The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5

by Bentley Little

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t there, okay? And when I looked up at Anna, she had the jar. She’d stopped crying and was busy trying to work the damn thing into her mouth!”

  “So how did she get it?”

  “I don’t know! Well, I didn’t know…”

  She dragged me by the arm to the kitchen.

  “I thought I might have left it close enough for her to reach, but I knew that I hadn’t. I left it…right…here.” Her forefinger stabbed at the counter. “So I took the jar back from her…you should have heard her scream…and I put it, very specifically, next to the sink. And I watched her.”

  Teresa paused, out of breath, trying to work up the nerve to tell me what happened next.

  “Anna looked at me and it was weird. All at once I felt kinda sick to my stomach. Like something was moving around in there. It only lasted a second, and only while she was looking at me. Her eyes were weird. Focused. Scary. Then she looked at the jar and it just…flew to her.”

  “It what?”

  She continued as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “Anna didn’t really catch it. It kinda just dropped in front of her and she picked it up and started to work on it again.”

  “You’re telling me that the jar flew to her.”

  “It flew, Pat! I saw it and I couldn’t believe it. So I took the jar from her again and I held onto it. Tight. Anna looked at the jar and I could feel it pulling against my fingers and I tried to hold onto it. I was squeezing it as tight as I could but it didn’t matter. When Anna looked at the jar, it went right to her.”

  I became aware of how quiet the apartment had become. Anna wasn’t crying anymore. The silence was suffocating, choking the air out of my lungs. I saw my own fear mirrored in Teresa’s dark eyes.

  “How can this be?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I, Pat. I put her to bed…just left the damn jar with her. I was afraid to take it from her again. I was afraid…of her. What are we going to do?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  * * *

  The next morning, when Anna woke up, we tested her.

  We started with some of her toys, showing each one to Anna and then moving them out of her reach. The teething ring flew out of Teresa’s hand as soon as Anna saw it. I tossed the plastic keys on the floor and they scuttled across the carpet and rose into Anna’s outstretched hand.

  Teresa pulled out a squeaky ball and worked it a few times to get Anna’s attention before hiding it behind her back. Anna squawked briefly, keys still clutched in her chubby fist, but the ball did not go to her.

  “So what’s that mean?” I said. “Did she lose interest, or is she just unable to get it?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was flat, quavering a bit.

  We moved up to bigger items. The remote control. A stuffed teddy bear. She appeared to have misjudged the weight of the basketball, because it smacked her squarely on the forehead and left her crying and angry, but otherwise unhurt.

  I tried holding onto a bottle of formula with both hands, using all my strength, just to see how much force she could exert against it. It was no good. The bottle flew to her from my hands, painfully splaying back my fingers in the process.

  For everything we tried, when Anna wanted what we showed her, she could make it come to her. But she couldn’t move the items that were out of her line of sight.

  Eventually, Anna got sleepy and cranky. Teresa set her down for a nap. While she slept, we talked.

  Together we debated the end of our world.

  Even now, I remember it perfectly. The afternoon sun cast slats of shadows at odd angles from the window blinds, and the silence in the apartment had swollen into an almost physical thing. The weight of doom. I sat on the couch beside Teresa and cradled her hands in mine. I took a deep breath.

  “We have to take her to the doctor,” I began. “This is too big for us…”

  “NO!” Teresa’s eyes welled with tears. “They won’t understand! They’ll take her from us and turn her into some kind of freak show.”

  “How can we handle this? Do you want to gamble on what she might or might not be able to move? On whether or not she’ll be able to pull the TV on top of herself ? How can we keep her safe?”

  “We’ll just have to make sure we don’t leave stuff lying around. And if we don’t show her that big things can move, she won’t try to make them come to her. It’ll be all right. We just have to be more careful!”

  “Listen to yourself, Teresa! How do you think we’re going to hide this from everyone?”

  “We’ll teach her just the same as we’d teach her anything else. We already know that if we keep her from seeing something, she won’t be able to get it. If she’s trying to get something she shouldn’t have, we’ll simply hide it out of sight. We can take care of her. Please, Pat. Please!”

  I knew better. To this day, I swear I knew better. Looking back at it now, I should have put my foot down and taken Anna to see the doctors or someone at the university—anything rather than trying to keep her with us.

  But sitting there, I saw the anguish on Teresa’s face, and I knew I would not change her mind. It was more than damning our daughter to a lifetime under a microscope: I would be damning our family, our marriage. She would never forgive me. To be honest, I would never have forgiven myself.

  “I’m not going to give our baby away,” she said quietly, almost to herself.

  “I know. We’ll make it work.”

  She cried softly on my shoulder and I stroked her hair as the shadows deepened around us.

  “Everything will be all right,” I told her.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  * * *

  As Anna grew, she learned. And as she learned, it became more difficult for us to keep some pretense of control over her.

  One day, with Anna safely strapped into her high chair, Teresa left the refrigerator door open while she was setting something on the counter. Attracted by the bright colors on the labels, Anna started “grabbing” things from the door. A jar of mustard. A ketchup bottle. The jug of milk. A carton of eggs. Most of the items she didn’t try to catch, but was content to let them soar across the room and crash into the wall behind her.

  Caught between getting to Anna and closing the door, Teresa eventually put her hands over Anna’s eyes to stop the barrage. She spent a good part of the afternoon cleaning the kitchen and dining room, listening to Anna thumping objects off her bedroom walls from the prison of her crib.

  Not long after that, Anna learned how to crawl and our apartment grew smaller and our problems bigger. Now that Anna could move throughout the apartment, our lives became even more harried; Teresa’s days became an endless series of futile attempts to keep ahead of Anna’s slow, but determined progress.

  Months passed in a blur, a slideshow of images marked our passage into confusion and despair.

  Teresa, her face darkened with dread, dragging herself out of bed in the morning. Teresa, her face smudged with fatigue, collapsing into bed at night.

  My own sunken eyes staring back at me from the mirror; days spent at work and nights spent catching up on the housework that Teresa was unable to do.

  Anna’s bright inquisitive face, her furious wails, an apartment that resembled a battle zone.

  And behind it all, Anna’s eyes. Her beautiful, terrible eyes.

  * * *

  Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like Anna was some demon-baby bent on finding new ways to torture us. She was just like any other nine-month-old who sees stuff and grabs it and puts it into her mouth to taste or gnaw or drool on. Sometimes temperamental and sometimes achingly cute. She was our daughter.

  But she was also different. For a long time, a forever spanning all of three months, we fought a losing battle. Distract. Move. Hide.

  Not a very good way to define one’s life, but Teresa and I wanted to believe that she would grow out of her baby phase and reach the stage where she’d
know the difference between yes and no. That she would somehow learn to leave things alone.

  Somewhere in its development, the average infant gains an understanding of the concept of “behind.” Young babies lose interest in an object when it is placed behind some obstruction because they don’t understand that it’s still there. Eventually, they figure it all out…some kind of spatial intelligence that signals a new stage of development. It’s all perfectly natural.

  For Anna, this comprehension signaled the beginning of the end of our battle. She learned that when we “hid” something from her, it didn’t simply go away. It was behind, but there was something in front. Usually one of us. She learned that she didn’t have to crawl to change her line of sight. All she had to do was to move whatever was shielding it from her view. She learned that she could move us.

  Just that quickly, our lives changed.

  When we tried to stop her or distract her, she abruptly pulled us out of the way. When we tried to hide or put away what Anna wanted, the door or drawer simply opened.

  The ways she found to exploit her talents grew almost exponentially. She learned she could unload the VCR tapes and DVDs from the entertainment center. She followed that by raiding the pantry and her old friend, the refrigerator. We lost dishes when Anna “explored” the kitchen cabinet where we kept them and crashed them against the walls and floors. Shutting Anna up in her room didn’t work anymore because she figured out how to open the door.

  We became little more than hermits: mentally and physically exhausted prisoners isolated in a cell of our own making. We were not safe taking Anna out of our apartment and we couldn’t trust anyone to come in. We could not risk it.

  The low point was the night when Teresa caught Anna sitting peacefully in her crib while her dresser floated around her room. Given Anna’s talents, the display shouldn’t have been too surprising. But it was the last straw. If she could “lift” something as heavy as her dresser, who knew just how heavy an object she could move. But there was something else: she dragged us around like rag dolls. How long before she was lifting us as well?

  That night, while Anna slept, I moved as much of our furniture as I could from our apartment into a storage unit.

  I returned home to blank floors and walls that echoed the noise of my arrival. Teresa sat on the empty carpet, lights off, holding a sleeping Anna against her shoulder. Teresa’s face, in shadow, was dark and fathomless. As empty as the apartment. As empty as my soul.

  We huddled together on the floor and waited for morning to come.

  We were wraiths in our own home. Ghosts of the people we once were. Shades of lives we lost.

  That was last night.

  * * *

  The sun rose this morning to a beautiful spring day.

  In the early light, the depths of despair we’d felt in the night seemed distant and less foreboding. Our barren apartment seemed open, almost airy.

  Together, Teresa and I watched Anna sleeping between us and without saying a word, we arrived at the same conclusion: We couldn’t do this anymore. We needed help.

  We looked ahead of us and saw Anna learning to walk. We imagined her in her terrible twos, the unreasonableness of the two-year-old temperament, mixed with the power of a god. We could envision the temptations and the horrors waiting for Anna outside our home, with an entire world of things that could get her attention…toys for the playing.

  Worst of all, we were left with the haunting question: how powerful was she? And how powerful would she become?

  It was beyond us, now. Perhaps it had always been.

  I called the doctor and set up an appointment for 9:30. I told his receptionist that our daughter was behaving strangely and left it at that. There would be plenty of opportunities to explain Anna to the doctor when we got there.

  * * *

  We left our apartment. Teresa carried Anna down the stairwell while I ran ahead to get the car.

  We had already talked about the best way for us to safely get to the doctor’s office. Anna could move big things: the TV, furniture, even us, around with ease. Neither of us was sure whether or not she could move something as big as a car or truck, but I wasn’t going to gamble against that chance. Just the thought of it gave me chills.

  I pulled up to the curb in front of our building, but waited until there was nobody around and no traffic passing by, before opening the car’s back door and giving Teresa the signal. She came out quickly, hand shielding Anna’s eyes, in part from the glare of the sun, but mainly so that she wouldn’t get a good look at anything around them. At the car, she strapped Anna into her baby seat, and shut the door.

  It was then that we realized that the height of Anna’s car seat allowed her a clear view out the car window.

  “This is not going to work!” I told Teresa. “She can see too much.”

  “But we have to get her to the doctor.”

  “Imagine what will happen if she grabs someone…or something…while we’re moving. People could get hurt. People could die. We could die.”

  “But we have to try!” Her voice, pleading and desperate.

  “We could walk…” I began, but immediately knew that was a bad idea. “No. She’d see even more that way.”

  “What if I sat on the floorboard with her in my lap?”

  “That’d do it!” I hugged Teresa. “But you’ll have to ride in the back seat. I don’t want Anna getting interested in my keys or the steering wheel.”

  “So…you think it will work?” she said.

  I hugged her again. “Yeah. Let’s get going.”

  We turned back to the car and two things happened, all at once.

  Anna screamed. Not the pissed-off, “I didn’t get my way” type of scream. She screamed in absolute pain. The type of sound that makes you drop everything and come running with your heart in your throat.

  The other thing that happened was bizarre, but every bit as terrifying. The car window beside Anna exploded, showering all of us in a rain of shattered bits of broken and molten safety glass.

  “ANNA!”

  Teresa screamed and I ran to the car door, glass burning holes through my clothing, and tried to open it but the door frame had melted and warped, blistering my hands as soon as I touched it. I ran around to the other side of the car. Anna was shrieking now in agony and I threw open the door and crawled through to get to her. Then I saw her eyes…

  God help me, I saw her eyes.

  My baby’s beautiful auburn eyes were a muddy, bruised color and the whites were shot full of red. The skin around her eyes was raw and beginning to blister. Blood leaked from the corners and traced streaks down her face.

  “Oh my God, Anna! Hang on! Daddy’s gonna get you out of here. Hang on!”

  I fumbled with the buckle on her car seat. Teresa had come around to the other side of the car and was standing behind me.

  “What’s wrong, Pat? Is she okay?” Her words became a mindless litany. “Is she okay, Pat? Is she? Is she okay…”

  “I don’t know, dammit!”

  I looked at her over my shoulder. Teresa flinched as if I had slapped her.

  “Teresa, I don’t know what happened, but we can’t afford for you to panic right now. We’ve got to get Anna out of here and get her inside and it’s not going to help her if you’re freaking out!”

  I turned back and gently lifted the seat belt over Anna’s head. By then, she was howling and I was desperate to get her back into the apartment, but before I did, I took a quick glance, a snapshot in my head, through the empty space that had been our car window.

  What had Anna seen?

  I scooped her out of the car seat and sprinted Anna inside as fast as I could carry her. To be honest, I was worried about what Teresa might do when she saw Anna’s eyes, but somehow, she had managed to get a little control over herself. She was right on my heels as I ran up the stairs.

  * * *

  Eight minutes.

  I know it was eight minutes because I had glanced
at my watch as I turned toward the car in the instant before the window exploded. It couldn’t have taken me more than two minutes to get Anna out of the car and into the apartment and another minute until I was able to get it through to the 911 operator that my daughter was seriously injured.

  Five minutes had passed. Teresa was holding Anna, still trying to calm her down. Three more minutes passed while I yelled at the 911 operator to hurry the fuck up. Then the first earthquake hit.

  In the instant before everything started shaking, it darkened briefly outside, like the shadow of a fast-moving cloud passing overhead. Then the world convulsed. We flew around the apartment like rag dolls. The windows shattered and the walls cracked. The doors banged open and shut, splitting in their frames. Just when I thought I couldn’t take any more and that we would be crushed as the building fell apart around us, it all stopped.

  Suddenly, silence, echoes still roaring in my ears. Eventually, other sounds intruded: car alarms blatted in the parking lot; dueling police and fire truck sirens wailed. More chilling, sounds of fear and pain and anguish coming from the other people in their apartments.

  I looked around. Teresa, pale, wide-eyed, had a small cut on her forehead, but otherwise looked okay. Anna didn’t appear to have been injured further, but was lethargic and hung limp in Teresa’s arms.

  When the next wave hit, I just had time to drag Teresa and Anna into the kitchen and throw ourselves in the space between the counters before the roof collapsed. Then another wave hit. And another. They continued, each one worse than the one before, and each one shaking apart more of our home. By the time they stopped, our building had collapsed—very little was left standing. By some miracle, our kitchen stayed mostly intact, with the cabinets propping up part of the fallen ceiling. To a certain degree, we were trapped. I was pretty sure that I could move enough debris to allow us to escape. But I wasn’t sure if I could do so safely, without accidentally making everything else fall in on us. So we sat. And waited.