New Fears--New horror stories by masters of the genre

by Mark Morris

  * * *

  Another time I heard my parents talking when they thought I was downstairs. “Do you think she knows?” my mom said. They were in their bedroom getting ready for dinner.

  “She can’t.” My dad sounded so confident.

  Knows what? I wondered.

  “But she has to… she has to. How?” And then my mom started crying.

  “It’s okay, Jen,” Dad said. “Really, it is.”

  My mom sobbed some more, and I slunk away to my room and half closed the door. I took my stuffed animals off their shelves and started playing with them, but they were in bad moods and wanted to fight and attack each other, so I put them back until they calmed down.

  I frowned. What could I know? I didn’t know anything. I was just a little kid.

  * * *

  “I think that Elizabeth is sick,” I announced at breakfast two weeks later.

  My mom glanced at my dad, who sat up straighter in his chair. I heard him give a faint sigh, then he said, “We’ve been meaning to talk to you, Nonny.”

  Guilt flooded me instantly. What had I done? I hadn’t meant it—whatever I had done! Really! I knew I was in trouble. That’s what “talk to” meant. I had done… something… and now I was in big trouble. Only, I couldn’t think of what I had done. Was it because of that something I was supposed to know—only I didn’t know?

  My mom made a noise. “I don’t think it’s time, Derek.”

  “She’s eight, Jen. She might as well know.”

  I watched as her eyes filled with tears. “No,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

  He covered her hand with his. I shifted uncomfortably. I didn’t like it when my parents touched or kissed. Didn’t all little kids feel that way? It was wrong… somehow.

  “Please.”

  “Okay. Not today.”

  She nodded and took a sip of her coffee, and I stared at the runny eggs on my plate and tried not to think about what they were going to tell me.

  I asked to be excused right after that, and they agreed, and I fled to my bedroom and my poor dead dollies.

  That night my mother visited me in my bedroom again, and she leaned down close, her dress rustling. Her breath was warm on my face. “It wasn’t my fault,” she whispered, and she smelled of cloves and something else… something sour. I tried not to wrinkle my nose. I didn’t want her to know I was awake. She stayed there for a minute or two, just staring at me, then she straightened and turned to leave.

  At the door, she stopped. “I know you’re awake, Nonny. You always are.”

  I said nothing.

  She waited a bit longer, then left. I felt wetness on my cheeks, and I realized I was crying, only I didn’t know why.

  * * *

  My dad kept wanting to tell me… whatever. And my mom kept saying, not yet. It happened when I was ten and when I was eleven… and even when I had just turned twelve, she would beg him not to tell me. He would sigh, then nod; he didn’t want to upset her even more, I knew.

  I was old enough then that I could have asked my parents separately. I could have not waited for them to tell me. But I got a little stubborn, I guess. If they wanted to tell me something, wanted to discuss some weighty matter for years now, then they could come to me; I wasn’t about to break down first and ask. Nope.

  And even then, my mom kept coming into my room at night, and I still said nothing.

  In school, I would sometimes watch the other kids, and I wondered if their parents did that… spied on them when they were sleeping? I wanted to ask some of my classmates, but I really wasn’t good friends with anyone now. I was too shy, too hesitant to ask them if I could join in, so mostly I kept to myself and watched the others as they played outside.

  Once, a girl new to the school asked me if I wanted to sit with her at lunch, and I just stared at her. I wanted to, but I didn’t know what to say, and after a minute, she shrugged and turned away. She didn’t try to talk to me again. I felt a little sad, and I was going to talk to my mom about it, but again, I didn’t know what to say.

  At home that afternoon, though, I told the dead dolls about my could-have-been friend. They listened silently. Of course.

  After that non-incident with the new girl, I guess I got the reputation of being a snob or someone too stuck up to talk to the “lower lifes”, but I wasn’t. I just didn’t know what to say or how to say it. I could talk to my dead dolls, but not living kids my own age.

  The kids at school were the only people I saw, outside my folks, of course. My parents weren’t big into entertaining. In fact, I don’t remember a single time when they ever had friends or neighbors over to the house, and no one on our street ever asked us over for summer barbecues or pool parties. Sometimes, I would stand at my bedroom window and stare across the street at all the people gathered there… the kids racing around with each other and their dogs, and the moms and dads standing with their glasses of cold beer or soda, and I’d hear laughter and shouts and some music from someone strumming a guitar. And I’d think that it looked like a lot of fun and I wished they would invite us. But they never did. And I would stay in my room and listen to the faint laughter and all I would hear in my house was the steady ticking of the clock in the living room.

  For some reason, people still insisted on giving me dolls. At twelve, I thought I was too old for them, and when Grandma gave me a doll, I would thank her politely and right after that I’d tuck the doll into the closet. I knew what would happen. Elizabeth the whatever-number-we-were-up-to would develop blue spots, and she’d die, and that would be it. I always liked to make an announcement about the doll’s death to my parents… I just felt it was something I had to do. I don’t know why.

  So many times Dad would start to say something to me, and Mom would silently plead with him, and he’d stop and just study me and shake his head. He worked longer hours now, and I didn’t see him as much, and so often I was in bed by the time he got home. And that’s how it continued right up to my fourteenth birthday when I got pregnant and my dad left the house one night and never came home.

  My mom said the two weren’t connected, but they were. They had to be. My dad couldn’t take it that his little girl got knocked up by some guy at school who was halfway cute and who had talked to her a few times and then said he wanted to show her something after the last class. Yeah, he had. Him and his two buddies. They knew I hardly talked, that I wouldn’t tell anyone what happened. They were right. I was still taller than most of the girls, but had developed a figure along the way. I always dressed in baggy clothing, because I didn’t want anyone to see that I had developed breasts. But I guess the boys knew.

  When I missed my first period, I got a little nervous. When I missed the second one and noticed I was eating more, I knew. It wasn’t until my fourth month that my mom caught on. She demanded to know if I was pregnant, and I said I guess I was… a little bit. She started crying then, and screamed at me and pleaded and demanded to know what happened. But I don’t think she really wanted to know; she didn’t want to know that I was held down while three sweaty boys climbed on top of me, one after the other.

  My dad just looked at me without a word—what did he want to tell me all these years? I wondered—and said he had to go to the store. He grabbed his wallet—the black leather one I had given him last Christmas—and keys, and he went out to the car and backed out of the driveway, and the last I saw of him was heading up toward the string of stores on the edge of the development.

  My mom continued to scream at me, then she’d stop and sob. She kept asking what would people think? I wanted to say that they’d think I got pregnant, and that would be it. She told me I had to have an abortion, and then two minutes later she said I had to keep the baby so I would learn my lesson. She claimed she wouldn’t raise the child; we would have to put the baby up for adoption. Or no, she would pretend to be pregnant, go away, and come back with me and the baby, and she and Dad would claim it was their baby, my little surprise sibling.

 
She cried and yelled for hours, and after a while she got quieter. My dad should have been home by then. She tried calling my dad on his cell, but we heard the ringing in the bedroom. He had left the phone there.

  By midnight Dad still hadn’t returned, and Mom had called the police to report a missing person, although to them Dad didn’t qualify as missing quite yet, so she called all the hospitals. She called the state police. She paced up and down the hallway, going into the living room to stare out the windows, like she might catch a glimpse of him driving by or something. And she went into every room and turned all the lights on, then flipped the outside lights on. Our house probably looked like a giant birthday cake blazing with all those lights. Why did she do that? Did she think he was lost in the darkness and needed some kind of beacon to guide him home?

  She reported him missing after the requisite number of hours, and the cops put out some bulletins. Someone said they thought they saw him in upstate New York or maybe it was Michigan. He didn’t call. He didn’t write.

  Mom and I settled into an uneasy routine with her going to work and me going to school, although once the teachers and school staff noticed the swelling of my stomach, I decided to stay home. I didn’t tell Mom that. I just left for school before she went to work, and I would linger around the corner until I knew she was gone, then I’d walk home and go into my room and fall back onto my bed and stare up at the ceiling. Sometimes, I would make myself a sandwich, but mostly I sat or lay on my bed and thought about… nothing.

  In my sixth month, I was home doing nothing when the doorbell rang. I went to the door; it was one of the boys. He doesn’t even deserve to be named; he certainly didn’t call me by my name during that entire ninety-minute ordeal. I flung open the door.

  “What?”

  He shuffled. “Can I come in?”

  “No.”

  I was surprised he was here. I didn’t even know he had any clue as to where I lived. Maybe he asked someone. Why, though? He had never been interested enough to visit before.

  “I just wanted to say—”

  “Stop. It’s too late. Don’t say you’re sorry. You’re not. You’re just afraid that I will tell someone what you and your friends did.”

  He looked down at his sneakers, then up at me. “Yeah. But I am sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  I slammed the door shut, then went back to my room and my dead dollies. I took them out of the closet, and I got a wet washcloth, and I took all of their clothing off, and I carefully washed their bodies. How strange to think in a few months I would be doing the same thing for the little living being growing inside me. I wanted to feel happy or sad or something. Mostly I felt nothing.

  I hadn’t been to a doctor yet. My mom said she couldn’t take me to a baby doctor. People would know; people would start to talk. She had abandoned her idea of us going somewhere and then coming back and pretending that the baby was hers. I wondered what she thought people would do when they started hearing a baby’s cry coming from our house?

  I thought we might move. Recently, she had started talking about a smaller house. Dad wasn’t dead, we didn’t think, but he wasn’t sending money either, and Mom couldn’t keep up this place by herself. I didn’t want to leave. What if Dad came back after we’d moved? How would he know where to find us?

  When Grandma next came to visit, she squinted at me, then at my mother and said, “This one needs to go on a diet.”

  Mom laughed and said we both did.

  Grandma had another present for me. Another doll. I thanked her. I’m not sure why she gave me one then, as I was nearly fifteen. Maybe she thought I collected them after all these years. I put the new Elizabeth on the shelf and waited.

  Mom found us a new place to live shortly after that—we were moving in with her mother. Grandma had a pretty big place, and I’d still have my own bedroom, toward the back of the house, and I liked that privacy. Mom had finally broken down and told Grandma what was going on, and Grandma had said nothing but simply pressed her lips together so they were thin and bloodless. That was when she said we should move in with her.

  It took us nearly a week but we got all our stuff over to Grandma’s. We had to sell a bunch of the furniture, and my mom packed up all of Dad’s stuff… in case he ever came by, I guess, and wanted his shoes and jeans and jackets and whatnot. Why would he want those things when he didn’t want his own wife and daughter? But I said nothing to Mom. I could tell she was still hopeful. Grandma just shook her head; she knew better.

  We settled into a fairly comfortable routine. Grandma took me to the doctor, who was amazed that the baby was so healthy. He talked to me about various options, and I just said my mom and I planned on keeping the baby. He looked across at my grandmother, who shrugged. When we got home, she said I needed to keep learning, so she took out some books and we started talking about history and stuff… It was more interesting than what I’d been taught in school. She said I could make up this year in school the following year, or maybe I could get my GED in a few years. I wondered why she paid more attention to me than Mom did.

  I was working on some math problems one afternoon when Grandma said, “Your mom has had it kind of rough, you know.”

  I put down my pencil. “No, I didn’t.”

  “She lost a baby.”

  Really? She had never said anything. I had never known about another sibling. Why hadn’t she told me? Was this what Dad was trying to tell me for so long?

  “Twins. She was going to have twins,” Grandma said, and she sighed heavily. “You were one of them.”

  “I was a twin?” I blinked. I couldn’t even begin to comprehend that.

  “She had to make a choice. Only one baby could be born. She had to choose. You were born.”

  I stared at my hands. I didn’t know what to say. Questions tumbled in my mind… words tried to form on my tongue… but nothing came.

  “Get back to your math,” Grandma finally said. It sounded harsh, but it wasn’t. She wasn’t into kissing and hugs and all that, and for her to be gruff with me was being kind. It’s those old-world people. No mushy stuff for them.

  I tried to focus, but what should have taken only minutes for me to do took me an hour. Finally I finished, and said I was going to my room, and I went in and closed the door and lay on the bed.

  I cried then. For myself. For my lost twin. For my mom and dad who never told me. I cried for the baby. And I cried for that boy who might have been my boyfriend or even a friend. And I wondered if he could ever find me at Grandma’s house. Could Dad?

  I didn’t have dinner that night—I just didn’t feel like eating—and I stayed in my room. Shivering, I burrowed under the covers.

  Sometime later I heard the door open, and I waited. I heard my mom approach the bed. It was the first time she’d come into my room at night since we had moved out of our own house. I held my breath.

  “I know she told you,” Mom whispered. “We wanted to tell you. Dad wanted to tell you. But I wouldn’t let him. It wasn’t right, I thought. I don’t know why. We should have told you years ago. We should have.” She paused and waited for me to say something, but I didn’t. “It was wrong. Choosing the other twin.”

  “You mean you should have let both of us be born?” I asked, finally finding my voice.

  “No,” my mother said, “I mean that I made a bad choice. I let the wrong twin live.”

  * * *

  I stopped talking to my mother after that. I had nothing left to say to her. I talked to my grandmother, and she talked to me, but for me, my mom didn’t exist. She might as well have left like Dad did.

  As I got closer to term, I realized I wasn’t feeling so well, or maybe it was just part of the pregnancy. I had started to read things online, but I just didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to hear about all the horrible things. I wondered if my grandmother would take me to the hospital to have the baby, or would we have a home delivery? She had told me that she had been born at home, but that her younger brothers had
all been born in the hospital. I wasn’t sure that Grandma could deliver a baby. Not my baby.

  But I didn’t say anything. No one talked about the pregnancy or the baby or anything like that. Mom kept going to work, and she would come home at the end of the day, and she would eat dinner, then retreat to her room off of the living room. And I would go into my bedroom at the back of the house. I don’t know what Grandma did.

  * * *

  Both my mom and my grandmother were out of the house when I began to feel the labour pains. I was going to call 911, but I didn’t, and I went into the bathroom and squatted in the tub, and I pushed like all those women you hear about, and I huffed and squeezed, and finally I felt wetness between my legs—my water broke, I guess—and then the baby was coming, just sliding right out. I caught her before she hit the bottom of the dry tub, and I studied her in the harsh bathroom light.

  So little… tiny tiny fingers. Her dark hair was plastered against her fragile skull. She was breathing, but kind of faintly. Her skin looked a little blue. I put my finger in her mouth to clear it out. She coughed once, twice, then breathed more easily.

  “Elizabeth,” I whispered.

  I got a wet washcloth and gently cleaned her up, cut the cord, and wiped up all the blood and stuff, then I wrapped her in a fresh towel. I cleaned myself up, but left the mess in the tub. Then I went into the bedroom with Elizabeth.

  I sat on the bed, and I gazed down at her. She hadn’t made any noise since she was born, but I could hear the faint rasp of her breathing. My mom had made a choice. I had a choice.

  I laid my fingers gently across her nose and mouth. It didn’t take long. She didn’t really even struggle all that much, just waved a tiny fist slowly. I watched for her chest to rise and fall, and when it no longer did, I bent down and gave her a kiss on the top of her head, and then I got up and crossed to the closet and put her on the shelf beside the other Elizabeths.

  Then I sat down on the bed and waited for my mother and grandmother to come home.