Blood Samples

by Bonansinga, Jay

The change came instantly. All the moist passion he held inside him came rushing out. The pain of discovery, the thrill of consummation, the things he didn't understand... overwhelming him as he inhaled her odors. The fading perfume, whiskey fumes, the crushed cachet of her bosom.

  They began to dance.

  Together.

  Sally found the entrance gate and peered through it. Her heart drummed in her chest. Her throat burned. When she saw the gravesite, she immediately fell to her knees.

  A figure stood next to Grammy's tombstone.

  "Timmy?" Sally's voice was reduced to a whimper.

  She struggled up the fence and lowered herself inside. During the course of her journey, she had bitten her lip so hard it had started bleeding. Now blood was caked in swaths around her mouth.

  She ran through the darkness.

  "TIMMY?!"

  The figure near the grave did not acknowledge Sally's presence. It continued to sway and dance to the silent music. And as Sally approached, the figure's features came into clearer focus, emerging from the shadows like a clay statue rising out of black water.

  The silver moonlight illuminated his face. The features were delicate, small, boyish, yet filmed by a diaphanous layer of age. A white patina, etched in lines around his mouth, wrinkled crow's feet around his eyes, and slack, flaccid skin hanging beneath his neck. An overlay of an ancient, wounded soul absorbed into his face.

  It wasn't Sally's little boy anymore.

  Sally froze in the edge of the gravesite and watched her son do the same drunken dance that her mother had once performed at the Gebhardt's patio party. But the look on the boy's face was one that Sally was all too familiar with.

  The look of restlessness and pain that Sally had always shared with her mother.

  DUE DATE

  I remember it was hot that night. The air conditioner was on the fritz, and we were sticking to the mattress.

  "Make love to me," she said, murmuring in my ear the four greatest words in the English language.

  "Yeah, um... you sure?" I said. I wasn't wearing any protection.

  "Fill me up, Eddie, fill me up," she kept saying.

  It was making me crazy.

  I entered her with blind abandon, and eventually gushed inside her.

  Afterward, we lay in the darkness of our little rural Victorian, not saying very much, feeling as though we had done something.

  Six weeks later we were in the bathroom when my wife told me she was pregnant.

  I showed her my penis.

  "Yeah, that's right," she said. "Blame it all on him."

  My wife and her jokes.

  Everything was different for a while, at work, at home.

  Then we sort of got used to the idea. I stopped trying to quit smoking. Sarah started drinking wine with dinner again. We were going to have a baby. Great. No big deal.

  We were both working, and Sarah was healthy.

  Bring it on.

  I think it was around the fourth or fifth month that the trouble started.

  "What if it's a Damien?" I said one morning, eating my breakfast.

  "A what?" Sarah was gobbling her scrambled eggs. She had gained like thirty pounds. You ask me, it was in all the right places.

  "You know," I said. "Like the movie."

  "What movie?"

  I gave her a look. "You're kidding me. You don't remember The Omen?"

  "Oh, I get it," she said. She chewed a little bit more, then frowned. "Don't even joke about stuff like that, Eddie."

  I asked her what she meant.

  "You don't fool around with negative imagery," she explained, "not with an unborn child."

  She went on to tell me about the impact parents can have on fetal growth by directing positive thoughts at the baby. Even the father can have an effect.

  "Oh please," I said.

  She raised one hand. "I'm telling you, the human brain has these cells, they're called neuropeptides, and they're like transmitters to the rest of the body."

  "But what difference does it make what the father thinks," I said.

  She said it makes a difference.

  I decided to change the subject, but I couldn't get that notion out of my mind.

  Even at work that day, I kept wondering if I should be careful about how I envisioned our baby. I had trouble concentrating. It's not easy designing get-well cards when you're obsessing over something like this.

  That night, I couldn't sleep. I couldn't stop thinking about that unborn child cooking in my wife's womb next to me. I tried to think about something else but my mind kept going back to that fetus.

  Over the next few weeks it got worse. The more I tried to think positive thoughts about the child, the more I kept seeing grotesque mutations.

  I have an overactive imagination. There's nothing I can do about that. I kept seeing creatures straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting in Sarah's belly.

  It really got bad at the end of month number six when we drove into town to see the OB/GYN for a checkup.

  "You folks want to come into my office for a moment?" the doctor said after Sarah had gotten weighed and probed and measured and stuck.

  We looked at each other, then followed the prim, grey-haired woman into her office.

  "I notice you've had a little spotting," the doctor said after closing her door and taking a seat behind her desk.

  Sarah confirmed that she had seen a few drops of blood on her panties, but hadn't thought it was anything to worry about.

  "And it probably isn't," the doctor said with a tepid smile, then pulled out a notepad and drew a crude illustration of an upside-down baby. "This is the baby, and this is the amniotic sac, and this is the placenta. From the looks of the ultrasound, the placenta appears to have moved on us."

  "Moved?" Sarah said.

  "It's nothing to lose sleep over. There is a slight risk of the placenta covering the opening of the cervix, which could cause fairly serious bleeding. And depending on how close we are to your due date, it would probably necessitate a c-section."

  A moment of silence.

  I was stricken with dread. What if I had been making the placenta move merely by ruminating on it?

  Sarah put her hand to her mouth, and I think I said something like, "Oh my God."

  "Now there's no reason to panic," the doctor said. "This is not uncommon in women your age. Forty percent of my patients go with cesareans anyway."

  The doctor went on to explain that the baby was not in any danger, but it was probably a good idea for Sarah to come in once a week now and try to stay off her feet for the duration of the pregnancy.

  We asked a lot of questions and didn't write anything down and forgot all the details by the time we got home. I didn't tell Sarah about my uncontrolled fantasies. I was hoping I could put them out of my mind.

  I couldn't put them out of my mind.

  The next few weeks were awful. Sarah's condition was getting worse. She had terrible back pain and cramps and vaginal bleeding. Unable to climb the stairs, she slept in the living room.

  I waited on her around the clock, bringing her hot packs, Saltines and soup during the day, cold washcloths for her forehead at night. And every time I came in the room to fluff her pillow or freshen her tea, the image of a tiny horned creature burrowing in her womb flickered across my mind's eye.

  In my imagination, the fetus was a demonic parasite trying to claw its way out of my wife.

  I couldn't help it.

  The thing is, I'm not a particularly morbid person. In fact, I'm not exceptional in any way. I just do my illustrations for the greeting card company during the day, and play around with my oil paintings at night.

  Which was exactly what I kept doing after Sarah lost the baby.

  Maybe that was where I went wrong. My graphic art background.

  I just can't help imagining stuff that most people would find unimaginable.

  After the miscarriage, things were quiet around the house for several weeks. It was as though the s
orrow were pressing down on us. Muffling everything just like the blanket of dirty snow on our roof. We had really wanted that baby. Maybe a little too much.

  I tried to cheer Sarah. I told her that we could try again. I insisted that we try again. But Sarah was broken. Most of the time she just sat on the porch with a quilt over her lap, staring at the barren farms, the snow-covered fields blotched with spots of black earth.

  The doctor saw Sarah on a regular basis during these weeks, tracking Sarah's recovery, helping with her diet and medication. Sarah had developed gestational diabetes during the pregnancy, and had problems with her blood pressure, but she eventually made a full recovery.

  Physically at least.

  She wasn't talking much. Which was tough. The house was so quiet. I couldn't get over how quiet it was. I guess I never noticed it before.

  We live in the country and it's always pretty quiet, but this silence was like an unwanted guest. It had a smell to it. A color. And you got the feeling this silence was never going to leave.

  I guess it was the grief. Or the guilt. I'm not sure. But it was maddening. And to make matters worse, I was still thinking about that fetus. Not in a grieving kind of way.

  In the other way.

  That's when the noises started.

  You know when you wake up in the middle of the night and you're kind of caught in that half-sleep state? You can't really see or hear properly.

  That's what happened to me one night about a month after the miscarriage.

  "Sarah?" I was sitting up in bed, blinking at the darkness of the bedroom.

  "Hmm?"

  "You awake?"

  "Mm?"

  "Did you hear that?"

  "Mm."

  I was positive there was an animal in the house. It happens sometime out here. A possum or a raccoon finds its way into the storm cellar. That's what this sounded like. But it was oddly muffled as though it were behind the walls.

  I sat up on the edge of the bed, my skin crawling with goosebumps.

  Then the noise was gone.

  That's how it went for several nights. I would wake up and hear stuff.

  One time I even went downstairs to investigate a muffled thumping noise coming from somewhere inside the house. I even put my ear against the wall in the kitchen to hear better. I finally gave up, figuring it was one of the farmers.

  A post-hole digger can send vibrations through the entire valley some times.

  I want to make something clear. I still don't believe in ghosts. Even at this late stage.

  But something was going on. Even Sarah noticed it.

  For instance, the furnace was acting up for no good reason. I would turn the thermostat way down — remember, this was early April in Illinois — but the house would remain like an oven. We could barely breathe.

  There were odors, too, strong odors that seemed to collect in certain areas. In the crawlspace, in the attic. I'm at a loss to describe them. One of them was musky and sharp like dried sweat, another coppery like blood. Another one reminded Sarah of the brine they used to pack herring in.

  But we could never find a source. It was as though something was festering behind the walls.

  And my nightmares were getting worse.

  I kept dreaming I was in doctor's' offices and hospitals, tracking the development of our monstrous fetus, watching its scaly face growing on ultrasound monitors, its unformed yellow eyes maturing in time lapse.

  I don't know why I kept imagining these horrible things. I was as devastated by our loss as Sarah. I've always wanted to be a father.

  I'm sure there's a connection somewhere. I'm not a psychologist.

  Of course we realized we had to get out of the place when the walls started convulsing.

  Actually, convulsing is not the right word. I don't have a word for what was happening.

  It started with the standard creaking noises that you always hear about in stories such as these, some of the noises loud enough to wake us up. Support beams would crack. Wallboard would pop. Houses as old as ours are always going to have a sound to them.

  Settling noises, whatever.

  But this was different.

  One night we were in the living room trying to ignore all the angst when the ceiling banged. Again, banged is not precisely what it did, but it's the best description I can muster at this point.

  We both jerked with a start. I think Sarah even ducked, as though somebody had fired on us.

  "Jesus," I said. "What was that?"

  "I don't —"

  It happened again, a snapping noise like a timber breaking in two, but this time there were aftershocks in other rooms. Like a ripple effect.

  I saw something move in my peripheral vision.

  "OhmyGod, Eddie, look!"

  I followed her gesture toward the opposite wall by the fireplace.

  The paneling was bowing outward as though under great pressure. You could hear the wood cracking. The noise was so loud it was hard to hear Sarah's cry.

  "We have to get out of here!"

  She threw off her quilt and started toward the front door but tripped on a rug. She sprawled to the floor. I was helping her up when the whole house shivered.

  I froze there on the floor. It was like turbulence. Or an earthquake.

  "Oh God," Sarah uttered.

  The odor engulfed us in a rich, meaty cloud of blood and protein.

  I dragged Sarah toward the front door.

  The sounds that were coming from the basement were incredible.

  By the time we got out, the phenomena had ceased.

  I managed to get Sarah to the car, and we sped out of there without a word.

  It took us an hour to get to Sarah's parents' farm in the next county. When we arrived it was nearly midnight, and we had to make up some excuse. We told them the boiler in our basement had exploded.

  Later, we lay in the darkness of her parents' guest room and discussed what had happened.

  Sarah was as pragmatic about these matters as I, and notwithstanding our deep pain and depression over the loss of the pregnancy, it never once occurred to either of us that our house was haunted.

  I told her I thought it had something to do with my neglecting to fix the furnace, combined with our collective grief, which had somehow formed a chain reaction of hallucinations and coincidence.

  She almost believed me.

  It was a lie of course.

  In the final moments as we were fleeing the house, I had experienced a sort of mini-revelation. We were stumbling across the yard, making our way toward the garage, when I noticed the attic window was breathing. That's the only way I can describe it.

  This was right before the manifestation stopped.

  Hyperventilating is a better word.

  All at once it occurred to me what was happening. And in that single epiphany, right before the phenomena halted, I realized many things. I realized that I had indeed brought about these events myself, and I would soon have to return and face the inevitable.

  Most importantly, I realized that what we were witnessing was not a standard haunting. The house was not under siege from some long dead spirit doomed to avenge his untimely demise. The house was doing something altogether different.

  The house was doing something that had sprung from my deepest fears. The cracking noises, the warping of walls, these were not your standard ghostly phenomena.

  These were contractions.

  The house was in labor.

  I returned the next evening.

  I hadn't planned on returning in the dark. God knows, it would have been a lot easier to confront this thing in the daylight. But the truth is, it took nearly twenty-four hours to get up my nerve.

  Climbing the porch steps, heart racing, I was still unsure about what I was going to do. I looked at my watch. It was after midnight.

  Something about the little date window on my Timex caught my eye.

  What was it about the 11th?

  I opened the front door and went i
nside.

  It was quiet. And dark. And as balmy as a greenhouse. The intensity of the smell was tremendous. Like the inside of a rotting oyster.

  Initially, we had misidentified this odor as human blood. Now I realized it was not blood at all. It was the salty tang of amniotic fluid.

  I crossed the dark living room. The lights were off. I tried a switch. No power. There were framed pictures on the floor.

  The walls were marbled with cracks.

  On my way up the stairs, I heard the distant, faint sound of thumping. Actually, I felt it more than heard it. As delicate as a baby's heartbeat.

  The second floor was just as we had left it. A couple of lamps had fallen. I took a peek at our bedroom. Our bed was unmade.

  I wiped sweat from my brow.

  A tremor passed through the floor beneath me.

  I grabbed the door jamb and braced myself as the sound of cracking timbers filled the darkness. I winced. The ceiling beams groaned above me. I could see the seams and joints shifting in my peripheral vision.

  All of a sudden I had to get out of there. It wasn't just the noise and the vibrations. It was a spontaneous sense of doom that was coming over me.

  I started back down the hallway toward the stairs but stumbled on a buckled-up carpet runner. I fell to the floor near the base of the attic steps.

  Something was rattling. A violent sound. Like a muffled Thompson machine-gun. I gazed up at the top of the stairs and saw the door to the attic shaking wildly.

  "Oh — !"

  The word puffed out of my lungs on an involuntary breath as I realized what I was looking at. The nursery was behind that door. I never finished the room, and when the miscarriage happened, I simply locked it up and forgot about it.

  The thumping noise was rising all around me, a thunderous tattoo in the dark.

  I was frozen with dread.

  The door at the top of the stairs was cracking and popping, its panels bloating outward as though made of rubber. Something horrible and immense was pushing its way out of that room. I couldn't take my eyes off it

  I managed to rise to my feet. I was damp with sweat and terror. I knew it was I who was coaxing this unnamable thing into existence, but there was nothing I could do.

  I started up the stairs.