Night Howl by Andrew Neiderman

wasn’t sure what had come at him. The force of it was overwhelming, but the silence was shocking. It couldn’t have been a dog, could it? Yet, when he looked up from the ground, that was just what it was . . . a large German shepherd, leaping in the air.
    It never touched Ken with its mouth. He didn’t even have to push its head away. This was like some kind of nightmare gone wild. He almost thought he had been attacked by a man dressed as a dog. The animal, or whatever it was, landed over his torso and dropped the center of its weight right over his face.
    He pushed up with all his might, but Ethel was right—he was not a young bull anymore. The strength in these arms could serve to dig holes for tomato plants and maybe run the Rototiller over the ground, but even that was getting hard to do; he had to stop so often to rest. Pressing into this animal was like pressing against a solid wall. He couldn’t budge it an inch.
    He stopped his effort because the animal wasn’t doing anything else to harm him. He expected it would get off him at any moment and run away, but it didn’t. It rolled its body slightly, just so it could lean more of its weight against his face. Its coat was soft, but the scent of it was definitely dog, and not domesticated dog but dog that had been out in the wilds, dog that had been rained upon, dog that had dried in the sun, that had traveled through the forest, that had slept on the hay in his barn. All these odors were familiar to him. They greeted him like a montage of the natural world he had known and loved so long, only now they presented him with a most extraordinary kind of life-threatening problem. Why was this dog so contented with simply staying this way?
    He pushed against it again and he turned his body from side to side to throw if off, but he might as well have tried to move a car. It was as though a decent-sized man had decided to sit on his face. The indignity of it all occurred to him, but that indignation was short because he quickly realized that his breathing was being cut off. As difficult as it was for him to accept, he was being smothered to death by a large German shepherd; what was most frightening about it for himwas the realization that the animal seemed to know exactly what it was doing.
    He gasped, closed his eyes, and gave a final push. The results were the same ... failure. His lungs began to ache; his mind reeled. The last thing he thought of was Ethel’s picture on the telephone table in the hallway. Thank God he had turned it to the wall.
    “I have a very surprising, maybe even very stupid thing to tell you,” Sid Kaufman began. The chief of police sat back in his chair. When Sid asked to see him privately with the door of his office closed, Harry Michaels’s interest was piqued.
    “Don’t be afraid to say somethin’ stupid, Mr. Kaufman. I hear a lot of that nowadays.” He smiled at his own sense of humor, but Sid only nodded. “Sit down, sit down. You look awful. That leg acting up?”
    “It thumps away, but I wish that was all of it.” Sid took the seat and folded his hands on his lap. “I don’t even know how to start this.”
    “Just start it. That’s usually the best way,” Michaels said.
    “My son . . . my son, of course, has been having nightmares.”
    “Sure.”
    “Yesterday, he insisted that King had come to the house at night and sat by his window, whining for him to come out to play. The dog would do that sometimes.”
    “King was your dog? The one that. . .”
    “Yes. Like I said, Bobby had been having nightmares, so I just assumed it was that.”
    “Uh huh.”
    “The kid’s kinda bright. Top of his class, reads two grade levels beyond his age.”
    “I gotcha, but bright kids can have nightmares too, Mr. Kaufman.”
    “Oh sure. What I mean is, he stuck to his story and then took me out to where he claimed the dog had been.”
    “A young Charlie Chan,” Michaels said. He took a cigar out of his shirt pocket, unwrapped it,