The Misunderstood and Other Misfit Horrors

by Jason Brannon

  “I’m coming,” she murmured again. She stopped in front of the door to the walk-in closet. “I’m coming,” she said as she pushed the unknown key into the lock. He knew for a fact that there hadn’t been a lock on that door earlier. The realtor had made a point of going through the entire house to make sure that the fourth key didn’t fit anything important. The closet door was one of the first ones she had tried.

  Maybe he had watched too many movies or read too many books. But he knew that something unnatural was waiting on the other side of the door, something that could be potentially threatening to Gina.

  “No,” he screamed as Gina turned the doorknob. Immediately, she woke up confused and scared.

  “Jacob?” she said, releasing her grip on the door. “Where am I? What’s going on?”

  Jacob ran to his wife and hugged her tightly. “You were sleepwalking again,” he said. “Let’s go back to bed.”

  Gina looked at the door she had been about to open and the keys that she now held in her hand. “What was I doing? I was trying to unlock a door that didn’t even have a place for a key.”

  “I don’t know,” Jacob was quick to say, snatching the keyring. “You must have been having some sort of dream. Let’s just go back to bed.”

  Once there, Gina went back to sleep easily enough, but Jacob wasn’t as fortunate. He kept wondering what might have been behind the door. Eventually, that curiosity was enough to push him out of bed and into the hallway.

  The closet door was closed up tight like the lid on a tomb. He put his hand on the knob and stopped. Confirming what he knew to be true, there wasn’t a place to insert a key nor was there any sort of lock so far as he could tell. Jacob wondered if he had been dreaming along with Gina when he saw her insert the key. Maybe they had been sleepwalking together.

  Gritting his teeth, he turned the doorknob a quarter turn, braced himself, and then turned it the rest of the way. The door swung open on its hinges, revealing a stack of boxes that they hadn’t unpacked yet. Nothing menacing crouched in wait for him as he had expected. He turned the closet light on to confirm it. The closet contained exactly what he knew it would.

  Weary from the night’s adventures, Jacob plodded back to bed. Gina was sleeping soundly. Intent on getting at least an hour or two of sleep, he pulled back the covers and froze. There in Gina’s left hand was the set of keys.

  After putting the keys back on their hook in the kitchen, Jacob pulled the covers up to his neck and tried to think of some reasonable explanation for it all. Gina must have gotten out of bed again while he was exploring the hall closet. That was the only possibility. But why? What was so special about those keys? Why were they so acutely embedded in her subconscious?

  Even as the questions formed in his mind, Jacob knew that three out of the four keys weren’t important. It was that fourth key-the one that unlocked an unknown door-that was important to Gina.

  Jacob made a decision to get rid of the key first thing in the morning. In the meantime, he put his arms around Gina and held her close. This was partly for the feeling of comfort she provided. It was also to make sure she didn’t get up and walk out on him again.

  He felt her pull away from him a few minutes before dawn. Sunlight was just beginning to creep into the room, stretching Gina’s shadow as she walked in front of the window.

  Despite the disorientation of half-sleep, it took him only a second to realize that she was gone again. A slap to the face couldn’t have roused him any better.

  “Gina,” he shouted, hoping to wake her before she made it to the closet. But something had a hold on Gina and was blocking out his words to her. She had already gotten the keys out of the kitchen again and was inserting the fourth key into the lock that hadn’t been there before when Jacob found her. This time she didn’t hesitate. She turned the key and opened the door. “I’m coming,” she whispered.

  The moving boxes weren’t there like before. Instead, there was a great dark void like the vast expanse of space. Only there were no stars to mar the otherwise perfect blackness, just a menacing laugh that resonated from the recesses of the void.

  “Come to me,” someone whispered in a voice that resembled the chatter of a pack of laughing hyenas. The sound made Jacob go numb and cold.

  Without qualm, Gina obeyed, stepping into the darkness. She looked over her shoulder once before the darkness swallowed her whole.

  “No,” Jacob screamed as his wife disappeared.

  The door slammed shut behind her. Jacob could have sworn that Gina woke up the minute she glanced over her shoulder at him. The look in her eyes was one of confusion and fear and an expectation of pain.

  He ran to the door and opened it to find the same dirty moving boxes that had been there to start with. There was no sign of Gina.

  What was worse she had taken the keys with her, leaving Jacob with no way to go after her.

  He must have searched the house fifty times or more that day, hoping that Gina would show up. She never did.

  * * *

  Sometimes at night as he lay there crying and hoping his wife would come back to him, he imagined that he could hear the soft sound of weeping. The thing that disturbed him the most was that he knew his imagination had nothing to do with it.

  The Oracles

  The crying babies sounded like police sirens. Brian wasn’t sure how anybody could get used to that sort of noise. It was bad enough that Denise had dragged him to the hospital for the birth of her new nephew. Yet bad was quickly turning to worse as she began to foster ideas of becoming pregnant and having a baby of her own.

  “Do you ever think about names for our future children?” Denise asked as they stood outside the nursery waiting for a chance to view her new nephew. “I like the name Skylar for a girl. Or Wyatt for a boy. What do you think about those?”

  “They’re both fine,” Brian grumbled.

  “Do you have any names you like better?”

  “I said those are fine.”

  “You obviously don’t want to talk about this,” Denise said in short, clipped tones.

  “You’re right,” Brian agreed. “I don’t want to name children that we don’t even have yet.”

  Denise looked at her husband and took a few steps away. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea to come here in the first place. You said you didn’t want to come, and I pushed the issue. I just thought it might warm you to the idea of having kids one day if you saw how precious they were, all fragile and vulnerable and innocent.”

  Brian sighed. Here it comes, he thought.

  Tears welled up at the corners of Denise’s eyes. “I support you in everything you do. I don’t question the odd hours you work. I don’t ask you to help much around the house. I try to be a good wife. All I want in return is a family. Is that too much to ask?”

  Brian didn’t want to make a scene right here in the middle of the hospital so he spoke in a whisper. “I’m not opposed to the idea of having children. I just feel like the timing is bad right now. Work is hectic. We’re fighting all the time. Money’s tight. Besides, you’ve only seriously started mentioning the idea since Brooke went into the hospital a few days ago.”

  He saw the change in Denise’s features and knew that a thunderstorm was brewing behind her eyes. “You think that the only reason I want a baby is because my brother and his wife have one? This is not my way of keeping up with the Joneses.”

  Without another word, Denise stormed down the hospital corridor toward the exit. Brian dutifully followed behind her, knowing he was in for a fight the minute they got to the car. But Denise didn’t say a word to him.

  She glared at him from the passenger seat, and he did his best not to look back at her. He knew that she was going to start screaming at him soon so he took a right turn at the stop light instead of a left. That was enough to temporarily confuse her.

  “Where are we going?” she demanded through clenched teeth.

  “I’ve got something to show you,” Brian replied calmly
.

  “Whatever it is, I don’t want to see it,” Denise said.

  “It’s important,” Brian said.

  “And what I want isn’t important? You are the most selfish person I have ever met.”

  “If you’ll give me five minutes, I’ll show you the reason I’m so hesitant to talk about having a baby.”

  “I’m not getting out of the car,” Denise said flatly, crossing her arms.

  Brian groaned, tired of dealing with Denise’s childlike attitudes. “O.K., look, we’ll make a deal. Just hear me out, see what I’ve got to show you. If you’re not convinced after this, then I’ll lay you down on my desk at the institute and impregnate you right then and there.”

  Denise didn’t reply at first. It was clear she was considering what he had said with a little more scrutiny.

  “Fine. Show me whatever you’ve got to show me. Then we’re going to talk about having a baby.”

  Brian nodded in agreement. He wasn’t exactly happy about going near a bunch of infants again, but if it proved to Denise that getting pregnant was a bad idea, then it was well worth the risk.

  His office and the study area were at the end of a long hall that was bisected by a guard station. The guards all knew Brian on sight and didn’t question his credentials.

  “Where are we going?” Denise demanded.

  “To see the babies I’ve been studying,” Brian explained. “We’ve been analyzing the sound patterns that newborn infants make to determine if there is enough structure to categorize it as speech.”

  “What does this have to do with us having a baby?” Denise demanded.

  Brian opened the door to a room just off of his office and led her into an area similar to that in a hospital viewing cubicle for new parents. A large pane of glass separated them from the babies. Yet the infants were close enough that the glass was easily ignored.

  “You’ve got all of them hooked up to monitors?” Denise asked, dumbfounded at the sight of so many wires crisscrossing their way across infant flesh.

  “And miked,” Brian added, pointing to a bank of microphones on the far side of the glass and a corresponding mixing board that sat in front of them like the console to an alien craft.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” Denise said. “What kind of parents would subject their newborns to this kind of treatment?”

  “The poverty-stricken kind,” Brian said. “We’re footing all the medical bills for these particular babies in exchange for a little time to study them.”

  “What could you possible expect to learn from a bunch of blabbering, crying kids?”

  Brian smiled at her, glad for the chance to finally make his point. “We’ve done a lot of analysis on the speech patterns of these particular newborns and discovered that there is, in fact, a type of language at work. We’ve fed each sound made into a computer voice-analysis system. This computer uses logarithms and algorithms in much the same way that code-breaking computers use them to crack cryptograms and encoded messages.”

  “And I suppose you’ve come up with a result,” Denise said smartly.

  “December 18th,” Brian replied. “I don’t know the significance of that date but according to the computer, that is what the babies keep saying over and over again. The whole thing’s got me freaked out. That’s why I’m a little hesitant about being around babies right now.”

  It was as if the plug holding all of the blood in Denise’s head had been pulled, allowing the color to drain away. “What did you say?”

  “December 18th. That’s the translation of what the infants are saying in baby talk. The computer has phoenetically grouped the sounds and determined that there is, in fact, some sort of primitive language embedded in all the gobbledygook. We’re not sure where the language comes from or how they know to communicate. It’s possible that they absorbed much of their knowledge while in the womb. It’s also possible that the collective unconscious is responsible for what they know. In any case, they can’t properly communicate the ideas in words that we understand because their palates aren’t completely developed at birth.”

  “Have they said anything else?” Denise asked. “Anything at all.” The expression on her face was a mixture of horror and intrigue.

  “Of course, they’ve said lots of other things. Mostly, they just tell us when they are hungry or when they’ve soiled their diaper. They also make remarks about the way everything looks. The colors, the shapes, the sizes of things. The world is still a mystery to them at this point, and they’ve got a lot of things to talk about. To only be a few days old, they’ve got quite a developed vocabulary. At first, we weren’t sure that we would have enough speech samples for the computer to analyze. But the babies have spoken volumes. Literally. In any event, they keep returning to that date-December 18th. I’m not sure why. Two days ago they said something else-‘He’s coming.’ I’m not sure what that meant either. The microphones are active and recording, however, twenty-four hours a day just in case we miss something. We’re also getting detailed transcripts of the conversations on a daily basis.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” Denise exclaimed, spitting the words out a little faster than she intended. “I wasn’t going to say anything yet, but this is too weird. I don’t need to hear any more about those babies.”

  “You’re scaring me a little,” Brian admitted. “What is it?”

  “I know this isn’t going to be what you want to hear at this point,” Denise blurted out. “But I’m pregnant. I went to the doctor last week. He confirmed it.”

  “What? How could this have happened? You were supposed to be on the pill.”

  “I forgot a couple of times,” Denise confessed.

  Brian was about to ask how she could have forgotten something so important when he realized that there was something else Denise wasn’t telling him. “Wait a minute,” he said. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

  Denise smiled and tried to seem positive about the whole thing. “December 18th is my due date.”

  “No way,” Brian said.

  Denise nodded. “Afraid so.”

  “It’s a coincidence.”

  “Maybe,” Denise agreed. “I was actually hoping to tell you all of this under better conditions. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been trying to warm you to the idea of having kids lately. That’s the reason I got so angry earlier. I didn’t know how you were going to react when I told you the news. But I felt like I had to speak up after you mentioned that date. Even if you’re not ready to be a father yet, you’re going to have to prepare yourself.”

  “You’re really pregnant,” Brian said sickly.

  “I think it was meant to be,” Denise said. “Your oracle babies even knew about it before you.”

  “You’re pregnant.”

  “You catch on quick,” Denise replied, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “But don’t worry. Things will be fine with our child. He won’t be some sort of misfit like these you’re studying. I’ll bet the message might even be different if you were using rich kids instead of poor. The computer could even be wrong.”

  Brian nodded his head like he was listening but his mind was elsewhere. All he could think about was what the infants’ cryptic message might mean.

  He’s coming.

  Brian spent the next few weeks trying to debunk his own results, looking for that flaw in the software, that one glaring error that would make those few deciphered words meaningless. Yet, try as he might, he couldn’t locate even the smallest deviance in his research. He was thorough in his work, and it reflected in his experiment.

  Brian had just about convinced himself that the messages really meant nothing at all when the babies began to say something different. For over a month the infants had repeated themselves time and time again, reciting that calendar day like a mantra, a litany. And then the patterns of speech changed. The sounds became different. The computer had new work to do and it performed tirelessly, separating the sounds into vowels and
consonants. Brian felt a little like he was waiting on a fortune cookie message. In the end, the words were nearly as cryptic and confusing. Yet, in the back of his mind, he suspected that they were much more significant.

  Kill it, the babies chattered. Kill it, the computer translated as it understood the infantspeak.

  By this point, Denise had already gone to the doctor a couple of times and confirmed that she and the baby were both developing normally. At this point, there were no signs of any defects or abnormalities that might prompt them to abort. Wisely, Brian decided not to tell Denise about the new message the infants were muttering. She would think it was all nonsense anyway. And maybe it was. Maybe this entire attempt to translate the abstract mutterings of babies into some reasonable semblance of language was a farce. Maybe he was looking for something that really wasn’t there. Although it was Brian’s research and his theory that had gotten the project off of the ground, even he was beginning to have misgivings about the results. Did babies really have a sort of language? And if so, were they trying to tell him something about his unborn child? Or were the messages the result of some fluke system glitch? Brian didn’t really think it was faulty computer programming, but neither did he think the messages were legitimate.

  He tried to imagine some reason why the babies would insist that Denise have an abortion and couldn’t come up with anything satisfactory. Day after day, he would tour the research ward and look in on the pink babies in their minuscule pajamas, thrashing about in their cribs, sucking on pacifiers or bottles, innocently absorbing each and every detail of a rapidly changing world. It seemed impossible that they could know anything about murder, and yet that is what they called for every time they made a sound. Given the bloody and violent history of the world, their words certainly supported the notion of a collective unconscious.

  At home, Denise seemed happier than he had ever seen her, and her joy was infectious at times, so much so that Brian worried more than he should have about the validity of the baby talk. He and Denise had grown so much closer in the past few months that Brian was reluctant to mention anything about work or the results he was getting. He loved his wife more than he ever had and didn’t want to ruin it. Yet he wanted to know the truth. He needed to know the truth.