“Excuse me?” I said, sure I had misunderstood.
The man sitting opposite pushed up his spectacles and repeated himself. The words sounded vaguely German, or something Scandinavian, but it was not English.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I said.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, switching to English and smiling. “Your child is speaking Dutch and so I thought you did also.”
George flicked through a farm animals picture book and turned the page and stuck out a tiny finger and pointed to the pig.
“Va-ka,” George said.
“It’s gibberish,” I said. “He does it all the time. Yammering away as if he is having a conversation with you, but it doesn’t mean anything.”
As if on cue George put together a string of nonsensical syllables.
“I’m sure he’s speaking Dutch,” the man said.
“It’s impossible. There are no Dutch speakers in our family. He only ever hears English.”
“Maybe I am mistaken. I have children of my own and sometimes you must interpret their sounds a little.”
George looked up at me from his book and gave me another spiel in baby talk. I met the gaze of the man opposite and raised my eyebrows.
“Was that also Dutch?” I said, and smiled.
He shrugged. “It sounds like it.”
I crossed my arms. “Are you joking?”
“No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.” The man waved a palm and went back to his book.
George pointed to the man and yammered away again, his mouth making exaggerated movements. I paid attention to the sounds. George said what sounded to me like ga nee tee en der kell-da.
The man looked up from his book.
“What do you think he is saying?” I asked.
The man smiled. “Before it sounded like he was giving the names of the animals in Dutch. In our language the pig is called a varken. He said va-ka, which is how a child would say it. And just now, what he seemed to say was: Ga niet in de kelder.”
I had the man write it down for me on the back of a business card. I repeated it back, butchering the accent.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“Don’t go in the basement.”
“Don’t go in the basement?”
The man shrugged. “I don’t know why he would say that. And it is a sentence a bit advanced for a boy his age. But that’s what it sounds like.”
We had celebrated George’s first birthday a couple of months before. He was already walking, but speech continued to elude him. Fiona came to me with a broad smile, convinced he called her mama. I ruined her day when I pointed out he also called said mama when pointing to our cat Felix. It was clear he didn’t understand and was only practicing making sounds. Or so I thought.
The man on the train closed his book and uncrossed his legs. “This is my stop.”
He rose and gave George a little wave and was gone.
I rode the rest of the train journey in silence, replaying the encounter with the Dutch speaker in my head. It must be some sort of freak coincidence. Or George had seen something on television he was imitating?
-—
George has a birthmark about the width of a finger that forms a complete circle around his neck. The unusual shape and size of the birthmark worried our doctor and she sent George for scans. Everything came back negative. She said the birthmark would fade in time, and until it did Fiona covered it with scarves for photographs.
The birthmark didn’t only interest the doctors. Fiona’s mother, a tiny woman called Heather, was also convinced it carried some meaning. Raised a strict Catholic, she discarded her faith as an adult after her own mother died. She filled the void with gurus and crystals and Tarot cards and all manner of things. I have a birthmark at the base of my spine, and have always had back problems. And what I take as a coincidence, Heather takes as a sign of some deeper meaning. Heather told us to beware of throat problems with George and gifted him a set of scented candles supposed to target throat health for his birthday. We burned one out of obligation, the putrid smelling smoke filled the house and burned our eyes. The rest are in the cupboard wrapped in plastic where I hope they will stay.
I waved all the superstition away until last week. On weeknights after we get George to sleep I go for a run. New parents will know this is the only time you get for yourself. To divert attention away from my burning thighs I listen to true crime podcasts. I can’t get enough. Having consumed everything on the big hitters like Bundy, Gacy, and Gein, I searched out smaller shows covering more obscure killers. One case made me stop dead on the footpath.
In the mid-1800s, a teenager in the Netherlands murdered his entire family – father and mother and three younger siblings – in the basement of their home. After committing his heinous act, the boy walked upstairs and scrawled ‘Don’t go in the basement’ on the wall using the blood of his butchered family. Convinced the boy was some sort of devil incarnate, the villagers captured him and beheaded the boy with an axe.
I thought immediately of the encounter I had on the train with the Dutch speaker a few weeks ago. Hadn’t he thought George had said those exact words? Don’t go in the basement. And then there was the ring birthmark around George’s neck, right where the axe separated the head from the body of the killer.
I ran home and searched for the business card of the Dutch man on the train and found it stuffed in my sock drawer. On the back were the words Ga niet in the kelder. I put the sentence into google translate. My memory was correct – Don’t go in the basement.
-—
In the days since I have tried to dismiss the ideas coalescing in my mind. What if George and his birthmark and his uncanny knowledge of Dutch are somehow related to the killer from the Netherlands?
I spent work hours googling information about birthmarks being indicators from previous lives. They showed up as shadow scars of gunshot and stab wounds from the previous life. And then there were the similarities in personality between the child and the deceased. The new child took on the mannerisms and habits of the dead.
Documented cases are rare enough, but then what are the chances of the spirit being reborn in a place and time close enough to be recognised? And yet it is a common enough belief to warrant dozens of articles and even some (sketchy) research projects. The rabbit hole I went down turned into a labyrinth of underground caves.
In the time since I have been avoiding our basement altogether. It has become a place of foreboding. I dream of being in basements, and when I say dream I mean suffer frightening nightmares. Yesterday when Fiona asked me to grab a bottle of wine I tried my best to deflect the request. She gave me a click of the tongue and crossed her arms and so I went.
As I descended the stairs I chuckled to myself. Here I am, a grown man afraid of shadows in the basement after listening to a true crime podcast and the linguistic assessment of a stranger on a train. It was as tragic as the sleepless nights I used to have as a teenager after watching a horror movie with the lights out.
I didn’t bother to turn on the strip lights and was relying on the single naked light bulb hung from the ceiling at the top of the stairs. I fumbled around in the wine rack looking for a decent bottle of red when I heard something at the top of the stairs. The door swung open and George stepped into the light in his pyjamas.
“George, what are you doing? Be careful of the stairs.”
George grabbed the railing and carefully descended the stairs, something he’d only just learned to do. I rushed over to the base of the stairs, afraid he would fall. When I made it there George was five steps down and he stopped and straightened to his modest height. In his left hand he held up a kitchen knife.
The door swung open and Fiona rushed down the stairs calling after George. She picked him up and in the process knocked the light bulb, sending it swinging. Shadows danced on the walls and I caught a moment where the bulb came close to George. It magnified his shadow on the wall into some kind of monster, knife aloft.
Fiona put George on her shoulder and climbed the stairs. George looked at me and said, “Ga niet in de kelder.” Then he made a stabbing motion with the knife and chuckled.