by Otto Penzler
The look she gave him was cold, foreign, one he had never seen on her face. “There isn’t going to be a next one.”
“But … but there’s no reason we …”
“No more,” she said. “We can still fuck”—he blanched at the harshness of the word in her mouth—“but not for a baby. I won’t do this again. I mean it.”
“But nothing says that this would happen again.”
“I won’t take the chance.”
“Life’s full of chances, Donna. From the minute …” He stopped.
“From the minute you’re born,” she finished for him.
“Yes. From the minute you’re born.”
“I’m sorry, Rick.”
“We should see someone.”
“No, there’s no point.”
“A counselor, a …”
“A psychiatrist?”
“Maybe. Donna, I know, I know it was hard to lose it, it was hard for me too, but you can’t let it rule your life.”
“It won’t. Just maybe the one small part of it, that’s all.”
Richard felt exhausted, unable to prolong their verbal skirmish. Her defenses seemed impregnable anyway, at least for now. In time, he thought, reason, the reason he possessed, might prevail. But not now. Not so soon.
That night, in bed, he put his arm around her and she moved into his warmth, but they did not make love, and he wondered if they ever would again.
Long after midnight, Richard awoke, conscious of Donna sitting up in bed next to him. Even in the dark, he could sense her tension, her attitude of expectant listening. “Donna?”
“Shh.”
“What is it?”
“Listen.” Her voice shook with excitement. Slowly he began to be aware of an alien sound just on the edge of audibility, similar to the tiny cracks and pings of expanding and cooling heat ducts that he spent the evenings of October getting used to. But this new sound seemed non-metallic, liquid in nature. It was nothing so simple as a drip, but it was rhythmic, a steady, constant surge of sound, like waves on a shore, though they were five hundred miles from the nearest beach. It was haunting, soothing, restful, and Richard thought there was a familiarity to it. It was tantalizing, elusive, and he knew that if he could only think back, think back far enough …
The furnace kicked on, and its barreling whoosh swept the sound and the nearly grasped memory far away. “Damn!” Donna cried. “Oh damn it!” Beside her, Richard shook his head as though coming out of a dream. “You heard it?” she said, switching on the lamp, barely blinking at its sudden glare.
“Yeah. Sure I did.”
“What was it?”
“I’m … not sure.”
“Where was it coming from?”
And he knew. Even though the sound seemed to lack any positive direction, he knew its source.
“The bath,” she whispered, saying what he would not. “The guest bath.” She turned as he nodded agreement, and stepped onto the cold wooden floor. Without pausing for a robe, she left the room and moved down the hall. He followed her.
When he arrived at the guest bath, she was already inside. The bright fluorescents had flickered into life, but their hum and the muffled rush of the furnace could not quell the other sound, that deep roar of moving fluids, the ebb and flow of the thick, heavy juices of life, all the churning activity of the womb. It was impossible to remember it, but he knew it could be nothing else.
“Oh my God,” said Donna. “It’s the baby.”
The closed lid of the toilet started to rattle, lightly at first, then began to chatter like a giant bridgework, rising so high that he almost, but not quite, got a glimpse of what was inside. He walked past Donna and stood beside the clattering bowl, staring down at it, the surging sound all around him now.
“Open it,” she said hollowly.
He began to reach down, but before his fingers could touch the vibrating lid, it snapped open like a hungry mouth, startling him, making him stumble backwards into his wife. The lid stayed open, showing them the water inside.
It was as black as ink, the unrelieved black of midnight cellars. As they watched, it started to slowly swirl and sink soundlessly downward, and more water, just as black, entered from under the rim to pour down, dance and turn and sink, over and over again, the sound of it lost in the pulse of the thicker liquids, that cacophony which poured over them, drowning their senses.
“Stop,” Richard said, or thought he said, as he could not hear his voice. “Stop!” he cried again, and this time it was thinly audible. Now he shrieked, “Stop!” and it cut the surging, parted the liquid waves of sound that deafened them, and the waters stopped pouring, the roar of fluid, of heartbeat, of life force quieted, leaving them in a flat, dead silence, a silence in which he saw.
It could have lasted only a split second, but in its brief space the bathroom winked from sight, and in its place was a face, huge and malformed. It was the face of a beast, yet a beast of potential. It was as primitive in form as a child’s drawing, yet the texture of the flesh was rich, finely grained, highly defined, viewed with perfect clarity. It was crowned by a vast and fleshy dome, bisected by a line of demarcation that could only be there to divide the hemispheres of its massive brain. The lower half of the face was composed of folds and wrinkles, out of which Richard could define loops of flexed muscle parodying a nose, and, beneath it, a broad, mountainous ridge that split the face from side to side, sinking at the edges into a countenance-spanning frown. On those hummocky sides of the primitive face hung two pouches, with a pit in each, that Richard knew would be eyes. They were not now. The thing was blind, though he felt it saw nonetheless, and his fear at seeing the thing was dwarfed by the realization that he in turn was seen.
He gasped and drew back, and the vision vanished. Once again the whiteness of the bathroom was all around him, and he heard no sounds but his own ragged breathing, the rumble of the furnace, the voice of Donna beside him.
“Did you see?” she said, as though she still could.
“See what?” he asked, praying she’d say the water, or the lid jiggling, hoping against hope that she had not seen what he had. If so, it had to have been real. They could not both be mad.
She shattered his hopes forever. “The face.” There was unimaginable awe in her words. “It was the baby. I saw it.”
So simply, he realized that she must be right. The face of a fetus, unborn, undeveloped, primitive in the extreme, little different from the fetus of beast or fish or fowl. How long, he tried to recall, before a fetus shows traces of being mammalian? And how much longer after that until displaying signs of humanity? Longer, surely, than eight weeks.
Oh, dear Christ, what had happened here? What had died? And what still, impossibly, lived?
IV
When Richard and Donna looked at the water in the bowl, it was perfectly clear and still. Indeed, there was not a thing in the bathroom to ascertain the sounds and sights they had experienced. It was as though they had undergone the same delusion, though Richard found that theory so unlikely as to be impossible. He had seen what he had seen, heard what he had heard, and that it had been a delusion occurred to him only momentarily.
The later manifestations, though, were quick and short and sharp, like jabs of temper, angry releases of ghostly frustration. The first of them occurred when he and Donna sat at the kitchen table, drinking instant coffee, trying to determine what had happened in the guest bath and why.
“It was the baby,” Donna said with rigid certainty.
“It couldn’t have been.”
“You saw it.”
“I saw something.”
“It was the baby.”
“Donna, the baby’s dead. It died. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“How else can you explain it?”
“It can’t …”
“Listen,” she said. “I don’t believe either … didn’t, at least. But if ghosts are supposed to result from violent things that happen, from … from traumatization,
well, God, can you imagine anything more traumatic than being stillborn? Being yanked out of the only place in the world where you can survive?”
“So what are you saying? That … that somehow this thing that wasn’t even born, that was never even alive, that never had”—he felt absurd saying it—“a soul, has come back as a ghost to flush our goddam toilet?”
He laughed at his words, and as he did his untouched coffee mug tipped over, pouring a half-cup of scalding liquid onto his stomach, groin, and thighs. The thin robe he wore offered no protection, and he gasped and stood up, letting the steaming brew drip off of him, trying not to cry out.
Donna, shocked, leaned toward him as if wanting to help but not knowing how. In a few seconds, after the first searing pains were over, he opened the robe. The flesh of his loins was bright red, but there were no blisters. He took a jar of cold water from the refrigerator, poured some into his cupped hand, and patted it on his skin. “Bastard,” he whispered fervently. “How the …” He stopped, knowing the only answer.
“It did it,” Donna said. “Because you laughed.”
It took Richard a moment to speak again. “I’m going to bed,” he said, wrapping the wet robe around him. “We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
The morning came slowly. Richard lay awake, listening for noises, his eyes staring at the false lights of the darkness, seeing that bulbous face in his memory. When daylight came, they did not speak of the night before, and Richard kept one hand firmly on his coffee mug.
Nothing happened for a week. Donna seemed exhausted and slept well, but Richard took a long time to get to sleep, and when he did, his night was haunted by disquieting dreams he could not remember in the morning.
Donna had said nothing about going back to work, and Richard brought it up only once. She dismissed it rather flippantly, which annoyed him. Mortgage payments were not small, and it seemed to him a waste to have her idle at home. Still, he remembered what the doctor had said, and did not press her.
A heavy snow storm blew up the following Thursday, and rapid changes in temperature crusted the white-covered roof with ice. A warm front came into the area on Saturday, and the snow beneath the ice melted. Unable to drip off the roof because of the ice dam above the spoutings, the chill water trickled beneath the eaves, down into the walls, and ultimately dripped from beneath the interior window sills. It had happened one previous winter, and Richard and Donna grudgingly packed towels beneath the sills, bundled up, and went outside. Richard took a hatchet and ladder from one of the outbuildings, wedged the ladder into the snow, and climbed up to the edge of the two-storey high roof, where he began to hack long chunks of ice from above the rusty spouting. Donna stood below, watching from a distance of a few yards, her booted feet wedged firmly in eighteen inches of snow.
Richard was leaning far to his left, trying to minimize the number of times he had to descend and shift the ladder, when the house suddenly seemed to slew to his left. The sensation lasted only a moment, and he knew he was falling, the ladder with him. He pushed back and away, thinking only that he must not smash into the house. He felt his body leave the ladder, float dizzily, and fall. The impact as he hit the ice made a sharp crack, and he was still, lying on his side in the snow beneath the icy crust.
“Richard!” Donna cried, wading toward him. “Richard! Don’t move!”
He had no intention of doing so until he knew he was capable of it. His heart was ratcheting, yet he felt curiously alive, as though he had just stepped from a particularly invigorating roller coaster ride. “I’m … I’m all right. I think I’m all right.” He tried a few tentative movements. There was no pain. “I’m okay.” He struggled through the thick snow to his feet. “What the hell happened?”
The ladder lay where it had fallen, the base at least twenty feet from where it had been solidly rooted in the snow.
“My God,” he whispered. “What on earth …”
“It didn’t fall,” Donna said. “It was just like it … like it was pulled out of the snow and thrown away. Like some invisible hand.”
“That’s impossible,” he said thickly.
“Look. Look for yourself.”
He saw that she was right. Had he merely overbalanced, the ladder’s base would have been next to the holes in the snow. As it was …
“This is crazy,” he said. “Some freak, that’s all. The way it hit, it bounced or something. Just some freak.”
“Don’t do any more. Let’s go inside.”
He looked at the ladder, then up at the roof, from which he had chipped well over half of the ice. There should be space for the melting water to drain off now. Yes, he told himself, there should be.
“Please, Richard.” Donna took his arm. “I love you. I don’t want you hurt.”
He let her lead him into the house.
The next evening he was taking a shower when Donna came into the bathroom to get a pair of tweezers. As she opened the door to leave, the shower caddy, laden with several pounds of soaps, shampoos, and rinses, tore loose from the tile and fell, hitting Richard sharply in the back of the neck. When they looked, they found the adhesive had not dried out.
On Sunday, Richard was in the den writing a letter at the roll-top desk, and Donna was standing by the bookcase. The heavy roll-top, contrary to all the laws of physics, came crashing down, striking the typewriter that Richard had pulled toward the desk’s edge. It was all that kept his wrists from being crushed.
Donna held him while he trembled and laughed simultaneously, but neither one of them said anything about the baby that had been lost. For Richard to suggest it would have meant admitting that something totally inexplicable and irrational was intruding into their lives. He could not admit to that, not after the night he had laughed at Donna for suggesting what he had considered to be the fantasy of a semi-hysterical woman. Now, he was unsure enough that he could not speak of it.
V
When Richard returned from his classes Monday afternoon, Donna was gone. She had taken the Accord, a great many of her clothes, and several thousand dollars, he later learned, from her personal savings account. She had left behind a letter, written in her sharp, slanting script:
Dear Rick,
I’m sorry that I have to do this, but I think it’s for the best for everybody. For you, for me, for the baby.
Maybe you’ll think I’m crazy, but the baby’s still alive, I know. Somehow, somewhere, and it’s still bound to me. It’s got to be. It’s too small to survive on its own. So I’m leaving, and I think it will come with me, and then you’ll be safe. It can do things, Rick. It can make things happen, and I’m afraid it will hurt you. Going away is the only answer. I owe it to you, and I owe it to the baby.
I didn’t tell you before, because I thought you’d laugh at me, but I honestly feel as though I’ve never lost it. After the miscarriage, I still felt (and feel) as though I was still pregnant, still carrying it inside me. So I’m taking it away. Please try to understand and try to forgive me. And please don’t look for me. I’ll be all right. I’m not crazy, Rick, and I say that knowing that that’s what crazy people always say. I’m not crazy, but I am special, and if that’s delusions of grandeur, so be it, but there’s got to be some purpose behind all this. I don’t know when I’ll come back, but I will come back, Rick. I love you, darling. Merry Christmas.
Donna
He put down the letter, poured himself a scotch, sat down, and listened to the silence. The house felt empty, lifeless. Had there been any kind of entity there, it was gone now. Gone with Donna.
He stood, encased by quiet, and turned on the amplifier, hitting the scan switch and letting the first station click in. It was a choir singing Christmas music, and he half-moaned, half-laughed as he identified it as the Coventry Carol. So fitting, he thought. His soul felt like Coventry, the latter-day Coventry, bombed, a shambles, wooden skeletons poking their fingers up through smoky rubble.
He listened. They were singing the final verse.
&n
bsp; That woe is me, poor child, for thee,
And ever mourn and say:
For thy parting, neither say nor sing
By, by, lully lullay.
He kept listening until he fell asleep. He did not dream.
VI
Parsons finished reading the letter. He stuck out his lower lip, tapped the paper with the knuckles of his right hand, set it down, and looked at Richard. “She’s disturbed,” he said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Richard responded bitterly.
“What did you expect me to say? You want a complete case history neatly labeled and explained?”
“You’re the psychiatrist.”
“I’m not a goddam psychiatrist, I’m a goddam psychologist.”
“So what the hell does the psychologist have to say?”
“Little more than you can figure out with common sense. Donna was very upset by the miscarriage, and when these incidents began happening, she interpreted it as a sign that the baby—or the life force, call it, that had been the baby—had somehow survived. Isn’t that what you think?”
“I suppose so.”
Parsons was silent for a moment. He eyed Richard carefully. “Now what do you believe?”
“There’s a difference?”
“You bet.”
Richard sighed. “Everything seems too coincidental. Why did these things all start to happen at once? And what about that thing … those noises and everything in the guest bath? We both saw it.”
“You thought you both saw it.”
“Oh, come on, John, I know when …”
“Hold it. I didn’t say you didn’t see it. I think maybe you did.”
“What?”
“You want an answer. Okay. I’ll give you an answer that isn’t completely rational, but one that has nothing to do with ghosts. You’re not going to find it in any textbook, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. It just means it’s not proven. Hell, it’s not even seriously proposed.”
