What Circles in the Dark

"When a golden retriever stops wagging and starts growling like a wolf, you don't ask questions. You start looking for an exit."

The growl didn't stop.

It hung in the air like a held breath, low and continuous, vibrating through the darkness with a menace that turned my blood to ice water. I fumbled with my trousers, shoving myself back inside with trembling fingers, the sticky residue of my dream already forgotten in the face of something far more immediate.

Lois was a golden retriever. A bloody golden retriever. The breed was famous for being friendly to a fault, for greeting burglars with wagging tails and licking faces instead of biting throats. Whatever was making her produce that sound — that deep, primal warning that seemed to come from somewhere ancient in her DNA — it wasn't good.

The darkness pressed against me like a physical weight.

I'd grown accustomed to the absence of stars in Clivilius, the way the night sky became an unbroken void once the sun disappeared. But lying here, flat on my back with nothing but dying embers for light, the blackness felt suffocating. Malevolent. Like the dark itself was watching, waiting, hungry for something it had been denied.

"The wind is picking up. Do you think it's another dust storm?"

Luke's voice sliced through the heavy silence, but I couldn't tell where it came from. The darkness swallowed direction, made distance impossible to gauge. He could have been two metres away or twenty.

"I hope not," Paul whispered back, his voice barely audible above Lois's continued growling.

I knew that growl. Not from Lois — from Hudson. My stupid, loveable, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly dog had made that exact sound once, and only once. We'd been walking through the reserve near our house when he'd stopped dead, hackles raised, that rumble building in his chest like distant thunder. I'd laughed it off, assumed he'd spotted a possum or a particularly offensive cat.

Then the brown snake had slithered across the path, close enough that I could have stepped on it.

Hudson had known. Before I'd seen anything, before my slow human senses had registered the danger, he'd known.

Lois knew too.

"I think something's out there," I whispered, my voice coming out hoarse and cracked as I shifted through the dust, crawling toward where I thought Luke and Paul were positioned.

My hands sank into the fine particles, the grit working its way under my fingernails and into the creases of my palms. I couldn't see them. Couldn't see anything beyond the faint orange glow of the embers, and even that was fading, the fire having burned down to almost nothing while we'd drunk and laughed and toasted to Joel's impossible recovery.

The tension in the air thickened with every passing second, building like static before a lightning strike. The back of my neck prickled with awareness, every primitive instinct I possessed screaming that something was wrong, that eyes I couldn't see were watching from the darkness, that teeth I couldn't imagine were waiting for the right moment to sink into flesh.

I found them by touch — my outstretched hand colliding with what felt like Paul's shoulder, making him flinch. We huddled together in the darkness, three men staring into an abyss that stared right back.

Lois's growl shifted pitch, became sharper, more urgent.

Then she barked — a single, explosive sound that made me jump so hard I nearly pissed myself. The bark was followed by a snarl, the kind of noise you'd expect from a wolf defending its territory, not a family pet who'd spent the evening begging for scraps of butter chicken.

"What's going on?" Glenda's voice cut through the darkness from somewhere behind us, concern threading through every syllable. "Why is Lois barking?"

"We don't know," Paul responded, and I could hear the fear he was trying to hide, the tremor beneath the words that betrayed how hard his heart must be hammering.

"Probably just the wind stirring up the dust," Luke offered, but even he didn't sound convinced. The words fell flat, a feeble attempt at reassurance that convinced no one.

A gust of wind chose that moment to prove his point, sweeping across the camp and hurling a wall of dust directly into my face. The particles invaded everything — my eyes, my nose, my mouth. I choked on it, tasted dirt and minerals on my tongue, felt the sting as the grit scraped against my corneas.

I squeezed my eyes shut and raised my hands to shield them, but it was too late. The damage was done. Tears streamed down my cheeks, my body's desperate attempt to flush out the foreign matter, and through the blur of moisture and pain, I could see exactly nothing.

Blind. I was fucking blind.

"We should seek shelter in the tents!" Luke's voice rang out with sudden urgency.

"Come, Lois," Glenda commanded.

But Lois wasn't listening. Her growling intensified, punctuated by sharp barks that seemed to come from different positions, as if she was pacing, tracking something that moved in the darkness beyond our perception.

I blinked rapidly, desperately, trying to clear my vision. The tears helped, washing away some of the grit, but everything remained blurred and indistinct. Shapes without definition. Shadows within shadows.

Then I saw it.

A silhouette. Just for a moment, outlined against the fading glow of the embers. Something low to the ground, moving with a fluid grace that no human possessed. It was there and then it wasn't, swallowed by the darkness before my damaged eyes could make sense of what I'd witnessed.

My heart stopped. Actually stopped, the muscle seizing in my chest for a beat that lasted an eternity.

"Duke! Get back here!" Jamie's voice echoed from somewhere behind me, sharp with the same fear that was clawing its way up my throat.

I spun — or tried to. The darkness disoriented me, made every movement feel like swimming through tar. My eyes swept across the camp, searching for another glimpse of whatever I'd seen, praying that I'd imagined it, that my traumatised brain had conjured a monster from dust and shadow and nothing more.

Movement. To my left.

Another shape, darting between the barely-visible outlines of the tents. Bigger than the first. Or maybe it was the same one, circling, testing, looking for weakness.

"Shit! We're surrounded!" The words tore from my throat before I could stop them, panic overriding any attempt at calm.

A third shape. A fourth. Glimpses of motion at the edges of my ruined vision, there and gone like fish in murky water. How many were there? Six? A dozen? More?

I scrambled backward, my hands and feet churning through the dust, desperate to put distance between myself and the things that prowled just beyond the firelight. My back hit something solid — one of the supply crates, maybe — and I pressed against it, making myself as small as possible, as if that would somehow make me invisible to whatever was hunting us.

"What's happening?" Karen's voice pierced the chaos, trembling with the kind of panic that lived just this side of hysteria.

The sound seemed to come from the direction of the tents. She'd emerged, then. Stepped out of whatever flimsy protection the canvas offered and into the nightmare that had descended on our camp.

The wind howled again, stronger this time, and I caught a flash of colour in the distance — the portal's rainbow hues dancing across the dunes for a brief, tantalising moment before vanishing. A lifeline. A way out. But it was so far away, and between here and there lay nothing but darkness and dust and whatever monsters had chosen this night to make themselves known.

"Is that Luke?" Karen's voice again, higher now, threaded with desperate hope.

"I think it's just a dust—" Paul started, but the words died in his throat.

Because we all heard it then.

A sound that wasn't the wind. Wasn't the dogs. Wasn't anything human or familiar or explicable. A chittering, clicking noise that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, surrounding us, pressing in from all sides. It was the sound of hunger given voice. The sound of things that ate flesh and cracked bones and didn't care whether their prey could see them coming.

"I'm right here," Luke's voice cut through, answering Karen's question, but the reassurance was hollow.

Being here, together, surrounded — that wasn't safety. That was just a different kind of trap.

Lois had stopped growling.

The silence was worse.

For three heartbeats, nothing moved. The wind died to a whisper. Even the chittering faded, leaving behind a void of sound that pressed against my eardrums like deep water. My pulse was so loud in my own head that I was certain the creatures could hear it, could track me by the desperate drumming of my terrified heart.

Then Glenda screamed.

"Lois!"

The golden blur of fur was there and gone in an instant, a streak of movement launching itself into the darkness with a ferocity that seemed impossible for such a gentle animal. Glenda's scream cut off abruptly, replaced by the thunder of paws against packed earth, the snarling cacophony of dog meeting something that was very much not a dog.

And then the night exploded.

Barking. Screaming. Shapes everywhere now, no longer bothering to hide, pouring out of the darkness like shadows given form and hunger.

"Run!" Someone was shouting — Paul, maybe, or Luke, or my own voice torn free from my throat without permission. "Run!"

I ran.