Cauchemar

by Alexandra Grigorescu

  Above them, the sky darkened, and Hannah had no sense of how much time was passing. She could’ve been in labor for days, or seconds. The pain overwhelmed all things.

  The creature watched them from several steps away, its rasping breath the only sound in the swamp. In the numbing relief between contractions, Hannah saw that it wasn’t as monstrous as she’d first thought. Faces moved across its head, unassuming men with kind eyes and pensive mouths. Hannah gasped as Timothy’s beautiful, cherubic face flashed, followed by Samuel’s.

  “It’s the men,” she murmured.

  “It’s the price of things,” Christobelle said, blotting the sweat from Hannah’s forehead with her sleeve. Christobelle took a deep breath and looked in the direction of the creature. Her eyes widened. “This is the face you choose? After all this time, now you let me see him?”

  The creature had shrunk to the approximate size and shape of a man. The face was settling as well, a light red dusting of stubble on a sharp chin. The man’s light brown hair was trimmed into a military cut above a pleasant, scholarly face. Hannah’s eyes, the same color and shape and framed in the same thick curtain of lashes, shone back at her. Hannah recognized her father, despite having never seen him.

  The creature smiled and stretched out a hand. “A mercy.”

  Christobelle drew a shuddering breath as Hannah began to weep. “I have loved you,” she said to Hannah and bent down. She kissed Hannah’s forehead just as she crested a contraction. Then Christobelle stood.

  Hannah swatted at her mother’s waist, her knees, her ankles, then pulled on the edge of her skirt like an ignored child. All the while, a soft whimper whistled out of her. Don’t go, she wanted to yell, but there wasn’t enough breath in her lungs. She watched her mother stop and stagger, her hands covering her mouth. Then she shook out her shoulders and walked toward the man. Hannah’s father listened as Christobelle spoke quietly, then looked over her shoulder to where Hannah writhed on the grass. He nodded, and extended a gallant arm toward the house.

  “No, no, no,” Hannah chanted in the rhythm of her breaths, the tenth yelled out as she tried to push. Nothing was budging, the baby having glimpsed the horror of the world and chosen to remain in its place. Her mother and the creature with her father’s face disappeared into the house. Hannah heard water pipes creak to life inside the house. Graydon mewled frantically in the kitchen, five pulsing, throaty meows, then trickled off into a low growl.

  “Kitten,” Hannah whispered. Her breaths blossomed into moans no matter how she tried to quiet them. Suddenly, there was only a thud, as innocuous as Mae’s broken glass a seeming lifetime ago, and then silence.

  She waited in the tall grass for what seemed like an eternity, her mouth opening and closing like a dying guppy’s. When she managed to hoist herself up enough to see her feet, she saw her blood glistening on the grass. Whole blades were tinged in red as if her blood had seeped into the roots, already siphoned into the chlorophyll.

  Through the kitchen door, the house was dark.

  “Mother,” she said softly. She’d meant to call it out, but the pain in her wrist cautioned her to keep quiet. Instead, Hannah lifted and parted her knees, then cautiously explored between her legs. She was dilating.

  She searched the trees for the figures she’d seen before, but they, too, had left her. Above her, the sky was shading toward gray, and she found herself wishing for a downpour to wet her chapped lips. She felt the baby move, her body jostling it out. She’d heard that some babies slipped out, as if the uterus were a slide, but the pain building inside told her to expect otherwise.

  She pushed through the next contraction and rolled her head toward the water, willing Callum to manifest in the fog. The memory of their goodbye, his confused, wounded eyes, gave her vertigo despite her supine state.

  Hannah passed out in the chill, half-dreaming of a motor slicing through weeds, her pushes like involuntary seizures. Her dreams were kind, filled with piano riffs and the comfort of having her head cradled against the splintered wood of a boat. The rocking current lulled her, and the waving of cypress garlands sounded like harps plucked by the wind.

  And Callum, always above her in a heady, outdated fiction. Callum, who might survive in the real world but never forgive her if she lost the baby, if she lost herself. He would love her less with each passing day, until she would exist only in these fine-spun fragments.

  Her body felt cold and filled, bombarded with memories. She fixated on simple ones. How she’d cracked the browned crust of Mae’s sour cherry pies like a surgeon and spooned out the steaming cherries with her fingers. The red hid under her nail beds for days like an angry wound.

  Push, a voice said.

  She winced against the intrusion, and the tickling sensation on her chest was momentarily not Callum’s head resting there. Pull, she replied, and clutched him closer. Callum’s blue eyes were empyrean, the whole of the sky. Lips moved mutely against her neck, and her pulse answered, chant-like, Yes.

  “Push!” A rousing yell knocked her into consciousness.

  The clicking came from the water. No adrenaline coursed through her body. Her stores were sapped. She veiled her face with her hair and waited.

  The grass betrayed its movement, swishing as it slid toward her. It leeched the scent of bones and soot. Hannah waited a few seconds before turning, finally, to face it.

  It was marbled white, from claws to tail and the stretch between, and chalky. Filmed orange eyes regarded her. The alligator looked fossilized, ancient crisscrossed scales like shattered bones sewn together. Worn teeth hung from its maw, the edges dull like limestone pulled from the wreckage of the world’s first temples.

  It was beautiful, its hypnotic sway allowing teasing glances at its ribbed tail, the peaks like plumage. She saw how its translucent white would make it vulnerable, how so many would die as babies, and yet this one had surely seen the birth of mankind.

  It crawled up to her, then lowered its head near her shoulder. Thyme and blue cohosh rode on its warm breath. She didn’t flinch from its open mouth, or the sandpaper tongue that ran up her arm. It left goosebumps in its wake.

  Hannah’s eyes rolled back into her head and she felt an immense pressure well up between her legs. “Oh, God.”

  She felt the creature’s girth swing around. Its head came to rest by hers, and the tail formed a semicircle around her feet. Their breaths merged. Hannah laid her hand over its scaled back as sound pumped back into the swamp. She could almost hear it purring. Chirping crickets swelled, crows cried overhead, and all around and beneath her—burrowing into her ears and armpits—ants. Nature held her, and she was not afraid.

  Hannah opened her eyes to blue irises framed in dark lashes. A dream then, and she sighed happily.

  “She’s up,” Callum said to someone standing behind him, and Hannah tried to raise her hand to trace his lips. It ached, sleep prickling it like nettles. There was dried blood on her fingers. She could almost remember where it came from. Hollowness, unfamiliar and painful, pierced her stomach. It felt excavated, as if she’d vomited for days. Something screamed, a car alarm in the parking lot, or a heron accosted by a toothed fish.

  “How do you feel?” he asked, stroking her face.

  “Happy,” she breathed. She tried to lie as still as possible. She didn’t want to wake herself. Faces were difficult to render in dreams, and Callum’s was perfect, unwavering even as her thoughts raced.

  “You’ve lost a lot of blood.” Her thighs were sticky, and the hairs bristled as if coated in honey.

  “It’s all been a dream.” The words were hard to form and her breath was shallow, but she pushed through. “We’re back where we started.” Everything smelled of damp earth. “God, your sheets,” she whispered.

  “Hannah, you’re outside. You’re going to be alright,” Callum said shakily as she dropped her head back onto the grass. The water was dar
k green with weeds. Dried moss trailed in the water like sunlit hair. “The baby is alright.”

  Two men in blue uniforms covered her mouth with a plastic cone, and she thought of blanched eyes standing guard. They wound a band around her right arm and she cried out.

  “What happened here?” one of them muttered to Callum. “Her wrist looks like it’s broken.”

  “Jesus,” someone exclaimed from inside the house. The voice was familiar. “We have a body!” Both men lifted their heads, but Callum’s eyes didn’t move from her face.

  Hannah wailed softly into her mask. So many bodies circling her. How many more were hiding in the shadowed corners of the room that suddenly felt vast. The ceiling above her was drab, a single bezel light screwed into its center. Or was that the sky? What had Callum said about a baby?

  “Callum,” James said, peering into Hannah’s field of vision. He paused to squeeze Hannah’s shoulder, then whispered into Callum’s ear, indicating behind him.

  Hannah was surprised to see the back of the house. She was still in the swamp then, ants bustling along exposed skin.

  The blackened doorway was threatening, and the longer Hannah looked, the more she felt a potent gravitation pulling her backward, down dim corridors of recollection. A stranger who was not a stranger. Her mother led inside, someone’s punishing hand like the final blow that bends the iron nail.

  “Mother,” Hannah muttered, fogging the mask.

  Callum’s jaw tightened above her. “Don’t think about that now. Just rest.”

  “Why,” she began, and coughed convulsively. “How?”

  He smoothed her eyebrows, and she felt a raindrop strike the tip of her nose. “I woke up in the hospital and my mind felt clear for the first time in months. My heartbeat was stronger, even. The doctors crowded around me with their clipboards trying to figure it out.” His voice quavered. “I was angry at you, at first. I wondered why you’d come back here and put yourself at risk. They tried to keep me in bed, but I insisted that I had to come find you.” He cleared his throat. “When I went out to the boat, I saw something. Maybe it was a dream, I don’t know, but I saw a white gator curled up under the bench.”

  Hannah stretched her fingers and could almost feel the Braille of the scales that had hunkered beside her. She gasped, but the sound was swallowed by the domed mask over her mouth.

  “It had your eyes, Hannah, if that doesn’t sound too crazy. It looked long and hard at me, and then slunk back into the water. I knew I had to come find you, and thank God I did. Our baby was in your arms. He was barely breathing, but he’s going to be alright. They’re taking him to an incubator.”

  “Him.” Hannah closed her eyes. “Don’t go,” she begged.

  Callum lowered his face and his curls rippled against her nose. He lay beside her, filling a space that had been recently vacated, still indented with its shape. “Never,” he said, his voice cracking as if it were swimming upstream, pounding against pebbles. Trickling over her closing eyes.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Hannah stood up straight and studied Callum’s body, lying on the blanket. Since their child’s birth, it had grown, fueled by a ravenous appetite. The whites of his eyes were pristine. In the full Texas sunlight, he was ignited as a meteor toppled.

  Here, desert and greenery mixed together. Cacti pierced the wavering mirages on either side of their new house like alien barbs, and in the distance, ruddy mountain ranges loomed. Texas was a single state over, but a world apart from the swamps she’d spent her life in. The heat was dry, the earth arid, and the bones of horses and occasional stag horns were out in the open, bleached and harmless as rocks.

  When they sold the house by the swamp to a wealthy middle-aged couple from Georgia, they’d disclosed as much of the house’s dark past as they thought could be believed, and focused on the damaged foundation, but the woman, face ruddy with makeup, put her palms together and declared it a “colorful history.” The man bobbed back and forth on his heels, and sheepishly admitted that they were more interested in the land and planned to demolish the house.

  The couple’s offer had easily paid for a three-bedroom Texan ranch. It had a pond set in the middle of a plant-filled backyard, as if some small part of Louisiana had been uprooted with them.

  Hannah looked around at it now, appreciating the sight of so much vast sky, then sighed, prompting Callum to look up at her.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Just admiring you, that’s all.”

  Callum patted his belly. “I could be a bit more … let’s say aerodynamic.”

  Hannah smiled slyly. “Blimps are aerodynamic.” He dove for her and caught her around the waist.

  Callum’s health had improved, and he wasn’t alone. Within days of Christobelle’s death, more and more men experienced the same thing. Advanced illnesses faded away. Callum didn’t ask Hannah what had happened, and she knew he’d compile theories. Somehow, it was better than the truth.

  He kissed her neck while Gavin cooed in his stroller. His head was covered in fine white-blonde hair that curled like his father’s. Wide eyes considered the world seriously, one hazel and one green.

  “Look at those eyes,” Callum whispered in her ear, hugging her from behind. “Do you think he sees the world differently?”

  Callum pulled her down onto Mae’s afghan and ran his hand over her stomach, now empty. She was still surprised by how much she missed the sensation of having something growing inside her. It was a new loneliness. Now Gavin was outside her body, a free agent subject to all dangers.

  Hannah moved to kneel by Gavin’s stroller. She put her lips against one pudgy leg and whistled a sweet note. Gavin’s eyes widened, then he burst into convulsive laughter. His pleasure was endless and intoxicating. “Our little chimera. You know Dr. Merrick said his eyes are fine. Just a kink somewhere in our genes.”

  “What about chimerism?” Hannah had asked Dr. Merrick at their first check-up, having stayed up late to read all the possible causes. “Isn’t it true that two different blood groups could come together within one body?”

  “Gavin’s healthy. We’ll monitor him, of course, and if anything develops, we’ll deal with it then. You sustained a significant amount of damage during birth,” he’d paused, allowing Hannah the opportunity to explain the contusions on her belly, her broken arm, her mild concussion. Hannah remained silent.

  Hannah tugged the squirming boy from the stroller and laid him down between them. They watched him silently as he rolled himself over. A cricket paused its noisy hand-rubbing and Gavin giggled again, blowing spit. He waved his hand over the insect until it hopped away, then smiled up at her.

  “Are you grinning at your mama? Can you say ‘mama’?” Callum asked, tickling him.

  Hannah felt her own smile freeze as she thought of Christobelle. It was still difficult to think of herself as an orphan. Days after Gavin’s birth, she’d begun to poke and prod for details of what had happened. Hannah’s memory of the birth was hazy, although she remembered Christobelle’s voice and a presence that had sheltered her against the chill. Her mother’s body had been found collapsed in the kitchen, the faucet overflowing. “She drowned herself,” Callum said, his eyes haunted.

  Hannah thought she’d misheard. “Drowned herself?”

  Callum nodded. “There was nothing under her fingernails, no bruises on her neck. The only sign of struggle was Mae’s broken urn. Christobelle’s were the only footprints in the ashes. Even the way she, well, breathed the water seemed to be peaceful. It’s as if she put her head down and went to sleep.”

  “What about Sarah Anne?” She tried to remember Sarah Anne as the honeyed girl she’d once been, not the hateful creature she’d become. She knew, instinctively, that the girl wasn’t entirely to blame, that other forces had shaped her.

  “Sarah Anne?” Callum repe
ated, cocking his head. “James said they found her uncle’s body in the house, and the girl’s missing, but—” He studied her face. “That has nothing to do with what happened to you, does it?”

  Hannah knew that Sarah Anne would never be found. Somehow, although matter could neither be created nor destroyed, hers had softened and dissolved into the peat and moss.

  After the policemen ruled out foul play, Hannah had knelt carefully by the mound of gray ash and sifted through it. She found a few specks of black. Raven feathers, James’s voice echoed in her mind, and she pressed her forehead against the cool counter to calm herself. Then she began gathering the ash into an empty spice container.

  Hannah had found Graydon’s limp body on their bed as they finished packing up the house. From afar, he seemed to be sleeping, his small, pink tongue hanging from his mouth. Tears hurried into her eyes but didn’t drop. As she stroked the cat’s cold fur, sapped of its sheen, she knew he belonged to the house.

  “Should we go in? It’s almost dinnertime,” Callum asked, picking up Gavin and cradling the child’s head against his shoulder. He hesitated, closely watching her face.

  “Sure. Are you cooking?” she asked, slapping his arm lightly.

  Hannah’s return to the kitchen had been hesitant. She was cautious in improvising recipes, knowing now how magic could be couched in the simplest of ingredients, but couldn’t resist the scents of cooking and their familiar effects. She followed blind instinct, and discovered she was talented.

  The container of ash she kept in the very back of the pantry, labeled “Mae.” Although the woman’s wish had been to have her ashes scattered, the Texan night winds were strong, and Hannah couldn’t bear the thought of her Mae spread so thin over an unfamiliar land. Occasionally, she would tap out a few specks across their front doorway as a shield, and sometimes she’d light a slender white candle and set it in the kitchen window.