The Barn Door

The Barn Door

I wasn’t ready to cross over yet, but these things don’t always go the way you plan. When the Committee told me it was time, I tried to back out. But that, of course, was unthinkable. That would jeopardize the whole mission. I didn’t want to be the one to undo all the good we had done so far.

I guess I had focused so intently on finding my way into my target human’s dreams that I hadn’t even thought about the actual joining.

I was completely unprepared, yet there I was, standing at the portal to another world.

“Go, go, go!” Myrna shouted. “Now! He’s about to leave the barn!”

Even though I was terrified and expected to fail, I went. I scooched my way through the portal into the dark corner at the back of the barn.

Bud had already turned to leave, so I whimpered to get his attention. He froze. I hoped he would turn and recognize me from his subconscious, and not instead turn and shoot me as humans so often did.

It seemed like an eternity passed. I whimpered again, and he turned. At first, he looked without seeing me and I wondered if my transport had worked. Then, he knelt down and called me to him. I saw it in his eyes! He knew who I was! I had succeeded. What a relief.

Due to the rules limiting inter-dimensional disclosure, I was not going to be able to communicate with Bud using language. I would need to communicate everything physically, which had never been my strong suit.

After the first night in this new world, I knew I was going to have to emulate a puppy’s need to urinate. I had worried that this was more than I could do. It’s not that I’m “pee shy” or anything, it’s just that there is no reason to pass fluids in my home dimension.

I had gotten the whimpering thing down, so I tried that. Bud got up and led me out to the pasture behind the house. I ran out and pretended to pee behind a tree. Soon, I would be eating and drinking and the whole thing would come naturally in this puppy body. With urination behind me, I turned my attention to integrating myself into Bud’s life.

Bud’s father turned out to be a real obstacle. He insisted that puppies didn’t just show up out of nowhere. He insisted Bud post signs all over the area, asking for my “real” owner to come forward. Great. Something else to worry about. I tried to plan a way to reject any persons that came forward to claim me. I couldn’t risk losing my chance to modify the locket.

Within about a week, I forgot all about my initial fears and even forgot half of the plan because I was having such a great time bonding with Bud. Being a puppy is a delightful experience. I highly recommend it if you get the chance.

I think Myrna was brilliant when she chose to send me here as a puppy. Puppies are naturally awkward and don’t know how to control their own bodies, even their bowels. This allowed me the leeway to bump into things, to have potty accidents, and still seem “normal.” Since my mission required me to stay with Bud long enough to sufficiently manipulate events over a ten-year period, I needed to avoid getting sent away as a behavior problem. I needed them to accept me into the family. The puppy thing did the trick. As a puppy, you can poop and they think it’s cute.

Bud’s mother had the locket in a box in her closet. I wasn’t allowed in his parent’s bedroom, let alone her closet. I was going to have to prompt Bud to get the locket for me, through some additional dream manipulation.

If there was one thing I’d learned in doing this work for the last hundred years, it was that you have to move slowly on the dream manipulations. Humans can become very afraid if they think they’re schizophrenic. We had to sneak the messages in gently. The human needs to think either it was their idea—that was the best outcome—or that they have received a psychic message.

Since Bud believed he had a prescient dream prior to meeting me, he was primed for more “psychic” messages. But it needed to be clear. I needed him to bring me the locket.

Luckily, Myrna was good at planning these things. We had worked out in advance what the dreams would be. We designed the locket dreams to be fairly simple. He would simply know that he needed to retrieve the locket from his mother’s jewelry box and that he needed to hide it in the barn, in the compartment near the portal.

We had agreed to repeat the dream up to five times, based on Bud’s responses. The whole thing was in Myrna’s hands, since I had no way to contact her without going back through the portal. Because the timing of the transit process was so variable, I was to return through the portal only in a dire emergency.

I couldn’t speak, but of course I understood English. You would think that would give you the advantage in trying to manipulate a human of average intelligence. However, I was unprepared for the use of slang and for the dishonesty. Bud could look his parents right in the eyes and tell a very convincing lie. That really surprised me.

OK, sure, it may have been a stretch to expect Bud to confide in me. I was, after all, a dog. I just wasn’t prepared for him to outright lie to me. What purpose could he have for lying to a dog? I briefly worried that he might have suspected my true identity and purpose, but then I notice that he lied to everyone, almost all the time. Truly strange.

One night, I was sure Bud had received the locket dream message. He woke up very anxious and wrote something in a notebook. The next day, however, when his mother asked him how he was, he said he was fine, and mentioned nothing about waking up scared at 3 am. I guess I really didn’t want him to tell his mother that he had been instructed in a dream to steal a family heirloom, but I had hoped to confirm he’d received the dream by observing his interactions with her.

Finally, after what I believe was the fourth transmission of the locket instruction dream, Bud finally crept into his mother’s bedroom and retrieved the locket.

I followed Bud into the barn and watched as he went to the back corner. He inspected the dog door / portal. We had placed a subconscious suggestion in his dreams letting him know about the compartment to the left of the door, but he didn’t seem to remember. He swung the door itself open and closed several times.

I panicked, thinking he might mess up the transfer, so I ran over and rubbed his leg, acting like I wanted attention. Then, I scratched at the compartment. Bud watched me suspiciously. That scratching was probably a mistake. I know Myrna was going to give me crap about it later.

Here I was, a dog that he met originally in an earlier dream, pointing out the compartment he should have seen in a recent dream. I was running the risk of being too obvious. I was blurring the line between his dreams and reality, and that was how you could trigger humans to think they were insane. I needed to back off, but I also desperately needed him to put the locket into the compartment.

I tried to fix things. I curled up on the floor, leaning into the wall where the compartment was concealed. I hoped that this approach was not too subtle. I hoped that he would look at me and then eventually notice the shape of the compartment door and recognize it from the dream. That didn’t happen.

Bud turned and began to leave the barn. I had to decide the best course of action and I had only a second to do so. I could risk being too obvious and making Bud think he was crazy or worse, I could blow my cover, ruining our chances of finishing the mission. On the other hand, if I let Bud leave the barn without placing the locket into the compartment, we might never be able to embed the message into the locket. This might be our only chance.

That last thought convinced me I had to act. I barked. Bud turned. He cocked his head. I barked again and nudged my head towards the compartment door. Please, Bud, remember the dream. Remember!

Time seemed to slow down. It was as if I could see Bud’s thoughts as he worked it out. He saw me, his new puppy, nudging him towards the compartment he had yet to discover. He processed fear, then curiosity. That’s it! You want to figure this out! I barked again. He looked at me, and then—finally—he looked behind me, where I was all but pointing. He studied the wall.

It took all my self-restraint to not open the compartment for him.

He still didn’t move. He just looked at the wall, thinking. Now, I couldn’t tell what was going on in his mind. I barked again.

Bud leaned in, to get a better look at the wall. His feet stayed where they were. He did not move to open the compartment. What was he afraid of? I tried to remember what we had put into that dream message. There was the snake, the girl, the raven… too many symbols! Shoot. I made a note to keep it simpler in the future. Just then, a barn owl hooted above our heads, startling us both.

The barn owl! That owl symbolized paranormal intelligence. Before arriving this time, I had assumed all humans would know that. Sadly, humanity had forgotten much of its knowledge of symbols since my last visit. I hoped somewhere in there, Bud would get it.

I’m not sure if it was the hooting owl that did it or if it was my barking again, but Bud finally returned to the corner. He pushed to dog door in and out again. If I could have spoken, I would have let him know I thought he was an idiot. Did he expect the dog door to do something differently this time? For goodness’s sake!

Bud looked at me. I decided this was my last chance. I jumped up and simultaneously licked his face and kicked the compartment door open with my back leg. I knew I had broken the rules on inter-dimensional disclosure, but I was trying to save humanity and it felt like a minor price to pay. The big question now was whether it worked.

The End (for now).