Entity story · 3 min read · Set in Dunmore Row ·
The Hollow Hound at Dunmore Row
A grey dog-shaped hole in the air moves through the attic of a Dunmore Row terrace each night, finding the letters and photographs that were put away in the wrong box, and returning them to the family's bureau in the right order.
The terrace at 21 Dunmore Row has three rooms and an attic, and for nearly a hundred years the attic has been where the Carrs kept what they could not bear to throw away. Boxes of letters tied with string. Photograph albums with their corners curled and their captions faded. A lace christening gown wrapped in newspaper, a cricket bat with a split handle, and a tin trunk full of ration books from the war, sorted, unsorted, and sorted again.
Ruth Carr was the one who finally went up to clear it, in the spring after her mother died. She found the boxes in the wrong order. The photographs of her grandfather were in the box marked *Christmas decorations*. The letters from her brother, who had emigrated in 1958 and never written again, were filed under *Bills (paid)*. The christening gown was in the trunk with the ration books. The cricket bat was propped against the chimney breast, where it had been since the day it was broken, and someone had written the score of the match on the handle in pencil.
She began to sort the attic properly, one box at a time, and found, each morning, that the boxes had moved in the night. Not much. A box would be one shelf higher than she had left it, or turned round so that its label faced the wall. The albums would be stacked by year, from oldest to newest, with the bookmarks in place. The letters would be bundled in date order and laid out on the boards in a neat row, each one with its envelope tucked inside.
On the sixth morning she heard the sound. A soft, deliberate scuffling across the boards, like paws on dust, and a rustle of paper being carefully moved. She crept up the ladder and looked through the hatch.
There was nothing in the attic. Just the grey light from the skylight and the boxes in their rows. But the air above the boxes was wrong, somehow. It bent and wavered, as heat wavers above a road in summer, and in the bending there was a shape: a long, low, dog-shaped outline, about the size of a retriever, with its head down and its tail low, moving slowly along the row of letters. Its body was a hole in the air, a dark gap filled with a faint grey static, like an old television with the signal lost, and where its muzzle nosed at each envelope the paper rose a fraction of an inch and settled into its proper place.
Ruth held her breath. The hound stopped, and turned its head toward the hatch. It did not look at her with eyes, because it had none, but she felt the attention come to rest on her, patient and considering, the way a dog watches its owner come into a room.
Then it went back to the letters, and picked up, very gently, in the place where a mouth should be, a brown envelope from the box marked *Bills (paid)*, and carried it across the attic to the box marked *Brother*, and set it down.
Ruth went down the ladder and sat in the kitchen for an hour. When she went back up, every box was in its right place, every photograph labelled, the christening gown hung on a hook, the cricket bat laid carefully on the floor beside the trunk, its score turned face up.
She has kept the attic open since. The Hollow Hound comes every night. Ruth leaves the skylight unlatched and a dish of water on the top step, and in the mornings the dish is always empty, and the boxes are always in order, and the letter from her brother, which she had never opened, is always on the top of the pile, open at the last page, where he wrote, in a careful hand, *Tell Mum I'm sorry I never wrote back. Tell her I got home in the end.*