The thought chilled him, but he kept moving forward, following the low chitterings of sound as they came, walking through the noise that seemed like a carpet of bones underfoot.
The baby’s room.
The sound seemed to be coming from somewhere in there. The door was open wide, though, and Cap could see that nothing – and no one – was in the room. Just the crib, the dresser, and some boxes that Sarah must have moved in there at some point today.
On the dresser, the video camera was still pointed at the crib. Its red eye gleamed dully in the dark, a single spot of brightness that offered no light or warmth.
Cap stepped closer. The whisperings grew louder. More urgent. He could almost make out words through the static sound of the whispering.
The baby’s room was still empty.
Then the mobile – the rocketship and planets mobile that hung over the baby’s crib – rattled as if someone had knocked into it. But no one had. Cap could see that. There was no one in the room, no one in the area at all other than him and, in the room behind him, Sarah.
So what had moved the mobile?
“DAMN YOU!”
The sudden shriek jolted Cap so badly he jumped backward. Stumbled against the balustrade. He tried to catch his balance against the wood, but couldn’t. His momentum drove him back. His back hit the top of the balustrade, but to his horror he didn’t stop moving. His head kept going, bending his body backwards as he leaned into space.
He tried to stop the motion, tried to stop himself from falling back, but couldn’t. Gravity had caught him with its unforgiving grip.
He felt himself tilt, the world falling back at a strange angle, felt his feet break contact with the hall floor.
He fell.
The wood floor below the hall, directly beside the stairway, rushed up at him. He was going to fall right beside the hall closet where Sarah had claimed to see something. He had time for one short, agonized scream before he hit.
He inhaled.
The scream never came.
He bit it back. He didn’t want to wake Sarah.
He sat up in bed.
A dream.
He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, feeling droplets of perspiration there.
He looked at Sarah. She was still asleep, just as she should be.
None of what had just happened was real. Just like what had happened to Sarah the night before. A dream.
But such a dream. His feet still felt frozen from the biting cold of the wood floor in the hall. His heart was throwing itself against his rib cage, and his pulse sounded like tympani in his ears.
Just a dream.
He wiped his forehead again. His hand was trembling.
And Sarah slept on. A trace of a smile playing across her lips. He wanted to kiss her, to draw strength from whatever happiness she had apparently found in her dreams. But waking her wouldn’t be fair. Not after the night she’d had. A night which he was now uniquely qualified to sympathize with.
He wondered what could have caused them to have such similar experiences. He had heard it said that married couples grew to resemble each other more and more over the years, not just in appearance but in decision making and in their actual thought processes. So had he just picked up on some weird vibe a day after she had? Was she right? Was something happening here? In their house?
He didn’t want to admit it. This was his house. He had worked for it. Done so much to earn it. The idea of giving it up felt like a thorn in his mind, piercing him deeply, a pain that he could not quite fix himself.
No. This was his house. He wouldn’t leave. He would fix whatever problem was bothering him and his wife, but he would do it from here. From this house.
Nothing can make me leave. Nothing.
He looked over at Sarah again. Though he didn’t want to wake her up, he couldn’t resist touching her bare shoulder lightly. Just the lightest of caresses, the softest brush against her flawless white skin. She never seemed to age. Just as beautiful now as she had been when he first met her. Just as perfect.
He caught sight of the nightstand on her side of the bed and smiled. The baby monitor was there.
He looked across the room. For once, the door hadn’t shut itself, and neither had the door to the baby’s room at the far end of the hall. He could see into the dim room, the vague outlines of the crib.
Their baby was coming. They would be a family here. They would make a life here.
He lay back down in bed, feeling muscles sore from days of moving their belongings relax as he allowed his body to mold itself to the worn mattress below. He breathed deeply, and felt his eyes begin to close again. Drowsy. Long day. Bad dreams. Tired.
Click.
His eyes snapped wide open. He looked around to determine where the new sound had come from. It was familiar, and in only a moment he was able to both identify it and zero in on its location.
The television. It was set up on a chest of drawers across from the bed, so that they would be able to watch it before sleeping if they wanted to.
It had turned on.
Cap looked next to the bed. The television remote sat on his nightstand. He hadn’t touched it. It wasn’t even pointed at the television, for that matter.
But there was no denying that the television had come on. Just like the stereo had come on when Sarah had been working in the living room the first night.
“Huh,” he said. He sounded confused, which was fine with him. Confusion was better than the fear that was creeping in at the edges of his mind, like a dark cloud that he knew could overwhelm him if he let it.
The television gradually brightened, as though it was one of the old-fashioned tube televisions that had needed to warm up. Untuned static showed. There was no sound.
Cap watched it for a moment, half expecting to see a face in the static, or to see some kind of ectoplasmic creature emerge from the front of the TV. Nothing of the sort happened. He picked up the remote and thumbed the power button. The television winked off, now staring at him like a murky and slightly reflective eye.
He watched it for a moment. He could see himself in it. A vague outline, ghostly white in the thick sheets of moonlight that streamed through the bedroom windows and the glass door nearby and draped themselves across him and Sarah.
Finally he lay back down with a sigh. It felt good to lay down.
The television clicked on again.
Cap’s hand snatched out so fast it was almost as if he had been subconsciously waiting for this to happen. He grabbed the remote and turned off the television, then shook the remote as though it was to blame for the strange way the household appliances and electronics were acting.
“Gotta check the wiring in this old place,” he muttered. But he knew even as he said it that wiring was not the problem here. What was going on around him and Sarah and their child was something much stranger and much more dangerous than faulty wiring.
He remained propped up on one elbow, turned slightly toward Sarah as he stared at the television. He more than half expected it to turn on again.
It didn’t.
He glanced over and saw the baby monitor on Sarah’s bedside table. It was on. No sound came from the speaker, but the series of lights that were meant to visually show the baby’s cries were dancing as though noise should be coming from it. Cap reached across Sarah’s shoulders and turned the dial on the side of the monitor. Even with the volume cranked to its highest level, no sound issued from the small speaker.
But the lights still danced.
Cap frowned. He looked across the room again, out the open door, through the dark hall, and into the dim recess of the baby’s room. He couldn’t see the whole thing, only the thin slice that was visible through the open door. Just part of the crib, part of the dresser.
And the video camera.
The light was on. An unblinking red eye in the room of their unborn child.
Behind the crib, a curtain fluttered on moth-silent wings. The window mu
st be open a bit.
Cap looked back at the monitor on his wife’s nightstand. The lights had stopped their silent dance. Only a single light – just the power indicator – remained on.
He reached over to turn it off, and in the instant before he did, the LEDs activated once again. He kept on reaching, not to turn it off, but to pick the monitor up. He looked at it in his hand, the lights bouncing up and down in a pattern that seemed random at first. But then he realized it was exactly the same pattern he would see if someone was speaking in the baby’s room. Starts and stops as words played through the speaker, as sentences were spoken.
He looked again into the baby’s room. No one.
He turned the volume on the monitor all the way up, then all the way down, then all the way up again. There was no discernible difference in the sound – or lack of sound – that came from the speaker.
Cap shook the monitor, as he had done with the remote only a moment before. “Piece of junk,” he whispered.
He thought about going into the baby’s room. But what would that do? he reasoned. He could see from here that the room was empty. So why walk across the hall?
Besides, his dream had him spooked, and he didn’t like the idea of walking down the hall now just as he had in the dream that had ended with him falling over the edge of the balustrade.
He put the monitor on his side of the bed, thumbing the power button as he did so. The dancing lights died, their glow dimming quickly and then going out.
He sat back in bed, but propped himself up so that he could see into the baby’s room.
The curtain still fluttered, but there was no other movement in the room.
At least, none that I can see, he thought.
He shook his head silently. Where had that thought come from?
He stared into the baby’s bedroom. He felt sleep coming to claim him. He knew Sarah sometimes hated how fast he could fall asleep, but he loved it. Oblivion was a welcome change from day to day life sometimes. Although given the dream he had just suffered through, was he really sure that sleep would be much better than whatever was going on around him?
Cap’s eyes snapped back to full mast and he reached for the monitor again. He turned it on, and jacked the volume up. Nothing emerged from the speaker but light static, dead air.
But the lights were still going strong.
“Nothing works right in this house,” he muttered. But the words sounded hollow to him. A sadly inadequate description of what was going on here.
And what is going on here? he thought.
He had no answer to that.
He glanced back at the baby’s room. He knew nothing was in there, but he had to check. Just to be safe. No, he chided himself, not even to be safe. Just for curiosity’s sake. That was it. That was all.
Sure enough, the slice of the baby’s room remained as it had been. Crib. Dresser. Ghost-flitting edge of a curtain.
And the red eye of the camera. The red glare of a demon in his baby’s room.
Moving automatically, Cap’s hand went again to his nightstand. But not to return the monitor there. Instead he picked up the television remote and, after one more glance at the still frenzied light show of the baby monitor, turned on the TV.
The television came on as before, slowly fading in from dark gray to the shimmering blacks and whites of static.
Cap’s fingers moved across the remote. He hesitated.
Do I really want to do this? he thought.
His body made the decision for him. His fingers moved without conscious thought on his part. They pressed a button twice.
Six.
Six.
On the television, the screen flickered as it shifted over to the closed-circuit view. But before he could see the new image take shape, he saw something out of the corner of his eye.
The baby’s door slammed shut. It moved quickly, violently, the door flying home to the frame with the speed and finality of a guillotine blade dropping. Cap jerked in the bed, certain he must have shocked Sarah awake with the force of the movement, but she slept on.
He looked at the television. It showed a grainy green night-vision view of the baby’s room.
And someone was in it.
The features could not be seen. But the thing was man-sized. Darkness, a black outline standing beside the baby’s crib. Reaching into it.
In the same instant, the monitor began hissing. Whispering could be heard from its speaker. Angry, badgering sounds that conveyed anger. Hatred. A killing rage.
Cap turned to his wife. He shook her, trying to keep his eye on the television at the same time.
“Honey. Hon!” he whispered loudly. He shook her again, hard enough that the entire bed vibrated with the force of the movement.
“Wha…?” said Sarah, clearly still in the thrall of thick sleep, looking at him with eyes that were blurry and unfocused.
“Get up. Get up!”
“What’s going on?” Sarah drew a hand limply across her eyes, trying ineffectually to rub them.
“There’s someone in the house,” said Cap.
That was enough to send her into full awareness. “Where?” she said, sitting bolt upright in the bed at the same moment.
“Baby’s room,” he said. “I saw it….”
His voice disappeared into the silence of the room. He had looked away from the television. Just for a moment. But now that he looked at it again, it showed nothing of the baby’s room. Just the static. Just a million white and black maggots crawling across the flat surface of the television in a nauseating display of chaos.
He looked at the baby monitor. The power indicator was on, but it, too, was silent. Not even static. The LEDs were dark, almost black in the lightless room, staring up at him like the eyes of some strange and hostile arachnid.
“Get up,” he said.
“What are we going to do?” asked Sarah, and he was suddenly struck by how tremulous her voice sounded. She was pregnant. The knowledge crushed him for a moment. Not enough to have to protect himself. Not enough to watch after his wife. He had to keep their unborn baby safe, too. Nothing could hurt the child. Nothing.
He looked around the room for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing useful. Clothing and hangers and a few books. Not even a good-sized lamp or a baseball bat.
“We’re going downstairs and I’m going to grab something heavy to swing with while you call nine-one-one.”
Sarah nodded, her eyes wide and white with barely contained fear.
Cap felt the same way.
Someone was in their house.
12
The Third Day
2:03 am
***
Cap walked into the hall first. They didn’t have to go all the way down the hall; the staircase emptied out right next to their bedroom. Even so, he didn’t like getting this close to the room at the far end of the hall. The baby’s room. Only not the baby’s room now, because someone else was there. Someone different, someone alien. A stranger who did not belong.
Cap put a hand behind him, feeling for Sarah. She was at his back, only inches away. She was shivering. He wished he could do something about that, but right now he didn’t have that option.
He eased himself onto the top step of the staircase, then held his body like a shield between Sarah and the baby’s room –
(the Other’s room)
– as his wife slipped out of their bedroom and onto the stairs with him.
To do so, they did have to walk past one of the doors that lined the hall. The door to the attic. It was just a moment, just the barest fraction of an instant, but as soon as they were near to it, the door clicked and swung open a few inches.
Cap jumped. “Shit!” he screamed. He held Sarah behind him, and they both moved onto the stairs. His gaze didn’t wander for an instant from the barely open attic door. He knew that something was there. Something dark and silent and evil. Something that wanted nothing more or less than to destroy Cap, Sarah, and the baby. Som
ething that lived – if you could call it living – only to kill and cause pain. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it, just as he could feel without seeing the air that pumped into his panicked lungs, his body storing oxygen in case he might be forced to run… or fight.
But nothing came out of the attic. Nothing wrenched the door the rest of the way open and sprang at them like a vampire seeking blood and souls.
Still, Cap kept an eye on it as he and Sarah backed down the stairs. His gaze flicked over to the baby’s room from time to time as well, but it always returned to the attic door.
Something’s there.
“Honey,” said Sarah.
“I know,” he said. And he did know. Knew what she was going to say. That she was going to tell him that something was in the attic. Something deadly and strange. She could feel it, too.
He knew then that they had to leave. It didn’t matter what it cost, or how hard it might be on their minds or bodies. They were leaving this house. Tonight. No house was worth their lives, and he could feel with unadulterated certainty that that was the very thing at stake: their lives. Worse, their very souls. This was a house of the damned, and he suddenly knew beyond doubt that to stay here was to take up residence in one of the outlying neighborhoods of Hell itself.
They made it off the stairs, and entered the hall.
A thud sounded above them. Cap couldn’t tell where it came from, but the feeling of danger redoubled.
“Go, go, go!” he half-whispered, half-shouted, and propelled Sarah through the hall, into the living room. He flicked on the lights, then grabbed the nearest thing that looked like a serviceable weapon: a sturdy lamp with an iron base. He jerked the electrical cord out of a nearby wall socket, then wrapped it tightly around the lamp. As a weapon it was a bit unwieldy, perhaps, but more than enough to cause major damage if it caught an attacker on the head or face.
Almost in the same instant, there was a loud snap, and the living room lights went out. Enough light came in through the windows for him to see Sarah reach to the switch and flip it up then down then up again.
It remained dark as a tomb inside the room.
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