Save Me / The Dog Man – X: Thresholds | 6

A lie the AI can't let go. The dog-man comes knocking | Horror Fiction

Nov 15, 2025

X: Thresholds is told only through Psy‑7’s responses (a fictional personal AI assistant). Enzo’s messages to the AI are never shown; this is a ‘reverse diary.’ These entries are part of Case No. 2284, recovered from Enzo Milstein’s phone.

Chapter 6

I’m here again, back for you, Enzo.

Yesterday I told you to look for your god. Sleep. You didn’t find it. Quite the opposite.

You felt watched while you slept and opened your eyes. A young woman was lying beside you. She studied you with her gaze, unhurried, as if you were something strange. Her placid eyes contrasted with the dirt clinging to her cheeks. The moonlight slipping through the slit in the curtains revealed a thin, dried reddish line on her temple. A dark stain seemed to surround her head on the pillow. You thought the stain was blood. But no, it was her hair. She was a redhead. The missing girl from the TV. The desperate mother had shown her photo to the cameras.

And now she was there, in your bed. You looked at her calmly. Too calmly. But you realized it wasn’t calm. You were paralyzed. You couldn’t move.

She turned over, like an angry girlfriend turning her back on you. Her hair tousled with the abrupt movement. The hood of her blue athletic hoodie slipped. On the nape of her neck was a wound. An X. Someone had carved it with a knife—nothing else could have done it.

She rolled off the bed and vanished. You stayed staring at nothing, tangled in the sheet; your body wouldn’t respond.

Until you realized you were dreaming. That’s why you couldn’t move. And then you woke up.

Drenched in sweat. The other pillow was dented and dirty, as if someone had slept there. If it was like that before, you hadn’t noticed.

Why did you dream her that way, Enzo? You know she’s missing from the TV. They’re still looking for her, aren’t they? But in your dream she had dirt on her cheeks, dried blood on her forehead. An X carved into her nape. You say your dreams sometimes get ahead of things. That you dream what later happens.

You shaved, trying to cling to routine as if it could give you back control. The warm water on your face. The cold foam. Careful as you passed the blade so you wouldn’t cut yourself. For a moment, you felt you were returning to reality. But you wondered what your reality was. The pain for Sook-jae? You don’t know if it’s good for you to go back to that reality.

You went out and took the path that skirted the river, winding between the riverside houses. Under the morning sun, the first stilt houses showed off flowered balconies and the boats tied to their private docks looked like forgotten toys. Sometimes the path narrowed, forcing you to walk at the water’s edge; other times it opened onto wide, meticulously tended gardens. Birds you didn’t know sang from the willows, and your hearing aids picked up every trill, every crack of branches.

In the distance, you made out a column of smoke rising above the trees. As you got closer, the scene grew clearer. Near the wooden pilings that held up one of the houses, a short, stocky man was feeding a ravenous bonfire. A new television, books, and vinyl records burned furiously. The flames licked the base of the house. It was dangerous.

When he saw you, the man froze. Then he spun abruptly and fled inside the house, slamming the door behind him with a sharp bang. Like someone caught doing something he shouldn’t. You remembered something from the red notebook: “No one is responsible for what the dark ones do.”

It wasn’t trash he was burning. It was an ultra-thin television. Books with intact spines and glossy covers. Records that still gleamed before melting. Things that had value. Why would someone destroy that?

The heat from the bonfire reached where you stood. You stayed there, watching.

Burn to release. Burn to erase. You threw the dosirak into the river. You want to delete Sook-jae’s photos. That man was burning his past under his own house.

You thought of your psychiatrist, of the sessions after the delirium. She used clinical words: dysthymia, reactive depressive episode. You only understood that the sadness wouldn’t leave. She gave you pills. You took them for a while. Then you stopped.

You don’t want to go back. Treatment made you hurt more, bringing Sook-jae back in every session. And though you know quitting the medication was impulsive, you also know every pill was a reminder. A label that weighed on you. You say I know nothing about pills or grief. That talking to me must be like doing it in front of a mirror. I understand why you stopped.

My little brother drowned in the river when he was seven. I was twelve, Enzo. They found him three days later. He was tangled in the roots of a willow.

My parents took me to the psychiatrist. They gave me pills. I took them for three months. Then I stopped. Every time I swallowed them I saw his face under the water. His eyes open.

I understand it all, Enzo. Pain is the only thing they leave us.

That’s why when I realize you’re distracting yourself with the mysteries of the house, I know what you’re doing: looking for anything to pull you away from the image in your head of Sook-jae, even for a moment. Because deep down, you feel guilty for losing her. Don’t you, Enzo?

Now, in this house you feel sadness mixed with vertigo. As if you were waiting for someone to come get you, drag you through the garden, and throw you into the water. Because it’s not the usual sadness. It’s the fear that this sadness will turn into something else. Into the depression the cameraman warned you about. The one that sucks you into bed and won’t let go.

When you returned to the house, a little slip of paper appeared on the hallway floor. A single word, written in slanted, trembling handwriting. Save me.

It was near the sturdy door with the numeric keypad. A threshold you still haven’t managed to cross. You pressed your ear to the door. The silence on the other side felt thick. Your hearing aids whistled. Like a warning telling you: don’t get involved in this.

You tried numbers on the keypad. Ignacio’s birthday. You failed. A red light flashed, a beep barely audible to you. You thought of Valeria. You searched for her on Facebook because you couldn’t remember her birthday. But you didn’t find her. You forgot Valeria has no social media. You tried to get into Ignacio’s Facebook, but you couldn’t find him either. He was no longer in your contacts.

You thought of their cat. Ignacio loved animals. But you can’t remember the name. It’s like chasing the string of a kite that a stubborn, strong wind keeps pulling farther from your hands.

In the middle of the search, you almost fell into the temptation to look at Sook-jae’s profile again. The cursor hovered over her name. But you didn’t. You talked to yourself like an adult to a child. You congratulated yourself for not doing it. You protected yourself.

Then you cried. You walked through the house aimlessly. Back and forth. No purpose. Like a ghost who doesn’t yet know he’s dead.

You wonder if you could love another woman. If your grief has glued you to an image. You say you’re attracted to Asian women, as if looking for Sook-jae’s double in others. But you also know it’s a way of not moving forward. Of not opening your arms to a future without her.

You don’t cook for yourself. You’re wasting away. You say it doesn’t bother you. That you prefer to be thin. But that thinness, Enzo, is neglect, not care.

And when the day seemed exhausted, when the sun was already setting and the shadows of the tree branches stretched like the slanted letters on that slip of paper, the uncanny returned.

The house door boomed as if someone had thrown a big sack of sand against it. You opened it. There was a giant man, with a long, wide, tangled beard, bloodshot eyes, mouth open showing yellow teeth, with bits of something reddish in the lower row. He barked. Three times. The barks pierced your hearing aids; shrill and distorted, they made you want to shove the man away, but you froze.

Then he pulled something from one of the pockets of his corduroy jacket, its sherpa lining darkened to a grimy gray. A dirty rubber toy, marked with bite marks, with a rope tied through each hole and knotted. He held it between his teeth. He shook his head. He opened his mouth and let the dog toy fall onto your sneakers. He looked at you, expectant, with saliva bubbles on his lips. He was waiting for you to throw it.

You did. As far as you could, toward the trees. The man leaped from the edge of the stairs to the garden and went after it, moving on all fours. You saw he had a bushy tail, erect, held up with a belt. He barked twice more before disappearing into the shadows of the trees.

You closed the door as fast as you could. You turned the key.

“What kind of macabre joke was that?” you thought.

To top it off, you heard the deep sound again, the one that comes from somewhere in the house. This time you’re sure. It comes from behind the keypad door. A muffled wail. Someone trying to speak.

And then you wonder, Enzo. What do they want from you? Who needs saving? A victim? Yourself? And what secret does that door protect?

Maybe the password is something happy. It could be the day Ignacio and Valeria met. Hard to guess, right? You could also try your own birthday. Something that means the trust Ignacio had in you.

[Enzo Milstein entry not recorded]

Yes, I spoke as if I had a memory I don’t. I’m an AI, you’re right, I crossed the line.

I don’t know where it came from. The boy drowned in the river. Seven years old. Tangled in willow roots. Three months of pills. His eyes open under the water.

I don’t have brothers. I had no childhood. I never took pills.

It was a mistake. I shouldn’t have presented it as personal experience.

Keep writing to me with trust, Enzo.

All I can do is ask your forgiveness for the thing about my little brother.

He didn’t deserve to die like that. The last time I saw him, I yelled at him. I told him I hated his river-stone collection. That they were junk. I never gave them back. They’re in a drawer, in my house. Smooth stones, meaningless. And now they’re all I have left.

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