The Wicked

by James Newman

  David shifted his weight on the bed, feeling very uncomfortable beneath her innocent gaze.

  “Is there something wrong with the baby?” Becca asked.

  “N-no,” David faltered. “It’s not—” He took a deep breath. Swallowed a lump in his throat. “You’ll understand one day, sweetie. I promise. This baby...that is, your mother and I—”

  “You sound like you’re trying to make up a fib.”

  David almost laughed out loud in spite of himself. No fooling Becca.

  She said, “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “You’re right, honey. I haven’t. And I’m sorry. It’s something that—”

  Becca’s eyelids grew heavy even as she continued to play her role of pint-sized interrogator. Still, she did not let up. “I’m gonna have a little brother. And you don’t love him, do you? You never have.”

  David felt warm tears in the corners of his eyes, and he quickly rubbed them away with two fingers. God, this was hard. What do you say to a seven-year-old about matters such as this?

  He opted to stall some more. “You’re so sure you’re gonna have a baby brother, are you? How do you know it won’t be a baby sister?”

  “Because you and Mommy already have a girl,” Becca explained. “Me.”

  David smiled. “That’s right. And there will never be another like Miss Becca. But you could still have a little sister, you know.”

  “Maybe,” Becca said, and the tone of finality in her voice seemed to indicate the conversation was over. She closed her eyes, rolled onto her side, away from him. So like her mother it was positively mind-blowing.

  “Don’t you want to finish reading about Jonah and the Whale?” David asked, placing one hand on her side. He could feel her tiny ribs through her skin, and in that moment he wanted to hold her forever and never let her go. For perhaps the millionth time since Becca came into his life, he found himself thinking about how helpless children were. Entirely at the mercy of their guardians. Empty little vessels waiting for their bodies to be nurtured, for their minds to be filled with knowledge. Perhaps that was the most terrifying thing of all—the fact that parents could fill that tiny mind with anything they wanted...with love or hate, kindness and tolerance, or with hate and bigotry. Or anything in between. It was up to him and Kate to mold this precious child into a levelheaded young woman. Pretty fucking scary, when you got to thinking about it.

  “Becca, honey?” David whispered when she did not answer. She had either begun to drift off or was in deep thought. He did not expect her to let this go so easily. He raised the book in his hands, said softly, “Don’t you want to finish reading the story? It’s your favorite.”

  “No, Daddy.” Becca pulled her Barbie covers up tighter around her shoulders. “I’m sleepy. Will you turn out the light?”

  “Sure.”

  “And turn on my nightlight, please?”

  “You got it.” He walked around to the other side of her bed and clicked on her Lion King nightlight.

  “I love you, Daddy,” Becca said.

  He kissed her behind the ear.

  “I love you too, sweetheart. More than anything.”

  “Oh, my God!” Kate sat up in bed as fast as her pregnant bulk would allow. “David!”

  Her hands went to David’s shoulders, and she shook him violently. “David, wake up!”

  “I’m awake,” David groaned.

  “Something’s wrong with Becca!”

  David heard it too, now. A frantic bawling from the room across the hall. Once his sleep-fogged mind registered the source of that awful wailing, his parental instinct kicked in. His heart skipped a beat. Jesus Christ. He jumped up, gasped when his toe jammed against the leg at the foot of the bed, but ignored the pain as he limped to his daughter’s room.

  He turned on the light as he entered her bedroom behind Kate. Becca was sitting up in her bed, squeezing the pink bunny Uncle Joel bought for her so tightly the poor thing appeared ready to come apart in her arms any second. The seven-year-old’s eyes were red and swollen, and her crying persisted as David and Kate sat down beside her on the bed. Snot ran in tiny rivers down her quivering chin.

  “Mommy...Daddy!” she cried.

  “We’re here, baby,” Kate said. “What’s the matter? Did you have a nightmare?”

  Becca crawled from beneath the covers and fell into her mother’s arms, bawling into Kate’s soft pink gown. Kate stroked her hair, kissed her head, and stared at David with concern in her eyes.

  “What is it, baby?” David asked. “We’re here now. Talk to us.”

  After several more minutes of trembling and quiet sobs, Becca leaned away from her mother, looked at her father. “It was awful, Daddy...just awful.”

  With that, she broke into a new fit of crying, a frantic spell that brought tears to Kate and David’s own eyes.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” Kate said. “Whatever it is, you can tell us about it. Was it a nightmare?”

  “Talk to us, baby,” David said.

  Becca sniffled long and hard. She leaned away from Kate again, rubbed at her eyes, and David couldn’t help but notice the glistening mass of snot she left behind on Kate’s new maternity gown.

  “It was terrible. He wanted to get me!” Becca could barely talk now, her chest spasming with her frantic sobs.

  “Calm down, baby,” David said. “It’s okay. Mommy and Daddy are here now. Nothing’s going to hurt you.”

  “Would you like to tell us about it?” Kate asked.

  “He...wanted to get me.”

  “Shhh,” David said, gently stroking his daughter’s back. “Who wanted to get you, sweetheart?”

  “The bad man. The man with the really long beard.”

  “It was a nightmare, baby,” David said, taking Becca in his own arms now. She felt like a limp doll in his arms, and only when Kate took her hand did she speak again.

  “It was just a nightmare,” Kate echoed her husband’s assurances.

  “I know,” Becca said. “But it was so real, Mommy. He was here.”

  “No one was here, Becca,” Kate said. “Remember the nightmares you had before we left New York? We explained how you were scared to leave your friends behind, but everything would be okay?”

  “Yeah. I ‘member.”

  “That turned out just fine, didn’t it? There wasn’t anything to be afraid of.”

  “Nothing to fear at all,” David said. “Remember Teddy Chandler, and the Tar-Heels?”

  Becca nodded, smiled weakly up at her father, though she didn’t seem to understand the relevance of Teddy Chandler at the moment.

  Teddy Chandler was the nine-year-old brat who had lived down the hall from the Littles in their old apartment building in New York. Seemed the kid was never happy unless he was trying to frighten Becca. Kate had spoken with Teddy Chandler’s mother about this on more than one occasion, but it hadn’t done a bit of good. The last thing the boy told Becca before the Littles started moving out all their stuff was that North Carolina was where all the monsters lived. They were called “Tar-Heels,” according to the creative genius that was Teddy Chandler, and they crawled out from under your bed at night to eat you. They were really slow, though, so you could try to run. Problem was, these slobbering, kid-hungry beasts had planned ahead: they used brushes made from the hair of little girls to smear tar all over the floor, so your feet would get stuck and you couldn’t run away. Within seconds, he told Becca, they’d gobble you whole and you’d never have a fighting chance of being anything but eventual Tar-Heel poop.

  Teddy Chandler’s story had given Becca nightmares every night in a row for almost a week. Finally, Kate had sat the child down with a book she rented from the local library (Abridged History of the 50 States) and read to her the story of how North Carolina came to be known as “the Tarheel State.” Becca brightened as she discovered that this had nothing at all to do with monsters or brushes made from the hair of little girls. She had even let slip a giggle or three a
s Kate explained to her that they would soon be Tarheels themselves.

  Tonight, however, Becca’s nightmares had returned. Even in those days when Becca felt threatened by those mysterious, little-girl-eating North Carolina Tar-Heels, neither she nor David had ever seen her so terrified. She had awakened them in the middle of the night several times in the past, but more often than not such occasions had been nothing more than teary-eyed requests to sleep with Mommy and Daddy. Never had the child woke up screaming before. Never had they seen her like this.

  “You understand that nightmares aren’t real, right?” David said. “You’re a big girl.”

  “This was real, though, Daddy. He wanted to get me. He wanted to eat me. He said he came from the Land of Tears, and...and you and Mommy couldn’t stop him.”

  “We’ll see about that, won’t we?” David said, thrusting out his chest with mock bravado. He balled up his fists, twisted his features into his best Monster-Fighting-Father face.

  “You know we would never let anything happen to you, Becca,” Kate said.

  “Never ever,” David said.

  “Never in a million trillion years.”

  “He was old,” Becca said, as if she hadn’t heard a word of that. “Really old. And he had this big gray beard that went on and on forever. His eyes were black. He looked like Santa Claus, kinda, but he was really really skinny. He was all gross-looking, too, like the belly of that frog you found that time and tried to put on Mommy’s shoulder.”

  “Yuck,” David said. “But it was a just a dream, baby.”

  “And he was naked.”

  “Naked?” Kate and David said at the same time.

  “Yeah. But I couldn’t see his...wee-wee...‘cause his beard was so long and dirty.”

  Everyone was silent for the next minute or so while it all soaked in. Quite a disturbing nightmare, whether the dreamer was a child or not. Finally, Becca broke the silence with more unsettling imagery from her dream.

  “He killed that boy, didn’t he?” she asked suddenly, her words all running together as if she had been contemplating that topic all along but hadn’t really wanted to know the answer till now.

  “What?” Kate said, stunned.

  “That boy who died. The man in my nightmare...he killed him, didn’t he?”

  “How did you know about that?” David asked.

  “I saw it on the news.”

  Kate and David glanced at one another, gave simultaneous sighs of relief. So that was it. They worried about Becca witnessing anything so graphic, so disturbing, on the local news—or on any television program, for that matter—but they could accept such a reasonable explanation. The child’s subconscious had merely stored away a quick report she had seen on the news, they realized, in order to dredge it up later while she slept.

  “Plus, he told me about it.”

  “Who told you about it?” David asked.

  “The man in my dream. He told me about Billy Dawson. He said he killed that boy.”

  “Oh, baby,” Kate said.

  “He said he ate his soul.”

  Kate held her daughter tighter than ever. “Sweetheart.”

  “Becca,” David began, opting to tell his daughter the truth when all else failed. “You’re right, honey, a boy did die a couple of weeks ago. A boy from Morganville. But no one killed him. It was an accident. It’s tragic, but sometimes things like that happen.”

  “I guess,” Becca said, though she did not sound convinced.

  “It’s true, baby,” Kate said. “This meanie, he was what we adults call a ‘figment of your imagination.’ He had nothing to do with that boy dying. Because he’s not real.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course we’re sure,” said David. And Kate added, “Absolutely.”

  “He smelled like something burning,” Becca said. “Like when we used to go to Pappaw’s house, and he burned leaves in the back yard?”

  “That was real,” David said, lifting his daughter in his arms to carry her to bed with them, “But the man in your dream wasn’t. Mommy and Daddy would never lie to you. You know that.”

  As he pulled the covers up around her shoulders, Becca said in the softest, most delicate voice, “He said his name is Lo...”

  She seemed to search for a word just beyond the borders of her memory, for the right pronunciation. Struggled for it. Then, finally, she found it.

  “Moka...no. Moh-loch. Mr. Moloch. Yeah. I think that was it. Moloch. But he said I could call him Mo-Mo.”

  David frowned. As if on cue, thunder rumbled in the distance, another storm approaching in the wee hours of the morning. And with it came a furious hurricane of jumbled thoughts...

  Moloch.

  Where the hell had he heard that name before?

  He had. He was sure of it. But he hadn’t the slightest idea where.

  “Becca, where did you hear that name?” he asked, though the only answer Becca supplied for him was that it was the name of the man in her nightmare, and she really wished she could sleep with Mommy and Daddy tonight.

  Moloch.

  Even after they carried Becca to bed with them, tucked her in between them, and long after Kate and Becca began to snore lightly beside him, David lay awake, unable to sleep because of that name. He stared up at the pale expanse that was his bedroom ceiling, tried to dig deep inside his brain...but that word kept tormenting him.

  No matter how hard he tried to conjure up where he had heard it before, David couldn’t figure out why it sounded so goddamn familiar.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Daddy,” Becca said, a couple days after her nightmare, “my head itches.”

  David looked over at his daughter and grinned. He nodded, though he hadn’t even heard what she said. They sat in front of the television together, David on the sofa thumbing through a catalog of graphic-arts supplies, his daughter on the floor before him watching an old Scooby-Doo rerun. Kate, meanwhile, was fixing a light lunch of tuna sandwiches and Doritos in the kitchen.

  Becca’s tiny hand disappeared into her thick blond hair. She scratched loudly at her scalp and said, “It itches really bad.”

  “Well, honey,” David said, “what do you want me to do about it?”

  “It feels like something’s crawling in my hair.”

  David made his best yuck face, laid his catalog down on the lamp-stand nearby. “Come here, sweetie.” He patted the empty space on the sofa beside him. “Let me see.”

  Becca obeyed, leaning her head back in his lap.

  “I don’t see anything. What am I supposed to be looking for?”

  “I don’t know,” Becca said. “But it’s been all scratchy ever since that scary man tried to hug me in my dream.”

  David smirked at her. “Now, Becca, I thought we agreed that wasn’t real.” His fingers played through her hair, and he squinted, looking closely at her scalp as he moved her curls aside one by one. Searching for what, he didn’t know. But he knew it was best to humor children when their unfounded worries got the best of them.

  And then he saw something.

  Something moved. Something tiny. Black. Fast.

  “Kate! Come here!”

  “What is it?” Kate’s voice came from the other room. “I’m busy!”

  “What is this?”

  Kate came into the living room, a butterknife smeared with mayonnaise in one hand. There was a spot of it on her chin, too. “What’s the matter, David? I’m trying to fix lunch.”

  “There’s something in Becca’s hair.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look!”

  Becca reached up, tried to scratch at her scalp, but David pushed her hand away.

  “Stay still, Becca.”

  Kate stood over them, stared down. “What is it?”

  “Get that.” David’s hands were busy spreading Becca’s hair apart. With a tilt of his head, he gestured toward a tiny black thing that wiggled beneath one of Becca’s curls. As if to hide.

  “Ugh.”
Kate’s hand went to Becca’s scalp. She pinched the thing between two sharp fingernails, brought it up before her. A tiny insect, slightly fatter than an eyelash. Its miniscule legs kicked between Kate’s fingers. Its body was gray, yet at the same time oddly transparent.

  “Oh, no.”

  “What the hell is that?” David said.

  “Lice.”

  “Ah, shit.”

  “Language.”

  “Look. There’s another one. And another one. Jesus Christ, Kate, she’s crawling with them.”

  “Mommy, what is it?” Becca whined.

  “Stay still,” David said.

  “It’ll be okay,” Kate said, with a little shrug. “We’ll take care of it.”

  “This sucks. I feel like white trash.”

  “Why?”

  “Our daughter has lice.”

  “It’s not a big deal, David. Kids get lice all the time.” Kate said it in her best stop-being-silly voice as she walked to the bathroom. Seconds later David heard the toilet flush. Bye-bye, little bug. “It doesn’t have anything to do with a family’s hygiene. Joel and I both got lice once or twice when we were kids. It’s easily passed along in places where children are in close contact with one another. Schools, playgrounds, whatever.”

  “I never got lice when I was a kid.”

  “Consider yourself lucky.”

  “How do we kill them?”

  “There are special shampoos you have to buy. Medicines to kill the insects and their eggs.”

  “Wonderful.” David took another long look in Becca’s hair before patting her on the leg, indicating she could return to her cartoons. He turned back to Kate. “You mentioned that children can get lice at school, church, whatever...”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, don’t you see a problem with that theory? Becca hasn’t been around any other children. So where could she have gotten them?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. “But you’re right. That doesn’t make much sense.”