the first time I looked in the mirror to search my own out. Staring into the depths of my eyes and feeling a moment of panic that there was nothing there before I saw the shadowed outline, the hint of movement from the rise and fall of its breath. I shouted at the mirror to try and wake it, but it did not stir. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had succeeded in waking it that day. It was only when I closed my eyes and saw the afterimage on my eyelids that I could make out the shape. A hound as black as my pupils curled in sleep. It wasn’t until puberty hit that I started to realise the truth.

Scotty was the first boy I thought I wanted to kiss. I didn’t tell anyone because all the girls wanted to kiss him and it was ridiculous to think he might pick me. I just stared at the back of his head in class. Admired the casual swagger that somehow came across even when he was sitting still.

And then the party. Those first gulps of cheap and burning vodka. Stumbling into a bedroom, and there he was. His casual swagger, now a stagger. His hands pulling me closer. The sudden sickening realisation that I did not want this.

I pushed him away in panic. “No!”

“I’ve seen the way you look at me,” he slurred.

I shook my head, and stepped back.

“Freak.”

My stomach churned with dread and my frantic eyes met his, searching for a sign that this would not make my life “over”. That I would be able to show my face at school on Monday. The thing is, I didn’t usually meet people’s eyes. Somewhere between kindergarten and that party, I had realised no-one else saw the flashes and I had decided I would not see them either. I watched their mouths instead: the twitch of hidden amusement at one corner or the downturned edges of lost patience. Maybe I would have been prepared if I had been watching eyes all those years. If I had let myself accustom to my changing sight.

I stared into Scotty’s eyes and I saw the rabid peacock tearing at his brain. Clawed feet scratching gouges down his amygdala as its sharp beak wrenched at optic nerves stretched so tight his eyes might pop out the back of their sockets. The bird’s majestic iridescent wings spread wide, bloodstained and razor sharp as they beat within his skull, slicing the soft tissues like the cutty grasses that used to catch our unwary arms as we walked to the beach.

I stood in that room and I screamed and I did not stop screaming until the ambulance came. I could not show my face at school that Monday or any Monday after.

It was weeks before I could even step foot outside my room. Weeks before I could bring myself to cry on my mother’s shoulder. I watched her mouth as I crept out into the lounge. I saw her fear for me in the tightness of her lips. I heard the tentative tremor in her voice, the uncertainty that she might say the wrong thing and make it worse. I kept my eyes down, scared of the coloured flashes lurking higher.

I sat beside her and leaned my head on her shoulder. I felt the comforting weight of her arm around me. I couldn’t see her face from there. I was safe.

“I love you,” she whispered.

I didn’t say anything. I could feel a tendril creeping down my face, caressing me. Each time it pulled away, I felt pinpoints of my cheek stretch outwards one by one. Tiny circles of pain. Not a tendril, but a tentacle. I jerked upright to stare at her, despite knowing better. I didn’t notice the metallic reflections of the octopus’s eyes within hers at first. I was too distracted by its tentacles tearing off the features of her face to shove them into its beak. I could see glimpses of her flesh further in. Pieces of her nose and ears being ground down by a tongue covered in rows of teeth.

I tore myself away and ran back to my room, the sound of her voice calling after me muffled by the squelching of those tentacles rending her faceless.

I could feel a sickening movement in my eyes, the first stirrings of a slumbering animal. I broke every mirror in the house.

My therapist thought that writing might give me an outlet, and it did. I chatted to other writers online. I could communicate, be supportive, and have value; and I did not have to see their faces. As I grew more confident, I could even meet them sometimes. I would sit and stare down at my paper, focussing only on the letters I was forming on the page. I would laugh at their jokes, offer solace for their trials. But, it is a hard thing to look away from the pain in a friend’s voice.

There came a day when I lost focus. I glanced up for a moment as I spoke.

“You are doing it! You are a writer already!” I tried to say.

My words were cut short by a missile smashing into my nose. I covered my face in my hands, but not before I saw my friend’s eyes bulging outwards with the pressure of a thousand cuckoo’s eggs. The mother bird invisible inside their skull but for the sound of her beak clacking in sinister pleasure. I staggered to my feet as a stream of projectiles flew at me, beating me backwards. I caught a glimpse of my friend as I ran away. Unimaginable pressure sending eggs erupting from their scalp like pumice flying from flesh volcanoes. Their red blood lava oozing from the open wounds.

The squeaking sound of hound’s teeth worrying at my synapses, not unlike the noise of biting into haloumi, echoed in my mind and drove me running home.

So, I locked myself away from the world once more, reaching out only through my keyboard and the screen. Groceries delivered to my door. Feet dragging, shoulders hunched, and the smell of loneliness permeating every space. The ache of claws and teeth inside my skull never left me and I wondered if there was anything left there and what that hound would feast on once it was stripped bare. There was a single mirror in my subsidised apartment. I had covered it with rainbow lines of duct tape. The colours made me feel like it was a choice; an interior design quirk that I could remove any time I wanted. I never did.

You can’t stay inside forever, though. The day I met Sid, I was walking to the letterbox. She was walking her dog, a golden terrier. Even with my eyes cast down, I noticed her nails reflecting in the sun. They were the most beautiful nails I’d ever seen; works of art with rainbow chrome colours shifting as she walked. I didn’t know it then, but people often stared at Sid. She didn’t match what they expected to see. She didn’t match who they expected her to be.

I stared at Sid, too, and maybe she saw the horror in my eyes because she looked away. Her shoulders hunched slightly against the blow she thought might come, just like mine. Everyone I met had something eating away at them. Sid was different, though. The thing consuming her was not inside her skull like mine. Its human mouth was latched onto her legs gnawing on an Achilles tendon while the weight of its body dragged behind her each step she took. As I watched, its jaws loosened but only so that its rooster talons could tear chunks from her calves. It was the cruel alpha, driving her away. A monster denying her the right to live.

Somehow, she strode on despite the creature hanging off her that was part human, part beast and all the cruelty of the world. I watched her pained footsteps almost pass my gate and I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Hi,” I cried out, and she turned around, uncertain.

I could feel the gnawing in my own brain pause.

“Hi,” she said.

I stood and stared at this beautiful woman, the horror of her parasite now hidden behind her legs. I tried to imagine how to convey to her that I was different, too. I didn’t have the words. I reached up and buried my face in my hands. My dank, unwashed hair fell forward to hide my face as sobs shook my body.

She didn’t see my dirty nails clawing into my eyes, tearing out the creature I could feel inside. And I am certain she did not see the black hound that I threw to the ground between us. Its teeth were bared in a snarl and its muscles were poised to leap back up; to savage my face before digging a hole back into my brain as if my frontal lobe was freshly mown grass begging for its claws.

She saw the red scratches down my cheeks, though. She saw the tears. She reached out to me, a stranger, and she hugged me in the street.

“Do you want to come for a walk?” she asked.

I nodded.

There is a forest at the end of my street where I had never ventured. At the entrance was a sign: “Dogs must be kept on a leash.”

Sid saw me reading it. “It’s to protect the birds, our taonga. We can’t let dogs roam free or they will destroy them,” she said.

Sid set off towards the trees. I looked at the black hound stalking beside me. I could still see the vestiges of my brain tissues on his snout, my blood colouring his whiskers. Then I looked at the almost human creature ahead of me, clinging to Sid’s shoes. It had lost its grip when I started walking beside her, shrunk back a little. It was still horrifying, but now it was no bigger than the playful terrier trotting by her side.

I glared at the black dog, looked deep into his eyes. We can’t let dogs roam free or they will destroy what is precious to us. I bared my teeth and planted both feet firmly on the track. His snarl faltered, his ears pressed down to his skull, and his tail twitched downwards until it was pressed tightly up under his belly.

I pointed at Sid’s creature and he streaked towards it, slamming his head into its side and sending it careening into the shadows of the undergrowth where it peered at us cowering. When he returned to me, I reached down to touch him with a trembling hand, to finally feel that coarse black fur. He tried to snap at my fingers, to crunch the tiny bones in his powerful jaws. I slapped his nose and grabbed the leash lying across his back. I had never even noticed it was there.

“Are you coming?” Sid asked from up ahead, her steps now gloriously unconstrained.

“Yes.”

She smiled at me. I could tell because of the tiny creases forming by her eyes. In their glossy depths, I could just make out the reflection of the silver fronds of a young ponga fern beside the track.

Thanks for reading!

If you’d like to read more black dog horror stories, you can find Black Dogs, Black Tales here.

If you’d like to read more stories by me, my debut collection Alt-ernate contains 37 stories that explore alternate realities, presents, and futures through science fiction, fantasy and horror and was described as "A deliciously thought-provoking, evocative, and spine-tingling collection” by Cassie Hart, author of Butcherbird. [Butcherbird is a new supernatural suspense from Huia that you should totally also buy!]