The Fridge

Paul F Walsh

 

This tale is a chiller rather than a thriller. The fact that I survived this encounter is evidenced by my continuing existence. Or … is it? Am I really the same person now? Is Lord Staffador, Chester the Jester himself, still the same doggo? He is resting on the end of our bed like a small horse, but he is saying nothing. And yet, this chilling tale begins and ends with him.

It was a dark, chilly, moonlit night. Chester began barking at 3am. This was unusual. Lord Staffador could have been the inspiration for the dog that did not bark in the night. But, on this nocturnal occasion, he was barking, and he had a bark that could wake the dead. I groaned, and then I rolled over to encounter Merlin the Magnificat who sleeps like a human between us. Merlin was not amused. Susan was not amused. And I was elected by a silent majority to stagger from the warmth of the bed to the dog’s room.

I know what you are thinking. The dog has a room? Surely, the narrator means a kennel, but, no, Chester does have an air-conditioned room, fully equipped with a beer fridge.

And by the time I reached the warmth of his room, neighbouring doggos had gone barking mad, joining Chester in a canine chorus that could have been heard by Sophocles in ancient Greece. Chester was literally baying through his bay window at what he regarded as a tree rat, a ringtail possum dangling by its tail in an aerial ballet that brought Rudolph Nureyev to my sleepy mind. Chester greeted me with his mad side-eye glance, and he began his huffa-puffa routine, huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf: Can’t you see the danger, Dad, or are you a complete idiot?

The answer to this unspoken question was revealed when I reached for the harness. I don’t do my best thinking at 3am, but the prospect of a walk outweighed the danger of a pirouetting possum in Chester’s mind, and he immediately shut up, suddenly wagging his tail with enough green energy to power a small cattery. And blessed proletarian quiet returned to our regal corner of New Lambton as the neighbouring doggos curled back into their dreams, swiftly followed by Susan and Merlin the Magnificat. All was at peace. Or … was it?

I was pulled like a milk cart to the letterbox. For a moment, I glanced up at the full moon, and, being a Cancer, I almost led Chester in a group howl, but the moment was lost as he dragged me towards Birdwood Street. They say that if you have trouble with a Staffador, then you’re looking at the wrong end of the lead, and I was perhaps living proof as Chester dragged me from Birdwood Street into Queens Road. His navigation was suggestive. I had a fair idea as to where we were headed, but his timing was off by hours. He turned left into Regent Street, paying due nasal deference to the row of gum trees on the nature strip, before lurching down the slope with no thought for my walking comfort or my trusty, though elongated, right arm. I was freezing, and Chester was blowing vapour like a demented dragon as we entered the fig-born shadows of Regent Park.

Each morning, we purchase cappuccinos from the friendliest baristas on the planet. Their addictive temple in Regent Street is like a caffeine church where worshippers of all shades of religious belief and non-belief gather on a daily basis to seek answers to their prayers within takeaway cups. It is an extraordinary gathering place, where the staff know all of their regulars by name, and where the communal chatter of the regulars is happily irregular for a New Lambton in which it is possible not to know your neighbours after living beside them for forty years.

And the coffee is to die for, but Chester cares only for the Schmacko that Gillian, the barista priestess, gifts to him each day as though he were a communicant at the altar rail. Such a Eucharistic treat can reputedly take a hound to the moon and back, but Chester’s love for his daily Schmacko is only matched by his anxiety regarding the moon. The moon is not to be trusted. And, at that moment, on this barking chiller of a night, the moon was stalking him, and he growled at its full smiling man-in-the-moon face as it peeked with evil intent through the fig foliage in Regent Park.

And Regent Park held other terrors. Chester flinched at the screech of the flying foxes feeding in the trees. They were eerily accompanied by the squeal of the playground swings in a horrid, breeze-blown harmony. The magnified, primordial shadows of the foxes began to swoop like pterodactyls on an unsuspecting doggo whose major concern was sniffing for the latest canine news while urinating appreciative editorial comments.

Chester was not the only being to be spooked in Regent Park. Long before such matters inspired the construction of Stonehenge at Novocastrian Park, I once tripped on a crop circle in Regent Park, created by some hapless, off-road hoon, only to regain my footing in time to see a ghost across the road in her 1940s finery waiting outside All Saints Anglican church as though a spectral bus would soon arrive to liberate her from the rattling chains of a recent sermon. I glanced nervously across at the church, but of the ghost there was no sign on this occasion. I pulled on Chester’s lead to indicate my desire to move on away from this past haunting, but he proceeded to drag me towards my spectral fear, as though he were a hound of hell pulling the cart of a banshee across Regent Street in search of a dying soul. I shivered, and not just from the cold.

The church bell tower was gone, but there was still a tap in that lovely reflective garden at the back of the church, and Chester has a thing for holy water. He is quite ecumenical in his tastes, so it was certain that he would require Catholic holy water from one of the taps at Saint Therese’s on the way back home. And he would no doubt once again bless my old puppy primary school in Royal Street. Chester would drink from the baptismal font itself, if he could, and, after refuelling his episcopal pistol, he would offer traditional urinary blessings to the entire suburb as though he were a visiting bishop; His Hairiness, Pope Chester the First, perhaps.

I eventually dragged him away from Anglican waters, relishing the feeling of being the dragger rather than the dragged. Chester wilfully protested as though newly charged with protestant fervour. And it was all I could do to drag him across Saint James Road to disrupt his sudden evangelical fixation on the nearby Samoan Church. He is remarkably protestant when on the lead, but complacently catholic if allowed to run free. After our usual religious tug of war under the all-seeing-ocular-square-and-compasses blue glow of the Masonic Lodge, with its Golden God of Geometric Gnosis dangling each way from an astrological ceiling above a chessboard floor, Chester begrudgingly consented to recross Regent Street where he spied an enormous black-and-white catto that thinks it’s the mayor of New Lambton.

Well, the cat stared, and Chester growled, and the cat advanced, and Chester retreated, and the mayor cleaned her paws with casual, secular contempt as we escaped her scary magnificence only to be accosted by a pagan sausage dog three doors down. Pope Chester the First decided to bless this sacrilegious sausage through the confessional grille of the front fence as though this barking, savage snag were a frozen sinner in need of the warming spray of absolution. At last, we made it to the stop sign near the Duke of Wellington Hotel where Chester paused to piddle religiously on the pole, but how I wished later that we had just stopped … yes, stopped … to avoid what was to come.

I had the creepy feeling that someone or something was following us. Someone or something wanted to meet me on this dark, chilly, moonlit night. But who, or what? Could it be the ghost from All Saints? Had she finally given up on the bus in favour of asking me for a spiritual lift? I glanced back, but I could see nothing, but what if nothing was the something that was stalking me? Could Chester guard me against nothing? My hair stood on end, and I swear that my old hat with its now apt Fuck Off badge was levitating above my long, thinning, balding hair. I wanted to scream Fuck Off, such was my terror in that moment, but I had to remain calm for Chester’s sake, and I had to trust that his acute doggo nose for danger would ultimately protect me.

The Trinity Uniting Church was the next Station of the Cross on Chester’s canine pilgrimage. And it was here that I fell in the footsteps of the master as Chester dragged me through the Palm Sunday shrubbery at the side of the church. The inspiration for his sudden paschal acceleration was his old enemy: the moon. As I lay prostrate in the blessed dirt, Chester growled at his lunar nemesis as though his faith in growling could eclipse the calm calculus of the Sea of Tranquillity. I could not determine whether he wanted to convert the moon to his doggo belief system, or eat it. He did love cheese, I madly thought, and he was ruled by the planet Stomach with a Virgo Schmacko moon.

Was Chester some form of astrologically attuned canine mason? I wondered. But Chester was more likely to chase a billy goat … my prejudicial mind could not finish the old Catholic joke because Chester distracted me from my worst self by chewing on a lamb bone that he had scavenged from the foliage. Scavenging was a religious obligation for him, but small cooked bones could be dangerous, and I vainly attempted to wrestle the lamb of God from his massive mouth. Perhaps, I was the mason, I thought. I was certainly riding a billy goat on this dark, chilly, moonlit night. And that billy goat was called FEAR. Was it a coincidence that my father was named Billy?

I studied the pub across the road. My father was as Irish as Paddy’s pigs, though he had never been to Ireland, and he once told me of an Irish pub called The Dog’s Arse. And perhaps Chester heard my fear-induced musing via some telepathic, symbiotic, artistic process, for, as I struggled against my own terror in order to become upright, he was sculpting a doggo boggo in the modern, abstract style, which he proceeded to install in the middle of the pedestrian crossing near IGA. This artistic deposit was more than a penny for my anxious, wandering thoughts, and I was grateful for the lack of traffic as I bagged this new-found commonwealth before dropping it into the nearest republican bin in accord with my honorary role as the royal poo carrier. For his part, Chester seemed astounded at my need to collect and discard his latest excrement since he did regard New Lambton as an effluent suburb. I smiled at my own night-soiled wit, and then I staggered onward at the behest of my insane terror and Chester’s mad anticipatory joy. Every now and then, I glanced back over my shoulder looking for God knows what, but someone, or something, was following me.

Chester inevitably dragged my fear to the door of Gillian’s caffeine temple, but this church too was closed. There was no Schmacko communion in the early hours, no matter how long a desperate doggo communicant might paw at the metaphorical altar rails. His disappointment was profound, and he eventually dragged me to a council bench on the footpath to await the arrival of Gillian, the barista priestess. I tried to reason with him as I sat with my irrational fear of being followed and studied the vegetarian option of the pizza shop next door, but all my canine protector would do was stare at Gillian’s closed door, as though staring was a form of prayer. And perhaps it is, I thought, as I sat there staring at a pizza and thinking vegetarian thoughts with my carnivorous companion.

And then every light in New Lambton went out.

Darkness. Terrifying darkness.

Well, almost every light.

The darkness was made even darker since the moon was hiding behind a bank of cloud. It was almost the only bank left in New Lambton. I laughed at my own mad pecuniary distraction like a beggar throwing a coin into his own empty hat. Perhaps the moon was hiding from Chester, but he was growling now at a new threat in the terrifying darkness. There was a glow emanating from the fridge in the Telstra car park across the road. But the fridge was not connected to any power source. So, even if its door was ajar, why would it be glowing, and why would anything be glowing during a blackout? Such were my terrified thoughts, as a growling Chester dragged me across Regent Street to once again confront my fears.

I had often wondered about that fridge. Had somebody just dumped it? It had been sitting there for months. It would make a good beer fridge, but we already had a beer fridge. Strange really, since I no longer drink beer. This one looked abandoned. Abandoned, but why? Why there, in a car park? I had never been game to open it. What if a serial killer was chilling a dismembered body?

I opened the little black gate that gave access to the fridge, and then I hesitated, but Chester was made of sterner stuff. His hungry paws opened the fridge, and we were sucked into a void of deeper darkness.

I could not see a bloody thing.

I could feel that this void was vast. How much beer could you store in here? I wondered.

This little fridge was enormous.

And the bloody door had slammed shut behind us.

We were trapped.

But we were not alone.

When I saw what was sitting under a sudden spotlight, I froze in sheer terror. Good thing we were in a fridge!

But was it really sitting? It was hard to tell.

It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. This creature had two heads and twelve tails. Surely, it was a beast of the Apocalypse. I did not have enough poo bags to handle this situation, but doggos get to the bottom of things very quickly. I watched in stunned horror as Chester greeted the beast by sniffing its twelve butts as though it were a new cross-breed friend in Lambton Park. I called him back, and he reluctantly left his new friend to return to me as it wagged its twelve tails and began to speak.

It had the most gentle of voices, totally belying its hideous appearance. It soon became clear that it thought I was the ugliest thing it had ever seen, but it quite liked the look of Chester.

I took no offence. I was used to this situation. Everywhere I walked with Chester, complete strangers introduced themselves to him and ignored me. They would declare him to be so shiny and beautiful while being so oblivious to me that I began to question my own existence. Perhaps I was The Invisible Man, but, right at that terrifying moment in the fridge, I was happy to be ignored.

I always thought that mathematics would be the key to communication with aliens since mathematics is a language built from observation of the universe, but, standing there below the freezer compartment, I realized that my doggo was really the key to communicating with aliens. I did hope this two-headed something was an alien, but …

‘Am I an alien or an angel?’ the something asked.

I studied it closely, beginning to suspect that it could read my mind. And then, to my horror, I noted that its second head was my head.

‘Do you get it now?’ the something asked.

I most certainly did not.

‘Perhaps the stalker you feared tonight was yourself?’ The something wagged its twelve tails.

I noted that its big expressionless potato head did the talking, surprisingly in English, while its copy of my head was very animated in its silent expression as though I had morphed into Marcel Marceau.

‘They say that the more you run away from yourself, the closer you become,’ the something said. ‘I, too, would run away from your ugliness. You humans are a destructive plague. You have so many churches, yet so little faith.’

‘But Chester has faith,’ I defended.

‘What would you miss if I allowed you to destroy this planet?’

Miss, I thought, in utter confusion.

And then Chester sat up like a good boy, fully anticipating a Schmacko, and said:

‘I’d miss Barista Miss.’

Copyright © Paul F Walsh 2021