Cradle Lake

by Ronald Malfi

  New Year’s Eve, and there were fireworks in the distance over the trees. Alan and Heather went out on the front porch and watched the dazzling display.

  Across the street, some neighborhood kids cheered, carving swaths of light through the darkness with twirling sparklers. Hank, Lydia, and Catherine were on their front porch watching the fireworks, too. Hank waved to him. Alan did not wave back. When he saw Hank rise from his seat, he rubbed Heather’s shoulder and told her it was getting cold and they should get inside.

  “It’s probably not very good for the baby,” Heather agreed, hustling through the front door.

  Alan had expected Hank to knock on the door moments later, but the knock never came.

  Alan told the college to find a substitute once winter break was over—that there were issues at home he had to attend to, complications with his family. He hung up before anyone could ask any questions. When the phone continued to ring, he unplugged it.

  Dinner that night, he lit candles on the kitchen table and dimmed the lights. Outside, the wind was blustery; the nearest tree branches scraped against the windows and the roof. He cooked and placed the food on the table in large ceramic bowls. Yet he hardly ate.

  Heather ate much of it, saying it was all very delicious. “What did you put in it?” she asked.

  Something tickled the inside of his throat. He affected no expression and simply said, “I made it with love.”

  Heather smiled and cleaned her plate. Then she retired to the bedroom, complaining of gas pains.

  Alone, Alan cleared the table, then sat before the fireplace, a small fire cooking in the hearth, while he knocked off a bottle of red wine. Sleeping in the same room with his wife had become an exercise in mental torture; the thing inside her womb had found a way to work the tendrils of invisible fingers into his brain. It knew what Alan was doing. It tried desperately to stop him.

  Twice that evening, he heard Heather rise from the bedroom and scamper down the hall to the bathroom. The second time, he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the couch cushions and tried not to think of much in particular.

  He listened to the scrabbling of buzzard claws on the roof instead.

  Two days later, Alan drove into town and refilled his miso-prostol prescription at the pharmacy. A young woman attended to him at the counter, but he did not forget that the pharmacy had once belonged to Owen Moreland.

  No, he did not forget.

  He drove home in the rain, singing along with a Bruce Springsteen song on the radio.

  When he arrived home, Hank was standing at the end of his driveway in a puffy red ski jacket and a baseball cap. Alan swerved around him and pulled up the driveway toward the house. In the rearview mirror he watched Hank move up the drive. When he got out, Hank took his hands out of his pockets in a symbol of surrender. Of peace.

  “I’m sorry,” Hank called to him. “I want to be friends again.”

  “Please go home.” His voice sounded cold, even to his own ears. “I’ve got things to attend to here at home. I don’t have time to talk to you.”

  “Alan, please—”

  “I don’t have time to talk to you.” He went inside and, without turning on any lights, peeked through a part in the curtain over the foyer window.

  Hank stood there for several moments, looking lost and hurt and afraid, before stuffing his hands into his ski jacket and turning tail back across the street.

  In the morning, Heather complained of cramps. “I feel dizzy a lot, too,” she said after refusing to eat the breakfast he’d made.

  “Should I call Dr. Crawford’s office?” It came out sounding like an empty threat.

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  She spent the next several minutes vomiting in the bathroom.

  Hank was knocking on the front door. Heather, ill in bed, never commented on the noise, if in fact she even heard it. Alan sat on the living room couch, his wife’s purse in his lap, and looked at Hank through the foyer window. Eventually, Hank gave up and sauntered dejectedly across the lawn toward his house. The black humps of buzzards moved behind the hedgerows near the edge of his property. One of them squawked at Hank, and the man put his head down and hurried home.

  In Heather’s purse, Alan found the envelope Crawford had given to them. But it had been torn open. When he looked inside, he found it was empty.

  Him, he thought. He.

  Behind him, the living room wall cracked as something pushed up through it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The baby came on the evening of January 15, five months premature.

  It was after two in the morning and Alan was sitting on the couch, watching an old Humphrey Bogart movie with the volume turned all the way down. A bottle of Jameson was tucked in his lap and he was feeling pretty good, despite the burning ember in his gut. Having used all the misoprostol in Heather’s food and water, it had left none for him. He would have to go to the pharmacy for another refill eventually. In his head, he cursed Hearn Landry and his deputies who rotated surveillance outside his house.

  At the end of the hall, Heather cried out. It wasn’t a sleep moan; there was real strength, real agony behind it, causing Alan to spring up from the couch and knock the bottle of Jameson to the floor.

  His heart hammered.

  “Alan! Alan!”

  His mind whirling, he gathered his legs up under him and commanded them to move. When he hit the hallway, he could see his wife had turned on the bedroom light: a crooked rectangle of yellowy light spilled out of the bedroom doorway and fell against the opposite wall.

  “Alan, come!”

  It was time.

  It had come.

  When he arrived in the bedroom doorway, he saw his wife buckled over in a fetal position on the mattress. Her face was a mask of pure agony and fear, her long hair plastered to the side of her face with sweat. She clutched the bulb of her stomach with both hands, the loose cotton fabric of her nightgown riding up one pale thigh.

  “Oh, God,” she moaned.

  “I’m here,” he said, moving to the side of the bed. But he didn’t touch her, not right away. He stood there looking down at her.

  “Something’s wrong!” There was a rattle in her throat.

  “Shhhhh.”

  “… hurts…”

  “Shhhhh, baby.” He brushed some of her sweaty hair from her face.

  She glared at him. Her eyes were wide and fearful.

  Distrustful.

  “Something’s … something’s happening …”

  He sat down beside her on the bed, rubbing the side of her face. She was burning up. He sang, “Mama’s gonna buy you a big black bird …”

  “Alan!”

  Her back arched. Her legs straightened. The cotton nightgown rose up to her hips. Alan could see the darkened V of her pubis between her legs. The lower portion of her swollen belly looked as taut and sturdy as the flesh on a piece of overripe fruit.

  Heather cried out. She tossed her head back, wiping his arm with her damp hair. “Oh my God,” she panted. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God …”

  “Lie back.” He pushed gently on one shoulder.

  Like a turtle, she wheeled backward onto her back and repositioned herself.

  “It’s okay, hon. It’s fine.”

  “No!” she barked. That rattling—

  (death rattle)

  —was still prominent in her throat, her voice. Tremolo. Vibrato.

  “Alan, please!”

  Leaning forward, he helped reposition her legs, bring her knees up and her thighs apart. The hem of the nightgown was over her hips now, and he could see the swollenness—the redness—of her down there.

  “It will be okay,” he promised her. He surprised himself with the steadiness of his own voice. “Everything will be okay, honey.”

  “Hurts! Alan! Alan!”

  Much of the rest occurred with her screaming and with his eyes shut. Snapshot images were all he retained, but they were enough to
piece it all together and formulate a single, cohesive picture.

  There was blood. It was black as squid ink and soaked the mattress and the sheets. It came out in sudden squirts, arcing like a fountain. Heather shrieked and grabbed fist-fuls of the sheets, slamming her head back against the headboard while gritting her teeth.

  There was a smell, too—of feces and blood and the vague artichoke smell of semen.

  Heather’s hips bucked. The flesh of her stomach rippled, the stomach itself changing shape. There was a sound like brittle fabric being torn in half. Alan felt something warm and wet splattered against his left hand.

  It was less born than it was rejected—coming out as if through a wet and bloody flume, coated in lumpy, reeking gelatin on a wave of amniotic juices that nearly burned his flesh as they sprayed him. The thing itself—the him, the he—wriggled wetly, brokenly, rubbery … though Alan couldn’t tell if it was because the thing was alive or because its frail and unformed body was easily jostled into lifelike movements in the course of its expulsion from its mother’s womb.

  It spilled out and rolled across the mattress, landing almost soundlessly against Alan’s right knee.

  He wanted to scream.

  Didn’t.

  Held his breath.

  On the bed, Heather’s cries gradually lost their potency. Exhausted, her entire body seemed to cave in on itself. Her head hung forward, wet hair draped over her face like a veil, and she released the grips she’d had on the sheets. Her blood-slicked thighs quivered. She moaned, then sighed, her sour breath momentarily all Alan could smell.

  “Shhhhh,” Alan whispered. He was looking at her, not at the thing that was slumped against his knee. He could feel its wetness bleeding through the fabric of his sweatpants. “It’s over, honey. It’s okay.”

  Heather just sobbed behind that curtain of wet hair. Her entire body hitched.

  Alan climbed off the bed, aware of all the wet places on his clothes and body, as well as the tenseness of his muscles. How long had the whole thing lasted? Ten minutes? An hour? He had no idea.

  He leaned over his wife, kissed the top of her head. Heat radiated off her in waves like desert blacktop.

  “Is … is it … ?” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Just relax,” he whispered in her ear. “I’m going to get some towels. I’m going to clean this up.”

  She sobbed almost painfully. “Alan, no … please …”

  “It’s over,” he told her. “It’s okay now. We’re done.”

  In the bathroom, he gathered bath towels from the linen closet. Then in the kitchen he retrieved the box of Glad trash bags from beneath the sink. When he returned to the bedroom, Heather’s sobs had tapered off in her exhaustion. She lay slumped nearly on her side, her head craned at an awkward angle, her respiration labored.

  He happened to glance at it as he gathered it up and dumped it in the trash bag: pale, fishlike, appendages like twists of intestines. The face was only a face in the most generous of terms, unfinished and malformed, one eye cut to a slit, the other a horrific, staring emerald with a vertical pupil, its mouth a ragged, lipless slash, its ears mere canals drilled into the sides of its narrow, oblong head.

  It had something that looked like a segmented tail …

  Fuck…

  He dumped its lifeless husk into the trash bag, then mopped up the afterbirth and what blood he could with the towels before throwing them, too, into the trash bag. By the time he had finished, Heather was asleep, though she cried out periodically, a sound like a distant summer loon.

  He set the loaded trash bag in the tub, then went back into the bedroom and fell asleep on the bed, spooning his wife.

  Moments before sunrise, Alan arose and dressed quickly and quietly in a pair of old dungarees, an NYU sweatshirt, and a ratty old Miller Lite ball cap. Heather was still sound asleep in bed, and he walked through the house without turning on any lights. He collected the trash bag from the bathroom tub and carried it out the back patio doors.

  The wind was bitterly cold, the sky a mottled undulation of stars. There were things all around him, movement all around him, and he paused just outside the doors and held his breath.

  Buzzards. They were in all the trees surrounding the house, even the ones down by the street. They had gathered on the roof and chimney, too, the sounds of their clicking talons like typewriter keys.

  He waited for them to shriek but they remained silent.

  “Okay.” His voice was tremulous, shaky. “Okay, then. Good.”

  He kept a trowel and a shovel leaning against the back of the house beside the large ceramic flowerpot he’d used to burn the strands of cut vines. He took the shovel now and, carrying the trash bag over one shoulder, tromped into the field to the edge of his property, where the yard abutted the line of trees, now mostly bare for the season. He dropped the bag at his feet, then thrust the head of the shovel into the earth. The soil was cold and hard. He kept digging.

  Once the hole was large enough, he kicked the trash bag into it and shoveled the dirt back on top, covering it up.

  He didn’t know how long it took, but by the time he returned to the bedroom, he was breathing heavily and his arms were sore from digging. That fecal stench hung stiflingly in the stale air of the bedroom. Soundlessly, he stripped out of his filthy clothes, then crawled into bed behind Heather. She stirred just the slightest bit. Beneath them, the mattress was sodden with blood.

  It coated their legs.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  A part of Alan Hammerstun never got up from that bed. Or so he wished. But the truth was, his actions of the following morning were actions taken by a man who was not completely there, not fully aware of what he was doing, what he was thinking, what he was being. It seemed his movements occurred before he actually thought about doing them, as if he were controlled by someone or something else. So, in truth, perhaps a man named Alan Hammerstun never did get up from that bed. Or even more likely is the possibility that he had disappeared even long before that …

  Either way, when he awoke, it was daylight. There was a horrid, metallic taste in his mouth, and when he rolled over, all his bones and muscles ached. It unleashed a pathetic cry, one hand sliding across the crusted bedsheets.

  He sat up, blinking stupidly. The mattress was black with blood, and the room stank of death.

  Heather’s side of the bed was empty.

  Rolling quickly out of bed, he stomped into the hallway but froze when he saw the bathroom door halfway open, light spilling out into the otherwise darkened hallway in a vertical sliver.

  Jesus, no …

  He went to the door, shoved it open.

  Haggard, vacant, lost, she looked up at him from where she sat on the edge of the tub. Her nightgown was covered in dried blood as were her legs—dark runnels of it straight down to her ankles—and her hair was a rat’s nest of twisted wires.

  There was no life left in her eyes.

  He went to her, hugged her clumsily. Pressing her head against his chest, he could feel her heartbeat reverberate through his body. He imagined he could feel the thoughts clanging around in her skull like shrapnel in a tornado. When he eventually pulled her away from him, she stared at him with those vacant, haunted eyes.

  “We’re broken,” she told him flatly, soullessly. Then she stood and walked to the bedroom.

  It took Alan another thirty seconds to get his wits about him and follow her. He seemed to be leaving contrails of Alan-shaped electrons behind in his wake. When he stopped in the bedroom doorway, he saw her climbing onto the bloodied mattress and scooting backward until she struck the headboard. It was as if she didn’t see the blood anymore.

  “I love you,” he told her.

  “We’re ruined now.”

  He shook his head. “We went too far. But I can fix things. Do you trust me, Heather? Do you trust me to fix things?”

  She looked away from him and stared out the window into the yard. It was an overcast morning.
<
br />   “You’re weak and you’re hurt,” he said, moving around to her side of the bed. She continued to look past him. “But if you come with me, I can make you feel better.”

  “The baby—”

  “Is dead. It isn’t meant to be. Some people get sick and some people die. But I can fix us. I know how to do it. You’ve just gotta trust me and come with me.” He extended a hand to her. “Will you come with me?”

  She looked at him, and there were tears in her eyes. “No. It ends here. No more.”

  Anger welled up inside him, fueling his determination. The ulcer had returned in full force now, too. “No. Goddamn it, I’m not going to let it end this way. I can fix us.”

  She folded her arms and refused to take his hand. Tears spilled down her face.

  Outside, there was a dull crash. Alan felt it in his bones. He went quickly to the window and scanned the yard, the trees, the street. Across the street, he saw Hearn Landry’s cruiser still parked down the block. The sheriff walked around the car, pulling his hat off, one arm pinwheeling in the air as if swatting away swarms of gnats. He stared perplexedly at his own vehicle, and for a second Alan had no idea why. But then he saw the windshield and the webbing of cracks that spread out along the glass. At the center was something large and black and … feathery …

  “One of the birds,” he muttered. “Goddamn it. That was one of the birds.”

  Indeed, they had overpopulated his yard. And as he watched, they flocked closer to the street. There were some perched on the cement curb and others roosting on the tops of nearby cars. Some had migrated across the street and sat like gargoyles on the peaks of neighboring houses. While he looked on, the birds all opened their wings in a gesture of intimidation. That was what it looked like to him at first, anyway. But then he realized what they were doing when their heavy network of wings blotted Sheriff Landry out of his line of sight …

  They were providing concealment.