The Pale Dog

Ellis Wren

Retelling en 33668 words First published 2026 United States TalesReborn

Dr. Simon Ashby, a physician in San Francisco, is visited one evening by Willa Cray, the coroner's doctor of Mercy County on the northern California coast. Ambrose Vandermeer, the last of the county's founding family, has been found dead on a gravel path below his house, his face fixed in terror; beyond the body are the prints of a dog far larger than any in the county. A family document of 1851 records nine deaths in three generations, each sudden, each at night, each with the marks of a running dog about it — the county calls it the curse of the Vandermeers. Dr. Cray has a theory of her own: the family carries a gene that can stop a healthy heart under sudden fright. The heir, Cole Vandermeer, an engineer from Chicago, arrives to take up four thousand acres, carrying that gene himself. Ronan Varley, a consultant who works for people the police have failed, sends Ashby north in his place, to keep the heir alive and to write to him by hand. At Harrow Reach, Ashby finds a house shut up for years, a groundskeeper feeding a fugitive in the blackberry, an enormous pale animal that runs the peat flat at night without a sound, and Emmett Scully, who runs the neighbouring wildlife station, breeds guardian dogs, and holds the survey permit over the ground where the beast is seen. A man is killed on the path in a Vandermeer's coat; a watercolour in the stairwell shows the station-keeper's face; and the truth turns out to be a hundred and thirty years of a family's silence, an animal painted with a compound so that it glows in fog, and a bog that has been made to look like a curse.

Adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). Published by TalesReborn.

The Pale Dog

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