“Hold on, Julie, now it’s you who’s being judgmental,” I said, my thoughts thick with drink. “First of all, only a few of my associates graduated from ivy league schools. Granted, it’s true many of them did their Master’s work at the more well-known east coast universities, but it’s no reason…”
“Oh, shut-up!” she screamed, and plucked a picture frame off a table and threw it at me from across the room! It smashed to bits against the wooden banister of our staircase and fell in pieces to the floor. I looked down to see our previously nestled visages lying bent and lost, the image distorted by triangular shards of glass. I looked back at her and my mouth went slack at the rage in her eyes. A darkness seemed to surround her, as if ink were seeping from her pores and spreading outward, shrouding her pale face in a monstrous mask of hate. I put my drink down and rubbed my eyes, trying to erase the twisted image of her the liquor and uncertainty had formed in my brain.
“You don’t understand.” I said, a trifle defensively. “You’ll never understand the people I work with. The world I live in.”
I picked up my drink and turned to look through the patio window at the darkness beyond.
“That,” I continued, addressing her ghostly reflection within the glass, the lamp beside her frying her edges with light, “is why I gave you the attic, a place to call your own. And now, when I let you out, when I allow you a chance to better yourself, this is what happens.”
I swung back to her, my voice rising, my words slurred with liquid courage. “You screw it all up! And I am the one who must live with you, turning my back on my true nature, crawling back into this damned hole we’ve dug.”
I exhaled theatrically and finished my drink in a swallow. I set the glass down and stared at her, waiting for the cloudburst swelling behind that dark, stormy gaze, to break open.
Julie did not look back at me with anger, or resentment, but with complete tranquility. A mother’s pity. She seemed somehow pleased with me, as if I’d just said that her dress (completely out of fashion) was the second most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and she the first.
She walked toward me slowly, wearing placidity like armor. I shuffled my feet, looked down, then back at her, drunken and awkward. Her eyes—those large, depthless brown eyes of hers—were positively dancing, as if fire flickered behind them instead of her guileless brain. She lifted her small white hands to my chest and there was a small part of me—a part deep beneath my skin, settled alongside my most sensitive nerve endings—repulsed by that grinning countenance. By that touch. When her fingers brushed my sweater it sent a flash of electricity up the back of my neck, tingling my innards in the same way one might be tickled by the slick cold brushing of a snake’s skin were it to slither over your bare foot in the night.
She must have sensed my repugnance, for her smile only widened, as if in humor, or triumph.
“Howard,” she purred, her hands spreading over me now, sliding to my shoulders. She leaned into me, her uplifted eyes holding mine, her breasts pressed against my chest with firm intention, her hair smelling sweet and tart, like one of her damned herbs.
“Howard,” she repeated, “let’s have a baby.”
For all the reasons I could have said no to Julie at that time, or stalled, or talked her out of the idea, there were just as many reasons to say yes, and do so immediately, with full support.
It was a Hail Mary, a last ditch attempt to reclaim the marriage I once envisioned. That made it hard to argue against, especially when things seemed to be going so well—on the surface, anyway. My salary was higher than ever. I had a young, beautiful (if somewhat eccentric) wife and a glorious home nestled in my native part of the country. Plus, our ages were at the point that to hold off would exponentially increase the odds of irreparable failure.
So I agreed, and the paradigm of this new venture was given seed that very night. The creature had begun germinating within my wife’s womb, the future fetus an embodiment of all I would pass on to this world.
Julie took to motherhood (or at least that sloppy, cumbersome precursor—pregnancy) with gusto and greatly improved spirits. She was beautiful in the early months, her skin radiant, her modest bump barely pressing against the fabric of her simple dresses, her drab sweaters. I would hear her on the weekends, reading out loud from a book on the deck, or singing sweetly to the unborn child while rocking in the half-finished nursery. She would sing softly on her walks, as well. Her voice would trail back to me as she’d venture deeper into the woods, a slim tendril of melody that pierced my mind like a long, cold thread, disorienting my senses, as if the mystery of her was more than my mind could absorb.
Her change in personality was most reflected in her renewed appetites. My god, how she cooked! Her vigor in the kitchen was so successful I was easily matching her pound for pound in our mutual fattening. Most meals would leave me sunken into my leather club chair without an inch to spare for bourbon. Julie, a sparse little nymph who had always been nothing more than skin, bones and taut muscles trapped within a slight, doll-like frame, had begun to swell. Her hips broadened, her breasts rounded pleasantly, her ass and thighs curved where before they lay flat and shapeless. Her figure aroused me as it hadn’t since our college days, and we made love with passion I’m sure we had not imagined still resided within the strengthening cocoon of our marriage.
There was a peace. Perhaps not joy, but at the least, a truce.
When the child’s birth came it was almost anti-climactic. After all those months of preparation and worry, the baby—a boy— was born within an hour of our arrival at the emergency room.
He was healthy, if slightly undersized. When I first held him, he looked at me as if I were the bearer of all the knowledge and warmth in the world. I lightly traced my fingers over his head, his tiny face. I brushed his lips and his moist puckered mouth found my thumb and immediately began sucking on the tip of it, as if it contained the mother’s milk he already craved. His eyes opened, they were glassy and dark, and held such depth that I could not help but stare into them. As his face contorted with his efforts to suck nutrition from my thumb, I felt something like awe, or worship, in his existence.
Moments later, however, I abruptly found myself wanting free from the tiny burden. Perhaps sensing my anxiety, he wormed in my arms like something alien and aggressive. The orifice laying claim to my thumb became intensely disconcerting, and I wondered if the strength of the newborn should be as it was. His strong firm lips were sucking my entire digit into its maw, as if hoping to swallow it whole before continuing with the rest. I saw myself then through his eyes—not as a loving guardian, but as a pulsing carcass of flesh, plump with blood and marrow. A potential feast he had apparently found a taste for.
Julie said my name and I looked at her. She was fatigued but smiling, as one does when completely spent by the efforts of creating something, of achieving something, wonderful. I went to her and (can I say gladly?) handed her the newborn.
The boy’s eyes slid off my own. He squawked once before Julie opened her hospital blouse and guided his mouth to her breast, where he hungrily suckled, as if he would extinguish were he not immediately filled with her body’s victuals.
I looked at them and tried to soften my vision, to blur my focus so I could see them as things I loved, forcing my expression into a mask of the loving husband, extending an aura of safety, compassion, and pride.
But I felt none of those things. I felt horror. Horror of the frail, bloodied, pale-limbed thing in the bed, and the pulpy, bulbous succubus of flesh that clung to it so ardently. The sounds of its feeding brought bile from my stomach in a bubbling wave, my constricting throat scratchy with the acids it fought to keep down, an activity hidden behind gritted teeth and a tight-lipped smile.
A few days later we were home, the baby tucked away into the nursery Julie had so painstakingly decorated. It was painted… and installed within were a brand new crib with all the most up-to-date safety features and a rocking chair for late night feedings
, now ready to claim its long-awaited occupants.
The first night back I suggested the child’s name be Howard, a junior. Julie, to my surprise, simply shrugged as if it were the most insignificant point in the world. She acquiesced with nothing more than a nod and a murmur of agreement, her fingertip drawing invisible lines along the infant’s forehead, cheeks and chin.
Days went by like the flitting pages of a storybook. The baby grew stronger and Julie settled back into her pre-pregnancy routines. I was working more and more hours at the university, and at the end of most days I was reluctant to leave my office. What should have been the happiest days of our marriage became an invasion I had no means to repel. Nothing obvious or overtly sinister, but there was a sort of fantastical air to my home life, a dreamy falsehood. My home had become a candy-covered hut from a fairy tale, where underneath the gingerbread façade and sticky gumdrops huddled a fat cannibalistic witch, waiting to rip apart the flesh of children between her sharp teeth, devouring them in large gnashing bites, likely not even taking time to heat the proverbial oven.
Inevitably, I stumbled awkwardly into an affair with a solemn student. It was a joyless, physical concoction, more of a chance intrusion upon my state of being than a manifestation of some buried need, fulfilled sacrificially by young flesh and naiveté. It was a distraction, a delay to my inevitable entrance to that house of strangers—the doting wife I felt neither love or compassion for, and the son I was repulsed by. To me he was not the spawn of my seed, an extension of my being, but a growth within my home, a tumor manifested as a sly, ravenous cancer that demanded my touch and protection.
In the darkest moments of the night the starling cry of the infant would carry from the hallway and into our bedroom. It would lift Julie from her slumber, the heft of weight releasing from the bed as she emerged from the sheets like a wraith, slipping through the dark toward the screaming thing. To feed it.
It was on those nights I realized the full extent of my building terror of this new world, this fairy-tale cabin in the woods I had found myself trapped within.
It was a cold, misty morning. Julie had disappeared with little Howard, strapping him to her and walking into those deep woods, finding her path, humming her mystical tunes. I watched her leave, and moments later found myself standing, once more, outside the door that led to the attic.
I climbed the stairs quietly, as if the walls themselves were against me, protectors of the secrets of wives and offspring.
At the top of the stairs was the studio. It was dark. Shadows stained the walls. I took a few steps and then paused, my breath catching. The room seemed alive. The air had a vibrating energy. I saw the space as through a warped window pane, the geometry of the floors and walls bent, somehow off. A cold draft prickled my feet and the hair on the back of my neck bristled, like a cold force urging me forward from behind. I wiped my mouth with a shaky hand and stepped into the tense bubble of energy, looking around urgently for warped passages to hell, remnants of pagan sacrifice, or strange symbols smeared in dark blood.
I stood there, frustrated, looking for some demonic disruption, but I could see nothing sinister. It was just a feeling, the kind one gets when turning out the last light in an unfamiliar room and wondering what might lay waiting in the dark. Common sense assures us of the invalidity of demons and sharp-clawed creatures of the night, but we still can’t help wonder if there is something there, waiting to drag itself toward us and slid its cold wet claws around our neck, empowered because we gave it what it needed. We gave it the dark.
My inspection of the attic was brief, for it contained only one item, and aside from that was bare.
It was an easel with an odd painting set upon it. Coloring the large canvas was a single, cycloptic image, a haggard, monstrous eye created by a smear of grotesque colors swirling upward from a black point. I approached the painting slowly, feeling the thing pull me toward it with a force I could not resist. It was an erupting black hole, a succubus of all the good energy remaining in my world.
At first glance the painting was nothing recognizable. Then, slowly, it took form in my mind, and soon I could make out an open cavity deep within a dark forest, a balding pate on Pan’s great head, the dark surrounding leaves as twisted as the mad god’s curly locks. Like a swirling cloud reaching a dark funnel, the circle of green directed my eyes round and round toward the dark center which, as I focused more deeply, seemed to levitate from the canvas. My plane of reality turned and dipped, so that my eyes dropped from a bird’s-eye view to the sight-line of a creature stumbling into that dark core from the level of brush and tree. As I moved downward into the world I could feel the cold black earth between my toes and hear the rustling of the wind in the leaves all around me.
Looking around I saw sparsely-set objects within the clearing, their application beyond my imagination’s capabilities: a stone slab, smeared dark with the blood and gore of animals, a smoldering fire that stank of dead flesh, fouling the air with pungent, poisonous fumes, and vertical-set bails of sharpened sticks puncturing the black earth.
I looked upward, into the trees, and saw thick webbing, the sticky silk extrusions from what must have been a noble arthropod of considerable size. The prey it had trapped—the small, squirming tightly-wound bundles hoisted throughout its web—were not moth-sized, but the size of large bats, or possibly ground-creatures, like a chipmunk or squirrel. If I looked more closely, I could see small tufts of brown fur protruding from within the hastily-spun cocoons, and couldn’t help wonder what manner of brute could capture and feast on something of such size.
I became lost in imagining such a creature. I didn’t think I would hear the silent, slippery thread being released from the abdomen of an unseen beast were it to lower itself from a high branch behind me, its stinger poised and dripping.
Something hard brushed the back of my neck.
I heard the slam of the rear screen door from my own distant world, my family returning from their morning sojourn. I twisted and saw a flash of hairy forelegs and black eyes.
I screamed and stumbled backward, but instead of staggering along roots and filth before falling awkwardly, there was a sickening shift of reality, and I landed with a tail-bone jarring thump onto my posterior in the dry, sane wooden floor of the attic. I jumped to my feet, spinning to look behind me in fear the creature had traveled with me, even now reaching for my flesh with its horrid stinger.
There was nothing. I stumbled back toward the stairs, my eyes never leaving the painting, a knuckle jammed between my teeth. I felt maddeningly overexposed, despite the room being devoid of any creatures, big or small.
I leapt for the stairs leading back to normality. I dropped down them by twos, flinging myself around the final turn, pushing through the door to the hallway only to nearly run into Julie, little Howard strapped to her bosom. Her face was unreadable, as if tensing to either fight or fly. I jerked to a stop, stifled a scream and, after catching a breath, forced a wan smile, trying desperately to slow my racing heart.
“Darling,” I said, swallowing, letting myself recover, not wanting to seem a scared fool. “How was your walk?”
A moment passed. Then Julie, perhaps feeling this was not the right time for a confrontation, smiled back coldly, her eyes untouched by her leering lips.
“It was fine,” she said. “It’s good for Howard, all the fresh air.”
“Yes, yes,” I agreed. “Well. I think I’ll take a shower and get the day started.”
Julie nodded and, turning, walked toward the nursery at the far end of the hall. Over her shoulder, so that I could not see her face (although I would swear there was a sly, vicious joviality in her tone), she jibed, “Perhaps next time you’d like to come with us,” she said, disappearing through the nursery door, “into the forest.”
A chill ran through my body at the thought, and I winced like a pinched child at the playful, stabbing tone in which the offer had been delivered. I made my way to the bedroom and a hot shower, not daring t
o look behind me, fearing I would see the muddy footsteps I was leaving on the cold wood of the hallway floor.
“I won’t be gone long,” Julie said. “Two days at the most.”
We were having an early dinner. Julie spoke while feeding the baby mashed greens from her private garden. She swore to its nutritional values, and scorned the thought of using jarred foods from the supermarket.
“I see,” I said stupidly, deep down reveling in the idea of being alone for a few days. “Is she unwell?”
“Oh, no, I don’t think so. I spoke with her on the phone and she sounded bright and cheerful. She just gets lonely. She wants so much to see the baby.”
Yes, I recalled a recent phone conversation between Julie and her bizarre grandmother. I had walked by the living room when I heard Jules’ hushed and hurried voice, as if relaying the most private entries from a hidden diary to a co-conspirator. But it was just one more secret between the two of them, and I had long grown weary of concerning myself with the weight of their hidden messages.
“Sounds like a great idea,” I said, stabbing at a hefty helping of pork roast and mashed potatoes. I shoved the meat in my mouth, and said through muffled chews, “please give her my best.”
“I will, Howard,” she said, then added quietly, “she asks about you often.”
I nodded at this, stared at my food, felt a tightening in my throat. I wished the vermin would leave this moment, and not in a day. I listened to the slurping and smacking of the child, the cooing of the mother, and wanted nothing more in the world than to be free of them both.
At that moment I was overcome by an alien desire, something so forceful, dark and evil that it was wholly unrecognizable to me. It was murder I thought of, the idea spreading like molten venom through my blood. I realized, with surprise, that I wanted them both dead. For the first time in my life my mind contained the needed mixture of repugnance, fear and volatility to make myself capable of the damnable act. I looked at them and imagined how I would do it.
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