Cradle Lake

by Ronald Malfi

  No, he thought. I feel it. It’s different now. It has to be. Because I couldn’t take any more heartache …

  (dead baby plastic biohazard bag blood dead)

  He noticed something clinging to the top of the well-like opening on the screen. It looked like a partially bent finger.

  “There you go,” Crawford said matter-of-factly. “There’s your little peanut.”

  Alan leaned even closer. “Look at that …” To him, the relief sounded all too evident in his voice.

  “And there,” Crawford said, pointing to a fluttering diode on the screen, “is the heart. See?”

  “Yes.” Heather was crying. “Yes.”

  Crawford withdrew the horrible plastic phallus. There was bloody mucus on the tip. “I can print you off some photos.”

  “Thank you,” Heather said. “That would be wonderful.”

  Crawford smiled with half her mouth. “Your due date is June 15.”

  Afterwards, they had lunch at a quaint bistro. They talked little about the baby, though Alan could tell from the glow in Heather’s eyes that the baby was all she was thinking about. He had seen that glow before. He hoped things would end differently this time.

  And he thought, Maybe this time I will become a father. Maybe this time things will take—things will work out—and I will do all the fatherly things I’ve always thought I’d do, the things my own father didn’t do for me.

  As they drove home, Heather found an alternative rock station on the radio and leaned back in the passenger seat as if she now ruled the world.

  “Oh, God,” Heather intoned, leaning forward in the passenger seat, straining the seat belt. “Will you look at those things?”

  But Alan was already looking. He eased down on the brake until the car came to a stop midway up their driveway.

  Buzzards were everywhere: in the grass, on the porch railing, the roof. The sheer number of them caused the gutters to sag. There must have been twenty-five, thirty of the fuckers.

  “Where did they come from?” Heather rolled up her window, as if in fear the giant birds might swarm the car and try to get in. “They look like monsters.”

  “The woods.” His throat was dry. “I’ve seen them before.”

  “There’s so many.”

  “Wait in the car.”

  She clamped a hand around his wrist. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to scare them off.”

  She wasn’t even looking at him; still leaning forward in the seat, she was silently counting the birds that had gathered like a plague upon the house. There was even one perched at the top of the stone chimney. When it spread its wings it looked like something prehistoric. Heather gasped.

  He opened the driver’s door and stepped outside.

  “But what are you gonna do?” Heather called after him.

  “Just wait in the car,” he said and shut the door.

  Outside, all was eerily silent. Alan could smell burning leaves in the distance and the crisper scent of the trees on the wind. But there was another smell beneath those—a decaying, fecal odor that he knew was coming from the carrion birds. The ones closest to him in the tall grass, crouched like black-feathered tombstones, shuffled closer. They made shrill noises that sounded nearly mechanical. He noticed whitish-gray shit splattered in dried clumps on their feathers.

  He waved his arms. “Beat it!”

  Several of the birds on the rooftop spread their accordion wings and trilled like alarm clocks.

  “Alan,” Heather said, leaning over the driver’s seat and speaking through the partially opened window, “should I honk the horn?”

  He nodded.

  She honked. Repeatedly.

  The sound did nothing.

  Get the hell out of here, you filthy fuckers.

  He leaned in the window and pulled the keys from the ignition. Again, Heather asked him what he was doing but he didn’t respond. He went immediately to the rear of the car and popped the trunk. Inside, beneath the spare, was an emergency roadside kit. He snatched it up and cracked open the lid. Sifting through jumper cables, a jack and tire iron, a fire-retardant blanket, and some first-aid equipment, he located what he was looking for: road flares. They looked like miniature sticks of dynamite.

  Alan grabbed two and lit them. Purple fire exploded from the top of each stick, raining down like fireworks on his fisted hands. The sticks grew instantly hot.

  He hurried around the front of the car, waving the flares like a madman. The birds nearest to him squawked and unfurled their shit-splattered wings. They were as large as dogs up close, their necks and heads like the curved rusted spigots of European fountains. He could see their eyes, too, and they were yellowed, bleary smears with dark pupils like chips of obsidian at the center.

  “Go!” he shrieked. “Get out of here!”

  The birds closest to him retreated into the tall grass toward the house. As he continued closing the distance, they flapped their great wings and rose off the ground in unison. On the porch, several of the vultures leered at him, their tapered, smoke-colored beaks hanging open as if on broken hinges.

  Winding back his right arm, he flung one of the flares onto the porch.

  The attack incited a cacophony of discordant cries from the creatures as they leapt almost catlike off the porch railing and into the grass. Again, their great wings unraveled and began pumping. They were ungainly and implausible looking, but they all somehow managed to climb into the air and take off over the nearest line of trees. For a second, the mass of them completely blotted out the sun.

  “Jesus,” he breathed, watching them go. His mouth tasted sour.

  Only the one on the chimney remained. The thing was plucking at something on the roof—what Alan initially mistook for a snake. But when the buzzard raised its head, the length of the snakelike thing trailing from both corners of its beak, Alan knew unequivocally that the monstrous bird had one of those thick vines in its mouth.

  For a moment he contemplated chucking the second flare at it. But then he thought about the roof catching on fire and hesitated.

  Atop the chimney, the large bird eyed him—

  Son of a bitch, it’s like the fucker’s mocking me …

  —then spread its wings. Only it didn’t fly away immediately. It remained perched there, its talons scratching the crumbling stone chimney, its eyes never leaving Alan. Startlingly, it emitted a high-pitched, strident cry that shook the marrow of Alan’s bones. Then it flew off the chimney and disappeared over the trees.

  They’re watching me. They’re getting braver and more cavalier and they’re coming for me. I know it. I can feel it.

  “Alan!” It was Heather, rushing up behind him. The sound of her voice so close caused him to jump. She grabbed his left wrist in two hands and pulled down on his arm. He saw the second flare drop out of his hand and onto the ground.

  “Oh,” he said: very small.

  “Your hand …”

  Indeed, the flare had scorched the skin—the soft flesh that ran between his thumb and index finger, as well as the back of his hand.

  Doesn’t matter now, he thought. It’ll be healed by tomorrow morning. Hell, maybe even by this evening.

  Heather stomped the flare dead in the grass. When she looked at him, there was a nonspecific compassion in her eyes he still wasn’t accustomed to seeing. But it felt good.

  “Come on,” she said, wrapping an arm around him. “Let’s get you inside.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  And then two nights later—

  His father stands at the foot of their bed, his naked flesh bluish gray in the pale light of the moon coming in through the bedroom windows. Even in the gloom Alan can make out the obscene autopsy scar. When his father turns his head and motions toward the bedroom door and the hallway beyond, Alan sees the bullet hole in his temple. It had been a clean, precise wound when he’d seen him all those years ago on the stainless steel table in the morgue, but now it continues to bleed oily black blood
down the side of his father’s face. It dribbles down his neck and segments into tributaries along the fleshy folds of his skin.

  Alan sits up in bed, perspiring. He looks to Heather’s side of the bed, and when he finds she is not there, panic rises in him like mercury. Stricken, he looks back at his father. The old man is still staring at the gaping black maw of the bedroom doorway. In the hallway beyond, Alan catches a glimpse of someone—Heather!—shuffling past in the darkness.

  He opens his mouth to call her name and finds he cannot speak. Something is blocking his windpipe. Suddenly, he cannot even breathe. His panic increases. There is … there is something in his mouth …

  He coughs. An expulsion of black feathers wafts to the bed-sheets. Coughs again … and this time it’s feathers and blood, lots of blood …

  (sick twist of tissue on the mattress dead babies)

  … and something else. Whatever it is that’s clogging his windpipe, impeding his breathing…

  He reaches into his mouth … and he can feel something all the way at the back of his throat. It’s just barely out of reach. He manages to work his thumb and first finger farther back until he’s able to pinch a corner of whatever it is. It feels odd, foreign.

  At the foot of the bed, his father turns back to him and makes a tsk-tsk sound of disapproval.

  Slowly, Alan pulls the item out of his throat. He can feel it coming loose, and the sensation makes him want to gag. But somehow he doesn’t. He pulls it out, blood spilling in rivulets down his chin and pooling onto the sheets piled into his lap. It comes wetly and with a sucking sound. It is large and unwieldy. Impossible that this thing was in his throat just moments ago.

  Tsk-tsk, says his father.

  “What is it, Alan?” It’s Heather. She has appeared behind his father, also naked, also with the autopsy incision running the length of her chest and abdomen. She looks hideously disfigured in the lightlessness. “What do you have?”

  It is in his lap now, smeared with his own blood. Or at least he thinks it’s his own blood.

  “I don’t… I don’t…” But he cannot formulate a coherent sentence. Anyway, his throat is still store and stopped up with blood. He leans over and spits some out onto the floor.

  It is a bag, a plastic bag. That is what he pulled from his throat. A large plastic bag with a biohazard symbol on it. And there is something inside. Though the bag is colorless, he cannot see what is inside because it’s also filled with blood. But there is something inside.

  It moves.

  And Alan sat up sharply, a scream caught in his throat.

  Still panicking, he looked over and was instantly relieved to find Heather fast asleep beside him. Jerking his gaze toward the foot of the bed, he was equally relieved to see that his dead father was not standing there, dribbling blood and brain fluid onto the floor.

  Still, something had awoken him, and he didn’t think it had been the nightmare.

  There’s someone else here, someone else in this house.

  Again, that sensation clung to him. He couldn’t shake it yet did not understand how he knew it to be true.

  Right here in this house with us. Right here with us.

  Flipping the sheets off him, he climbed out of bed and tugged on a pair of jeans that were flung over the back of a nearby chair. Stepping into the hallway, he was cautious of every permeating sound. The floorboards groaned beneath his feet. Despite the dream, he was not thinking of his father. And despite the incident with the birds two days prior, he was not thinking about them, either.

  Owen Moreland. He was thinking about Owen Moreland.

  Is that what you think? said a voice at the back of his head. That this house is haunted by the ghost of a guy who lived the fuck down the street? What the hell is wrong with you?

  Alan didn’t know what the hell was wrong with him. He could only walk silently down the hallway, trailing one hand along the wall to keep his bearings.

  As he had done on a previous night, he searched the house until he was satisfied that no one had broken in and that he and Heather were alone. Satisfied but not necessarily relieved. Something still ticked away inside him. It was a feral, instinctual feeling and he couldn’t shake it.

  Before heading back to the bedroom, Alan swore he heard a noise come from directly above his head. There was no upstairs level—it was a single-floor house—but when he looked up he found himself staring at a cutout square of Sheetrock in the ceiling.

  The attic, he thought.

  There was a small stepladder in the kitchen pantry, along with a Maglite. He carried the ladder and the flashlight back into the hall and set up the stepladder beneath the attic doorway. He ascended the ladder and placed one hand flat against the cutout square of Sheetrock. Pushing up, particles of dust drifted down into his hair and eyes as he opened the tiny door. Cold air breathed out.

  He clicked on the flashlight and climbed to the top of the ladder until his head broached the opening in the hallway ceiling. He shone the flashlight’s beam into the attic, panning the area slowly.

  It took him almost a full thirty seconds to realize what he was looking at.

  Holy Christ…

  They looked like the tentacles of a prehistoric undersea creature or possibly something from an H. P. Love-craft mythos. They spilled from rents in the ceiling, coiled around joists, and wound their way through knotholes in the exposed two-by-fours. He felt the cold night air issuing through the cracks they created in the roof, the smell of pine and the distant mountains as strong as horrible memories.

  Dread overtook him.

  This is what I’ve been sensing in the house, he thought. The hand holding the flashlight shook, causing the shadows to dance across the low attic beams. Not another person but these goddamn vines. They’re everywhere. It’s an infestation.

  Alan crawled into the attic before he realized what he was doing. The moment he stood, his feet balanced on two separate two-by-fours between which yellowing insulation tufted out like mounds of dirty snow, he was aware of the proximity of the vines. Some were long enough to come down nearly to his shoulders. He was careful not to let them touch him. Just the thought of those vines getting tangled in his hair or caressing the side of his face disgusted him.

  Fanning the flashlight’s beam across the ceiling, he was overwhelmed by the sheer violation he felt in looking at the vines. They had come in under the shingles in the roof and had snaked down in twisting, wiry bundles. It was like standing inside an ancient and overgrown Mayan temple. At any moment, he expected the vines to come alive, to snake down his back and wrap themselves around his biceps, to wind around his ankles until he was hanging upside down from the rafters …

  Something warm and wet splattered on his face. He shrieked and almost lost his footing on the beams. The flashlight dropped soundlessly into the mound of insulation, the beam thrown into a dark and distant corner between two joists.

  Pawing at his face, his hand came away moist and sticky. Vaguely warm. He thought the fluid looked dark—like blood—but he couldn’t be sure until he picked up the flashlight and shone the beam onto the palm of his hand: syrupy purple fluid. He then turned the beam on the ceiling, directly above his head, just as a second patter of liquid fell in his eyes.

  Alan shuddered and swiped fingers across his eyelids. Above, the vines seemed to sway as if in a subtle breeze. Some were as thick as broomsticks, sprouting curved, angry-looking thorns. They hung down from what appeared to be a centralized network of vines clinging to the ceiling, like a nest of garden snakes. The syrupy purplish liquid dripped from the vines and splattered gooey patterns onto the exposed insulation along the floor. They reminded him of—

  (umbilical cords)

  —intestines.

  Down in the kitchen, he washed his face and hands thoroughly, disgusted by the thought of that purplish slime on his flesh.

  When he tried to go back to sleep, he found himself unable to calm down, thinking too much about the vines in the attic. Above the monotonous
sounds of Heather’s breathing beside him, he even swore he could hear the rustling of movement up there in the attic, separated by a thin panel of Sheetrock and some moldy insulation. Moving, he thought. Alive.

  He spent the next two days in the attic, cutting away the vines and stuffing the cut lengths into trash bags. It was grueling work. The vines bled their amniotic fluid onto the two-by-fours and the insulation, as well as onto Alan himself, and the curled thorns, angry as fangs, bit into the palms of Alan’s hands even through his work gloves.

  Once he’d completed the task, he slammed a ladder against the side of the house and climbed onto the roof. Vines, thick as rubber hoses in some instances, crisscrossed the rooftop in a grid. He pried the vines away from the roof and let them spool down into the yard. Then he hammered the pried-up shingles back into place. The September sun beat down on him without forgiveness while he worked, and it caused sweat to spring out of his pores and soak his T-shirt.

  When he’d finished, he dragged the trash bags out to the curb. There were over a dozen bags all told, and the palms of his hands now sweated blood.

  Hearn Landry’s cruiser was parked across the street in front of the Gerski house. Alan shaded the sun from his eyes with one hand and tried to see if Landry was sitting behind the wheel. The glare across the window was too great; he couldn’t make out anything.

  Overhead, one of the buzzards screamed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  For the next three nights, Alan awoke doused in sweat, certain someone had been breathing down on him. Heart strumming, he sat up and looked around the darkened bedroom. But aside from Heather’s soundless form beside him in bed, he was utterly alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR