by Brian Hodge
And my nightmares were getting worse.
I kept dreaming I was in doctor’s’ offices and hospitals, tracking the development of our monstrous fetus, watching its scaly face growing on ultrasound monitors, its unformed yellow eyes maturing in time lapse.
I don’t know why I kept imagining these horrible things. I was as devastated by our loss as Sarah. I’ve always wanted to be a father.
I’m sure there’s a connection somewhere. I’m not a psychologist.
Of course we realized we had to get out of the place when the walls started convulsing.
Actually, convulsing is not the right word. I don’t have a word for what was happening.
It started with the standard creaking noises that you always hear about in stories such as these, some of the noises loud enough to wake us up. Support beams would crack. Wallboard would pop. Houses as old as ours are always going to have a sound to them.
Settling noises, whatever.
But this was different.
One night we were in the living room trying to ignore all the angst when the ceiling banged. Again, banged is not precisely what it did, but it’s the best description I can muster at this point.
We both jerked with a start. I think Sarah even ducked, as though somebody had fired on us.
“Jesus,” I said. “What was that?”
“I don’t —”
It happened again, a snapping noise like a timber breaking in two, but this time there were aftershocks in other rooms. Like a ripple effect.
I saw something move in my peripheral vision.
“OhmyGod, Eddie, look!”
I followed her gesture toward the opposite wall by the fireplace.
The paneling was bowing outward as though under great pressure. You could hear the wood cracking. The noise was so loud it was hard to hear Sarah’s cry.
“We have to get out of here!”
She threw off her quilt and started toward the front door but tripped on a rug. She sprawled to the floor. I was helping her up when the whole house shivered.
I froze there on the floor. It was like turbulence. Or an earthquake.
“Oh God,” Sarah uttered.
The odor engulfed us in a rich, meaty cloud of blood and protein.
I dragged Sarah toward the front door.
The sounds that were coming from the basement were incredible.
By the time we got out, the phenomena had ceased.
I managed to get Sarah to the car, and we sped out of there without a word.
It took us an hour to get to Sarah’s parents’ farm in the next county. When we arrived it was nearly midnight, and we had to make up some excuse. We told them the boiler in our basement had exploded.
Later, we lay in the darkness of her parents’ guest room and discussed what had happened.
Sarah was as pragmatic about these matters as I, and notwithstanding our deep pain and depression over the loss of the pregnancy, it never once occurred to either of us that our house was haunted.
I told her I thought it had something to do with my neglecting to fix the furnace, combined with our collective grief, which had somehow formed a chain reaction of hallucinations and coincidence.
She almost believed me.
It was a lie of course.
In the final moments as we were fleeing the house, I had experienced a sort of mini-revelation. We were stumbling across the yard, making our way toward the garage, when I noticed the attic window was breathing. That’s the only way I can describe it.
This was right before the manifestation stopped.
Hyperventilating is a better word.
All at once it occurred to me what was happening. And in that single epiphany, right before the phenomena halted, I realized many things. I realized that I had indeed brought about these events myself, and I would soon have to return and face the inevitable.
Most importantly, I realized that what we were witnessing was not a standard haunting. The house was not under siege from some long dead spirit doomed to avenge his untimely demise. The house was doing something altogether different.
The house was doing something that had sprung from my deepest fears. The cracking noises, the warping of walls, these were not your standard ghostly phenomena.
These were contractions.
The house was in labor.
I returned the next evening.
I hadn’t planned on returning in the dark. God knows, it would have been a lot easier to confront this thing in the daylight. But the truth is, it took nearly twenty-four hours to get up my nerve.
Climbing the porch steps, heart racing, I was still unsure about what I was going to do. I looked at my watch. It was after midnight.
Something about the little date window on my Timex caught my eye.
What was it about the 11th?
I opened the front door and went inside.
It was quiet. And dark. And as balmy as a greenhouse. The intensity of the smell was tremendous. Like the inside of a rotting oyster.
Initially, we had misidentified this odor as human blood. Now I realized it was not blood at all. It was the salty tang of amniotic fluid.
I crossed the dark living room. The lights were off. I tried a switch. No power. There were framed pictures on the floor.
The walls were marbled with cracks.
On my way up the stairs, I heard the distant, faint sound of thumping. Actually, I felt it more than heard it. As delicate as a baby’s heartbeat.
The second floor was just as we had left it. A couple of lamps had fallen. I took a peek at our bedroom. Our bed was unmade.
I wiped sweat from my brow.
A tremor passed through the floor beneath me.
I grabbed the door jamb and braced myself as the sound of cracking timbers filled the darkness. I winced. The ceiling beams groaned above me. I could see the seams and joints shifting in my peripheral vision.
All of a sudden I had to get out of there. It wasn’t just the noise and the vibrations. It was a spontaneous sense of doom that was coming over me.
I started back down the hallway toward the stairs but stumbled on a buckled-up carpet runner. I fell to the floor near the base of the attic steps.
Something was rattling. A violent sound. Like a muffled Thompson machine-gun. I gazed up at the top of the stairs and saw the door to the attic shaking wildly.
“Oh — !”
The word puffed out of my lungs on an involuntary breath as I realized what I was looking at. The nursery was behind that door. I never finished the room, and when the miscarriage happened, I simply locked it up and forgot about it.
The thumping noise was rising all around me, a thunderous tattoo in the dark.
I was frozen with dread.
The door at the top of the stairs was cracking and popping, its panels bloating outward as though made of rubber. Something horrible and immense was pushing its way out of that room. I couldn’t take my eyes off it
I managed to rise to my feet. I was damp with sweat and terror. I knew it was I who was coaxing this unnamable thing into existence, but there was nothing I could do.
I started up the stairs.
The door-frame was swelling, splintering, dilating, the contractions coming faster and faster now. My brain was swimming with images. And that incredible tympani pounding, pounding.
Right then I remembered what was so significant about April 11th.
The due date.
“NO!!”
The door burst open.
Something that was neither solid nor smoke, neither human nor animal, leapt out of that room.
I instinctively ducked.
The shimmering black entity roared past me and penetrated the opposite wall with the force of a nuclear shock wave. The entire building shuddered, and I caught one quick glimpse of the thing before it was absorbed into the surface of ancient floral wallpaper, then expelled through the outer skin of the house like a geyser of antimatter.
It was worse than my dar
kest fantasy, worse than my bleakest nightmare.
I careened backward down the stairs and landed on the small of my back, the pain shooting up my spine.
It was as though someone had thrown a switch. The noises stopped, the house settling, the smell dissipating. Even the temperature seemed to abruptly return to normal.
For a moment I had to fight for my breath, but soon I was breathing freely again.
At the top of the stairs, the door hung limply on broken hinges.
The house was silent again.
I was alive — that was about all I could say. I had survived the due date.
I lay there in the dark for a while, staring at the ceiling, trying to get the image of that thing out of my mind. I’m not a spiritual man, not especially deep, but at that moment I knew I had done something wrong.
Evil.
Eventually I got up, hobbled down the stairs, and walked out of the house.
I walked and walked that night, through the indigo country darkness, until I was lost and alone…
…devastated by the knowledge that — for the brief time I was earmarked to be a father — I could not avoid the mistake all bad parents make.
The unleashing of another damaged progeny into the world.
V. NOIR
“The dead of midnight is the noon of thought.”
- Anna Barbauld
MAMA
Detective Third-Grade Gene Kilgallon stands alone in a still life from hell.
He wears rubber surgical gloves on his delicate, powdered hands.
He has cotton booties over his Armani loafers.
He writes notes in his spiral-bound, his handwriting forming tight little rows of dark blue ballpoint.
He records observations about the scene: 4:37 AM, Sunday, August 16th, a male Caucasian in his mid thirties slumped over a trundle bed in the corner of a low-rent shotgun shack, apparent cause of death either massive blood loss from apparent lacerations or asphyxiation from apparent ligature marks, depending upon the causes of lividity in the neck and facial areas (ME to determine time of death).
The detective makes precise notes about the blood patterns on the walls of this one-room cabin in which he is standing, the dark smudges indicating a struggle, the dark arterial spray across the refrigerator in the corner, fanning out along the wall, suggesting overkill, suggesting the perp might have known the victim, suggesting a possible grudge-killing.
Kilgallon takes deep breaths between each entry. The writing helps him concentrate, helps him focus on the fresh crime scene, helps him ignore his natural tendency toward over-reaction, toward emotional involvement, toward repulsion. A diminutive man with narrow, intelligent eyes, oversized ears, and razor-groomed black hair, Kilgallon is dressed in his customary double-breasted Brooks Brothers suit, crisp shirt and silk tie. He believes in order and neatness.
Sometimes he hears his mama’s shrill voice in the back of his mind, admonishing him for being careless.
He pauses from his writing and takes a good long look at the scene.
The overriding feeling now is one of disappointment.
Only a few moments ago, Kilgallon had thought he had stumbled upon the handiwork of the Red River Killer, a notorious serial murderer whom the Stinson Homicide Squad (in cooperation with the local field office of the FBI) had been hunting for months. What a coup that would have been! A junior detective like Kilgallon, only thirty-two years old and fresh from patrol, still in the fifth month of his sixth-month probationary period, sent out on a simple errand to interview a night watchman at a remote forest preserve: Discovering the latest victim of the Red River Killer.
What a break!
But now… all Kilgallon sees is chaos.
He sees the broken glass strewn around the cabin, and the cardboard cylinder of corn meal lying on the floor, its dust blossoming across cracked linoleum. He sees the overturned chairs, the bloody arc on the mattress ticking, the imprint of a belt buckle on the headboard, and the drip patterns beneath the body indicating the victim was moved, perhaps post-mortem.
This is not the work of the Red River killer.
Kilgallon knows all too well the Red River killer’s signature. Kilgallon had studied the Behavioral Science Unit’s memos as though cramming for a final exam: The Red River’s fetishistic attention to clean-up, the freshly scrubbed surfaces, the faint residue of cleaning fluid, the blood-soaked refuse neatly bagged and stacked near the door, and the corpse stripped and wiped and disinfected and wrapped like a choice cut of meat prepared for the holiday larder.
Victims of the Red River killer are always posed in tidy bundles.
Detective Kilgallon closes his eyes amid the carnage and tries to ignore The Smell.
The Smell is a grappling hook striking the detective’s skull, sinking into his nasal passages, burning cold-hot, ammonia rot. That coppery, salty, alkaline spoor. The smell of the abattoir, the charnel house. The smell which Kilgallon will never get used to.
Kilgallon’s hands are oily with perspiration in their rubber gloves now.
His heart is hammering harder than ever.
Now you just calm right down this instant, Eugene, and you get your head straight. You’re a Kilgallon, and no Kilgallon is going to let some slaughterhouse scene get the best of them. Do you hear me, Eugene?
Kilgallon swallows air and tries to breathe through the sound of Mama’s hard, cold voice.
And that’s when he hears the noise.
— clink! —
It comes from outside, just beyond the fog bank of shadows encircling the cabin, and the abruptness of it — an almost jittery quality to the sound — stiffens Kilgallon’s spine like a lightning rod.
Somebody is coming. But it’s not a uniform, and it’s not an ME, and it’s not forensics. It can’t be. Kilgallon only called in the scene a couple of minutes ago. There is no conceivable way that the team could get here that quickly. Plus, the sound doesn’t have that casual, authoritative stride of a badge or an emergency tech. It’s an awkward sound, jagged, nervous. Like a tentative footstep accidentally kicking a bottle across the gravel of the narrow drive.
Somebody approaching the cabin.
Kilgallon seizes up for a moment.
There are so many options here, the synapses firing and crackling in Kilgallon’s mind, the lessons resonating from his Academy days. He could draw his side arm, storming the front door, shouting orders at this unexpected visitor: Freeze, buddy! — Hands up! — Do it now or suffer the consequences! Or he could call out from where he is standing, call out to the anonymous guest: Police! — Stay back, please! — This is a crime scene! Or he could play it hard and fast, grabbing something like a lamp or a stray dish, hurling the object through the front window to surprise the mysterious oncoming figure, then maybe dive back toward the rear door with gun blazing like something from a Mickey Spillane novel.
But for myriad reasons too complex and convoluted to sort out, Kilgallon decides — within the span of an instant — to do none of the above.
He decides to go with his instinct.
He decides to wait, hide, and see what happens.
The footsteps are coming up the cement steps now, scuffling toward the front door.
Move, Eugene! Move! You idiot! You useless, good-for-nothing little boy! —
Kilgallon backs away from the body, his cotton booties allowing him to maneuver silently backward. He whirls around toward the shadows without making much noise, and he scans the back wall, his gaze sweeping across the prehistoric gingham curtains, stained Formica counters, congealed sauce pans, frantically searching for a nook or a cranny or a piece of furniture or anything behind which to hide. He can hear the footsteps outside the shack, scuttling across the porch, pausing outside the front door.
Then the sound of something jiggling in the latch.
Kilgallon finds a large plastic trash barrel on the far side of the kitchenette, pushed into the corner, half immersed in shadows, filled to the brim with rotting garbage.
/> He ducks behind it just as the sound of the door coming open pierces the silence.
At this point, several things happen at once, overloading Kilgallon’s brain. He sees the figure entering the cabin, and he realizes it’s a woman — a woman, for God’s sake — and he notices that she’s carrying something that looks like a small tree in a burlap pot.
Kilgallon assumes this is a coworker, a gardener, or a groundskeeper.
Then he stops thinking about anything else because there is a foreign object lying in a sticky puddle of gore next to the corpse.
His notebook.
He must have dropped it when he heard the footsteps approaching.
Now Kilgallon’s throat tightens with panic, a boa constrictor wrapping around his sternum, squeezing, squeezing, heartbeats pulsing in his ears, the ghostly voice of his stern, judgmental mother rising up in his brain: What in God’s name are you doing, Eugene, hiding like a naughty little boy? You’re a policeman, for God’s sake. You belong here. Pull yourself together, boy! You must question this woman, you must do it this instant!
The dry, loveless rasp of the matriarch is a diamond drill now, boring through Kilgallon’s psyche, just as it has done for years, but stronger now, stronger than ever, because Kilgallon is hiding in the shadows, metamorphosing into a lonely little boy, cowering in the cellar, avoiding his mother’s terrible icy gaze, hiding things from her, hiding his report card, hiding the frayed cuffs on his Catholic school uniform, hiding the scuffs and scratches on his little Buster Brown shoes.
Across the cabin, the unexpected visitor takes a few steps toward the carnage, then pauses.
A shaft of yellow light catches her face, and Kilgallon feels himself turning to stone. He recognizes her. He recognizes that deeply lined face, those folds of leathery skin crinkled up around pale blue eyes. She’s an apparition in the dimly lit cabin, an avatar straight out of Kilgallon’s dreams. A stocky little bulldog of a woman in her late fifties, dressed in a faded sweater, stretch slacks and crepe soled nurse’s shoes, standing motionless for endless moments, holding her potted tree sapling, staring at the tendrils of dried blood. Her shoulders slump. Head cocks at an odd angle.