‘No, you fucking monster. Not Bart.’

The swirling blackness inside the animal stirred in its dark pleasure, rippling under the dog’s skin like an animated disease. When it spoke, Sam could hear in its voice the agony of the animal that was fighting to be let free.

‘Bart’s been a very bad dog, Sam.’

The foul rasping voice spoke in Siouan, and its timbre was deeper than those small lungs could afford. Cells were bursting in there, sinews snapping and twisting.

‘He’s been so bad he’s going to punish himself.’

The dog looked up at Sam, and for one tiny second it was Bart looking out of the blue eyes in unimaginable pain and terror, before the black thing wrestled back its control. The dog’s jaws opened and with a movement of almost balletic elegance, Bart rolled on his back and ripped at his belly with glistening teeth. His jaws were surprisingly wide and the wedge of flesh that he tore off with the first bite was thick and substantial, leaving a hole the size of a saucer in which the grey-white of Bart’s intestines could be glimpsed. The dog’s blood spattered Sam’s trousers and ran in thick rivulets from the dark hole onto the floor to mix with the milk like an obscene raspberry whippy. Sam could not move. His mouth worked like a penny-catching fairground clown, his hands clenching and unclenching, but the rest of his body was immobile. It wasn’t until the third bite, when the dog’s jaws got through to the serious stuff and buried its bloody snout deep in its own guts, that Sam broke free from his shock and jerked into action.

The wet tearing and growling noises from the abomination on the floor at his feet were threatening to make him vomit, but he whipped his eyes round the room, desperate to find something to end this torment. The snow shovel for clearing the path glinted at him from its place beside the back door. In one bound Sam grabbed it and skidded back to the horror in the pink milk. He held the tool by its shaft like a two-handed sword and lifted it high above his chest. As he brought the shovel down on Bart’s head, the animal was ripping its liver. The blade of the shovel came down harder than Sam could have hoped, slicing clean through Bart’s skull between his ears. An eye burst from its socket and the brains that had told Bart when to bark, when there was a chance of left-over chicken, where the warm bit in the kennel was, and what his beloved Billy smelled like, spilled out into the soft grey fur like porridge. The body was still, and the air around it moved as the darkness leaked away like the steam off hot urine.