 = The day I pull my own hair so hard I cry, I know it can’t go on. Or to be more precise, that I can’t go on. Everything has become muddled and chaotic, infused with anxiety. I operate in a panicky zone of uncertainty. I can only work alone; anything involving other people is problematic. I work on evading anyone who annoys me because I might – no, I will - become unreasonably angry. I am enveloped in a suffocating, selfish fug of dread. The possibility of intimate conversation terrifies me. The simple question – how are you? – could provoke any manner of honest and terrible responses. My fear of dogs, always present, intensifies. The sight of a tense, bristling dog makes me sweat and shake. Even my body is breaking down. My energy dips and wanes each day. I crave sugar and salt, chocolate and meat. My skin itches. My leg has developed patches of eczema, like rust on metal, lichen on stone. I scratch them mindlessly till blood leaks under my fingernails to form a perfect burgundy crescent line separating the white from the pink part of the nails. My chest beats fast, staccato one-two, one-two, like a tight red drum in my chest. I sleep with earplugs in to dim the sounds that might make me panic. I read to dull the thoughts in my head. In moments of lucidity, I am scared. I sit in traffic, thinking – Is this it? Is this ever going to end? – And, most terrifying of all – Is it still me? Because, you know, it doesn’t feel like me anymore. It feels like a bad version, a blurred photocopy, a self of newsprint smudged with tears. I’m no longer in the driving seat you see. The Black Dog. He names it for me, the kind doctor. His eyes squint at me in sympathy. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, gently. ‘It’s a brute, that dog.’ I’ve listed my ailments; those strange, pressing urges, the blank undertow of sadness that smothers me, night after night. I’ve told him of the fear that disrupts my rest with teeth-clenching anxiety. Of the long, heavy, blank sleeps that can overpower me, so I wake, dry-mouthed and heavy-eyed. ‘Maybe it’s my hormones?’ I suggest. Slow, fat tears trickle down my face. I wipe them away, absently. These days I cry so much I barely notice the constant flow. The doctor straightens up. He cocks his head to one side and says quietly, ‘Poor old you.’ It is such an un-doctorly statement, I forget to cry. ‘Well, I don’t think this is PMS. What you describe – the listlessness, the panic, the overwhelming feeling of sadness, these all tally with the definition of depression.’ That’s when he names it. The Black Dog. I feel a terrible sorrow mixed with a dawning relief at his diagnosis. His face is calm and kind. ‘Is there a history of depression in the family?’ he asks. Is there a history of depression in the family? Yes. Yes, there is. I can see that now. Like an ancient poison it has infected us, generation after generation. I see it now, exposed for what it is in the clinical environment of the doctor’s office. I see it in my mother’s despairing rages, my grandmother’s glassy stare and the strange, asynchronous workings of her mouth. And now I see it in my own mirror, in the ugly lines at the corner of my mouth. I see it in my flat, panicked eyes. It’s a dreadful, quiet homecoming, a recognition of what has always lain beneath. Is it still me? It’s been inside, quiet, dark, waiting. As a child, when I bit my hand in rage or pulled my dolls to pieces…was that it? Like a detective I examine myself for clues. That night I hit my head off the wall to stop thinking. That was definitely it. Maybe in time I’ll be proud of this. I’ll see it as part of my family heritage, as genetically distinctive as the dimple in the cleft of my chin, my long fingers, or the slight upward tilt of my nose that I see replicated, endlessly familiar, on strange faces at family funerals. For now, the tears trace lines on my face, a map of erosion, the long, slow slide of hot salt over sore skin. I start taking the pills. They are tiny, like little dots of white on my palm. I find it implausible that they can stem such a huge and weighty tide of emotion. But I try. I remember to breathe deeply when I can. As the days go by, the tautness in my chest loosens, little by little. I can now drive my car without visualising all the possible accidents that will happen; the flickering images of blood and twisted metal begin to pale and recede. I sleep past the white-night hour of three in the morning. I say hello. I ask how people are. Once I catch myself laughing, unguarded. The sound shocks me. Some things don’t get better though. As the general anxiety fades my fear of dogs intensifies. There are so many dogs. They are everywhere. Little dogs bark at me from gardens, short, throaty, angry yaps. When I go by, they hurl themselves against gates, in a blurred frenzy of pink gums and sharp white teeth. It’s the big ones that terrify me most. I see them throw their large bodies against their leashes, their powerful chests working with ribby muscles as they strain and pull. I stop walking around the city to avoid them. These animals are only domesticated on the outside. I can see them for what they are. In their rolling eyes, their curled snarls, I see their true nature; they are jackals, wolves, carnivores. The heavy wall of anger and despair is lifting, slowly but surely. Now, like a recovering car-crash victim, I feel the pain in my limbs. I can’t stop eating. Everything tastes pungent and delicious. I don’t fall asleep anymore, I crash into sleep, and it’s heavy and blank, a flat, implacable wall. It’s then that the dreams start. The dreams are always the same. I’m walking down a road, a flat, unmemorable country road. It’s summer. I can smell the dry heat, the cut, shrivelled grass. I hear the hum of insect-buzz, and feel their tiny wings bat against my face. I’m walking parallel to a deep ditch, backed by a large dark-green hedge. Suddenly I realise I’m seeing with a curious double vision, one that remains fixed on the dusty road, and the other which has risen to give me a birds-eye view of the hedge. Behind the hedge I see him. He’s a huge black dog, crouching, his hackles raised and his powerful body coiled and tense like a bowstring. I know he is waiting for me, but I can’t stop my feet leading me inevitably towards the hedge he lies behind. I wake just as he is about to spring, my mouth parched and open, hot, damp patches livid on my chest and the back of my neck. I call my mother. This is unusual. We don’t phone each other a lot in my family. Years of tense silences and uneasy conversations lie behind this. ‘Was I ever frightened by a dog? When I was little?’ My mother is silent for a moment. ‘No,’ she says eventually. ‘Not to my knowledge. You’ve always been afraid of dogs.’ I persist. Maybe if I’m more specific. ‘Is there any time you recall that I saw a dog pounce from behind a hedge?’ I need to know the origin of this dream. ‘No.’ Her voice is sharper now. I’m a little startled. In recent years, she’s been so much calmer. ‘Sorry,’ I say automatically. ‘Sorry for bothering you.’ ‘It’s fine,’ she says in a softer voice. ‘When are you coming to visit me and your granny? I’d love to see you.’ ‘Me too,’ I say. There are tears in my eyes. I mean it. I put down the phone. A patch of eczema flares on my ankle, pink and angry. I scratch it until the blood wells up in dark beads. Last night, the dream changed. I was walking down the road, when I realised my viewpoint had changed. I could still see from the birds-eye view, but when I looked downwards, my old trainers had disappeared. In their place were two glossy black paws, stretched out to show long, cruel nails. The wave of horror wakes me abruptly. I’m sweating, panting, lungs bursting with effort. Is it still me? ‘So now you dream you are a dog?’ The doctor is making interested notes. He shakes his head. ‘The good news now,’ he says. ‘I’m very happy that your symptoms have dissipated, and that your blood-pressure is down. You’re feeling better in all respects but this very particular anxiety.’ He puts his pad down. ‘I’d recommend cognitive behavioural therapy to you. It’s a good way to address these kinds of fears, which seem to come from nowhere.’ He pauses, head cocked on one side ‘But I’m curious. Are you sure you’ve never been bitten by a dog? Scared of one as a child?’ I consider the conversation with my mother. ‘Almost positive that I wasn’t.’ He considers it. ‘Maybe you heard a story about one that frightened you?’ I think. Something in that last sentence sounds familiar. I close my eyes and raise a hand to stop him. There is silence. I hear the clock tick on the white-painted wall, slowly, calmly measuring the seconds, the minutes, the hours… ‘Yes,’ I say finally. ‘Yes. I heard a story.’ I’m five years old. My grandmother is making a new dress for me in the kitchen, her clever fingers pulling and tugging the material under the whirring needle of the sewing machine. I am tiptoe-stretched, head following the flashing movement of the needle. Quietly I reach out one chubby hand towards it – ‘Stop!’ shouts my grandmother, suddenly, pushing my hand away. I’m opening my mouth to cry, when she pulls me onto her lap. I rest my head against her soft, warm neck. ‘Hush now,’ she says, and her voice is quiet, murmuring. ‘Hush or the Black Dog will hear you.’ The Black Dog of Cratloe. How could I forget about him? According to my grandmother, the Black Dog ran beside the road beyond Limerick. If he ran alongside you, that was good, and you’d have a safe journey. If he jumped out at you, Fate would follow you, like the dog itself, until you met your bloody end. My grandmother claimed to know a man who had died a week after a cycle home. The dog had run at him repeatedly during the stretch of road by the estuary, he told her, run at him over and over again, so he had to keep cycling and shouting, faster and louder, until it finally vanished at the foot of the Cratloe hills. ‘It did him no good,’ my grandmother says, nipping off the thread with her sharp teeth. ‘Sure wasn’t he dead a week later. God rest him.’ I get to my feet and leave the surgery, rejecting all offers of referral. There is nothing wrong with me anymore. My fear is real. It is out there in the woods, hiding by the road, waiting for me. That night I dream again. I’m back on the road. This time it’s dark. Beyond the hedge is the silver salmon-flash of moonlight on water. The air smells different, moister, and loamier than before. I stretch myself out. Every muscle in my body lengthens and tautens as I flex slowly behind the hedge. Then I hear it, faint in the distance, the whirr of bicycle wheels. I tense. Nearly there. The whirr grows louder, and I am running quick, sure, low to the ground, the grassy earth under me damp and firm. He sees me. His mouth opens in a perfect round 0 of shock. I keep running, darting out and back from the hedge. It is intoxicating, the dew-fresh smell, the speed, the frightened, phlegmy catch of his breath as he pedals faster and faster. The chase goes on, I run in and out, just missing his front wheel, until the bike swerves, and with a ripping sound of rubber on tarmac, it stutters, and crashes to the ground. I grab his collar in my mouth and start to drag him away. He is crying now, in hot, blurting breaths, face contorted, but the faint light shows me who it is. The doctor. When I wake up, heart blundering in my chest, everything has changed. There’s blood in my mouth, but I can’t find a cut. There’s blood under my nails, but there’s no scratches on my legs. I feel a glass-shatter of pure, high terror in the soft pouch of my stomach. Is it still me? What do you do when what you fear most becomes invisible? When it hides inside? I sit down with my mother and my grandmother. Their eyes tell me they know what I am going to say. My grandmother is already nodding. ‘I have it too,’ I say simply. ‘The Black Dog.’ My mother’s face is gentler than I have ever seen it. She brushes a hand over my hair, with a gossamer-light touch. ‘We know.’ Wordlessly, I extend my hands to her and my grandmother. Is it still me? Their eyes are warm, reassuring. We grip each other, palms warm, fingers taut. Together, our weakness is our strength. I feel the power coursing between us, from generation to generation, from Black Dog to Black Dog. STORY NOTES BY TRACY FAHEY ‘The Black Dog’ is a story originally published in 2018 in my second collection, New Music For Old Rituals that weaves together strands of a local legend, that of ‘The Black Dog of Cratloe’ with the wider apparition of the Black Dog in folklore, with other elements of pathography, genetic mental illness and lycanthropy. The Black Dog is of course a popular trope in global folklore; possibly most manifest in English folklore, with variants of the Black Dog legend in most counties in England. The Black Dog may be a direct descendant of Cerberus in Greek mythology; most stories tell of it as a pre-shadowing of death. It also makes several appearances in Irish folklore. T.J. Westropp, in his A Folklore Survey of County Clare documents the story which directly inspired this one, that of the ‘Black Dog of Cratloe’. However, in this story, I was powerfully attracted to the metaphor of the black dog in contemporary culture, as a euphemism for depression. Diarist Samuel Johnson first used the term in the 1780’s as a metaphor to describe his own struggles with a depressive disorder, and Winston Churchill popularised the term to describe his own encounters with the illness. This image is a striking one; the idea of a dog who follows, who won’t go away. Writing about a mental disorder also introduces the idea of the unreliable narrator – to my mind, a story always works particularly well if there are several different explanations for how the narrative unfolds. For those who have experienced depression, or its high-octane sister, anxiety, this feeling of persistent onslaught is particularly relevant. I was also interested in the idea of genetic inheritance and the vulnerability of families to the transmission of certain mental health conditions. Illness, and the feeling of dislocation it brings, is a theme that runs through several of my short stories. We write, inevitably from the standpoint of our own bodies, minds and experiences. From my own auto ethnographic experiences of illness, I’m powerfully aware of the (often almost unacknowledged) interrelationship between the body and mind, particularly in the area of chronic illness, which takes a mental as well as a physical toll on the self. Illness itself is a liminal space where the sufferer is plunged into the intensely introspective terrain of one’s own body and mind. However, it’s also a space of Unhemlich alienation from the self; a stark realisation of the divorce that has happened between the ‘normal’ terrain of wellness, and the uncertain, grey world of illness. In exploring the idea of the black dog as a signifier of mental illness, there’s a very deliberate reason I’ve played with the werewolf motif. We’re familiar with the legends associated with the werewolf, rising to prominence in Germany in the 1591 with the trial and execution of Peter Stubbe, a serial killer who believed that he became a wolf and committed his crimes while in this state of physical and mental transformation. This notion of lycanthropy as a mental disease is one that has survived until the present day. Today it is recognized as ‘clinical lycanthropy’, a rare syndrome whereby sufferer is convinced that he or she can transform into an animal. This belief in transformation of self is connected both with body-image ideas and as an add-on expression of a psychotic episode caused by another mental health condition such as schizophrenia. Lycanthropy is most commonly associated with men and male werewolves, which is strange, as in most fairy tales and legends, the wolf is a complex character; not only a vicious male predator, seeking out young girls to seduce and eat, but also as female, operating on a lunar cycle, ruled by blood and the moon, prey to monthly shifts in mood and hormonal changes. Many horror movies such as the Canadian Ginger Snaps, which align women with wolves, can also be read as a metaphor for the darker side of the transformation from childhood to womanhood. In such narratives, lycanthropy is also used as a signifier of mental illness. In ‘The Black Dog’, I was interested in drawing these different strands together – from global trope to local legend, from illness to werewolf stories. It was important that the narrator’s illness could be read in a variety of ways, from depression to menstrual psychosis to lycanthropy. It was equally important that the end be a resolution of sorts; a coming-together of generations of the same family to recognise and join forces to withstand the toll of this mental health condition, or conditions. And so ‘The Black Dog’ is that rarity; a horror story with a deeply hopeful ending. I hereby dedicate this story to all in our community of writers who struggle with challenges of the body and mind. Discussing and exploring these issues honestly together offers a chance of catharsis. Thanks so much to Jim Mcleod and Ginger Nuts of Horror for inviting me to be part of this conversation. Tracy Fahey Tracy Fahey is an Irish writer of Gothic fiction. In 2017, her debut collection The Unheimlich Manoeuvre was shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award for Best Collection. In 2019, her short story, 'That Thing I Did' (The Black Room Manuscripts IV) received an Honourable Mention from Ellen Datlow in her The Best Horror of the Year Volume 11, with five further stories on Datlow's Recommended Reading list for 2019. She is published in over twenty-five Irish, American and British anthologies. Her PhD is on the Gothic in visual arts, and her non-fiction writing has been published in edited Irish, English, Dutch, Italian, Australian and American collections and journals. She has been awarded residencies in Ireland and Greece. Her first novel, The Girl in the Fort, was released in 2017. Her second collection, New Music For Old Rituals was released in 2018 by Black Shuck Books. The Unheimlich Manoeuvre: Deluxe Edition by Tracy Fahey The Unheimlich Manoeuvre explores the psychological horror that occurs when home is subverted as a place of safety, when it becomes surreal, changes and even disappears… In these stories, a coma patient wakes to find herself replaced by a doppelgänger, a ghost state reflects doubles of both houses and inhabitants, a suburban enclave takes control of its trespassers, and a beaten woman exacts revenge. Just as the Heimlich Manoeuvre restores order, health and well-being, The Unheimlich Manoeuvre does quite the opposite. This new Deluxe Edition contains Fahey’s essay ‘Creative Evocations of Uncanny Domestic Spaces,’ five additional stories, an original print and piece, ‘Remembering Wildgoose Lodge,’ and complete story notes for all tales featured in this edition. Read our review here  Comments are closed.
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