“No,” I finally shout aloud at the intruder’s back. “That didn’t happen. None of it.”
The last remnants of my fear and confusion dissolve as I become overwhelmed with a sense of rage. This fat, bald, old stranger is a liar and an intruder—
I grab the large butcher knife from the nearby kitchen rack. Then, I punch him in the back with it as hard as possible.
He grunts painfully and turns to face me, shock on his pale face.
Again, I punch him firmly in the chest with the knife.
And again . . .
And then I whisper through clenched teeth: “My name is not Babe. And I don’t know a Stanley or any Dr. Montague, either.”
I blink and the lying, scruffy old man is collapsed on the floor, the large knife sunken up to the handle in his chest. Around him is a rapidly widening pool of dark blood.
He’s groaning now, his words barely audible: “Please . . . call nine—”
I ignore his plea and glance down at my hands. They are stained red and are very slippery.
Quickly, I turn and rush off to the bathroom to wash them clean, leaving the old stranger bleeding badly on the kitchen floor.
After I finally manage to wash all of the slippery mess off my hands, I look up into the mirror . . . and freeze.
Staring back at me is a stranger with tangled and completely gray hair, forehead wrinkles and crow’s feet deeply etched. For some reason, her face reminds me of the worn out, faded, and old hallway. Her expression though is stoic, lacking any affect. Except, I can sense the deep pain in her stormy-gray eyes, the permanent despair of a shattered soul . . . And I feel the flutter of silent wings.
HOLLOW SKULLS
SAMUEL MARZIOLI
We’ve finally made a family and nothing can go wrong.
***
Orson took the long way home from the hospital, along gravel back roads that cut through miles of empty fields and scattered stands of birches. It added an extra thirty minutes to their drive, but his wife Martha insisted it would be safer that way.
“Precious cargo,” she said, from the back seat, caressing their newborn Gabriel’s face with her finger.
At the sight of their proximity, Orson’s cheeks went flush and he nodded at her reflection in the rearview mirror. Not in agreement, just to acknowledge she’d spoken. When he pulled up to their house, Martha was the first one out. By the time he unbuckled the baby seat, she’d rounded the car, sweat beads collecting on her forehead.
“Martha—”
She put a finger to his lips. “I know what you’re going to say, but I want to be the one to carry him inside.”
He shook his head. “The doctor said—”
“Oh, who cares what that old quack thinks?”
She crossed her arms and grinned, the middle of her cheeks sinking into dimples. Despite an avalanche of fears and misgivings, he couldn’t bring himself to say no to that face.
Martha lifted Gabriel from his chair and held him snug in her arms, as if he were slick and fragile, squirming to get loose, and not merely sleeping. Orson wrapped an arm around her and led them both inside. Once they reached the nursery door, he hesitated, averting his eyes from the newly painted walls. Even with the many coats of blue he’d laid down last week, a shade of pink still bled through the surface, vague but somehow blinding.
Martha shuffled to the crib and set Gabriel down. “Orson, come say hi to our son,” she said, waving him farther in.
He tottered to her side and held her close, absorbing the scent, the feel, and smell of her.
“What do you think?” said Martha.
The pristine white of the crib and blankets surrounding Gabriel made Orson feel somehow safer, as if the purity implied would leach out all the darkness, leaving his son’s insides clean and gleaming. He imagined Gabriel with angel wings, and for a moment he let himself believe it.
We’ve finally made a family and nothing can go wrong.
“He’s . . . beautiful,” Orson said, but the illusion of innocence vanished. In his mind, the angel wings shriveled into gashes and a nub of horns broke through the brown too-thin skin of Gabriel’s forehead.
Martha must have noticed the change in his demeanor because she pressed her lips into a perfect line and said, “Oh, Orson. I know you’re afraid. I am too, but whatever happened with Michelle can’t possibly . . . ” She shook her head, glanced at the walls and quickly turned away. “This time things will be different.”
“Yes. I’ll make sure of that,” he said. “I promise.”
***
Martha turned in at sundown. Though she’d stayed a few extra days in the hospital, the strain of a thirty-hour delivery took a severe toll on her already weakened body. She fell asleep as soon as Orson tucked the sheets under her chin, her lungs whooping heavy with every rise and fall of her chest.
Orson lay in bed beside her, watching her, envying the easy way she rested, the way her smile followed her even into sleep. Such peace seemed beyond him now, fixed to a time and place so far gone he could hardly remember it. He cupped her cheek, whispering comfort and kind words, and once he was sure she wouldn’t wake, he slipped into the darkness of the hallway.
The air felt thick and cramped, as if there weren’t enough space for the pieces of him to fit. The refrigerator hummed and gurgled in the kitchen and Orson’s footsteps thumped to its set rhythm. He peered inside the doorway of the nursery. The only illumination came from a nightlight—ethereal streaks of red and blue and yellow cast by a plastic butterfly cover. After matching dark shapes up to memories, and seeing nothing out of place, he gathered his courage and edged up to the crib.
Even in the dim light he could make out the details of Gabriel’s face: eyes closed, mouth shifting between a smile and a grimace, body jerking back and forth from some unknown dreamtime impulse. A baby in repose, he wondered. Or was it something worse?
Orson’s grandmother had a different name for newborns. She called them “it” or “vessel,” not he or she. Hollow skulls, waiting like an empty truck cab with the engine left running. Whenever she got going, and the fire in her gut warmed over, she would let loose a litany about it—the same way a backwoods yokel might rant about Bigfoot.
“Most of the time, the cab remains without a driver and the vessel’s allowed to age enough so that the soul blooms in the soft soil of its mind. But sometimes? Sometimes they come first,” Orson’s grandmother had said.
He was barely ten at the time, and while he wasn’t sure his grandmother’s words were gospel truth they still scratched the itch of his curiosity.
“Who do you mean? Who are they?” Orson asked.
She’d played the question in her mind, in a way that made her eyebrows dance. Then she’d said, “The old gods who ruled the chaos before creation. Or monsters made before the world began. Who can say for sure? All I know is what they do, and what they do is desecrate the innocent.”
Those last words haunted Orson even now, played havoc with his senses. Shadows darted at him from across the nursery floor, forcing him back into the hallway. Hidden behind the gurgle of the fridge, he heard hushed laughter. With that, he slunk back to his bedroom, wondering one last thing: how many days or months until this matter was settled and he knew for sure whether he could celebrate or mourn for the coming of his son.
***
Heavy rainfall dulled the morning sky, but by early afternoon the sunlight burst through the cloud cover, and warmed over a new spring day. Martha decided it was the perfect time to take Gabriel to the park.
“No. You need your rest,” Orson said, but Martha wouldn’t hear it.
“I’ve rested enough. Besides, some fresh air will do us all some good.”
Martha clutched Orson’s arm while he pushed the stroller. The sight and sound of birds chirping among the blossoms on trees left her warm, and smiling, and gazing all around. But Orson kept his focus on the baby. Gabriel seemed a little too interested in the things around him for a week-old someone who o
nly saw in blurs. Or was it the constant rush of sense data, the steady drone of sounds he’d never heard before? Either way, Orson made a mental note of it and stowed it away for later.
The neighborhood was arrayed in its usual weekend bustle. Across the street, a crowd gathered at a yard sale. Other neighbors watered or mowed their lawns, or weeded and pruned their gardens. No one took the slightest interest in Orson and his family, except Mrs. Rhodes, an elderly widow who lived in a house at the end of the block. As she approached the passing family from her porch, she joined her hands together and aimed her grin beneath the shade of the stroller’s hood.
“Oh, what a little angel,” she said.
“Isn’t he?” said Martha.
As if on cue, Gabriel puckered his lips and a milky string dribbled down his chin. Mrs. Rhodes and Martha both tilted their heads and blurted “Awww.” Orson merely grimaced. Somewhere in the false calm of his mind, he could hear his grandmother’s voice, huffing and scoffing in turns. She was a different breed, that woman. If Martha and Mrs. Rhodes were cut from the same dreamy spool of silk, his grandmother was torn from rusted sheet metal.
Orson thought back to the time when she sat him down before his cousin’s christening. He was twelve then, dressed in a black suit and tie, staring at his reflection in his newly polished shoes with no small amount of pride. While all the other members of their family were still preparing, she took him into the living room and sat him on the sofa. She kneeled before him, looked into his eyes, urging her face forward as if to give her words a prod.
“Make no mistake; some vessels are pretty things through and through. But sometimes you’ll see one and you’ll know it’s gone wrong. Keep a sharp eye out and see if you can’t spot it for yourself. Their skin splotched red and pink, like flesh too scrubbed by scouring pads. Their hair stuck out like thin wires, cheeks bulging round as infected plums. Eyelids held in slits so that only the deep, deep dark of their pupils lay exposed.”
“Is that what Aunt Tabby’s baby looks like?” Orson had said.
“I don’t know yet,” she’d said. “What I do know is the uglier it is the closer they’ve come. Touched it somehow, put their mark upon its skin.”
Mrs. Rhodes took her leave and Orson and Martha carried on a few more blocks into the park. The benches were full of chattering parents, a kid planted on every swing and a line formed at every slide. Martha seemed delighted by the sight of them. She moved closer to Orson’s ear and said, “Soon he’ll be that old too. They grow up so fast.”
How he wanted it to be true. He pictured Gabriel a four-foot strapping boy, one of the many gamboling children punching footprints in the sand. A normal child, untainted by what his grandmother had long warned him of. Hope surged within him, and he sneaked a glance in his son’s direction.
We’ve finally made a family and nothing can go wrong.
Gabriel stared back, the black of his thin-slit eyes an endless sea of nothing, the red lines of his exposed skin like deep-etched omens. Two sure signs as plain as day.
***
Gabriel’s cries swelled heavy in the narrow walls of the hallway. Martha heard sadness, but Orson could almost taste their baby’s true intent. There were curses flitting among each forlorn shriek, babble uttered in an unholy language. He wanted to plug his ears to it, to pretend it’d gone away, but Martha wouldn’t let him.
“We already fed and changed him,” Orson said. “He’s fine. Babies need to scream, that’s all.”
“I can’t help feeling like there’s something wrong,” Martha said. “What if he hurt himself? Or what if someone’s in his room and they try to take him away, like they took our—”
“Shhh, sweetie. I’ll go and check if you promise me you’ll rest,” he said, severing her words before the idea took root, and the lie he’d fed her about their daughter, Michelle, came spilling from her lips.
Orson crept down the hallway, deeper into the black throat of the monster’s lair. He was conscious of the walls and a feeling like something, or things, watched him from the dark corners and the shadows, measuring the way he moved, his every step. The pipes in the ceiling knocked a metronomic beat, smothering the sound of almost-voices uttered just below a whisper. When he entered the nursery, Gabriel began thrashing in his crib, his face crimson, his eyelids mashed into thick black lines and his mouth a toothless oval.
“Settle down. It’s me. I know what you really are, so there’s no use wasting all that energy.”
He said it as a test, to see how Gabriel would react. But if Gabriel understood, he gave no hint and the guessing game continued—along with all the crying.
Despite a slick and cold sensation worming across Orson’s skin, he scooped up Gabriel in his arms and rocked him back and forth. He began to sing a lullaby, one Martha taught him shortly after Michelle was born. Alongside it, a thought lumbered through his mind of a night much like this one, in this very room. It shook the dust and cobwebs off memories he’d long since left behind and put a lump too thick to swallow in his throat.
“There was a time when I believed you had one,” his grandmother had said as he cradled and shushed Michelle.
“Really?” said Orson. “Why?”
“This was after your father left and you and your mother came to live with me. You were empty still, barely a month, and the nights were long and dappled by your ungodly screeches.”
“Oh, Grandma. Babies cry. That’s what they do,”
“One that’s clean? Well fed? Comfortable?” she said, inching her round and disbelieving face closer to his.
“Yes, even them.”
“Yeah right. The doctors named it colic, as if pinning a word on the unexplained somehow makes it better. But I know the truth. No healthy body ever needs to scream in pain.”
“So what are you saying? Did I have one or not?”
“No, thank our lucky stars. Turned out to be a fractured bone is all. The question is does it have a fractured bone as well?”
They had stared at Michelle while she kept on thrashing. From the very start, she was terrified when Orson’s grandmother was around. Not even the presence of Orson offered any solace as she cracked sobs through the wide gulf of her mouth, almost begging for release.
And, now, so did Gabriel.
***
Orson had violent dreams. In them, Gabriel seized Martha’s breast and began to suck the life from her. Orson was forced to watch from behind a glass wall he couldn’t move or break as her body turned cadaverous and then fell into a heap of empty flesh. He woke up gasping for air and threw a glance at Martha. She lay limp and unconscious, chest sunken as if crumpled by the weight of her exhaustion. He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and quietly left the room.
The polite stutter of her snores trailed him to the nursery where he watched Gabriel at rest. Martha’s pregnancy had been hard. Nine months of headaches and vomiting while the soft globe of her belly slowly inflated to a boulder. Constant bleeds led right up to Gabriel’s birth, spotting Martha’s clothes and bed sheets with black dollops and red spots. Even then, he’d found it hard to believe her condition wasn’t a sign of things to come: the little leech hurting her insides for the pure sake of cruelty.
That was when the nightmares had begun. Some variation of her murder and the funeral that followed, where a closed casket hid the mess of what his then-future child had left behind. It tired him to no end. Aged him, drawing lines of worry on his face so that, by the time the slog through pregnancy had ended, he looked more like a grandfather than a father. But Martha, through ignorance, had held onto her youthful vigor and he loved her all the more because of it. He would let that ignorance persist as long as he could. And in the meantime? He’d just have to keep the two apart.
He made breakfast. By the time the eggs hardened and the hash browns caked, an undulating creak sounded from the living room. He looked through the kitchen door at Martha seated on the couch, her shirt pulled up and left breast mashed between Gabriel’s anxious lips.
>
Orson fought against the wild panic that drove the strength out from his knees. He wanted to yell at her for the danger she’d put herself in, but a stream of violent images filled his mind: Gabriel’s teeth sinking into Martha’s carotid artery; Gabriel seated by her still, dead body, bathing in a pool of her blood; Gabriel carving crosshatch marks into her skin while laughing, always laughing.
Clinging to the countertop was all he could do to keep himself from falling down. It proved more than he could bear and he found his hand crawling spider-like across the countertop, to the knife block, where his fingers curled around the synthetic handle of the chef’s knife.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said, barely comprehending his own words above mere chatter.
“I heard Gabriel crying. Poor little thing. I think he missed his Mommy. And her milk.”
The ferocity with which Gabriel drank hypnotized Orson; all that wet slurping and lip smacking, like a predatory animal devouring its prey. He couldn’t shut out the idea that Gabriel was just feigning impotence, to amplify the moment he attacked, and he shuddered—even as Martha hissed in pain.
“What? What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” he shouted, pulling the knife free, holding it tight and ready at his side.
Martha grinned. Her cheeks dimpled. “He pinched me.”
“I thought . . . ” He shook his head. “Never mind,” he said, letting the tension ease away from the muscles in his arms and shoulders.
“What were you going to do with that?” said Martha, nodding to the knife.
He shot it a glance and his eyes went wide with knowing. “Nothing. I don’t know. I wanted to, maybe, cut some ham for breakfast.”
“I don’t think we have any left,” said Martha.
“No, you’re right. I didn’t find any either,” he said and quietly slipped the knife back in the block.
***
Another night, and they convened in the living room. Martha spoke over the blare of evening news, gushing plans for Gabriel’s future: shopping trips to buy him clothes, visits out of state to show him off to family, and even what private school he should attend.
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