Being Fooled - Judy Albietz

Lily was still asleep when Sam heard the growling noise in the distance. He went outside the cave house to look around. In the early morning light he saw what looked like a large dog standing still up on the hill behind the cave. Sam immediately felt something was wrong. The dog’s head and shoulders were twice the size of its body. Its large fangs hung outside its mouth, almost dragging on the ground. All its teeth were stained with what looked like old crusted blood. Its gray grizzled hair was matted and dirty. Worse, it had the face of Mort, a dog who lived and died a couple hundred years ago. Sam, as the only time-traveling dog on the island, was the only dog from that time who still survived. Even though Sam knew that Mort was long gone, it still shook him that the dog facing him looked like Mort, at least a little. However, Sam remembered Mort had a small narrow head and his medium-sized body was slender and wolf-like. This monster dog was all out of proportion. Sam wondered where it had come from. It couldn’t be real.

The monster dog still hadn’t moved when it began to glow with an unnatural bright stoplight red. After a few seconds, its body changed, oscillating between a solid shape and a two-dimensional one. Then the monster shook its filthy coat and became undeniably solid and started moving towards the cave house in attack mode. Now Sam knew he had to take it seriously.