Horror Stories

Princess

Ever wondered if things can just be born evil? In this enlightened age of ours, concepts like good and evil are often painted as outmoded, archaic even. According to modern thought, people (animals too, obviously) are simply products of their environment and no more responsible for their actions than a twig in a stream. But I know better. Some things are just born bad.

About ten years ago, we had a German shepherd named Duchess that had a litter of puppies - seven in all. Six looked like any other shepherd you've ever seen, the seventh was a snowy white. Not a true albino, just white-furred with a black nose and blue eyes.

There was never any doubt about which one we were keeping out of that litter. We named her Princess.

Before the end of six months, any plans we had about giving away or selling the others became a moot point, as all of the others were dead. We'd just find them at a rate of about one a month, not mangled or anything, just dead as if they'd died in their sleep. At first, we thought maybe their mother, it being her first litter and all, was accidentally crushing or smothering them.

Later, we had no doubt as to what had killed them.

Within a year, she came to dominate her mother, her father (tough old alpha that he was), and to a degree, us too. Her parents shied away from her. When we put out their food, she ate till her heart's content, unchallenged by the other two. Once I tried to shoo her away and let the other two eat. She snarled at me, baring those perfect white fangs to her incongruously black gums and loosing a growl so deep that I felt it in my guts more than heard it.

After that, I left her alone too.

I've often wondered if the parents of serial killers know they have a monster in the making. I mean, sure, some of them are to blame for how their kids turn out, products of fucked up households with systematic abuse of all possible flavors, but then there are the ones that seem to be true aberrations. It's those families I'm curious about. Do they smile and laugh and pretend that everything's fine?

I know that we sure did. We downplayed the weirdness around Princess, tried to rationalize her behavior, the bizarre things she'd do, like killing rabbits and leaving them hung up in the bushes behind our house.

"Some dogs do that to show they love you, cats too," my father would say. "To them, it's just bringing you food."

To me, it looked like she was taunting us. Just like the puppies years earlier, not one of those rabbits ever had a mark on it.

Princess, just like her mom and dad, was well looked after and never hurt for a meal, so it wasn't as if she were hunting for food. Her innumerable kills were always untouched. No, the only thing I ever saw her eat was a kitten.

We had some feral cats in the woods around our house and one momma cat had a litter in our tool shed. "Feral" really is stretching it; most of them were tame enough to be petted, this momma being among them. I returned home from school one day and headed around back to look in on them.

The door to the shed was open and inside I found Princess, her jaws pink from her feast. As she devoured that last kitten, her beautiful blue eyes never left mine.

The momma we found displayed on what I'd come to think of as the "rabbit bush."

The tipping point came that same year when we found her sire dead. He was the best dog we'd ever had, that we ever will have. We woke one Saturday morning to find him in the backyard lying dead without a mark like so many rabbits before him. I can count the number of times I ever saw my father cry on one hand. That was one of them.

That was also when we found out how she killed so cleanly: she strangled her prey. Like a jaguar. The fur at her father's neck was still wet with her saliva.