by Holly Black
She said, “I’m going to bed. Are you coming?”
“I thought I’d stay up for a bit.”
She crossed the flagstone floor to him in stocking feet, soundlessly, like a grotesquely misshapen apparition—her belly preceding her. He wondered if the long lines of the body he used to know were in there somewhere. She was still beautiful, still graceful, to be sure. But she possessed now a grace and beauty unlike any he had known, ponderous and alien, wholly different from that she had possessed the first time he had seen her all those years ago—ghost-like then as well, an apparition from a world stable and dependable, a world of family, glimpsed in heart-wrenching profile through the clamorous throng of the University Center cafeteria.
She knelt by him. “Please come to bed.”
He swished his drink. Ice bobbed and clinked. “I need to unwind.”
“Gerald … ”
“No really, I’m not sleepy, okay?” He smiled, and he could feel the falseness of the smile, but it satisfied her.
She leaned toward him, her lips brushed his cheek with a pressure barely present—the merest papery rush of moth wings in a darkened room. And then she was gone.
Gerald drank: stared into the television’s poison glow and drank gin and tonic, nectar and ambrosia. Tastes like a Christmas tree, Sara had told him the first night they were together, really together. He had loved her, he thought. He touched the remote, cycled past a fragmentary highlight of an NFL football game; past the dependable hysteria over the LA cannibal killer, identity unknown; past the long face of Mr. Ed. Drank gin and cycled through and through the channels, fragmentary windows on a broken world. Oh, he had loved her.
Later, how much later he didn’t know and didn’t care, Gerald found his way to the bedroom. Without undressing, he lay supine on the bed and stared sightlessly at the ceiling, Sara beside him, sleeping the hard sleep of exhaustion for now, though Gerald knew it would not last. Before the night was out, the relentless demands of the child within her would prod her into wakefulness. Lying there, his eyes gradually adjusting to the dark until the features of the room appeared to stand out, blacker still against the blackness, something, some whim, some impulse he could not contain, compelled him to steal his hand beneath the covers: stealthy now, through the folds of the sheet; past the hem of her gown, rucked up below her breasts; at last flattening his palm along the arc of her distended belly. Sara took in a heavy breath, kicked at the covers restlessly, subsided.
Silence all through the house, even the furnace silent in its basement lair: just Sara’s steady respiration, and Gerald with her in the weighty dark, daring hardly to breath, aware now of a cold sobriety in the pressure of the air.
The child moved.
For the first time, he felt it. He felt it move. An icy needle of emotion pierced him. It moved, moved again, the faintest shift in its embryonic slumber, bare adjustment of some internal gravity.
Just a month, he thought. Only a month.
The child moved, really moved now, palpable against his outstretched palm. Gerald threw back the covers, sitting upright, the room wheeling about him so swiftly that he had to swallow hard against an obstruction rising in his throat. Sara kicked in her sleep, and then was still.
Gerald looked down at her, supine, one long hand curled at her chin, eyes closed, mouth parted, great mound of belly half-visible below the hem of her upturned gown. Now again, slowly, he lay a hand against her warm stomach, and yes, just as he had feared, it happened again: the baby moved, a long slow pressure against his palm.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, hissed the thin nasty voice of the cockroach. But what exactly did that mean?
He moved his palm along her taut belly, pausing as Sara sighed in her sleep, and here too, like the slow pressure of some creature of the unknown deep, boiling through the placid waters, came that patient and insistent pressure. And then something more, not mere pressure, not gentle: a sudden, powerful blow. Sara moaned and arched her back, but the blow came again, as though the creature within her had hurled itself against the wall of the imprisoning womb. Why didn’t she wake up? Gerald drew his hand away. Blow wasn’t really the right word, was it?
What was?
His heart hammered at his ribcage; transfixed, Gerald moved his hand back toward Sara’s belly. No longer daring to touch her, he skated his hand over the long curve on an inch-thin cushion of air. My God, he thought. My God. For he could see it now, he could see it: an outward bulge of the taut flesh with each repeated blow, as though a fist had punched her from within. He moved his hand, paused, and it happened again, sudden and sure, an outward protrusion that swelled and sank and swelled again. In a kind of panic—
—what the hell was going on here—
—Gerald moved his hand, paused, moved it again, tracing the curve of Sara’s belly in a series of jerks and starts. And it followed him. Even though he was no longer touching her, it followed him, that sudden outward protrusion, the thing within somehow aware of his presence and trying to get at him. The blows quickened even as he watched, until they began to appear and disappear with savage, violent speed.
And still she did not wake up.
Not a blow, he thought. A strike.
Like the swift, certain strike of a cobra. An image unfolded with deadly urgency in Gerald’s mind: the image of the orchid-colored mantis exploding outward from its flowery hole to drag down the helpless grasshopper and devour it.
Gerald jerked his hand away as if stung.
Sara’s abdomen was still and pale as a tract of mountain snow. Nothing moved there. He reached the covers across her and lay back. A terrific weight settled over him; his chest constricted with panic; he could barely draw breath.
The terrible logic of the thing revealed itself to him at last. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, Exavious had told him. And what if it was true? What if each child reflected in its own development the evolutionary history of the entire species?
Imagine:
Somewhere, far far back in the evolutionary past—who could say how far?—but somewhere, it began. A mutation that should have died, but didn’t, a creature born of man and woman that survived to feed … and reproduce. Imagine a recessive gene so rare that it appeared in only one of every ten thousand individuals—one of every hundred thousand even. For that would be sufficient, wouldn’t it? Gerald couldn’t calculate the odds, but he knew that it would be sufficient, that occasionally, three or four times in a generation, two carriers of such a gene would come together and produce … What? A child that was not what it appeared to be. A child that was not human. A monster clothed in human flesh.
Beside him, Sara moaned in her sleep. Gerald did not move.
He shut his eyes and saw against the dark screens of his eyelids, the flower-colored mantis, hidden in its perfumed lair; saw its deadly graceful assault, its pincers as they closed around the helpless grasshopper and dragged it down. The words of the narrator came back to him as well: natural selection favors the most efficient predator. And the most efficient predator is the monster that walks unseen among its chosen prey.
Terror gripped him as at last he understood how it must have been through all the long span of human history: Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac, the cannibal killer loose even now in the diseased bowels of Los Angeles.
We are hunted, he thought. We are hunted.
He stumbled clumsily from the bed and made his way into the adjoining bathroom, where for a long time he knelt over the toilet and was violently, violently sick.
Sanity returned to him in perceptual shards: watery light through the slatted blinds, the mattress rolling under him like a ship in rough waters, a jagged sob of fear and pain that pierced him through. Sara.
Gerald sat upright, swallowing bile. He took in the room with a wild glance.
Sara: in the doorway to the bathroom, long legs twisted beneath her, hands clutched in agony at her bloated abdomen. And blood—
—my God, how could you have—
—so
much blood, a crimson gout against the pale carpet, a pool spreading over the tiled floor of the bathroom.
Gerald reached for the phone, dialed 911. And then he went to her, took her in his arms, comforted her.
Swarming masses of interns and nurses in white smocks swept her away from him at the hospital. Later, during the long gray hours in the waiting room—hours spent staring at the mindless flicker of television or gazing through dirty windows that commanded a view of the parking lot, cup after cup of sour vending-machine coffee clutched in hands that would not warm—Gerald could not recall how they had spirited her away. In his last clear memory he saw himself step out of the ambulance into an icy blood-washed dawn, walking fast beside the gurney, Sara’s cold hand clutched in his as the automatic doors slipped open on the chill impersonal reaches of the emergency room.
Somehow he had been shunted aside, diverted without the solace of a last endearment, without even a backwards glance. Instead he found himself wrestling with a severe gray-headed woman about insurance policies and admission requirements, a kind of low-wattage bureaucratic hell he hated every minute of, but missed immediately when it ended and left him to his thoughts.
Occasionally he gazed at the pay phones along the far wall, knowing he should call Sara’s mother but somehow unable to gather sufficient strength to do so. Later, he glimpsed Exavious in an adjacent corridor, but the doctor barely broke stride. He merely cast at Gerald a speculative glance—
—he knows, he knows—
—and passed on, uttering over his shoulder these words in his obscurely accented English: “We are doing everything in our power, Mr. Hartshorn. I will let you know as soon as I have news.”
Alone again. Alone with bitter coffee, recriminations, the voice of the cockroach.
An hour passed. At eleven o’clock, Exavious returned. “It is not good, I’m afraid,” he said. “We need to perform a caesarean section, risky under the circumstances, but we have little choice if the baby is to survive.”
“And Sara?”
“We cannot know, Mr. Hartshorn.” Exavious licked his lips, met Gerald’s gaze. “Guarded optimism, shall we say. The fall … ” He lifted his hand. “Your wife is feverish, irrational. We need you to sign some forms.”
And afterwards, after the forms were signed, he fixed Gerald for a long moment with that same speculative stare and then he turned away. “I’ll be in touch.”
Gerald glared at the clock as if he could by force of will speed time’s passage. At last he stood, crossed once more to the vending machines, and for the first time in seven years purchased a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. After a word with the receptionist, he stepped into the bitterly cold December morning to smoke.
A few flakes of snow had begun to drift aimlessly about in the wind. Gerald stood under the E.R. awning, beneath the bruised and sullen sky, the familiar stink of cigarette smoke somehow comforting in his nostrils. He gazed out over the crowded parking lot, his eyes watering. Like stepping into icy water, he thought, this stepping into the past: for what he saw was not the endless rows of cars, but the house he had visited for the first time in a decade only a day ago. And the voice he heard in his head was neither the voice of the hospital p.a. system or the voice of the wind. It was the voice of the cockroach, saying words he did not want to hear.
You, the cockroach told him. You are responsible.
Gerald flipped his cigarette, still burning, into the gutter and wrapped his arms close about his shoulders. But the cold he felt was colder than mere weather.
Responsible.
He supposed he had been. Even now, he could not forget the isolation they had endured during the first years of their marriage. The fear. It hadn’t been easy for either of them—not for Gerald, sharing for the first time the bitter legacy of a life he had still to come to terms with; not for Sara, smiling patrician Sara, banished from a family who would not accept the impoverished marriage she had made. To this day Gerald had not forgiven his in-laws for the wedding: the thin-lipped grimace that passed for his motherin-law’s smile; the encounter with his father-in-law in the spotless restroom of the Marriott, when the stout old dentist turned from a urinal to wag a finger in Gerald’s face. “Don’t ever ask me for a dime, Gerald,” he had said. “Sara’s made her choice and she’ll have to abide by it.”
No wonder we were proud, he thought. Sara had taken an evening job as a cashier at a supermarket. Gerald continued at the ad agency, a poorly paid associate, returning nightly to the abandoned rental house where he sat blankly in front of the television and awaited the sound of Sara’s key in the lock. God knows they hadn’t needed a baby.
But there it was. There it was.
And so the pressure began to tell, the endless pressure to stretch each check just a little further. Gerald could not remember when or why—money he supposed—but gradually the arguments had begun. And he had started drinking. And one night …
One night. Well.
Gerald slipped another cigarette free of the pack and brought it to his lips. Cupping his hands against the wind, he set the cigarette alight, and drew deeply.
One night, she was late from work and, worried, Gerald met her at the door. He stepped out onto the concrete stoop to greet her, his hand curled about the graying wooden rail. When Sara looked up at him, her features taut with worry in the jaundiced corona of the porch light, he had just for a moment glimpsed a vision of himself as she must have seen him: bearish, slovenly, stinking of drink. And poor. Just another poor fucking bastard, only she had married this one.
He opened his arms to her, needing her to deny the truth he had seen reflected in her eyes. But she fended him off, a tight-lipped little moue of distaste crossing her features—he knew that expression, he had seen it on her mother’s face.
Her voice was weary when she spoke. Her words stung him like a lash. “Drinking again, Gerald?” And then, as she started to push her way past him: “Christ, sometimes I think Mom was right about you.”
And he had struck her.
For the first and only time in all the years they had been married, he had struck her—without thought or even heat, the impulse arising out of some deep poisoned well-spring of his being, regretted even as he lifted his hand.
Sara stumbled. Gerald moved forward to steady her, his heart racing. She fell away from him forever, and in that timeless interval Gerald had a grotesquely heightened sense of his surroundings: the walk, broken and weedy; the dim shadow of a moth battering himself tirelessly against the porch light; in the sky a thousand thousand stars. Abruptly, the world shifted into motion again; in confusion, Gerald watched an almost comically broad expression of relief spread over Sara’s face. The railing. The railing had caught her.
“Jesus, Sara, I’m sorr—” he began to say, but a wild gale of hilarity had risen up inside her.
She hadn’t begun to realize the consequences of this simple action, Gerald saw. She did not yet see that with a single blow he had altered forever the tenor of their relationship. But the laughter was catching, and he stepped down now, laughing himself, laughing hysterically in a way that was not funny, to soothe away her fears before she saw the damage he had done. Maybe she would never see it.
But just at that moment, the railing snapped with a sound like a gunshot. Sara fell hard, three steps to the ground, breath exploding from her lungs.
But again, she was okay. Just shaken up.
Only later, in the night, would Gerald realize what he had done. Only when the contractions took her would he begin to fear. Only when he tore back the blankets of the bed and saw the blood—
—so little blood—
—would he understand.
Gerald snapped away his cigarette in disgust. They had lost the child. Sara, too, had almost died. And yet she had forgiven him. She had forgiven him.
He shivered and looked back through the cold-fogged windows at the waiting room, but he couldn’t tolerate the idea of another moment in there. He turned back to the parkin
g lot, exhaled into his cupped hands. He thought of Dr. Exavious, those febrile eyes, the way he had of seeming to gaze into the secret regions of your heart. Probing you. Judging you. Finding you wanting.
There was something else.
Last night.
With this thought, Gerald experienced bleak depths of self-knowledge he had never plumbed before. He saw again the smooth expanse of his wife’s belly as he had seen it last night, hideously aswarm with the vicious assaults of the creature within. Now he recognized this vision as a fevered hallucination, nothing more. But last night, last night he had believed. And after his feverish dream, after he had been sick, he had done something else, hadn’t he? Something so monstrous and so simple that until this moment he had successfully avoided thinking of it.
He had stood up from the toilet, and there, in the doorway between the bedroom and the bathroom, he had kicked off his shoes, deliberately arranging them heel up on the floor. Knowing she would wake to go to the john two, maybe three times in the night. Knowing she would not turn on the light. Knowing she might fall.
Hoping.
You are responsible.
Oh yes, he thought, you are responsible, my friend. You are guilty.
Just at that moment, Gerald felt a hand on his shoulder. Startled, he turned too fast, feeling the horror rise into his face and announce his guilt to anyone who cared to see. Exavious stood behind him. “Mr. Hartshorn,” he said.
Gerald followed the doctor through the waiting room and down a crowded corridor that smelled of ammonia. Exavious did not speak; his lips pressed into a narrow line beneath his mustache. He led Gerald through a set of swinging doors into a cavernous chamber lined with pallets of supplies and soiled linen heaped in laundry baskets. Dusty light-bulbs in metal cages cast a fitful glow over the concrete floor.
“What’s going on?” Gerald asked. “How’s Sara?”
