The door is locked and the gaps are plugged with towels, but I don’t think it will make any difference. I can hear my neighbors driving by outside the barricaded window, completely unaware of the horrors taking place inside this house.
I guess I just want someone else to know the truth.
It started–as these things often do–with something completely unexpected.
An event that came screeching in out of the dark to smash the quiet life that I’d build with my wife Alice and our son, Jake.
We tried so hard to child-proof our house. We protected the power outlets, used baby gates, and stored dangerous chemicals far out of reach. I don’t know where Jake got ahold of that small glass bead. Maybe he even found it outside, in the street or at the playground.
All I know is, the moment he swallowed it, that little ball of glass cut off his air supply completely. Alice and I tried desperately to remember the heimlich maneuver and perform it on our squirming, crying, purple-faced child–
But we only made things worse. By the time the EMTs arrived, Jake had stopped breathing. He lay in my wife’s arms limp and lifeless as a rag doll, drool dribbling out of his bluish lips.
The looks on the paramedics’ faces, when they finally arrived, told us everything we needed to know. Despite their best resuscitation efforts, our son was gone.
I still remember the way my wife’s hot tears soaked through my shirt as we walked out to the ambulance with Jake. I wanted to hold his tiny hand until the last minute, until they loaded him into that sterile metal box and the doors closed on him forever–
Then, suddenly…Jake grabbed my finger. His eyes snapped open, and with a pop, the cat’s-eye bead popped out of his mouth.
The paramedics couldn’t believe it. Resuscitation efforts had ended eight minutes ago, and Jake had been legally dead for almost half an hour.
Lazarus syndrome, they called it, but I didn’t care about names or diagnosis. I didn’t care about tests and trials and clinical statistics. I was just happy to have my son back.
Jake was quieter than I remembered. Before, his big blue eyes had sparked like sunlight on the sea; now, however they seemed darker–deeper somehow–like I was looking into a still, bottomless pool.
I found that couldn’t maintain eye contact with him for long.
Maybe that was the first sign. Maybe that’s when I should have acted–
But it’s too late now.
Like most new parents, Alice and I had been terrified to leave Jake’s side at first. We kept his crib in our bedroom, but after his recovery…
We found we couldn’t sleep with Jake nearby.
He would stand and stare at us all night, his hands grabbing the bars of his crib like a death-row inmate in teddy bear pajamas. Although Alice and I never talked about it, we could both feel his gaze probing at the back of our skulls, as though he were trying to drill them open and let something in. A few weeks later, we moved Jake’s crib to my office.
That’s why we were so terrified to find him in bed with us at 3 A.M. the next night.
He lay sucking his thumb with one hand, and had the other on Alice’s hip in a way that seemed strangely adult and possessive. Worse still, when I looked at that hand out of the corner of my eye, it didn’t seem like a toddler’s arm at all.
It looked stretched, hairy, and horrible.
While I carried my sleeping son back to his crib, I wondered if I was having some kind of psychological reaction to the trauma of Jake’s death and unexpected resuscitation.
That could be the only explanation for the things I was seeing and feeling–
Right?
As I put Jake back in his crib, I noticed something red on his lip. With awful, adult intelligence, he quickly tried to hide it from me, but I spun him back around–
Jake opened his mouth wide. A waterfall of blood poured out. I’d never seen so much in my life. I screamed for Alice and looked around for something, anything, to stop the bleeding. Behind me, I could hear the gory stream splattering on the floor–
And that wasn’t all. When I turned again, hundreds of round cat’s-eye beads were dribbling from my son’s mouth.
“WHAT?!” Alice burst into the room with a shout. I pointed to Jake–
But he was fine. Our son sat sleepily in his crib with a puzzled expression on his face, as though he was concerned about my weird behavior. I tried to stammer an explanation to Alice on our walk back to bed, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my son was laughing silently at me behind my back.
From there, things only got worse.
The next night, I woke from a revolting dream in which a giant leech was writhing around inside my sheets, sucking me dry–
And just like in the dream, there was a weight on my chest when I woke.
It was Jake, giggling as he crawled around our bed. It was all I could do to keep myself from shoving him off me.
This is your son, I told myself. You love him. And it was true…
But more and more I was starting to wonder whether the thing inside that crib was really Jake at all.
I installed a bolt on Jake’s bedroom door; surely that would stop his late-night wanderings.
But the next night, my son was back in bed with us again.
I placed a motion-activated camera in the hallway, hoping to figure out how on earth Jake had opened the bolt–
And what I saw on that eerie night-vision footage will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Something slid beneath my son’s door. A hand. At first, it looked just like Jake’s–but as the arm stretched upwards toward the lock and the fingers extended, its appearance changed into something monstrous. My “son’s” arm had somehow passed beneath the door, reached all the way up its length, and unbolted its lock with clawed, hairy fingers.
The hideous arm retracted. The door creaked open…and Jake crawled along the ceiling toward our bedroom. The last still image the camera captured was Jake’s freakishly extended foot and snarling face as he kicked it away.
I watched the clip again and again, unable to reconcile what I’d seen with the toddler dozing peacefully just a few feet away. During the day, Jake was completely normal: he threw tantrums, colored and played with his toys, asked a question every five seconds, and fell asleep eating his Cheerios. Maybe it was just at night when he…
A sudden THUMP jolted me out of my reverie. Jake was awake; in fact, he was standing right next to me, a lifeless expression on his face. He’d just slammed his little fist into my computer…right above the port where I’d inserted the camera’s SD card. Was he trying to destroy the video?!
THUMP.
THUMP.
Jake brought his fist down two more times with impossible strength, shattering my laptop’s fragile plastic covering and the SD card inside–
And that wasn’t all
My mind didn’t want to process it, couldn’t process it.
But Jake…had grown taller than me.
I looked down in horror at the extra forty inches of deformed flesh that started at my son’s pajama bottoms and ended in the clawed feet on the floor. I shut my eyes and clamped down a scream–
When I opened them again, Jake was crawling on the rug, completely fixated on the toy truck in front of him. His face and body were completely normal…
But my laptop was a broken mess.
Jake–or whatever was inside of him–was getting more powerful.
Alice and I felt hunted inside our own home. Whenever we tried to discuss what was happening to Jake, we’d hear his tiny feet scurrying impossibly fast and suddenly–
he’d be standing right beside us
Listening.
Watching with those dark blue, endlessly deep eyes.
After what happened last night, I suppose I can’t blame Alice for leaving.
I’d spent the day installing a key-operated lock on Jake’s bedroom door. I set up a baby camera in the room that streamed live to Alice and I. In case he needs us, I told myself–
But the truth was that I’d set it up for our own protection.
If Jake started to…change…we’d know about it.
The new setup was supposed to help us sleep, but in the end, Alice and I just lay awake watching what was happening on the other side of the baby camera. We stared at our perfectly ordinary, snoozing, thumb-sucking toddler as though we were watching a tense scene in a horror movie, the kind so terrifying that it’s impossible to look away…
We’d gone without sleep for so long; I suppose it was just a matter of time.
I couldn’t blame Alice when she dozed off on my shoulder; I kept nodding off as well. I tried to tell myself that one of us needed to keep watch–
But every time I looked up, the scene on the screen was unchanged: the small, cute shape of Jake in his onesie pajamas, one arm around his teddy bear.
Maybe things are fine now, the treacherous, exhausted part of my mind whispered. Maybe the danger, or whatever it was, has passed…
My chin hit my chest; my eyes popped open with a start: a dark shape–probably Jake’s teddy bear–lay in front of the camera, blocking it…
And where was our son?
Mmmph…mmmmppphhh…
At first, I didn’t notice the sounds coming from beside me.
I turned slowly–almost not wanting to see–and saw Jake’s monstrous fingers toying with my wife’s hair. His open mouth was pressed against hers, and something bulky and hideous was sliding down her throat–
Although whether Jake was draining something out of Alice or infesting her with something of his own, I couldn’t tell. My whole world became that horrible strangled sound, those two entangled figures lit only by the eerie green glow of the screen, and my own paralyzing fear.
Alice’s hands struggled feebly, trying to pry Jake off her face; it was only then that I found the strength to act. I grabbed Jake from behind and pulled.
It took both of our combined strength to pry him, screeching and flailing, off of Alice’s face. Both of their mouths were covered with a lipstick-smear coating of bright red blood.
Alice coughed and spit something up: a tiger’s eye-glass bead. She stared at it for a long second, then grabbed her purse and walked out the door.
I could hear Jake giggling beside me as Alice started her car in the misty four-A.M. darkness.
Even then, I knew in my heart that I’d never see her again.
I’ve been home alone with Jake since then. He’s been testing the boundaries, changing more often and more obviously. I think he knows that no help is coming for me. I can hear him running through the house, laughing, smashing things for fun…
It’s only a matter of time now.
I’m not afraid of death; the moment Alice left, I accepted my fate.
No, what I’m afraid of is–
What if death is not the end?
What if…after whatever Jake does to me…I wake up again, and spit a tiger’s-eye ball of glass out onto the floor?
What if I wake up as something else?