The Dog Outside the Light

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

There is a truism attributed to early-20th century weird fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” That’s what makes the following one of the scariest things that ever happened to me — or maybe didn’t happen. I can’t be sure, and not knowing whether it was real has haunted me for decades.

This isn’t so much a story as it is a memory, though lacking much context other than what I can describe from the wider facts of my life at the time during which the “event” occurred.

I must have been between the ages of 9 and 10, and living in my childhood home on five forested acres off a dirt road in Sagle.

It got dark out there. We had neighbors, but all of them were screened by thick barriers of trees and brush, and little if any of their existence filtered through. We had no curtains to be closed. 

The exceptions to that were the folks behind us whose woods abutted our own and occasionally fired their guns for no apparent reason. The others lived across our dirt road in a complex of trailers and small homes occupied by three generations of their family members. 

The grandparents of the family lived opposite the mouth of our driveway, and they had a halogen light that shone out from their yard. Because our driveway curved slightly before meeting the road, we did not have a direct line of sight to their property, but at night their light could be seen as a constellation of bright pinpricks through the trees and cast a sharp-edged blue-white hue on the gravel of

Generative AI image courtesy NightCafe.

the driveway just where it bent to meet the road.

From the window in our living room at night, it seemed like a giant door stood ajar in the wall of indiscernible trees, letting in a sliver of cold light from another room beyond.

I wasn’t the kind of kid who got up at night and roamed around the house. When I did awaken, it was to go to the bathroom or get a glass of water. On those occasions, I’d glance out the front room window in passing and see that shaft of halogen. Despite my full awareness of its source, it always gave me an unearthly feeling and I wouldn’t stare too long into it for fear I might see something staring back.

The mysterious occurrence that I’m frankly hesitant to share because it makes me sound unhinged — and my own mind remains queasy about its essential reality — came on an otherwise typical night sometime in the very late summer.

My memory is of getting out of bed and, in my pajamas, walking out into the living room. I don’t remember why I got up, but do recall looking out the front window at the neighbors’ light, shining in that cold way at the end of the driveway.

The next memory I have is of being outside and walking toward the light. How or why I made the decision to leave the house is lost to me, as is the recollection of walking out the front door, but the sensation of crunching across the gravel and feeling the night air is so distinct and vivid that no matter how analytical I’ve tried to be over the years, I can’t fully shake the perception that this actually happened in some form or another.

I walked on and remember feeling how close in and dark the woods were on either side of me, but I refused to look, feeling compelled to continue on to the end of the driveway where I would see the halogen light rising from the neighbors’ front yard.

As I neared the dirt road and neared entering the full glare of the light, my mind leapt to the realization that there was something crouched in the bushes to my right. I kept my eyes forward and took another step or two, then the thought burst into my head that there was a black dog hunched down next to me. 

Though I could not see it — could not make out any details in the bushes and woods beyond — the image came fully formed and clear that this was a dog with medium-length, bristly black hair and its eyes fixed on me in a taut-coiled low posture.

I finally looked blindly to my right and, the instant I did so, I heard it growl and snap and felt somehow that it lunged about a foot toward me, though not far enough to leave the darkness in the bushes. I never actually saw it, even when staring directly at where I knew it to be, but felt suddenly that it had vanished after making itself known.

There is no further recollection in my mind, neither of continuing on toward the dirt road or returning to my bed. The incident ends at the point of my feeling the dog had gone and of being surrounded by the light as I blinked into the forest, and I’ll never know the truth of it.