A little over two years ago, my mother was diagnosed with dementia and quickly deteriorated into something that no longer resembled my mother. Whatever it was started by taking her words, and then by the end of it all, took her body. It’s difficult for me, going back to that first night, so if you need a refresher, please go back here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/enjklb/momma_wont_stay_dead/
My father and I eventually did go back to our home after hearing my mother singing again on the radio, and again, we found my mother, or what was once my mother, twirling around in her bedroom. This time around, though, Dad and I were prepared. He had brought with him a pitchfork from Mom’s garden. It had fallen to the side and gotten rusty, forgotten. Dad used to look back at that discovered tool in the garden and laugh, thinking of it as a final parting gift from my mother.
Me, on the other hand, decided on a crowbar from the back of my Dad’s work pickup. It, too, was also rusty, leaving the palms of my hands orange and smelling like rot, but the weight had been reaffirming at the time.
We had approached my mother’s bedroom slowly, her singing once again coming down the hallway in some half-dead / half-alive lilt, “Momma Mia, hi, hi hi…” The singing never ceased to give me goosebumps and make my stomach turn. Not even to this day.
As we approached, my dad paused, looking back, locking eyes with me and then nodding down at one of the floorboards. He nodded his head to the side, his silent way of telling me to not step there. He had walked that hallway with Mom so many times, he had known exactly which floorboard would creak, and which wouldn’t. I nodded back to him in acknowledgement, and then followed his exact footsteps as we approached the bedroom.
Mom spun in and out of the moonlight, still wearing the gown that she had found in the dressers. It was a satin gown, and one of the straps had fallen partially down her shoulder. The rest of the gown stuck to her frail body as she twirled, her hair at the time still somewhat full.
Dad held the pitchfork up at chest level, aiming the prongs towards the things face. He looked back to me, his eyes asking me if I were ready for what we were about to do. I lied to myself internally, and also lied to him, and nodded, Yes. I am ready to kill Mom again.
He turned back to face the thing that was once my mother, and like he did the first night, he muttered, “Hon.”
The thing turned on its heels with the grace of a demon and ran towards us, arms outstretched, beckoning for one last embrace, not realizing that Dad has been wielding the pitchfork.
It swallowed the center prong, it exploding out the back of its neck with a wet plop. That didn’t stop it, though, as it continued to thrash against my dad, arms flailing, trying its damndest to claw him. I could hear jellied blood squelching as it worked its way into the pitchfork, the outside prongs splitting its mouth in some kind of putrid Glasgow smile.
“Help! Kill her, kill her dammit!” my dad had yelled at me.
I had just been standing there, just like last time, watching this thing once again trying to rip my father to shreds. Snapping out of this grotesque hypnosis, I sprung forward, raising the crowbar above my own head and then swinging it down into my mother’s. With almost no resistance at all, its head caved in, its arms dropped, and it fell back to the floor, taking the pitchfork down with it. My dad fell back onto his ass, gasping. I knelt down beside him to see if he was fine.
“Did we do it?” he asked between gasps.
I looked to the thing, seeing how the pitchfork stood straight up from its mouth like some strange monument of defilement to my mother. Like last time, the things body fizzled and bubbled, deteriorating, melting into the carpet. The pitchfork, no longer supported, fell over, thumping hard enough into the carpet to make both me and my father jump.
And just like that, Momma was dead again.
Routine is a necessary devil, and a devil was exactly what we needed to keep making sure that Momma would stay dead.
Like clockwork, the next night, my mother reappeared in her bedroom, singing, dancing, twirling in the moonlight.
In the living room, my dad and I had heard her.
“She’s back,” he said almost in a sigh. After putting her down again the second time, we had a long talk outside in the backyard about what we would do if she came back for a third time. I had made some kind of offhand remark that “third time’s the charm”, and my dad just gave a half chuckle.
“I guess, I guess we’ll just have to kill her again,” I had said.
And the next night, she was back.
We repeated the same song and dance, except this time my father had bought a newer, sturdier pitchfork, and I had picked up a titanium baseball bat. Earlier in the evening, I was out in the backyard, practicing swinging the bat several times, making sure it felt good in my hands, making sure I even still remembered how to swing a damn baseball bat.
It had brought back memories of when I used to play t-ball in elementary school. I had always been anxious and afraid when it was my turn to come up to bat, so much so that I ended up giving myself a stomach ulcer, but Mom had been there to help soothe me, tell me that it would be okay if I missed hitting the ball.
“It’s all apart of the game,” she had said to me back then, “you win some, and you lose some, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Our new weapons in hand, we approached the bedroom for the third night in a row, my father uttering that word that lost its original loving meaning with me, “Hon.”
This time it was cleaner. The thing impaled itself on the pitchfork, rocking my dad back on his heels, but he held his ground firmly. I didn’t hesitate a moment to bring the baseball bat down onto its head. It fell backwards and fizzled into the carpet.
Dad and I looked at each other, and I broke the silence, “Are we going to have to do this every single night?”
He almost looked angry with me, and said, “Of course. We can’t leave her like this.”
I wanted to tell him “It’s not her though, it’s not Mom,” but my head had still been spinning from everything that had happened in the past couple of days.
I needed more time to think. Needed some time to figure out what we were going to do.
But that’s the problem when you get into a routine whenever you are in survival mode. There really isn’t a whole lot of space to “figure things out”. The next night, it was the same thing. Mom’s voice came back, still singing that same damn song, and again, Dad and I took up our weapons and made that trudge down the hallway.
I developed blisters on my hands, and they popped at the same moment its skull did, but I gritted through the pain as we carried out this sick ritual.
Routine is a necessary devil. Wake up, brush your teeth, wash your face, kill Mom. It was through routine that my dad and I made sure that Mom was always put to rest, every single night. Blisters turned to calluses, sore shoulders turned into muscled and toned arms, and we made sure to “tuck Mom into bed” every single night. At least that’s what me and Dad would call it.
Routine was a necessary devil, and then COVID happened.
At first, we didn’t mind it. We took shelter in the house, followed protocols, got vaccinated, everything. Life went on as normal, or as normal as it could be. Two years of the world falling apart. Two years of killing mom, I mean, tucking her in every night, we were doing quite alright.
And then Dad developed a cough, and started having difficulty breathing. Sure enough, he tested positive off of one of those tests that you get in the mail. When his sense of smell went, he made some joke of “well at least I don’t have to smell your mom’s rotting flesh anymore”. We had laughed that off, our senses of humor going rancid just like that walking corpse, but the laughs stopped when my dad started going red in the face, not really able to catch his breath.
“Maybe I’ll take care of Mom tonight by myself,” I had told him.
He shook his head vehemently, “No, it’s my burden just as much as it is yours.”
I should’ve pushed harder against him, but he persisted, and to be honest, I didn’t want to handle Mom by myself. Even after two years of doing it together, she still frightened me.
That night, when that thing rushed my dad and impaled itself onto the now well-worn pitchfork, it knocked him flat onto his back. Its head had still been propped up and held away by the pitchfork, but it stomped on my dad, stomped on his chest and on his stomach like some kind of interpretive dance. It gurgled as it did it, almost laughing.
I swung the bat at its head, but without it being held firmly in place, I missed, awkwardly tripping forward, my feet tangling up on my fallen father, and it grabbed me, pulling me in for a deep embrace.
That’s exactly what it felt like.
Like my mother was hugging me. For a brief moment, I could smell the perfume she had been wearing when she was buried. Then I could only smell dirt and rot.
And then the hug just kept getting, tighter, and tighter, and I couldn’t breathe. The irony wasn’t entirely lost on me. I hadn’t caught COVID, but I was still going to suffocate. Thankfully, still holding onto the bat, I swung it up, trying to hit the damned thing in it head. I smacked myself in my own head, doubling the stars that were already starting to pepper my vision, but I kept on swinging, eventually striking gold and finding my mark. Its grip on me loosened, and I fell to the floor.
It fell backwards, off of Dad and vanished again.
Dad and I laid on the floor of my mother’s bedroom, him struggling to catch his breath, and me struggling to see clearly again, feeling warm blood starting to drip down my face, my vision slowly pulsing back with every beat of my heart.
The next day I took him to the hospital and had him admitted, thanking all of the stars that there was a bed still available. But now, Mom would be coming back, and I know I won’t be able to handle her all by myself. There just wasn’t anyway I could face that thing by myself.
So this awful secret, this grim ritual that my father and I had been carrying out by ourselves for the past two years, it was finally going to have to spread. Tonight, I will be calling my sister, and I will be asking for her help.
If she says no, I’ll just have to do my best on my own. I’m hoping to God that she does come and help me, though.