Speaker 1: The Baptism of a dog Man, Mumbai, India. I would
like to share a dog man's story that I've written
inspired by a true event that happened with me. I
still can't wrap my head around it. Writing this story
is probably away from me. To make sense of it,
I will reveal to you what part of the story
is true toward the end. Usually we have heard stories
only about encounters with the vicious, cryptid dog man. Here
is a legend about how a dog man probably comes
into being as a result of the apathy of the
very society we live in and certain dark forces we
know almost nothing about. I grew up in a part
of Mumbai, India that has always identified themselves as nastis,
meaning non believers, non believers in everything from the great
gods to the damned devils. But something happened in this
quaint town that crushed this belief to blunt yards. My
town is located on the outskirts of the National Park,
so close to the woods that it gets preposterously chilly,
especially at night. Outsiders find it eerie, but to us
it just means that ice cream lasts longer. I was
employed for the longest time but managed to get a
job as a postman thanks to my childhood friend Tahas,
who works as an accountant at the local post office.
Postmen get designated zones in which they have to deliver.
Lucky for me, I got to sign. The area where
Tahas and I have lived all our lives is on
the outskirts of the National Park. Unlike in foreign trees,
Indian postmen do not get vehicles for delivery and have
to deliver mostly on foot. I didn't mind that. I
thought it would help me shed the extra pounds that
I had put on while I was unemployed. But delivering
posts turned out to be a thankless job. To pull
my spirits up, I would plug in my earphones and
try to bob my head to the sickest beats on
the way to the houses. It seldom helped. Now, I
would often cross our town's colorful marketplace, where I was
always greeted by this cute little black and white Streek
dog I called her Patchy. She would jump in glee
and put her four limbs on my hips because she
knew I carried in my shirt pocket the tastiest roasted
chickpeas a form of healthy energy replenishment. In case I
got really tired, which was often, but I would still
give her a handful of chickpeas as it was extra
extraordinarily amusing to see her relish the snack. She'd nibblely
licked my hand clean in a matter of seconds, but
made sure that her teeth never hurt me. Patchy was
undoubtedly the highlight of my day, the smile in many
miles of misery. One morning, I got an earfull at
the post office for having a delivery backlog, and I
was given an ultimatum by my superior to finish off
all of the deliveries by the end of the day
or else he would fire me. I was not ready
to face the demons of unemployment again, so I was
hauling ass across town to deliver the backlogged post and
new post. I was rushing past the marketplace when I
heard a bark from across the street. Oh no, not today, sweetie,
I thought, no time for doggy loving when your ass
is on the line. But the black and white qutie
barked again and gave the cutest smile. It was enough
to make a heart of stone melt, and mine is
merely made of tender. I reached in my pocket for
her favorite roasted chickpeas, and her ears perked up, and
I know she was salivating in anticipation. Patchy darted across
the street, and in a flash, a sedan just steam
rolled over her out of nowhere, the horrid yelp. It
is an imprinted scar in my memory, like a third
degree burned passers by. I tried to stop the car,
but the reckless ass sped away. I didn't care for that.
All I cared for was the highlight of my day,
and she was just crushed under its wheels. I ran
to her and sat down on the filthy road where
she laid, and she looked surprisingly fine but motionless. So
I lifted her head in my palm and it felt wet,
but it wasn't blood. It was her brains. One side
of her skull was missing and her brain was spilling
out and in shock. I sat there with the dog
in my arms for the longest time. My buzzing phone
jolted me out of the days. It was my supervisor.
I hope you're done with most of your deliveries. Report
back to me at six pm on the dot, hopefully
with your post bag empty. The fact was I had
barely started for the day. I laid Patchy back down
and wiped her brains off my fingers with my handkerchief,
and I looked around for help. I was lucky a
nearby shop owner was already on call with the authorities.
He gave me a nod, and I'm not proud of it,
but I left the beloved street dog and I rushed
to complete my deliveries. I had lost one worthy thing
in my life, and it made no sense losing another.
I ran, and I ran like the wind, even though
my appalling fitness allowed me only to move like a
slow breeze across the marketplace many times. But Patchie still
lay there in the middle of the street. This is
what often happens in my country. The authorities don't give
a shit about us, much less a dead dog. And
then the late evening heat scorched her dead body to
the point where it began to emit the odor of decomposition.
I covered my nose with my handkerchief until I realized
I was inhaling Patchi's brain off of it, and I
shoved it back into my pocket. I couldn't help but
just go on with making my deliveries. The deadline of
six pm flew by as if in seconds. I made
deliveries into the dead of the night, and I was
cursed by sleepy homeowners. And still I was unable to
finish all the deliveries. It was impossible with the backlog.
My crazy supervisor called me to the post office at
that hour, only to fire me and take away my
ID card in the remaining post letters. I phoned my
friend the post office account at Tahas, but even his
pleas to the supervisor didn't help. I was having the
worst day of my life. I was dejected and defeated,
and I walked home alone. The chill, the fog from
the National Park crept in once more. Crossing the marketplace,
I dreaded seeing the dead dog again, but she wasn't there.
Thank god, the authorities had picked her up for a
decent burial, I thought. I walked up the druid, desolate
street and shop shutters down. Not a sound but that
of the wishing wind. I saw a shadow moving down
the street. It went past the light of the street
lamp and appeared beneath another. This time it was not
a shadow, but because it was clearly lit, my eyes widened.
It was a dog, and I couldn't believe it. It
was black and white. It was Patchy, no doubt about it.
But she looked strange, a little off. I felt a
lump in my chest and a ball of fear or happiness.
I didn't know. How could she be alive? I saw
her die this morning. I saw her brains in the road,
and I smelled her decomposing body. How could she be alive?
I couldn't wrap my head around this. And then she
started limping toward the curb. There was a decrepit woman
sitting there. She had white hair and a multicolored surrey.
But I couldn't see her face, not that there wasn't
enough light. There was. She was sitting under the street light,
but her face was complete darkness, as if she were faceless.
She stretched her hand out to Patchy and started applying
a yellow paste on the dog's head where the skull
had broken off. Ah, it's t merick, I thought. Tameric
is a local aniseptic found widely in Indian kitchens. She
was applying it to heal the street dog. Maybe I
was misreading the situation. The woman was here to help hell.
She practically resurrected my beloved Patche using ancient Indian medicines.
Still applying the tameric, the woman looked at me. The
chill ran through my entire body. My muscles, which were
aching after the horrid day, throbbed in much greater pain,
and then suddenly relaxed. Feeling strange but relieved. I smiled
at her, and she picked up something from beside her.
It was pieces of brain, and she shoved it inside
the dog's head. Her entire fist was inside. The dog
let out a deafening howl, brandishing her teeth, which appeared
much larger than before. And then it struck me why
Patchy looked so strange. She had somehow become larger in
a matter of hours, but still she was supposedly dead.
This is not my Patchy, and this is not a woman,
I thought. I gasped out loud at the realization, as
my gut sank a thousand feet. But now Patchi turned
toward me and growled as if I was the one
who shoved a hand on her skull. I backed up,
and Patchy jumped up onto her hind legs, just as
the old decrepit woman stood up I waited for the
dog's fore legs to come back down, but they didn't.
What the hell? The darkness in the woman's face became bigger,
as big as a wrecking ball. It seemed as if
she had opened her mouth wide, and a low rumble
filled the air, and my chest vibrated like a tuning
fork and my stomach I vomited. My ears hurt like hell,
and blood ran out of them. The damn dog started
sprinting menacingly on his hind legs toward me. The black
and white face with ghoulish, shining black eyes and a
yellow red head, scowled and drooled. I ran back down
the road as fast as I could, not looking back
even once, and I dashed into the post office and
locked myself in the strange booth. Outside the door, there
was a loud bang, and then howls, and then scratching claws.
Why does Patchie want to kill me? I was good
to her, I fed her. Now she can't be Patchy.
The thoughts plagued my mind all night. I don't remember
whether the scratching stopped first or exhaustion consumed me. I
was woken to Knox and my supervisor's bossy shouts early
the next morning, who locked this room? And what are
these scratches? I have important files in here. Relieved, I
opened the door for the supervisor and standing behind him
was ta Haas. They were shocked to see me and
my clothes were stained. I had shit in my pants
due to the fright during the night's ordeal. I hadn't
realized it at the time. Tahas took the day off
and he took me home and he bathed me and
sat with me patiently, even though I didn't say a
word to him. He prepared some food and we ate
and then he put me to sleep. He is a
true friend. Indeed, that evening I said to him, I
want to tell you, but I don't understand it myself.
There is no need. He said, Let's go out for
drinks to your favorite place. Well that brought a smile
to my face and a time that seemed the darkest.
Our favorite, extravagantly secret, magical place for locals to drink
was the National Park. The park stays shut at night,
and so we entered unnoticed from a secluded end of town.
We had broken a hole at the bottom of the
National Park's boundary wall. And that night, Taos and I
purchased our whiskey from the local liquor shop and we
entered the park woods. It was serene and quiet and calm,
like this town is always supposed to be. It took
my mind off the horrific memories of last night, the
dog and the shadow woman, the howls and the yelps.
Oh God, I closed my eyes while walking, and a
tear fell down my cheek. It was a good thing.
It was pitch dark in the woods, so Tahis couldnot
see them. What sort of man cries in front of
another man? I thought, A manly one, I realized later.
Soon we were drinking and smoking heavily, reminiscing about how
we used to score on girls and all the mischief
we would gravitate to, and we laughed and laughed. A
haunting image came screaming back to me, that of the
decrepit woman shoving her hand inside Patchie's head, and I
stopped laughing. Though Tejas could not see my face, he
could sense something was wrong. Do you hear that too?
He asked me. Hear what? The faint sound of hoofs
thumped the ground. The thumping increased as if there were
hundreds of animals approaching and we could not decipher what
they were. The woods were laden with ferocious leopards infamous
for claiming many innocent lives. Run whispered Tajos, and we
took off at a sprint, blind and in the opposite direction,
leaving all our booze behind. I crashed into the thick
trees and I couldn't see a thing, but I could
feel fear like water up the nose. Tahis helped me
up and we darted through the thicket, bruising ourselves with
whips from the bushes. But then we heard approaching hoofs
from this direction as well, then the left, and we
ran towards the right, and something surrounded us. The thumping
was so loud that Tahas and I huddled together and
we sat down, waiting for an inevitable stampede. The hoofs
sped toward us, but stopped merely a centimeter short, and
wind gushed past as dust filled the air to a
stifling point, and then everything went silent. We couldn't see
a thing. With trembling hands, I lit the flashlight on
my mobile phone, expecting to see a leopard or a
panther or a wild boar, But no, what we saw
were deer, hundreds and hundreds of deer like mannequins, standing
paralyzed in fear. What were they petrified of? Was it us? Well,
that was unlikely. I couldn't understand, but I hope that
they weren't scared of the same thing I ran from
the night before. I reached for Ta Hoos's hand. It
was frigid, much colder than mine, and we slowly stood
up and started squeezing past the deer, making sure not
to touch and alarm them, and we heard footsteps. They
were bipedal something heavy beneath which twigs and branches snapped
like crackers. Whoever or whatever this was, stealth was not
its tactic. Fear was its tactic. I tugged at Tehos's shirt,
indicating him to be still, and then a loud thud,
as if something jumped into the crowd of deer and
between us. Chaos ensued as the deer ran helter skelter,
slashes and growls and yelps and pounding hooks filled the night.
Warm liquid sprayed over us from all directions, and I
still remember the metallic taste of blood in my mouth.
Something was slaughtering the deer ruthlessly, and I shined my
flashlight in the direction of the pandemonium, and beyond the
carnage of the bleeding dead and scurrying injured, we saw
it me for the second time in Tahas for the first,
and standing on its hind legs was the dog Patchy.
The dog had become grotesque and taller, nine maybe ten
feet tall, still with the yellowish shade on its head
and a throbbing brain poking out with vicious claws and incisors,
and its muzzle was covered in blood. It saw us
and shoved aside the deer in our path, and it
curved its lips ominously back when it looked at me,
almost like a smirt has pulled me back. But I
was trampled down by the running deer, whose hoof snapped
in my right forearm in half. But I somehow managed
to stand back up despite the piercing agony. The sinister
dog growled at Tehos and he charged. Instead of running away,
tey Haas too, charged at it with clenched fists. The
dog opened its mouth wide and I pleaded with tey
Has to stop, but it was too late. Nick cleanly
bit Tajos's head off as swiftly as plucking out flowers.
Just when did life leave his body? I don't know,
because even without his head, his clenched fist delivered an
almighty punch square to the dog's muzzle, but it didn't
affect the dog at all. It approached me slowly, and
the gore and shock of my best friend getting brutally
beheaded made me freeze where I stood. It spat my
friend's head at my feet, all slimy and bloody and
cut up by the dog's incisors. The dog started bending
and letting out steamed breath onto my bloody face. It
smelled horrific, like the right of many bodies that had
just slain before my eyes, and it went past my
face below and poked its chin at my shirt pocket.
I didn't understand it first, but when I noticed the
crunching sound coming from my pocket, I realized that the
dog wanted the roasted chickpeas within I'd carried it to
chomp on while having drinks with Tahas. This monster, this
monster wants roasted snacks. Perhaps a part of my cute
little patchy was still alive inside this insidious, abhorrent, despicable creature.
With my working left arm, I fished out a fistful
of roasted chickpeas and I threw it to the ground.
The dog roared and spat right in my face, and
I thought I would disintegrate. I took out another fistful
of the snack and held it out in my trembling palm,
and just like the patchy, I knew the monster nibble
and licked my hand clean in a matter of seconds.
I thought, surely it would chew off my hand, but
the teeth shockingly never hurt me. The brute licked my
face and the roughness of its tongue scratched my skin,
and then it grabbed Tahas's limp body between two of
its long, skinny fingers and dragged him into the murk,
away from the reach of my frail flashlight. I dashed
away from among the slain bodies as fast as my
aching body could. The pain was unbearable, to the point
that I could see darkness blacker than the blinding wooded
night creeping in front of my eyes, and I stumbled
out of the hole into the National park's boundary wall
and collapsed to the coal numbing ground, and I whirled
my eyes to stay open. I had to do one
more thing. I saw the slabs of the wall that
we had broken and thrown aside, and I crawled into
it on my elbows, the stony glacial earth, cutting deep,
grabbing the wall slabs between my left and both hands,
and painstakingly sealed the wall. Only then did I allow
my knees to buckle below me. But something held me up.
It didn't let me fall. I turned to look, and
I saw first a multicolored serri and then her face,
as dark as a black hole. The shadowy, sinister face
moved as she spoke, you seem hurt. Won't you let
me apply some to merit to your wounds? You'll feel
better than ever. She put her hand in my pant
pocket and pulled out the brain smeared handkerchief I had
almost forgotten about, and she swallowed it. The low rumble
echoed it once again, engulfing me in waves of misery,
and I let out a scream, through which escaped every
ounce of my depleted energy, and it drowned in the
cackling laughter of the decrepit old woman. As I faded
into the killing night. The town still mourns the death
of Tahas's young, brave life. As for me, I try
to get by with PTSD counseling to deal with my
survivor's guilt. We should have never gone out that night,
and especially with all that had happened with me the
night before. My hand had healed overnight courtesy of the
decrepit woman. I'm still awaiting its haunting repercussions, keeping in
mind what that kind of healing has done to the
once lifeless patche my quaint town. And now you too
know the story of the birth of our town's dog
or dog Woman, to be precise, It is as if
I got baptized by consuming my dear friend Tahas. Even
though the National Park is now permanently shut and its
boundary wall is completely sealed with the dog Man inside,
we are not safe. From time to time I see
the monster standing atop the tall boundary walls, now even
taller eleven feet. Its body structure looks oddly like that
of my dead friend. It lurks in the darkness of
the streets and people go missing. I'm sure they're dead,
but not me, even though I have felt it stalking me.
Now I can't help but accept the fact that there
is still some kind of weird bond between me and
the killer creature, the monster, the dog man, my sweetie Patchy.
The end. Now for the part of the story that
is true. The dead dog was really resurrected by that woman.
I would see this patchy dog every day on my
way to work. One day, a car ran over its head,
crushing a part of it, just like I have stated earlier,
And for two whole days I walked past it as
it lay on the side of the road, stinking like
any dead animal. It had shrunken to half its size
than when it was alive. The next day, the body
had just disappeared. Five days after that, while coming back
from work way past midnight on a one lane empty road,
I was stopped in my tracks by a dead dog,
now miraculously alive. I was shivering, and it had become
fat again, but its brains were still hanging out. They
were glistening in the light. And I saw it walk
to this woman in the darkness who was applying to
Merrick on its head, muttering something I couldn't hear. When
they noticed me, they just stared at me for an eternity.
I was so petrified that I couldn't move. I called
up a friend, waking him up from a deep slumber.
I didn't care. I told him, dude, get your car
pick me up right now, and that he did. But
the four minutes he took to reach me felt like ours.
My friend saw the dog, but strangely not the woman.
I thought maybe he missed seeing her since we were
in such a horrid hurry to get the hell out
of there, but my friend kept saying that there was
no one there. What the hell. I still can't understand
how a dead dog can come to life just by
applying to merit. Surely some dark forces are at play here.
I really don't know. Now that dog is healed completely
and actually acts quite normal. I see this dog every day,
but I've never seen that woman again, and I never
wont to PostScript. It is okay for you to reveal
my name, even if you decide to read out the
real part of the story, because fortunately in India, telling
such stories is not frowned down upon. Unreal things keep
happening to many around here, and I've told this story
to my parents and friends, as they have shared their
true experiences with me, and I believe them just like
they believe me. If you or your listeners would be interested,
I would love to share their stories with you too,
but sadly they're not cryptid stories. There are more about spirits,
both good and bad.