Dogman -

The records were hidden in plain sight. County coroner reports from the 1970s with "coyote attack" scribbled in the margin, despite the bite radius being three inches too wide. Native American oral histories from the Ojibwe tribe: the Michi Peshu , they called it, but that was a water panther. No, the elders had another name, one they wouldn't say aloud. They called it Giishkimanidoo —the Walking Nightmare.

Edmund was standing in the corner, facing the wall. He was naked. His jumpsuit lay torn on the floor, not unzipped, but shredded from the inside out. His spine was elongating. I watched his vertebrae separate, crack, and reform into a curve that was not human. His jaw unhinged with a wet pop. He turned.

"It's not a werewolf, Doctor," he said, picking at a loose thread on his gray jumpsuit. "That implies a man who turns into a beast. A curse. A full moon. This is different. It was never a man. It's a thing that learned to walk like one." DogMan

For twenty years, I told myself it was a deer. A sick coyote. The power of suggestion. I moved to the city, became a forensic psychologist, and buried the memory under case files and coffee. I diagnosed schizophrenia, dissociative disorders, and the occasional delusional parasitosis. I never once diagnosed a monster.

I found the pattern. Every twenty to thirty years, the sightings would cluster. A spike in missing persons in the Upper Peninsula. Then silence. Then another cluster. As if the creature hibernated for a generation, then woke up hungry. The last cluster ended in 1993. The year after I saw it. The records were hidden in plain sight

The staff wrote him off as a paranoid fantasist. But when I read his file, my palm started to sweat. The location of the first "animal attack" he described? The crossroads of M-37 and Old Stage Road. The year? 1992. The year I saw it.

Now I'm in a motel in Lansing. The news is on. They're reporting a "mass escape" at the asylum. Seven guards dead. Cause of death: "severe lacerations consistent with a large animal." Edmund Croft is listed as "missing, presumed deceased." No, the elders had another name, one they wouldn't say aloud

The last thing I write in this journal is a single line, scrawled in the dark: It wants to be seen. And I looked.