The Mysterious Dog

The Mysterious Dog(Alex Letona) It was on that Friday evening that it happened, the day I met that strange and mysterious dog. Me and my three friends were walking home from school that day, when we passed that same old broken-down and abandoned house, as we did every day, coming home from school. It was a house with a very bad reputation, for it´s last owner, an old man, had disappeared about a year ago and had not been seen since. People in the village had many theories about what could have happened to the old man. Some people thought he´d just gone away somewhere for good, without telling anybody. However, others liked to believe that he had been secretly murdered. Some people even went as far as believing he had committed suicide and had never been found. Personally, I agreed with the people who thought he´d just gone away somewhere, without telling anybody. Now, it had a bad reputation, because legend has it that the old house is haunted by the old man every day. Anyway, it was just after we´d passed that old house that Ginger, the most bossy and annoying of the four of us, suddenly broke out that he dared any of us to go into the house and take a look inside. My other two friends, Peter and Neville, who were both quite cowerdly and would do anything Ginger told them to, said they would never dare even taking a step into the old house. I, however, was not afraid at all. To me, that place didn´t look frightening at all. Personally, to be honest, I thought that the myth people told about it was a big, fat lie and that house was nothing but an old house, in which nobody lived in any more. I told Ginger I´d have no problem going in there. Ginger looked at me, smirking. I asked him what he would give me in return. His answer was ten pounds. Anything for that, I thought. I started walking confidently towards the font door. However, though I didn´t like to admit it, I was getting more and more scared with every step I took. I suddenly noticed the cobwebby windows upstairs, I had never really noticed that before. However, if I ran back to my friends now, telling that I too, was too scared, they would tease me and call me a coward. So I forced myself to get to the front door of the old, spooky house. By the time I got there, I was practically trembling with fear. What if the rumours about this old house were true? What if there really was a ghost in there? I turned the doorknob with my shaky, trembling hand. Why on earth had I agreed to this? I opened the door slowly, little by little. However, all I could make out was a few cobwebs, but nothing else. I opened it wider. Still nothing strange or creepy was in sight. I opened the door as wide as it would open. Apart from the many cobwebs all around the place, there was nothing wrong with the house at all. It was in perfect condition. The walls weren´t falling apart, there were no creeky stairs on the staircase, the lights worked perfectly. How could this be? However, I was yet to find out that I was not the only living thing in the house at that time. I was so distracted looking at the perfect condition the house was in, that I did not immediately notice a pair of yellow eyes had appeared at the top of the staircase. They were staring at me, they suddenly caught my eye. I realized that those yellow eyes belonged to a dog, who apparently had been living here all this time. The dog started walking down the stairs, towards me. I expected it to chase me out of the house, lashing out at me and biting. However, the dog reacted in quite the opposite way. It was wagging it´s tail, looking quite pleased to meet me. When it got to the bottom, it stopped and just stood there, as if it was considering me. I reached out my hand to stroke it. To this, however, it did not react well. It bit my hand, with it´s sharp, yellow teeth. It hurt quite a lot. This dog, obviously, did not like to be touched. I decided to try giving it some food, it was so skinny it looked like it could do with some. I grabbed my backpack which I still had round my neck and took out my lunch box. I had not had time to finish all of my lunch today. I still had a biscuit, a bit of cheese and a bit of a chicken left over. I offered all these things to the dog. The biscuit and the bit of cheese, it turned it´s nose up at. I thought that was very strange, because I know for a fact that dogs love both biscuits and cheese. The chicken, however, had quite the opposite effect. It was chewed and swallowed in ten seconds flat by the dog. The bread belonging to the sandwich, it ignored completely. I was beginning to feel that I quite liked this dog, despite the fact that it did not like being touched. And it was then, when I was just thinking of taking this dog home with me and adopting it, that I saw it, a big, red blotch on the wall right next to the bed. I immediately recognized it as blood. I started to walk towards this blotch, now completely ignoring the dog. I now suddenly noticed that there was an arm sticking out from under the bed, as well. I took a peep under the bed. And there it was. I recognized it immediately. The body of the old man, the last owner of this old house. The way he had been killed was now perfectly obvious as well. He had big, yellow teeth marks cut into his throat. Those were no ordinary teeth marks, they were the teeth marks of that dog, standing behind me. Panic suddenly struck inside me. I turned round to run away as fast as I could, only to find my way blocked by the dog. It was sort of smirking at me, showing every single one of those mucky, yellow, sharp fangs.