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Note: This post has been included in one of the new Chapter drafts, please refer to the Index for the current draft of the story.

Please note, this is currently a very rough draft from NaNoWriMo 2007. There will be spelling and grammatical errors afoot as well as flat out bad writing, info dumps, plot holes, flat out contradictions, and uneven characterization and pacing. (Content is also subject to constant change as I take an editing chainsaw to the story.)

The next day the dog was waiting for him at the construction site. Jon paused for a moment, but it wagged its tail and grinned, just like every other dog he’d met. It seemed more doglike today, less, off somehow. So he ignored it and went back to work. Today was mostly inside work anyway and he wasn’t outside again until they broke for lunch. Then he found it begging for scraps and being generally friendly. So he tossed it a bit of sandwich and suggested that it might want to find a safer place to hunt for food. It sniffed at him and after lunch went back to hang out under the tree, watching him with that same steady brown gaze. It was unnerving, but not as bad as yesterday. He waved to it as he left, more out of habit than anything else and headed home.

Later that night he woke to a noise outside, although he couldn’t remember what the noise had been. He looked out the windows into the back yard and saw four dogs standing in the moonlight. They were all staring at him and he thought one of them looked like the dogs from the worksite. After a moment they turned and loped away, only they run -through- the back fence. Jon went back to bed but really didn’t get any sleep.

The next day he went back into work, but the dogs wasn’t there. He spent the day being rather freaked, but getting less worried as the day ran on. The good thing about mindless work was that there was plenty of it. So he finished work and was putting things in the truck when the first dogs showed up again. Then a second. He jumps in the truck and heads, not home, but over to Todd’s dad’s shop. The dogs watch him leave.

Over at the shop he explains what’s going on to Todd, who really doesn’t believe it, but he gets off work and the two head over to see Sebastian at the local college. The three hang out in Sebastian’s doom room talking about it, and then Jon hears something the other two don’t and looks out the window. Doggies! So he says look! Look! And they look, but they don’t see anything and Jon looks and yup, they’ve run off. But the other dogs in the nearby neighborhood are barking so there must have been something.

Much debate and googling follows as they try to figure out what on earth is going on. The problem is that the dogs don’t fit any of the descriptions and they finally settle on the fact that the dogs haven’t been threatening. Odd and unnerving, but not threatening. Plus the one dog was interacting with people and begging for food and that didn’t seem much like a ghost. Nor of any of the dogs of legend.