The Ghost Shepherd - Chapter 4
Imported from SF2 with no description.
Chapter Four
Monday, March 29, 2021
3:47am
Fighting through thoughts all morning to keep from drowning in them. Too many to reason. Raining over him. Gathering towards a great, laughing, crying, shouting, shrieking blur. Too many to contain. His head hurt. His skull was going to explode. He bashed the heels of his paws against the sides of his head, trying to force the thoughts out. More more thoughts raining and timbering down upon him. Split it open, alleviate the pressure. (bang bang). Not even close. (bang bang bang bang). Rip it open. Scrape it out. It hurts it hurts. Ears, cartilage and flesh and fur—get them out of the way. Pull pull pull and let the thoughts and pain spill out. Wouldn't someone come and end it?
* * *
9:00am
He had for her his hollowed stare. His muzzle rained. He sat with collapsed shoulders, wilted fingers falling through his lap. He had had another wonderful night, the orderly explained, had tried to smash his head open and tried to tear his ears from his skull before taking a little Haloperidol nap. Jocelyn listened and shook her head and thanked the orderly before they left, and then she swooped into the abandoned seat in the hall and scooted until her nostrils excitedly fogged the reinforced glass of her patient's tomb. Her fingers hastened arpeggios upon a leather conference folder which she held in her lap as she slowed herself with a deep breath and inquired conversationally, "Were you looking forward to our visit, Tyson?"
The chestnut eyes blinked.
“You must have been," she chuckled. “Did you have yourself a nice weekend? Go out? Do anything fun? Maybe you bumped into Elena—excuse me—Doctor Rokem, again?"
She had to slow herself with another deep breath. She was getting ahead of herself. She drew out her phone, looking down as she tapped and swiped at it.
“I was quite busy. My little sister is trying to drag the family out to Washington for the Fourth of July this year. I would rather not, but you know how sisters can be, don't you? Anyways, here is what I was looking for."
She was grinning as she pushed the face of her phone against the window.
“After my Friday workout. Do I look good?"
It was a long second for the German shepherd's uneven eyes to find the phone, but when they did, they snapped, unevenly, into lustful and savage life.
“I do, don't I?" pressed Jocelyn, and she turned the phone so she could see for herself again.
A photo—the Belgian Malinois lay supine across a black leather seat. Her small and nice tits, her toned arms and abs and thighs, her beautiful face were all there to see and dream of grabbing, stroking, lapping. The Malinois was agonizingly, unfairly sexy. Just looking at her made Jocelyn a little wet. And plopped upon the gorgeous temptress's mons pubis was a big, fat canine cock covered in a clear latex condom with a reservoir ballooned immensely full of thick, milky German shepherd cum.
Jocelyn could have stared at the photo for hours, but their time alone was limited, and she had so many other pieces to exhibit.
“How about this one? Or do you like this one more?" she hummed, spinning the phone between the pair of them. “Oh, and check out this video."
The German Shepherd opposite her watched, looking mesmerized, as his own name spilled out of the phone on the other side of the glass.
“Tyson! Tyson! Mmmmf! Good boy!" whimpered the sultry voice.
The phone screen showed an overview of a masterfully sculpted Malinois back.
Continuing through the speaker—“Yes, Tyson! Yes!"
After the video had finished, Jocelyn went to the most recently taken image on her phone. She grinned broadly. She wondered how the other shepherd would respond.
“I took this one especially for you," she said.
* * *
Two dark, brawny paws entirely encircled the throat of the bitch whose eyes leapt agape, drawing a moat of tears around themselves, whose mouth flung agasp in vivid delight and desperation, like she was happy but dying.
She was dying in his paws.
The room about Tyson blackened. The scent of tobacco flooded his breath. Her final words resounded in his ears.
“We'll be late."
“We'll be late."
“We'll be late."
“We'll be late."
He covered his ears and screamed, but he couldn't drown her out. He chucked his head about his neck, but he couldn't shake her voice.
“We'll be late," she said so plainly. “We'll be late."
“—n."
How long had the shady prick she'd called waited? Had he waited years? She wouldn't leave that spot for over five of them. She would have been nothing more than a pile of bones.
“—son?"
He panted with a searing hold of his pinnae, the small, flat tone having jerked him back from that night, but she was still standing in front of him. Why? He had answered all her questions years ago. Taken all her pills. But she would never cease. None of it would change. He was his misdeeds. A whimper rose in his throat.
“Tyson, look," she said tenderly, and when he looked, he saw she held in her paws the face of the black shepherd. Her voice turned scathing, vindictive. “Do you miss her? Do you miss choking her while you fucked her? If you could, would you kill her again, or would you bring her back so you could fuck her the rest of your life?"
The black shepherd's face was torn apart before he, her son, could answer.
Tyson turned to curl in his seat.
“We're not done," said the pleased voice. “Look, Tyson."
He looked back to his tormentor and in her paws found a warmer, as familiar face, and his own face softened and his heart fluttered with a melancholic longing as Elena—he had called her “Miss Rokem" at first—smiled quietly through his window until she was torn into uneven halves with his tormentor's bitter laugh.
“She's dead, Tyson. Just like you thought. Dead. Cancer took your sloppy seconds."
Her terrible laugh rang in his ears.
“But, Ty, you never told me she was your college professor—or that she was a fucking half-breed. You were better off with your mother!"
He cried and curled into himself, taking refuge in his own arms and forlorn mumblings.
“Tyson. Look."
And he looked back to his tormentor again, and his anguish struck him catatonic.
Bella, her hair long, smooth and lustrous, her eyes smartly, prettily aglimmer, muzzle smiling as she never had for him, was shredded, spitefully and maliciously, into many, many pieces.
* * *
“Poor, poor Bella," Jocelyn tittered while she zipped the remains of Tyson's departed within her folder. “The one girl in the family you didn't try and fuck, and she was so pretty. Prettier than your little Anessa. Speaking of, it's been a while since Nessa has written, hasn't it? She didn't enjoy your last few letters, did she? But your father hasn't visited lately, either. I ought to check the obituaries—that's where I found all of these."
She looked up and saw that her patient's head had slumped to a shoulder, and his chestnut eyes were fled. He looked utterly delicious in his defeat, so she leaned towards him, leering, and licked the glass between them, wetly and roughly, and laughed when he couldn't even react.
“Oh, Ty," she whispered, giggling, and then she stood and she stroked the window with her tongue again, leaving a long, horizontal brushstroke over the shepherd on the other side. “I'm so sorry."
When she found herself coating the glass a third time with her saliva, Jocelyn realized that at that point she didn't care. She didn't care if some fucking orderly came about the corner and saw her. She didn't care if the whole board of East View caught her with a paw down her pants in the hallway of her comatose patient. She didn't care about her parents, the people she had called halfheartedly “friends."
Fuck it, Tyson had told her he told himself, and Jocelyn thought the words quite convincing as she shoved her pants and thong out her way.
She wouldn't bother with the psychobabble today. She wouldn't scamper off and hide away in her office.
She took a long, deep drag of her own aroma and wafted a clawed fingertip through her labia.
“Why?" she had asked, folding her arms.
Tyson Marshall Spriggs had been with East View for thirty-two months, arriving from a highly covered, highly sensationalized regional court case—a debacle of incest and matricide. His arrival had set the faculty abuzz. But for all the fanfare, the German shepherd had made a quiet debut. He had been depressed, docile. He had shuffled about the facility as asked, answered her questions with painful honesty, raised no more than a few tears or the occasional wish to die. She had been sat at arms length of her patient. No locked, ligature-resistant door, no psychiatric-grade window between them—just her old executive desk at the center of her old office. Their topic of discussion was his first incident towards staff; he had groped a nurse in the hallway.
“That's what I just told you," said Tyson, shaking his head. He then leaned forward and shaped a serious glare to his brow. “If you want more, well, doc, I'm here losing my goddamn mind from isolation, and I feel like shit. I'm lonely and horny, and I've touched myself enough to make the rest of the world jealous, so I figured I'd share my love a little."
“Miss Rahma didn't appreciate your generosity so much," Jocelyn said flatly.
The shepherd shrugged.
“And molesting other staff won't win me over."
“Would you rather I molest you instead?" the German shepherd offered, all at once brightening with such flirty offhandedness that Jocelyn chortled.
To the shepherd's gall she teased back, “You know I have a boyfriend."
“And?" Tyson asked, shifting in his chair. “You know that hasn't stopped me before."
A look of him revealed strong, masculine proportions to his head and jaws. He wore the classic arrangement of tan and black over a Vitruvian build and was overall a handsome fit to the standards for a German shepherd, and had the circumstances of their familiarity been different—
Jocelyn tore herself from thoughts of the attractive, articulate shepherd and widened her eyes upon the static, drooling figure in the chair on the other side of the window as she sucked her own flavor from her fingertip.
How pitiful, how inferior he appeared.
She leaned her head against the window and began to strum herself.
That's fucking right.
That's what you fucking get.
That's it.
* * *
Audrey shook her head and checked the time on her phone. Twenty-five minutes until her morning's first appointment.
She hadn't really left the office all weekend—meeting with a few new patients but there mostly to put a microscope to the tome of Tyson Spriggs. She had re-read all of the incident reports, all of the evaluations, all of the treatment notes kept by Doctor Jackson and other East View staff, but she made no further sense of the situation than in previous attempts. The shepherd had only deteriorated since his arrival to East View. Paging through the folder, she had watched Tyson's penmanship decline into illegibility and his privileges plummet while his doses surged. She had read, again, how his inflictions against staff had escalated. An unwanted pat in October 2019. A seven-stitch bite-wound two weeks later. The attempted strangulation of Doctor York in January of 2020.
October 2014—the haggard shepherd at her mother's door. Then in the passenger seat of her own car. She recalled returning from the hospital alone and her mother telling her how the shepherd had been a student of hers at the university. “It was years ago," her mother had whispered as she had allowed her eyes to rest, and Audrey had pulled her chair beside her mother's bed, a book tented upon her lap. “He asked me on a date. I agreed." That had shocked Audrey, but her mother had donned such a fond, nostalgic smile. “I was worried about the whole thing, about being hurt, about hurting you, dear—but he was very sweet. We made a real go of it."
There was a long, wistful silence.
“We lasted a few months before it ended. Neither of us wanted it to end."
“What happened?" asked Audrey, and the smile upon her mother's muzzle fell with discontent so sudden and heavy that Audrey wished she hadn't asked.
“His mother found out. She got a hold of me and threatened me. Audrey, I've never spoken with someone I've liked less. What a horrible woman. From just talking to her on the phone, I was scared. I'm not sure how her son turned out so decent."
How decent he had turned out—an attempted rapist, convicted murderer, institutionalized, drugged into senselessness.
Cynically, Audrey wondered if her mother had simply been a poor judge in the character of men, but that thought disgusted her. Her mother had been her guardian, teacher and friend. Her mother had raised her tough and strong and with love so large she still felt its warmth clinging to her soul. Audrey hadn't known that perhaps the only man to give her mother a brief bit of happiness had been incarcerated at East View when she had applied for the job, but now there and knowing, she wondered were her concerns for the patient in question motivated by more than her general benevolence and the ethics of her profession?
She wasn't sure.
She looked down the medication schedule of Tyson Spriggs and again shook her head, checked her watch and stood from Doctor Jackson's old desk. She still had time before the patient's arrival—and Doctor York would be with Tyson.
She wanted to observe them again.
* * *
“What good will fantasizing over your past mistakes do your treatment?" Jocelyn had asked.
“Fuck your treatment, whore."
The German shepherd had forgotten his laid-back charm that morning. He stared over the desk, muzzle grimly taut, ears sprung confrontationally, eyes uninflected and dangerous. He subtracted their distance with a threatening forward lean.
“What good's your treatment? Think I'll ever be able to have an intimate moment that's not with my own paw? By the time I'm out of here, probably won't be able to get it up anyways—fuck."
Tyson scoured his face with his paws, and his muzzle twitched at a corner, opening a lopsided, unhappy smile.
“I should have just fucked Nessa back when we were all crying over Bella. I could have fucking done it."
He curled his arms before him in an empty embrace.
“Had her on my lap, in my arms one day," said the shepherd, and his voice quavered between excitement and despair.
"Dad at work. Just the two of us at home. I wanted her so fucking bad. She was so warm in my arms. I started thinking of what I was going to say to convince her."
He looked at his paws.
“I wanted to feel her. Kiss her. Take her clothes off. I wanted to fuck her on the couch. I wanted to hit her and choke her and make her scream and cry. My little sister. She was so nice. But I swear if I could go back—"
“But you can't go back," Jocelyn interjected. “You already made your choice—a noble one."
“Didn't fuck my grieving little sister's brains out. Ain't I the fucking hero."
Tyson went at his head again with his paws and claws.
“Headache?" Jocelyn asked sympathetically.
The room went quiet.
Then the German shepherd's eyes glazed darkly. He leaned back in his chair and raised his paws, the dark palm-pads opened towards Jocelyn, and with his dark-tinted eyes, he squinted thoughtfully and lifted his paws further to level them at Jocelyn's throat.
Dryly, he said, “You know, you remind me of someone."
And the shepherd clamped his fingers shut.
Jocelyn struck that belligerent, misogynistic shepherd from her thoughts and she leaned on one paw towards the window which showed a shepherd now sterile, pent and drooling all over himself, and she used her other paw to congratulate herself on a job well-fucking-done. Her breath flittered through her mouth and nostrils, and her knees were shaking. Her pants had fallen towards her ankles. Her cardigan was on the floor. Her shirt was drawn to expose her fine brassiere. Inadvertently, she had kicked her conference folder aside, spilling its contents across the floor.
“Look at you now," she snarled through the glass. “Castrated like a bitch."
* * *
Audrey didn't expect much.
Ignored (or uncomprehended) questions, idle chit-chit, observations of side effects and symptoms—lots of well-practiced unproductivity—just like she had observed the week ago. She didn't expect her senior would be much pleased by her unexpected attendance, but Audrey also had the feeling nothing about her much pleased her colleague even before she had voiced her concerns towards the treatment of Tyson Spriggs.
“Brilliant," Kalyani Jackson had said. “I've never seen someone so adept at changing patients. The way she solves them—" And Kalyani, whom Audrey had quickly come to respect, had from there went speechless when asked to describe Doctor York.
And there was Audrey—vying to remember which of her keys matched her office, second-guessing her ways around East View's corridors and corners. Even then, as she rerouted herself from one wrong turn towards the hall where Tyson Spriggs was kept, a voice in her head inquired, “I don't know who you think you are."
She didn't think she was anyone but a psychologist wanting the best treatment for her patient.
“Look at you now," said that same voice, only these words had a reduced and indirect quality about them, and Audrey's ears twitched as they absorbed them.
Then—“Castrated, like a bitch."
Audrey halted, glaring about the hall, looking for the words she surely hadn't just heard. She heard panting breaths. She moved forward again, now emphasizing stealth, towards the corner around which Tyson was roomed.
The air took on a conspicuous odor and, again, the voice of Doctor York, with the mean crack of a whip, derided, “You pathetic little fucker!"
Audrey drew her phone and began recording.
“Come on, Ty. Let me see that nice doggy dick. I know you can hear me."
It didn't sound like a healthy, therapeutic brand of role-play—it sounded something else entirely, something bizarre, something well against Primum non nocere. But Audrey did not want to make assumptions of her senior, and she did not want to be sneaky and underhanded in her tactics. So, with her phone held out front of her chest, she stepped around the corner.
The same woman who had laughed in Audrey's face and asked her who she thought she was, that same proud, brilliant doctor, stood in a corridor of their workplace with her pants well towards the floor and another discarded article actually on the floor and a shirt rolled into no more than a cloth necklace above a white brassier.
The canine was shivering at the fondling of her own paws and making wild eyes through the window between the hall and the patient's room.
“Doctor York!" shouted Audrey, shocked, appalled.
The Malinois made a startling, slashing turn of her head, made those wild, bristling eyes at Audrey.
Audrey immediately regretted revealing her presence as she looked into the devolved, animalistic expression of her colleague, and while her body braced itself for hostility, she did not trust her instincts enough to run, figuring surely Doctor York would return to her senses and her decency.
With thoughtless efficiency, the Malinois tore a foot free of a pant leg and shoe. She shot forwards.
Audrey registered only a flurry of motion before her back was against the hard floor. She blinked. An angry pain throbbed her cheek. Above her—white fangs and dark, frothy lips.
When she realized that her colleague had struck her, she had already been struck again.
Audrey shouted frightfully as the back of her head bounced against the hard floor. She raised her paws to defend herself, forgetting the phone she held until it was wrenched from her grip and snapped in half.
“You ugly, deformed cunt," seethed the voice of Doctor York, and something hard and heavy stomped through Audrey's paws, slamming the back of Audrey's head against the floor. “Can't fucking keep to yourself."
“Let me go!" Audrey begged, feebly turning and sheltering her head.
* * *
Jocelyn dropped her heel upon the pleading mishmash again, feeding primal urges with the sensual, satisfying effect. She glared, heaving breaths, but was then possessed by a mean bark of a laugh. She—the strong, attractive, intelligent purebred subjugating her inferior.
“What you deserve," she said.
She rewarded herself with a parting step across the thing's swollen, pain-twisted face and spat, “I hope you inherited your mother's predisposition for cancer with the rest of her fucked up genes."
She returned to Tyson's window.
The German shepherd remained slouched, drooling down his self.
Behind her, Jocelyn noted the pitiful retreat of Doctor Rokem and considered chasing the ugly bitch down and putting her out of her misery, but she didn't move.
She had showed the breed-bashed bitch her place.
What now?
The thought came with a roaring shot of pain between her ears, and Jocelyn crumpled into a squat, ineffectually soothing her skull with her claws—an unheard of, unbelievable pain.
What now?
The words pulsed so hard and loud that they pushed her to the floor. She attempted to writhe from them.
She was beneath a pestle.
And she remembered how he had come crawling over her desk like an animal with big, dead eyes and desperately clutching paws, and how he had had her at his mercy, how he had choked the life from her lungs and mind, and, clinging to that morning, the present pain turned dull and distant, but even as she smothered herself in its details, the pestle pressed down upon her, the weight of a crushing, catastrophic humiliation being prepared for her—a triumphant, victorious life to be unsown by a jealous, spiteful low-breed who hadn't kept her place and had gone and fucking done it. Gone and fucking done it. Gone and fucking—
What now?
The long and miserable public execution of Jocelyn York, MD—of all the fucking jokes.
“No!" she screamed.
Not like that.
She would not go like that.
Clawing, sputtering, pounding, and now weeping, Jocelyn crawled out from under the pestle on her knees and went to her discarded pants. She searched one pocket and the other and pulled out her keychain and fought herself to her feet.
She had another score to settle.
* * *
It wasn't him to reach back but she to rip through the years and the permanence of death. Sunlight penetrating the window slid as a glimmer through her coat which was dark but dusted as with earth. From her black mask, her eyes glowed with hellfire. The flames danced about her huge iridal discs as she came towards him. She was there to reclaim him—to end it.
* * *
She was back in that morning. Nothing between them. The German shepherd was half-conscious and still. Jocelyn drew back an open paw, flashed it across the strong, unsmiling muzzle.
* * *
It was Anessa's terror-pitched screams which slapped Tyson from his paralysis. He dragged himself backwards, falling from his chair, scuttling his back to a wall which he began to claw at it in agonizing fear—anything to further him from the ghost shepherd.
She floated after him.
His ears and toes curled at the shepherd's inescapable glide. He shrieked terrified barks at her. His lips receded from his trembling fangs. She did not stop. He shut his eyes to make her disappear, but then she was omnipresent, and when he looked up and past his cringing arms, he found the fiery eyes sinking towards him, closer and closer and closer, illuminating a terrible resolution upon her face. His heart burst inside out.
He shook with helplessness as she lowered herself upon him.
A black paw reached out and riffled the whiskers of his muzzle.
Her black muzzle twisted into a cold smile.
He couldn't take it.
Desperately, he attacked.
* * *
She toppled beneath his weight. She felt the smooth, vinyl surface of the floor against her back. She felt the shepherd straddling her stomach. She felt the rough, dry flesh of his paws encircling her throat.
They made a fine fit—his paws for her throat.
Her surroundings darkened and blurred. Another dizzying, swelling throb of an ache gathered in her head, and a warm, wet splash of drool hit the side of her face. She blinked, squinted through the lethal grip at the terrified canine; his eyes and mouth were gaped. For a moment, as her senses teetered towards unconsciousness, she considered letting the purebred give her her end.
A romantic but unsatisfying notion.
She slammed her teeth together in a snarl and pushed, driving her feet into the floor, twisting herself, shoving with her wiry chest and arms and shoulders the German shepherd atop her, watching his eyes swell with greater and greater fear, and when the seal around her throat broke, her lungs seized a full breath of air, and she wrestled Tyson to his back and took his chest as her saddle and his throat in her grasp.
“How's that fucking feel?" she growled.
Her voice was raw and thin.
The shepherd's throat was shrinking in her paws.
“I thought you liked it rough, you little bitch!"
* * *
The darkness around her bulging orange eyes and her snarling fangs was spreading as her strength overcame his, seeping into the fawns and russets and blondes of her brindled chest. She burrowed her strong fingers into the fur around his throat. She was wringing his brain from his skull, his ruptured heart from his chest. His lungs would explode and shrivel. His eyes clouded with tears, his throat with burning, crushing pain and his mind with terror. The terror made him pry pathetically at her grip for a moment, and then, through the catastrophic onset, appeared two small, reliable words. After everything, they were all he had, and with them, he fought no more.