The Baby
THE BABY:
Mia bows her head, and her eyes lower to the floor, to the empty spot where the bed was.
It is a new bed, at least, she thinks. The beds in which the children were shot had been replaced by new beds. There was no way she could have slept in a bed that someone had died in, especially a bed someone had been shot to death in…
A sudden chill overtakes Mia. And she feels stiff. Then frozen. Is unable to move. Unable to speak. Lisa freezes too. Her soft warm body shifting instantaneously into an ice sculpture. The blood on her face hardens, sprinkles into tiny red particles, misting like sleet.
Mia, her head stuck to the ice sculpture’s shoulder, can do nothing but stare as the room darkens.
In the spot underneath the Saint’s picture, there’s a white flash, then a circle of light, like as if it were illuminated by a searchlight.
A faint crackling sounds, and Mia sees a cherry-sized bubble, a red bubble floating, hovering up from the brown hardwood floor, the bubble then expanding and eclipsing the circle of light, giving it the appearance of a blood sun.
The bubble pops, with an angry clapping sound, like a balloon bursting, and the bubble breaks into a million droplets of dark red liquid that hang in the air and then solidify, constituting a smallish form that plunges to the floor, like it was thrown out of the window of a high-rise building.
Landing with a thump on the floor, the figure, at first, appears to be a doll in a red dress, but then Mia can see that it is clearly a baby, an infant, in red diapers. It is a chubby, pale child with cherubic cheeks and wispy strands of blond hair.
The baby has a face that looks familiar. A nose she’s seen. Eyes that are a shade of sea blue. She’s seen that face. She knows that face.
The baby on the floor sits perched on all fours. It has thin red lips that twist into a smile. It then emits a vacuum sound, a mechanical, whirring suck. A sound that is inhuman.
The inhuman sound, the twisted smile scares her. She’s unsettled, and something gnaws at her, deep inside her, like she’d swallowed a live rat. She feels like that, like there’s a rodent alive, inside her guts, eating into the pit of her stomach. A rush of acid pushes up at her throat. She feels sick. She too smells a burning stink, like garbage being burned, like plastic on fire.
The stench cuts into her. The stink sharp as a saw. And the baby remains on all fours, staring at her, its sparkling blue eyes with a baleful, ominous presence.
Then the baby stands to its tiny feet. Its feet look like clumps of skin. Mia can’t see that the baby has toes. The baby has what might be hooves. The baby giggles and shifts its gaze to the wall.
It moves. The infant launches itself, slinks with the agility of a small beast and then runs through the wall, disappearing for a second, only to reappear, hanging from a noose, from the ceiling, the baby’s face in a mask of agony, like a sad clown.
The noose knotting the baby’s neck is not actually a rope but instead is a blood-dripping umbilical cord that then shapeshifts into a live, slithering green snake.
The snake’s body is looped in a knot around the baby’s neck, and the snake is dangling the baby. The baby is wheezing like an emphysema patient, then starts shrinking, smaller and smaller, finally forming into another cherry-sized red bubble, this one like an embryo, that then pops.
And when the red bubble pops, the snake hanging from the ceiling melts, dripping like candle wax, falling, slowly, from the ceiling, then forming into an effervescent stream, a neon cord, of an almost supernova brilliance, that then launches itself, touches like a bolt of lightning into Mia’s cell phone.
The phone lights up in an effulgent haze, sizzles for a split second, and Mia and her friend are then unfrozen, reanimated.
Mia finds herself again sitting on the bed. She’s trembling. A cold sweat is slicked over her skin, the sweat sticky on her limbs.
Then Mia stutters to ask Lisa, in a throaty, shaky voice, “Did you, you, um, s..s..see, anything, just now?”
Her friend, squatting, and examining the wall, rises, shakes her head, replies, with a quizzical expression, her upper lip curling, “See something? Like what? Oh-my-God, did you see something? Like, what? What? What is it? What did you see?” Lisa’s eyes light up, and she’s panning excitedly about the room, whips out her phone and flicks the camera on…
Mia then notices Lisa’s nose isn’t bleeding.
Terror seizes Mia; chills barb up her spine; tears fill her eyes.
“I think I’m leaving. I’m going back to school. TONIGHT,” Mia exclaims, emphatically, grabbing her backpack and storming out of the room.
“Mia!” Lisa calls after her, “WAIT!” Lisa stands stoically, lowers her phone to her hip, as if returning a gun to a holster.
Mia stops for a second in the doorway, looks over her shoulder. Her face contorts in anger, blazes sunset red. She sighs loudly, then speaks in a combative tone, seethes, “Look, you got your pictures. You visited the ‘haunted fucking funeral home.’ This place totally freaks me out. After dinner, I am gone.”
Lisa has never seen Mia like this. She’s never seen her so pissed off. She replies, in a whispering, syrupy tone, “It’s okay, I understand. But please, tell me what you saw. Did you see a ghost? What was it? The girl? It was the girl, wasn’t it?”
Mia rolls her eyes, shakes her head and stomps off in a huff.
“Mia, wait, you forgot your phone!” yells Lisa.
Mia doesn’t reply and vanishes into the hallway.
Mia then finds herself crossing into the dining room but doesn’t even recall stepping down the stairs. Her thoughts flash, backward in time, and traumatic images are dealt, like tarot cards. These thoughts popping up, these are the thoughts she attempts to repress… She thinks to herself how she’s never told anyone about that, about what happened with… that joker, the aspiring standup comedian, the witty guy from that party, the guy with the oily mop of hair and the mouth that wouldn’t shut…
She’d suppressed and buried everything about… that snowy, muddy, ugly morning…
About the clinic and its emptiness, its sterile smell…
And she wasn’t ever going to tell anyone. Not now. Not ever. Not even her best friend.
It was a ghost she’d live with for the rest of her life. It was a ghost she’d always keep to herself. It was a ghost she’d take to her grave.
