Where the Light Bends Incorrectly

Two teenagers take cover behind a groundskeeper's shed in a sprawling city park, catching their breath as they try to make sense of the unnervingly synchronized man and dog they just fled from.

“Don’t—just don’t look,” Sorcha gasped, her hand grabbing the back of Paulo’s jacket and yanking him sideways, off the gravel path and onto the damp, mulchy ground behind the groundskeeper’s shed. His trainers slid on a patch of wet leaves and he went down on one knee, the impact jarring up his spine. The cold wetness immediately soaked through his jeans.

“Ow—what the hell?” he hissed, scrambling to his feet and brushing uselessly at the dark patch on his knee. His heart was a frantic, irregular drum against his ribs.

“Shhh! Get down.” Sorcha was already crouched, her back flat against the peeling green paint of the shed. She peered around the edge, her breath fogging in the autumn air. “Is he still…?”

Paulo dropped down beside her, the smell of rust and damp soil filling his nose. He didn’t want to look. He wanted to un-see the last two minutes. “I don’t know. I’m not looking. You looked.”

“Because you just froze, you idiot,” she shot back, her voice a fierce whisper. “You just stood there on the path like a garden gnome. He was looking right at us.”

“He wasn’t,” Paulo argued, his voice cracking. He hated that. “He was just… walking. It was the dog. The dog was wrong.”

“The dog was wrong?” Sorcha finally pulled back from the edge, leaning her head against the cold metal. Her eyes were wide, pupils blown out. Fear looked strange on her; she was usually the one who found everything boring. “Everything was wrong, Paulo. The way they moved. Did you see it? When he lifted his left foot, the dog lifted its left paw. At the exact. Same. Time.”

He nodded, swallowing against a dry throat. That was it. That was the thing that had broken his brain. He’d seen it from the corner of his eye first. Just a man in a beige trench coat and a nondescript brown dog, a lanky mutt of some kind, walking along the path that looped around the duck pond. It was a perfectly normal sight for a Tuesday afternoon in October. Except it wasn’t.

“There was no… delay,” Paulo managed, picking at a loose thread on his cuff. “You know? Like, when a person walks, their arms swing, and it’s all a bit… messy. He was like a machine. And the dog. It wasn’t on a lead.”

“No lead,” Sorcha agreed, her gaze distant. “And its feet. Paulo, I swear to god, its feet weren’t properly touching the ground. It was like… floating. Just a bit. A centimetre of air between its paws and the gravel.”

Paulo squeezed his eyes shut. He hadn’t noticed that part. He didn’t want to have noticed that part. He’d been too focused on the rhythm. The perfect, silent, horrifying synchronicity. The man’s head hadn’t turned, his expression was blank, placid. The dog’s tail hadn’t wagged. Its ears hadn’t twitched at the sound of a nearby siren. They were two separate bodies moving with a single, alien mind.

“Okay,” Sorcha said, taking a shaky breath and running a hand through her messy fringe. “Okay. Let’s… let’s analyse this. There’s a rational explanation.”

“Is there?”

“There always is. Maybe… it was a robot. Like, one of those Boston Dynamics things, but they’re testing a new one. A secret one.”

“A secret robot dog that floats? And a secret robot man in a coat from the nineteen-eighties?” Paulo countered, his voice rising in pitch. “And they test it by walking it past the duck pond where Mrs. Henderson feeds stale bread to the geese?”

“Alright, fine, stupid theory.” Sorcha bit her lip. “A performance artist?”

“What’s the performance? ‘Unsettling Walker Number One’? Who is the audience? Us? Why?”

“I don’t know!” She pushed herself away from the wall, pacing the three feet of space between the shed and a thick rhododendron bush. “I’m trying to not freak out here, Paulo. Because what I saw… it’s not possible. It doesn’t fit.”

He knew what she meant. It was a glitch in the fabric of a normal afternoon. A tear in the mundane. The world suddenly felt thin, like a projection on a screen that had just flickered. He looked around their hiding spot. The rust on the shed’s hinges was real. The smell of the damp earth was real. The distant traffic hum was real. But the man and the dog… they felt like an error. Code that had been written badly.

---

The wind picked up, rattling the dry, skeletal leaves still clinging to the branches of the oak tree overhead. A few dozen spun down, skittering across the metal roof of the shed with a sound like tiny claws. Paulo flinched.

“We can’t just stay here,” he said. “My mum’s expecting me home.” The thought was absurdly normal, and for a second, it was comforting. Mum, dinner, homework. The solid, boring architecture of his life.

“And go where? Back on the path?” Sorcha gestured vaguely. “What if he’s still there? What if he’s looking for us?”

“Why would he be looking for us? We’re just two kids.”

“Because we saw,” she said, her voice dropping low. “We saw the… the seam. The mistake. You’re not supposed to see that.”

Her certainty was more frightening than his own panic. Paulo had always thought of the world as a solid, predictable place governed by rules—gravity, physics, the inevitability of school on a Wednesday morning. Sorcha was telling him those rules could be bent. Or broken.

“This is nuts,” he whispered. “We’re being nuts.”

“Are we?” She stopped pacing and crouched down again, her eyes fixed on the gap between the shed and the bush. “Take one more look. For me. You have better eyes.”

He didn’t want to. Every instinct screamed at him to stay small, to stay hidden until nightfall. But the pleading in her eyes was real, a hook he couldn’t wriggle off. Cautiously, he shuffled forward on his knees, the wet denim cold against his skin. He put his head to the grimy, lichen-spotted wood of the shed’s corner and angled his eye just enough to see the path.

The park was almost empty now. The weak afternoon sun cast long, distorted shadows. The geese were huddled on the far side of the pond. A lone jogger in bright orange traced the outer perimeter. Everything looked normal. No man. No dog.

Relief washed over him, so potent it made him dizzy. “He’s gone. See? Nothing. It was… a trick of the light. We were tired. Or maybe someone was flying a really weird drone.” The explanations sounded feeble even as he said them, but he clung to them.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, he’s g—wait.”

### The Stationary Figure

Paulo’s breath hitched. He wasn’t on the path. He was further away, standing under the massive, weeping willow by the old footbridge. A small, still figure in a beige trench coat. He was at least two hundred metres away, partially obscured by the drooping fronds of the tree. But it was him. And the dog was there, sitting at his feet. Perfectly still. Not sniffing, not panting. Just… sitting.

“He’s there,” Paulo breathed, the words catching in his throat. “By the bridge.”

Sorcha crawled over, pressing her face close to his to see through the gap. “Where? I don’t…” She saw him. He felt the tension spike in her body. “He’s just standing there.”

“Yeah.”

“Is he looking this way?”

Paulo squinted, his eyes watering from the strain. The figure was too far to make out a face, a direction of gaze. It was just a shape. But it felt like it was looking at them. The sheer stillness of the man and the animal was a beacon, a violation of the natural order of the park where things were supposed to fidget and move and live.

“I think so,” he said. “I can’t tell. But… it feels like it.”

They watched for what felt like an hour, though the clock on Paulo’s phone insisted it had only been four minutes. The figure did not move. Not a twitch. Not a shift in weight. The jogger completed another lap and ran past the bridge, seemingly not noticing the man and his statue of a dog. It was as if they existed only for Paulo and Sorcha. A private, terrifying exhibition.

“Okay,” Sorcha whispered, her voice tight. “New plan. This is not a performance artist. This is not a robot. This is… something else. And we’re leaving. Now.”

“How? He’s between us and the main gate.”

“We go the other way. Through the woods, over the fence, and onto Chamberlain Avenue. It’s further, but it keeps us out of his line of sight.” She was already moving, her mind locked on logistics, a defence against the rising tide of the impossible.

Paulo agreed. Any plan was better than no plan. He pushed himself up, his muscles stiff and cold. His knee throbbed. He took one last, compulsive look through the gap.

The man was gone.

The space under the willow was empty.

“Sorcha,” he said, his voice a strangled croak. “He’s gone. He’s not there anymore.”

For a half-second, relief flickered. And then a colder, sharper fear took its place. Where did he go? He couldn’t have just vanished.

Sorcha looked, her face pale in the fading light. “Where is he?”

SCRAPE. SCRATCH. SCRATCH.

The sound was right behind them. On the other side of the thin, corrugated metal wall they were leaning against. The dry, distinct sound of a dog’s claws dragging down the painted surface.