JD
I HAVE A bad feeling about Emma and the locked room. I try to text her, and when she doesn’t answer, I tell myself she’s still recovering. She’s got a new baby.
And still I have that suspicion. Like a tooth that’s just starting to throb. I decide to drive over to the house and see if anyone’s there.
Just before I leave I get my shotgun and put it in the truck rack. I’m not sure why I feel the need for it, but I do. I never used it except once to kill a rattlesnake. No one admits we have them around here, but we do. I keep meaning to tell Emma to watch out.
The gun’s unloaded, but the sight of it will convince Ben to back down from whatever he and Lindsay are doing.
TWO CARS ARE parked in front of the house. Ben’s and Lindsay’s.
I can’t risk pulling up near the house.
I park a short walk down the driveway. It’s still snowing, but that’s okay. I’ve worn my waterproof boots.
Of course, the door is locked. Big Brave Ben would never spend a night in the country without pulling up the drawbridge. I know every board on the porch, every splinter in the doorframe.
And I’ve got the front door keys. I inch open the door and creep into the hall.
It’s dark. Pale moonlight drifts down from the skylight, but it seems to make everything murkier rather than clearer. I can’t see in front of me. I feel as if I’ve never been here, though I worked here all summer and fall.
I hear something.
A baby crying.
A BABY CRYING… all those years ago… something stirs… takes shape… like a picture coming into focus.
Then I remember. It comes back, piece by piece, like an image broken up into pixels, blinking on, lighting up, tiny square by tiny square.
First there was the smell.
The smell of a dead mouse in the wall. Of hundreds of dead mice in the wall. Mice and cats and death and rotting flesh.
And then the sound. The mewing, the mewling, on and on and on.
At first I thought, Cats. The house was full of cats. That was terrifying enough. What could be creepier than stumbling through a pitch-black house with cats hiding, lurking everywhere, ready to leap at me and sink their claws and teeth into my flesh? And yet I kept going, into the darkness in which, at any moment, a feral rabid cat could leap on my head and scratch my eyes out.
But it wasn’t cats. It wasn’t the sound of cats. The crying wasn’t meowing.
It was babies. Crying babies.
More terrifying still.
I should have left right then. I should have turned and ran. No dare was worth it. Why did I care if my friends dared me to go inside the haunted house? What was in it for me? What was I trying to prove? I could have gone back out and made a joke out of it. The girls wouldn’t have liked me any less. No one would have thought I was weak. They knew me better than that.
But I kept going. Following the sound of the babies. The crying babies. Were the babies in trouble? Was someone taking care of them? Did they need help? Was I supposed to save them? Was that why I’d been sent here—to do this?
Maybe that was what kept me going.
That’s who I was. That’s who I still am. The guy who wants to help. The guy who wants to save the ones who need saving. I’m the guy who runs toward the accident rather than away.
The sound got louder and louder. I made my way through the hall, past all the rooms with closed doors. It felt like a house in a dream. Like a house in a nightmare.
At last the narrow hallway widened, and the space opened up. I directed my flashlight up to see that I’d entered a large space. Sort of like a theater.
Not sort of like a theater.
A theater.
I WAS STANDING in the back of a theater.
The stage was dimly lit, not enough for me to see clearly, but just enough for me to make out indistinct shapes and movement. Something was happening onstage.
Inching closer, I saw a giant bed on the stage. Something was wriggling around in it. Under the blankets. Like worms. Like larvae in a hunk of rotting flesh.
Again, I wanted to run. And yet I needed to get closer. I needed to see.
Every cell in my body said Run!
Walking down the aisle toward the stage, I tripped over something—something hard. I looked down. A hunk of wood, maybe a stone.
I didn’t care. I kept going.
The light was still hazy, bluish, faint, but at last I got close enough to see.
Three people were sitting up in the bed. All three were old. Very old. Pale and thin and withered. I couldn’t tell if they were men or women. I couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead. Which ones were wriggling and which were still.
There was a new smell in the theater. Rot and mold and corpses. Worse than a dead mouse in the wall.
Was one of the old people dead? Was that what I was smelling?
A little lamp by the side of the bed went on and lit them up. Half lit them up.
I wished it hadn’t.
One of them had a face that was scarred and pitted, burned off, puckered down to a circular hole from which strange birdlike caws emerged. One was lying on its back. All three had nests of long gray hair flying about their heads. The three witches in a fairy tale.
Babies. I kept looking around for the babies. Did these old people have babies imprisoned somewhere? That seemed impossible. How could they have gotten all those babies? How could they take care of them? No wonder the babies were crying.
Unless I was hearing the ghosts of babies that had lived and died in this place when it was an asylum. Didn’t they say they used to send unwed mothers up here along with the old drunks? Maybe they’d killed the babies. Maybe I was hearing their ghosts. Maybe that’s who was buried in the old cemetery that everybody talked about but no one was brave enough to look for.
A tape player—one of those gigantic old reel-to-reels—was on the stage next to the bed. A tape was playing.
The crying of the babies was a recording. It was playing on a loop, over and over. It was a recording of babies crying. The three ancient people in the bed were listening. Listening to it like music.
The one with the burned-out face was pretending to conduct.
The two who still had faces seemed to be smiling, or anyway, their faces were stuck in masklike grins. Then I looked past them and saw that the stage was covered with baby dolls, stuffed babies, rows and rows of moldy torn dolls, jammed together, several layers deep. Half the dolls were smiling, and the other half were partially rotted away, as if rats had been chewing them.
The three old people—alive or dead—lay in bed, listening to a tape of crying babies while doll babies were crowded around them.
I yelled, but it was more like I was hearing myself yell. Like the shout you make in a dream, the scream you think you’re making at the top of your lungs, and then it turns out you’re just making a turkey gobble sound to wake yourself from the nightmare.
I turned and ran. I knew they couldn’t be following me, but I ran as if they were chasing me. As if they wanted to catch me and keep me in the house forever. But of course, they could never do that. They could never get out of bed. If they were even alive.
If they were even real.
I tripped again, this time over a hole in the floorboards. I fell and scrambled back up and kept running.
My head hurt.
I can still feel the pain.
I stumbled toward the air, toward the night outside.
I can still smell that dead mouse smell.
And then I was outside, and I fell on the ground. I heard, as if from a great distance, my friends gathering around me. Above me.
“What happened? What the hell happened?” Their voices sounded wobbly. Underwater. I felt like I was at the bottom of a well, or a swimming pool.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what happened.”
I kept hearing those babies cry.
IN ALL ITS horror, it comes back to me now as I search the dark house for Emma. I hear a baby crying.
The sound brings everything back.
I’m there. It’s as if I’m watching myself watching the three old hermits.
That’s what happened to me. The house. The darkness. The sound of crying babies.
I remember.
I should turn around.
But it’s different now. I’m older. A man. And I have a gun. And there’s a woman and a baby in here. Emma and her child.
Maybe this is worse than what happened then. Those old people weren’t going to hurt me. But Lindsay and Ben… who knows what they’re up to? Who knows what they plan to do to Emma and the baby?
The bedroom door locks on the outside.
I have a key.
It’s Emma’s baby crying.
That sound, its cry, is what keeps me working my way through the darkness, trying to reach her, to save her, holding the gun with one hand and reaching into my coat pocket for the key to her room with the other.