by Ronald Malfi
He saw something dart through a thicket of trees off to his left, causing him to slam on the brakes. The tires growled along the road. He jerked his head in that direction and caught a fleeting human visage disappear into the darkness of the forest.
My sweet God…
It took all of thirty seconds for Raintree to regain composure and snap from his daze. His right hand went for the flashlight that now rested on the passenger seat while his left hand popped open the door. Again, freezing wind blew into the car, mercilessly needling his skin. The air was so bitterly cold, it caused his head to spin. He thought, This is what it is like at the top of a mountain.
He hopped from the car and hustled in the direction of the figure, now completely gone from his sight. He moved the flashlight to his left hand, his right unconsciously sliding to the handgun inside his pancake holster.
“Hello?” he shouted. His voice echoed back on the dry, cold wind. “This is the police. Step out, now.”
He crossed the dirt road and stepped into the woods for the second time that evening, only now his heart was pounding and the beam of the flashlight vibrated ahead of him like a giant epileptic lightning bug. Sweat blossomed on his forehead, immediately freezing in the cold night air.
“Hello?”
Except for his muted footfalls crunching on the dead, frozen earth, the woods were silent. He paused in midstride and swept the surrounding trees with the flashlight.
There was someone out here, all right, someone for certain. Some white figure, just like Graham Rand said…
But the thought of spotting Rand’s naked ghost-man just minutes after convincing Rand himself that no such person existed seemed way too economical. It was impossibly—
A flutter: a materialized image somewhere in the darkness ahead of him. Like flailing arms. He was too slow with the flashlight beam, just barely missing the figure—yet he could hear it now, bounding through the forest. The abecedarian gait of a human being. He’d grown up in these woods and was certain of the sound—the sound of a human being, a man, running through the woods.
“Police! Police!”
Raintree hopped a deadfall and proceeded after the man, moving faster, although he could no longer see the figure. Arms up as protection against the whipping tree limbs, the cop ran awkwardly and without certitude, his subconscious mind already beginning to doubt a positive outcome to this situation. It was an inbred knowledge, akin to Graham Rand’s proclamation that he could tell a man was a man because he could just feel it. Instinctual. It was the basic, animalistic sensation of unavoidable doom. And it was now mere seconds away.
Out of breath and vanquished, Felix Raintree paused and leaned his great weight against a tree, his head back, his teeth chattering in the frigid air despite the sweat he’d managed to work up. He brought his flashlight down. The beam trickled over his boots. His right hand slowly slid away from his holster and to his right side, where a burning stitch had suddenly materialized.
Just a few feet ahead of him, the woods seemed to come alive. It wasn’t something he saw—not immediately, anyway—but, rather, something he felt—felt it like a white-hot pulse at the center of every cell, every fiber in his body. A sense of thereness, of an empty space suddenly and completely filled.
And then he saw the figure, half hidden behind a stand of firs.
Out of breath, he managed, “Step out. Sir. Caliban County…Police…please…step out where I can…”
Felix Raintree’s words caught in his throat.
A moment later, he was screaming.
A moment after that, he was dead.
Part Two
Figures Unseen
Chapter Fourteen
Carlos Mendes thought of blood. He thought of it when he looked at food, when he looked at alcohol, when he looked at rain washing against his bedroom windows. Mostly, he thought about blood when he looked at his wife.
He’d never been a paranoid man. And, despite his family’s strong proclivity toward the belief in the supernatural, he’d never truly been a superstitious man. Such beliefs were erroneous and without foundation, and he was a doctor—someone who’d surrendered such beliefs the moment he took his professional oath. There was nothing to be afraid of in that make-believe world of fairies and goblins and trolls; it was only once you started fearing that make-believe world was there a cause for worry. It became dangerous when you started to believe in such things.
Yet, the blood…
He knew he was imagining it, that it was all in his head, but he couldn’t shake it. It was less a vision (or a series of visions) than a version of his own personal warning. Warning him of impending doom.
He’d look at Marie and think, What’s going on inside you, my sweet? What’s going on inside your body that is making me so paranoid, so frightened? What was it that old Nellie Worthridge saw that I can’t? Can you tell me?
He’d stare at Marie’s hands and would suddenly find himself acutely aware of the blood that coursed through her veins. Or he’d watch her eat, knowing that the food would turn to blood, that it would become her blood…and then it would become the baby’s blood. Because they were now one thing, one creature, living off the same blood, the same food. Or worse—that they actually were two separate entities entirely, and that the little life inside Marie was only using his wife as an incubator, prepared to burst out once it was fully formed and ready to claw and scratch and survive on the outside. He would think of his aunt’s stories of the Jersey Devil, that hoofed, horse-faced child-monster, and he would wake up in the middle of the night with a scream caught in his throat. And Marie? She didn’t even notice. Like any woman in the throes of procreation, she had her good days and her bad days. Yet even on her bad days, she never exhibited any signs that anything was wrong.
One evening, Mendes was awakened by Marie using the toilet in the small bathroom off their bedroom. His eyes flipped open and he darted toward the half-closed bathroom door in his underwear. There was already a picture in his head: Marie, projected onto a huge screen in a darkened theater, her body covered in blood, her eyes wide and frightened and staring. On the floor between her thighs was this purple, vein-riddled expulsion that moved on its own, that was sightless and limbless yet still desperate to pull itself across the cold tile floor of the bathroom and away from the womb that had birthed it. Baby, was all he could think. Baby.
But when he entered the bathroom, Marie was standing at the sink, washing her hands. The sight of her husband swinging the door open gave her a start.
“Carlito,” she breathed.
He was immediately embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”
“These bad dreams have got to stop.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“No,” she said. “Let me take care of you. It’s not your job to always be the one taking care of someone else.”
“It’s not a big deal. Can’t even remember what it was about.” But that image still lingered behind his eyelids—his wife’s blank stare beneath the warming lights of the bathroom, blood congealing in her hair, her eyelashes…and that indescribable thing slinking across the floor, leaving behind a snail-trail of pink membrane…
Other nights, when he couldn’t sleep, he found himself sitting in his study with the lights turned out, listening to Nellie Worthridge’s voice on his tape recorder over and over again.
He managed to convince Marie to go with him to Doctor Chalmers’s office for a full examination, despite her insistence that she felt fine. When Bruce Chalmers questioned the reason for Mendes’s concern, Mendes did not know exactly how to respond.
Marie said, “He’s been having nightmares.”
Chalmers laughed in his deep-belly way. “You’re about to be a father, Carlos,” Chalmers said. “I’ll grant you some nervousness. But don’t overdo it. You should be calm, like Marie here.”
“She’s a tough one, all right,” he said, smiling at his wife. But all he could see was blood. “I’m very proud of her.”
“She’s d
oing great,” Chalmers agreed. He adjusted two suctions on the side of Marie’s belly and clicked on a small machine mounted on the wall. The sound of a washing machine heard from some great distance away filled the room. “You hear that? There’s your baby’s heartbeat.”
“Oh,” Marie managed, a loss for words. “Oh-oh-oh…”
“It’s fast,” Mendes said.
“It’s perfectly normal,” Chalmers assured him.
“It sounds fast,” Mendes repeated. Chalmers gave him a sideways glance.
The examination lasted roughly one hour, after which Bruce Chalmers assured the couple that he could find no cause for alarm, and that everything was fine. “You’re like a clock, Marie,” Chalmers told her. “Everything’s running on time.”
“Maybe poor Carlito can sleep now,” she joked.
Chalmers laughed. “Maybe. What do you think, Carlito?” he said, causing Marie to giggle at Chalmers’s use of her husband’s pet-name.
“I think I’m fine,” he told them both. Then as an afterthought: “Could you tell us what the baby’s sex is at this point?”
“No!” Marie nearly shouted. “No, Carlito, we agreed, remember?”
“I know, I’m just curious, sweetheart.”
“I could tell you, yes,” Chalmers said. “If you wanted to know…”
“No,” Marie insisted, “we don’t.”
In the hallway, as his wife filled out medical papers, Mendes thought, If I knew the sex of the baby and the baby turned out to be a girl, I could rest easy. Then I’d know what Nellie Worthridge said was just a bunch of nonsense and I could rest easy. If only I knew…
A hand fell on his shoulder. He looked into the smiling face of Bruce Chalmers. “Can we talk just for a minute?”
“All right.”
Mendes followed Chalmers down the hallway. They paused just outside the men’s room. Chalmers tapped a pen against his left index finger as he spoke.
“Carlos, what’s bothering you?”
“No, it’s nothing.”
“It’s something. Tell me. You’re having trouble sleeping? You’re worried about the baby? Well, that’s normal. But you can tell me if it’s something else, you know. Is it something else?”
Yes, Doctor, I’m afraid that our baby will be born dead just like the old crippled woman predicted, and I’m also afraid of these dreams I’ve been having where my wife gives birth to a bloody, pulsating mutant.
“There’s nothing,” he told Chalmers. “Just sleep. I’ve been working too hard lately.”
Chalmers nodded. “I know how it is downtown. You should take some time off, relax, spend it with your family. You’re going to be a father soon, Carlos. You’re about to face a lifetime of difficulties, but also a lifetime of some pretty great stuff too. You work too hard, Carlos. You always have. You need to take some time for yourself.”
“I know.”
“This isn’t just lip service.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re right.”
“I am. Listen to me, then, all right? Do me a favor here? It’s not doing Marie any good for you to be working yourself into the ground. Now, if you want, I can give you something for those nightmares. I can have you sleeping through the night like a baby, if you’ll pardon the pun.”
He shook his head. “No, I’m good.”
“Suit yourself. But my primary concern here is Marie and that baby. So I don’t want you driving that pretty little wife of yours crazy.”
“You’re right,” he said, suddenly anxious to get home. “Thank you.”
When they arrived home, Mendes’s mother had prepared a stew for them. “Everything is good?” she asked her son.
“Good, Mamma. The baby’s fine.”
“This is good,” his mother said, hobbling around the table and taking a seat by the window. Frost had formed on the pane. “And you?”
“Me?”
“Why you’re not sleeping.”
“Mamma,” he said, “Bruce Chalmers is an obstetrician…”
“He said Carlito is working too hard, Mamma,” Marie said while filling their bowls with stew.
“This I knew,” his mother said. She hooked a crooked finger in his direction. “You see what I’ve been saying? Maybe you don’t listen to your mother, Carlos, but maybe now you listen to a doctor, eh?”
“I’m all right,” he insisted. It had become his own personal litany.
“All this work is not for good,” his mother continued. “You work so hard and you forget to remember the important things. You have the stress.”
“I’m not forgetting anything, Mamma.”
“Let’s eat,” Marie said.
He took Bruce Chalmers’s advice and took a few days off—his first since he began working at NYU Downtown. He spent the first day lounging around the house, reading books, and fixing the busted lock on the bathroom door. When night came and Marie went to soak herself in a warm bath, he crept out onto the back porch with a cigar and suffered the cold. But it was all a show. His absence from the hospital did not ease his tension any; in fact, it only seemed to add an extra layer of apprehension to his condition. Without work, he could think of nothing but Marie and the baby. And no amount of time off was going to make him forget about Nellie Worthridge and what she said.
After his wife and his mother had gone to bed, Mendes once again found himself sitting in the dark study with his hand-held tape recorder on his lap. By now, he’d memorized the old woman’s voice all the way down to her most trivial inflection. And continuing to listen to the recording was not helping him any; rather, it was like a hidden stash to a drug addict: as long as it was in the house, he would have his nightly fix.
And what if Marie sneaks down here one night and catches me listening to it? What if she hears what the old woman says on the tape? Then what? How do I explain it? And moreover, how do I prevent her from becoming just as frightened as I am?
It would feel good to have someone to share the recording with, just so he didn’t have to feel so alone. But he couldn’t bring Marie into it. That wasn’t fair.
Be a man, he thought, and pressed the PLAY button on the recorder.
Static. Silence. Nothing.
He leaned back in his chair toward the window and examined the tape in the moonlight. It was rewound—he could see that—yet it did not play. He tried it a second time, a third time, but there was still nothing.
Partially angry and partially relieved, he assumed he must have carelessly recorded over the tape the last time he’d listened to it.
He’d flushed his own stash.
Despite Dr. Bruce Chalmers’s assurance that both Marie and the baby were in perfect health, Mendes’s nightmares did not ease up.
He found himself in a darkened hallway that smelled vaguely of vinegar. The walls were skewed at uncertain angles, rippling in places, visibly moving, undulating. But it was too dark to see. He took a step closer to one of the walls (felt his foot sink an inch into the quicksand floor) and brought his hand up to the wall to feel for a light switch. The tips of his fingers sank into the fleshy membrane that was the wall, and he could feel a cool menthol liquid coursing down his arm to the crook of his elbow. Disgusted, he quickly withdrew his hand.
There was a dull red light up ahead, but the abstract hallway turned and he could only make out the light’s reflection on the opposite wall. In that light, the consistency of the wall itself resembled the surface of a human tongue…as if he were trapped in some giant’s throat.
He took several dreamlike steps toward the light and the bend in the hallway. With each step, he could feel his bare feet sinking into the moist, pappy surface of the hallway, chilling him. The deeper he moved down the winding, fleshly corridor, the thicker the air grew—wet and heady and stinging his eyes. The reflection of the light on the wall grew more and more intense as he maneuvered through each curve of the hallway, and he thought, This is not a hallway—this is a tunnel.
Up ahead, somewhere in that red light, he could hear a
baby crying. It sounded close.
He started to run, but the more effort he put into his movements, the more the ground tried to swallow his feet. Yet he was almost there, almost in the light, almost right there with that baby…
Julian!
A fierce convulsion sent the floor heaving toward the ceiling, sent the walls in on themselves, and he heard himself scream. The intensity of the red light flared to an almost fiery brilliance, then resumed its original muted pulse. A second convulsion rocked him off his feet and sent him head-first onto the ground. Slick moisture splashed his face. On his stomach with his hands splayed out in front of him, bare feet dragging behind, a third convulsion sent him sliding down the tunnel toward the red light. His splayed hands and spread fingers kicked up a gelatinous spray that pattered against his face as he slid.
The infant’s crying grew steadily louder.
He felt himself lose momentum and crash—no, splash—against one of the living walls before tumbling further down the tunnel, and then there he was, at the epicenter of this giant, yet not in the throat, not in the mouth, but in the life force, in the womb, in the center of creation.
The baby and the light were the same creature—not tiny and helpless, but indefinably enormous and alive, each heartbeat like the pounding of a steel drum, like the resonant hum of a live electrical wire…
Julian! Julian!
It was aglow and too bright to stare at. A cloth-like membrane webbing encased it, stretching taut with each spastic movement of the infant creature inside. And it was still crying—mewling—with each exhale of air from its incomplete lungs sending vibrating ripples along the skin of the membrane. It was just so enormous, this titanic infant-creature. Some monster…
This is not a baby, he thought, on the verge of screaming those very words. This is not a baby at all!
There was a blast of moist, stinging heat. A final convulsion caused the red light to burst into a stunning white flame, with the infant-creature’s silhouette directly in the center of that flame, and Mendes felt himself crushed by the mucus-lined walls of the tunnel and forcefully pulled from the womb—
