Excerpt: GREY DOG by Elliott Gish (ECW Press)

Tomorrow, ECW Press are due to publish Grey Dog by Elliott Gish — a “subversive” literary horror debut that “disrupts the tropes of women’s historical fiction with delusions, wild beasts, and the uncontainable power of female rage”, it sounds like this deserves quite a wide readership. To celebrate the release, the publisher has provided us with a short excerpt to share with our readers. First, though, here’s the synopsis:

The year is 1901, and Ada Byrd — spinster, schoolmarm, amateur naturalist — accepts a teaching post in isolated Lowry Bridge, grateful for the chance to re-establish herself where no one knows her secrets. She develops friendships with her neighbors, explores the woods with her students, and begins to see a future in this tiny farming community. Her past — riddled with grief and shame — has never seemed so far away.

But then, Ada begins to witness strange and grisly phenomena: a swarm of dying crickets, a self-mutilating rabbit, a malformed faun. She soon believes that something old and beastly — which she calls Grey Dog — is behind these visceral offerings, which both beckon and repel her. As her confusion deepens, her grip on what is real, what is delusion, and what is traumatic memory loosens, and Ada takes on the wildness of the woods, behaving erratically and pushing her newfound friends away. In the end, she is left with one question: What is the real horror? The Grey Dog, the uncontainable power of female rage, or Ada herself?

October 20^th, 1901

It is Sunday now — the parlour clock just chimed the midnight hour — and in just a few short hours I shall have to rise for the usual Sabbath routine of breakfast, Bibles, and church. I ought to be asleep. Instead, I have spent these last few hours lying in bed, waiting for sleep to find me, all for naught. I must write down what happened this evening, I think, before I will be able to rest. And before this candle stub gutters out completely, leaving me in the dark.

Saturday evening saw me walking over the bridge and up to the manse for a late supper with Agatha. The Reverend was there, of course, but the Griers were not; Mrs. Grier had been taken with a sick headache, and Mr. Grier, it seems, is reluctant to partake in any social situation without his wife by his side. I had feared that I would feel terribly old maid-ish, dining with a married couple alone — that I would be intruding on their intimacy like an unwanted chaperone.

Happily, this was not the case. Agatha kept up a steady flow of conversation, asking after my students, and chuckling at my recounting of Effie’s brief feud with Clara; I in turn asked her about their behaviour in Sunday School, and was amused to learn that George Perley once asked her where Cain had found a wife, if there were only him and his parents alive on the whole earth after he murdered Abel. (This was the kind of thing I often wondered myself in Sunday School, though I was never bold enough to ask.) Occasionally we paused so that the Reverend could interject a question or observation — more of the latter than the former, it must be said, and most of them on such subjects as the nature of sin, forgiveness, Godliness, and so forth. Very edifying conversational topics, to be sure, but somewhat out of place at the table.

“You must forgive Mr. MacPherson,” Agatha said to me after the fifth (or was it sixth?) such digression. “He spends so much time in the pulpit that he sometimes forgets where he is and starts sermonizing over supper.”

She said this with a laugh, and no trace of malice; but the Reverend frowned at her, very sternly, and her laughter faltered. He took no notice of either of us from that moment forward, but sat and ate his dinner in silence, his grey brows lowered ominously. Our conversation was not so easy after that, nor our laughter. For the rest of the evening, she darted glances at his thunderous face, her own contorted with anxiety. The night, which had been so gay and full of promise, was spoiled.

I made my excuses soon after supper, pleading an early morning and lesson plans still to go over. The Reverend made no attempt to keep me — indeed, he barely acknowledged my goodbyes — but Agatha insisted on walking me down the lane, saying that she did not want me to be alone in the dark.

“He does get cross when I tease him,” she said as we started walking, her arm threaded companionably through mine. It was a cold night, and it did us both good to draw closer together. “I know I oughtn’t do it, but I simply cannot help myself. All that talk of sin and hellfire.” I felt the sigh that went through her. “I suppose it is to be expected, being the wife of a minister. Sin and hellfire are the orders of the day.”

“Is it terribly hard?”

Agatha considered the question in silence. Our shoes squelched a bit in the mud left by the autumn rain. From either side of the road came the chirruping song of autumn field crickets, as beautiful in its way as the cry of a fiddle.

“Sometimes,” she said finally. “He doesn’t approve of novels. I must hide them in my hope chest and wolf them down when he is gone, like a child gorging himself on sweets while his mother’s back is turned. That is hard. Or when he has his minister friends over and they talk theology, and I must sit there quietly and serve tea. Or when the children in Sunday School ask questions about hell, and they are so frightened, and I must answer the way he might. Or when we had to come here, because it was the only parish that wanted him, and I knew no one, and I had Douglas all alone… Yes. It is terribly hard, sometimes.”

In that moment, I acted without thinking. Withdrawing my arm from Agatha’s, I reached down and took her hand in mine, squeezing gently. Her palm was very warm, her fingers delicate as the wings of a sparrow. It seemed to me utterly natural to do this, and just as natural to say:

“I’m glad you came here, Agatha.”

There was more that I wanted to tell her: that I was grateful to have her as a friend, that she was the last thing I’d expected to find here in Lowry Bridge, that I wished she did not have to hide her books or worry about teasing her husband. But it all sounded silly in my head, and not really what I meant to say at all, and so I simply held her hand.

She smiled, squeezing back, and we continued in companionable silence until we reached the bend in the road. There she said she must turn back, for the Reverend would be waiting for his tea. I watched her slowly fade into the darkness, her pale dress first becoming a smudge, then a stain, then nothing at all. The thought of her trotting back up to the manse, waiting on her irritable husband and anxiously checking his face for signs of displeasure, made me sigh.

I turned to continue walking, struck by the utter stillness around me. No wind blew through the trees; no dogs barked in the distance; no owls called from the heart of the woods. The clouds overhead had gathered thickly in the night, and there was no moon to light my way. The world was dim and full of shadows, the road barely visible in front of me. I took one step forward, then two, then stopped.

The crickets had stopped singing.

I saw no one, heard nothing, but a sense unbound to any bodily mode of perception screamed a warning deep within my guts. It was an instinct more than anything, some intuition left over from the days when Man was prey to anything with teeth and claws. I felt with my entire body that there were eyes in the dark, hungrily tracking my every movement.

“Hello?” I called, remembering the day that Muriel had startled me so. Perhaps it was her, or some other young person, hoping to frighten the new schoolteacher as she made her way home. Perhaps it was a local man out cutting wood or checking his traps, wondering what a respectable lady was doing on the road so late at night. Or perhaps there was an animal hiding in the trees, choked with the same fear that held me frozen in place.

No answer came to me, and though I stood and waited, no one emerged from the deeper shadow of the trees. Presently my heart began to slow. After a few moments I was able to move again, although I did so cautiously, one foot at a time. A child may know that there are no monsters under the bed, waiting to grab his ankles, but he will take a running leap onto the mattress anyway, just in case.

“Nervous, nervous,” I whispered to myself. My voice was brash and jocular, like Florrie’s used to be.

I barely noticed the first one when it hit me. It felt like a small object, a twig or a pebble, thrown against my left shoulder. The second one struck the back of my neck, and that made me pause and turn, squinting into the darkness. The third one struck my face, and I reached out to catch it as it fell, raising it to my eyes to look at it. A spiky black insect, its long legs working feebly as it struggled to recover from its headlong crash into my cheek. A name came to mind unbidden, as clear in my mind as though I had just read it in a book: Gryllus pennsylvanicus.

“A cricket?” I whispered, puzzled. I let the thing drop to the ground, looking up, and then

then they were upon me by the dozens, the hundreds, uncountable numbers of tiny black bodies hitting my face, my chest, my legs. They flew directly into me as moths might a burning lamp, the air filled with the soft whirr of their rustling wings. It was like being pelted with handfuls of living gravel. I shrieked, waving my arms frantically around my head in an attempt to beat them off, but they kept coming in thick black waves, bouncing off my torso and limbs, catching in my hair and the folds of my dress. When I crumpled to the ground, I felt their bodies burst wetly beneath my knees and feet, heard the hideous crunch of their exoskeletons giving way beneath my weight. The eighth plague, the desolation of Egypt, clouds of locusts descending on fertile ground and stripping it of its green, its life! I covered my head with my hands and waited to feel the sting of the creatures biting into my flesh, laying me bare as the shores of the Nile.

As soon as I did this, the pelting stopped. The sound of thousands of wings moving in unison disappeared, replaced with that eerie silence. And then, gradually, the singing of the crickets returned, as bright and lovely as before.

After a moment I lifted my head and looked down at myself, then around me. There were no crickets clinging to my dress, no insectile gore waiting to be scraped off my knees or skirt. I lifted a hand to inspect my hair, and found it similarly free of vermin. The road beneath my feet was, so far as I could tell, clear. It was as though it had never happened at all.

Somehow I managed the walk back across the bridge to the Griers’ house and went straight upstairs, latching my bedroom door behind me and shutting the window tightly. When I took off my clothes, I shook each item carefully, waiting to see a dead insect fall onto the floor. None did, not even a segment of a leg or a tattered wing.

The clock just struck half past one. I must go to sleep. But I feel that if I close my eyes, I will feel those terrible spiny bodies hailing down on me once again, hear the terrible crackle of them beneath my feet.

Elliott Gish’s Grey Dog is out tomorrow, published by ECW Press in Canada, the US, and in the UK.

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