AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A human child.
“Hello?” I say, my voice sounding flat in the stone room as I keep searching the corners, wishing like hell I could move.
It lets out another cry again, not quite one of distress, but the happy, gurgling cries that a baby might make, only there’s something off about it.
I feel a sharp pang in my womb in response, as if the baby is mine, and my mind wants to wallow in the pain for a moment and drift back to the babies I lost as Mina and Lucy. I didn’t think I had any mothering instincts left since I never thought about being a mother as Dahlia, and I certainly hadn’t considered it as Rose thus far, but it’s rising up inside me sharp and powerful and primal.
Oh god, I think to myself,I thought I’d made peace with the past.
But the baby is somewhere in this room and it’s making those gurgling sounds and in front of me the bathroom door is slowly opening with a drawn-out creak.
Holyfuck.
I suck in my breath, sorrow and terror fighting inside me for dominance, watching as the door opens wider, the lowcreeeeeeakfilling my bones.
Then the door stops.
Nothing comes out, not that I can see.
But I can hear it.
I can hear something shuffling along the stone floor. It sounds wet and thick, like someone dragging a wet towel on the ground, but then I hear the occasional slap of flesh.
What the hell is happening?!
“Valtu?” I ask and it feels like the darkness of the room is swallowing up my voice, eating my strength, my nerve. “Hello? Please tell me who’s there.”
The sound disappears. I wait a moment, listening hard for its return. But there’s only silence.
I breathe out in relief, relaxing back into the bed, hoping that this is all some horrible figment of my imagination.
Until I feel the covers shift underneath me.
I raise my head and look down at the bed and watch as the covers move back a little, as if being tugged, as if someone is lying at the foot of the bed and pulling at it.
Oh fuck. Oh god.
I keep my eyes glued to the end of the bed, right between my spread legs, a whimper escaping my throat as a tiny human hand comes into view.
A small bloody hand belonging to a baby.
I open my mouth to scream but no sound comes out.
The baby’s head rises above the edge of the bed. Half of its skull is crushed in, like someone stepped on it, and I immediately know that it’s my baby. It’s the baby I carried as Mina, after my father had stepped on my stomach and before he chopped off my head.
It’s me and Valtu’s first child. And the first child to die.
The baby looks at me, one eye popping out, its mouth crooked and drooling blood. An aberration, and yet part of me loves it like a mother would love its child. Because this is my child, isn’t it? A child I’d lost but had somehow found me again all these centuries later.
“Hello,” I whisper, a sob falling from my lips. “Hello little one.”
The baby opens its mouth wide, letting out a peal of metallic laughter and bares its fangs at me. Fangs. Of course it has fangs.
I am cursed, Valtu, don’t you see?I said that once to him, as I lay on my deathbed as Lucy, our second child still inside of me, dead. I see it now, clear as day. I’m cursed.
The baby starts crawling toward me, dragging itself along, and I realize it can’t move its legs. It pulls itself up the length of the bed, heading right between my thighs.
Like it’s heading back home.
