by Dan Dillard
“You are rotten, little man,” she said.
She scooped him up and checked his diaper. It was clean and dry. She sniffed again and grimaced.
“Child, that is awful. Is that why you’ve been so cranky lately?” she asked and poked his belly.
He grabbed her finger and pulled himself over to her, hugging her tightly. His face was full of concern. Shocked and amused, she picked him up and held him close.
“Okay, honey. Mommy’s got you. Mommy loves you.”
Charlie-Bear lay tiny his head on her shoulder and squeezed her tight. Faith sat on the couch with him, cradled him and sang.
*****
Sam drove through the rain and his wipers kept up as best they could. They blurred the cityscape that lay outside his windows. Streaks of lightning forked in the distance, but made no sound that he could hear. He paid close attention to the traffic lights, and the other vehicles. It was wet, miserable weather.
His car crawled along the streets. Large buildings hovered over him like doctors over an operating table. Those gave way to smaller buildings, then to street level offices and restaurants. People ducked under umbrellas as they left and shook off umbrellas as they entered. Then, buildings were dead.
Sam hated those last few blocks. He had ever since they’d moved to the neighborhood. The drive was minimal, still a hassle compared to their downtown apartment, but it was worth it to have a comfortable home for his family. He stopped at a red light. It washed in and out of clarity as the wiper blades passed over the glass. The radio spewed forth advertisement after advertisement.
“Monotonous monotony,” he sang, waiting for the light to turn.
The light stayed red for a long time. It felt much longer than usual. Sam fidgeted with the controls on his steering wheel, turned the heat up a bit, then turned the radio down. The light was still red. He looked down the cross street in each direction and it was barren. Rainwater flooded the storm drains, but there were no cars and no pedestrians…except one.
To his right, standing on the corner in the downpour, was a dark figure of a man with his arms to his sides, letting the water drench him. Sam couldn’t see him clearly through the passenger-side window, but he knew who it was. The stranger stared back, and Sam felt as if their gazes met. He felt like the stranger might have been holding that red light as well, but suddenly, the old man crumbled into a pile. Sam gasped.
He rolled the passenger-side window down, and leaned over to get a clearer look. Water drops sprayed off the car door, spritzing him in the face. He checked his mirrors and pulled the car around the corner, hugging the curb and dialing his cell.
9-1-1.
Sam fished an umbrella from the back seat, then stepped out of the car. He took his coat off and lay it over the man, shielding his grimy face from the rain with his umbrella.
“Sir? Hey buddy, are you okay?” he said.
The strange man lay on the hard, cold sidewalk, muttering sounds with no meaning. His eyelids flickered, and his eyes rolled back into his skull as if he was seizing. Sam shifted the umbrella, trying to keep his cell phone dry.
“9-1-1. What’s your emergency?” the operator said.
“I man just collapsed on the street,” Sam said.
He gave an address and the details he knew to the operator.
“Sir, can you wait until the ambulance arrives?”
Sam thought about it. He didn’t owe this man. If anything, the man had scared him, but there was something about him that Sam couldn’t deny. Something intangible.
“Yeah. I guess so. Will it be long?”
“Should be there in five minutes.”
The ambulance was there in less than five minutes.
“Thanks for the call, buddy,” one of the EMT’s said.
He was tall with a large belly and thinning brown hair. His words were sarcastic.
“We pick up one of these bums every day. They drink, they’re dirty, and they live outside. Whatta you expect?” the other said. He was Latino with short black hair and a goatee.
Sam watched them load the stranger onto a gurney and push him into the ambulance. He was still muttering, but the words were clearer and Sam could hear them.
“The baby. Baby, baby, baby,” he was saying.
“Yeah, yeah pops. The baby. Whatever,” the Latino said. “You’ll feel better after a nap. You want a cheeseburger? I’ll go through the drive-thru for you. Least we can do. Freakin’ bum.”
The rear doors shut and the ambulance drove away. Sam got in his car and tossed the umbrella into the back seat. He sat for a while watching the tail lights of the ambulance disappear into the downpour. Afterward, he drove home and was glad when Faith and Charlie-Bear met him at the door.
“Saw you drive up. Nasty out. Oh, baby, you’re soaked,” she said.
“Yeah, strange thing happened on the way home from work,” he replied.
THREE---
Creaking sounds in the old roof kept Sam awake as the autumn wind tormented their house. The cold front finally took hold and the warm summer was shelved for another year. Faith rolled one way, then the other, grunting with frustration.
“Relax,” Sam said. “It'll stop eventually.”
Faith laughed. “I have to sleep before eventually.”
She rolled over, and Sam knew she was exhausted from another long day with her infant son. He rubbed her back and stared at the ceiling. Between that and a lull in the weather, her breathing steadied. Before long, she was snoring. Sam smiled and stopped stroking her back.
He started to doze just as the rippling and scratching picked back up. Another band of rain. It was 11:30 pm. His eyes burned, a side effect of the dehydration caused by consuming only coffee. He closed them, but it didn’t help.
“Damn,” he whispered.
*****
The baby lay in his crib, only the guest bathroom between his room and his parents. Normally he slept on his hands and knees with his butt pushed up in the air. In the past few days, he had taken to sleeping on his back. His chest rose and fell with the soft wheeze of a tiny, runny nose. His cheeks were pink due to a slight fever.
He smelled of baby lotion and the faint sourness of a damp diaper. At just nine months old, he was pudgy with ever thickening brown hair. His round cheeks flexed in and out as he sighed with content relaxation, despite his cold and the noise of the storm. It was a sweet sound.
Outside, the high winds and pounding raindrops raged in waves, but as the thunder rolled at a greater and greater distance, the noise evened out. Charlie-Bear rolled onto his side and sucked on his little fist.
*****
Sam still stared at the ceiling. He traced the random pattern of its sponged texture in the dim blue-green light of his alarm clock. He looked at Faith, who snored lightly next to him.
“At least you're asleep,” he said and looked at the bedroom door. “I'll take the easy shift. He’ll probably be up at five again.”
He turned on the television with the remote and muted the volume. A black and white movie was on, and the light from the TV’s screen flickered on the walls of the room like a giant candle. Lightning flashed through the bedroom window as if it was answering. Sam eased out of bed to take a piss. He was careful not to disturb his wife.
*****
Charlie-Bear wiggled and woke momentarily. He grabbed at nothing with his pudgy hands. One of them found a pacifier on the mattress and he popped it into his mouth. Sucking calmed him and his eyes began to droop. He rubbed his ear with tiny fingers and rolled onto his back. The sound of the toilet flushing down the hall startled the little one and his body lurched. Both hands reached for help then slowly found their way back in place.
The door to the nursery creaked on its hinges, opening halfway. There was a rogue bolt of lightning and a loud clap of thunder that woke the baby. He whined with growing enthusiasm and rolled one way and then the other. Then something caught his attention.
A figure entered from the darkness of the hall
way. It took one awkward step into the room. Rain pelted the window, and the moonless night left the room dark except for one small green nightlight, a glowing, plastic teddy bear. The figure tiptoed deeper into the room, skulking like the darkest of cartoon characters.
“Hush, my sssweet,” it whispered.
Charlie-Bear stopped whimpering as if he understood. Lightning surged again, and the baby's eyes grew wide, finding his visitor only in its flashes. Rain beat down on the roof and the windows with force. He sat up and wobbled, gnawing harder on the pacifier, wrinkles on his tiny brow. The thing stepped forward, into the soft glow of the green night light and shut the bedroom door. Then it turned toward the child.
Its eyes were giant, four or five times that of a normal human. They sat loosely in its head, as if someone had pulled the sockets wide and tall with magic hands. They didn't blink. No eyelids could span those enormous gaps, and as a result they were deeply bloodshot, the swollen capillaries showed black in the green light. The cried again, an upset sound, like the beginning of a tantrum.
The creature smiled with a mouth as impossibly wide as its eyes were large. Needle sharp teeth, one hundred strong, filled the hole, each an inch long and tubular, fang-like. It dropped its jaw and its thick, dark tongue dragged moisture across those hideous eyes. They lapped around each orb, ducking deep into the sockets before tucking back inside its mouth.
“There,” it said. “There is what I seek.”
Charlie-Bear whimpered a bit louder, not quite enough to reach his mother and father's ears with the door closed and the rain still pounding. He looked at the monster, then at the door as if wondering where mommy was and why she wasn’t comforting him.
“I’ve come to find the young one's fear, my dear. I'll eat it up, tear by tear.”
It danced around the crib on pointed, silent toes, holding its hands up as a marionette might, all the while with that terrible grin and bulging, bloody eyes.
“Do you fear me?” it said.
The baby cried out, loud that time.
“There it is. Give me more! It izzz delicious!”
Louder cries. The beast laughed and bounced from one toe to another and back to the first. It leapt into the air, landing on the rail of the crib and perching there like some maligned bird.
“I am Wicked!” it said. “That's my name and that’s my role. Not to play, but to scar your soul.”
Wicked stepped down into the crib. It crouched and its presence filled half of the small space. It wrapped thin arms and long fingers around equally bony knees and stared, watching…listening and drinking up the pain as if it was the perfect mouthful of wine.
Charlie-Bear tried to crawl away. He grabbed at the bars of his crib, but Wicked reached out and gently turned the baby around. Then, with a pale-skinned hand and thick, black, pointed nails, it turned the boy’s face so their eyes met. Charlie-Bear screamed.
“Ahhh, your tears are to die for. Your blood must be sweet. I can almost taste that precious meat.”
Again, Wicked licked his tongue across his needle teeth, then lashed it out to the baby's cheek, leaving a streak of slimy saliva that dripped to the mattress. The pacifier dropped from Charlie-Bear's mouth and his cries pierced the walls of the house, finding a hole in the din of the storm.
“Yesss,” Wicked hissed. “More. More!”
*****
A few rooms over, Faith got to her feet in a groggy rush and fumbled her way out of her room and down the hallway. She opened the door to the nursery and entered, tying her robe together. Wicked ducked into the shadows with a hypodermic smile and a flourish of foul smelling air.
“Who closed your door, baby?” she said.
Charlie-Bear continued to cry. He was inconsolable.
“Mommy's here. Shh,” she said, and repeated it over and again as she picked him up and held him to her chest. “Mommy’s here.”
Wicked watched from the dark center of the floor, shadowed from the hall light by the door, which still stood partially closed. It sniffed at the woman who just entered.
“Nice, it looks,” he whispered. “It smells nice, too. Maybe I have more to do.”
It disappeared into the shadows, sliding across the wall and becoming the reflection of the night in the nursery window.
Faith changed his diaper without looking, as a machine might. She tried to plop him back into his crib, but he protested, grabbed at her frantically and pulled himself to her.
“Okay, okay,” Faith said.
She plugged his mouth with the rubber stopper. He sucked on it involuntarily. His eyes were serious and his forehead crisscrossed with worry. He looked around the dark room, finding his green glowing teddy bear.
“Now, now,” Faith said. “Calm down, sweetie. Mommy is beat.”
“Ma,” Charlie-Bear said through the pacifier.
“That's right. Ma.”
His tear-stained cheeks glistened in the light of the green bear as he hugged his mother. She took him to the rocking chair.
“You’re safe with mommy.”
Faith smiled and shushed him as she rocked gently. She reached to his bookshelf for a small music box and wound it up. The tiny metal combs played a saccharin lullaby as they rocked. She stood and mother and son danced together for several minutes until his shudders smoothed into deep, sleepy breaths.
When she thought he was asleep, Faith lay him down in his crib, but his eyes opened and chased shadows around the room. His breathing was still heavy, but the sobs and cries of “Ma” had dissipated into sighs. His eyes found hers and she brushed the tiny curls of his hair back with her hand. He closed his eyes. The storm settled in the distance, leaving the house in an eerie silence.
Content her son was calm, Faith walked back to her room, leaving the nursery door open. She stopped in the bathroom to relieve her bladder and washed her face and hands.
*****
The sound of the toilet flush snapped Charlie-Bear to attention and he sat up and crawled to the other side of the crib. Pulling up to its top rail, he stood and strained to see out the door. The smell returned as did the hiss of Wicked’s voice.
“She is gone,” Wicked said, oozing from the shadows underneath the crib.
“She is gone, we’re alone. Deeds to be done…to the littlest one.”
The child watched it dance about the room. Its jerky motions and jester like dancing might have made Charlie-Bear laugh if not for those eyes and teeth. Some innate fear of long pointed teeth kept him on edge.
Wicked slinked back to the crib, ducking its head around the doorjamb and peeking toward Faith and Sam’s room. Then it slowly pulled its head back into the nursery and pointed those large eyes at the baby. Charlie-Bear began to cry, but the creature held up one long finger in the child’s face.
“Hush little baby, don’t say a word,” he sang and Charlie-Bear obliged, unable to disobey.
Wicked disintegrated into a swirl of black mist and surrounded the child, spinning about him like a swarm of insects. The mist divided. Some entered Charlie-Bear’s head through his nostrils and some through his ears. Strands of disembodied Wicked crawled into the corners of the baby’s eyes. Charlie-Bear opened his mouth as if to scream, and the rest of the mist flooded in, silencing him. The baby fell over in a lump and began to twitch.
Moments later, he shrieked. It was powerful enough to rattle the windows in his room, and it was loud enough to wake his parents again. Faith rushed to his side first, with Sam no more than two paces behind her.
“What the hell is wrong?” Sam said.
“I don’t know. Call the doctor.”
Sam shrugged, rubbing his stubbled chin. Faith followed him back to their bedroom, carrying Charlie-Bear. She sat on the bed with the baby in her arms while Sam dialed the phone. She sang quietly, kissing the child’s head while her husband talked to a third shift nurse. His foot tapped nervously on the carpet as the nurse gave him directions.
“Okay,” Sam said. “Okay. Yes. We’re on our way.
”
Faith looked at him as he placed the phone back in its cradle.
“She said to take him to the E.R. and meet the on-call doc.”
It wants your baby.
FOUR---
Sam, Faith and Charlie-Bear entered the waiting room. He was thankful the E.R. looked empty. Faith played with their son, bouncing him on her knee and keeping him occupied with energy stored in some limitless store that only mothers have. Sam knew none of this was Charlie-Bear’s fault, but there was only so much he could deal with. Faith’s patience made him love her all the more.
“I’m going to find some coffee, this one’s empty,” Sam said. “You want a cup?”
“No. Not right now,” Faith answered.
He nodded and rubbed the baby’s head. Sam walked through the double doors that led to the main section of the hospital and turned down a long hallway.
The rest of the building was quiet. The cafeteria was closed and the normal coffee carts, even the gift shop were gated for a few more hours. He dug a palm full of change out of his pocket and found a vending machine with several choices and ordered the largest black coffee he could get. A paper cup dropped and the spout fizzled and steamed before the black liquid poured out.
He took his drink and walked to the row of windows looking out over a mostly empty parking lot. The rain had ceased. Something to his right moved. A patient was up and walking at the other end of the sterile hospital hallway. The man’s gown fluttered open in the back revealing a dingy t-shirt and boxer shorts beneath. He was shuffling down the hallway, shifting his weight from left to right and back again in an odd, but familiar dance.
“No shit?” Sam said.
He walked toward the man, careful not to spill his coffee, feet moving faster and faster until he was in a comical shuffle-jog. His eyes moved from the old man to the sloshing coffee and back. Sam was twenty-five feet away when the stranger parted a pair of double doors and turned through them.
Sam followed no more than five seconds later, rushing through the swinging but the old man was not there. There was nothing but another expanse of hallway lined with fluorescent lights and opposing doors. Sam stopped at the first door and started to open it.
