It started with the little things. I’d find a small plant in the fridge. The children’s dolls would go missing and were found buried in the garden. The last page of every book in the house was torn out. She seemed absolutely fine otherwise. Entirely aware and normal.
But now, something smelled dead in my house.
The putrid smell of decay assaulted my nostrils the minute I walked in through the kitchen door. I nearly choked when I saw the three dead rats lying on the kitchen table, each one neatly laid, their bodies arranged perfectly straight from head to tail.
These rats had been dead for at least a week not more.
My eyes watered as the overpowering smell made me want to retch.
Before I could even formulate a secondary reaction, I heard the humming from my living room. It was an old lullaby she used to sing to me when I was a child. One of the few things passed down by her Icelandic grandmother who stayed on in Iceland long after the family had left for America.
I cautiously put my bag down on the kitchen floor. Then slowly walked to the living room.
“Mom?”
I didn’t see her at first. The curtains had been pulled and the blinds pulled down in my usually sunny living room, so it took my eyes a moment to adjust. Finally I saw the back of her head sitting on the sofa, slowly rocking.
“Mom.” I almost whispered. Something told me I shouldn’t speak too loud. That if I did, I would disturb something in the dark. Something I could not yet see. She didn’t move. She just kept humming that old Icelandic lullaby which used to creep me out as a kid.
“Mom,” I asked carefully not moving from my spot close enough the door of the darkened living room, “where are the kids?”
When she didn’t respond, I swallowed hard and heart pounding, I ran up the stairs taking two at a time in my panic. When I got to the top of the stairs, I turned right into my daughter’s bedroom. Anna and Kristin were only four and my absolute joy. And my mother was their favourite person, much to the chagrin of my husband’s mother.
As soon as I opened the door to the girls room though, my panic reached a catastrophic level. They weren’t there.
But worse.
Two identical pools of dark red decorated both their unmade beds.
I fell to my knees on the floor and screamed.
*
The days that followed were the most awful days of my life and they grew worse every day.
We searched everywhere. The police, my family and friends collectively searched our entire town and the nearby woods. Everyone asked me why I had left the girls alone with my mother. I told them that I hadn’t, that the baby sitter had called me to tell me she had to urgently go home and I had instantly driven back home to be with the girls and my mother. My mother was taken away and interrogated for hours after they found blood on her clothes.
But the blood on her didn’t belong to the girls. It wasn’t human. But nor was it animal blood. The repeated DNA tests came back inconclusive.
The interrogations were no good either. My mother wouldn’t speak. She refused to tell the police anything. Just say there humming that old Icelandic lullaby.
“Bíum bíum bambaló, bambaló og dillidillidó
My friend I lull to sleep, but outside waits a face
at the window.“
She came home with me after I told them I would call a lawyer if they didn’t let her go as they had no evidence against her.
I helped her bathe and fed her, did everything I could to look after her in hopes that she would tell me what happened to the girls. The local news picked up the story and started harassing us every single day. The police still suspected my mother had something to do with it and would make threatening visits to check her room or the girls room.
I didn’t know whether to grieve or be incandescent with rage or hold onto hope.
A month passed like this. Then two. My husband, devastated about our daughters, furious at my mother and me left to stay with his own family for a while.
I took my mother to the doctor and he told me that she actually didn’t have dementia or any ailment he could see. She was just in a state of shock, possibly created by seeing something terrifying. That we just had to wait and see if she would return to her old self.
I wish she never ever had.
Finally one day when I was sitting in the kitchen staring at a photo of my daughters and drinking a coffee, my mother walked into the kitchen. Her long hair was loose around her face instead of a braid down her back. She looked at me like she was seeing me for the very first time in a long time.
“Eva.” She said softly.
I could have cried. “Mom?”
She seemed to have regained some of her old self, I could see that her eyes were no longer glazed with that far away look like she was no longer there.
She sat down, shuddering slightly on the kitchen table. I poured her a cup of coffee and put it before her, but I couldn’t stop myself from instantly asking as she took her first sip “Mom, please…you have to tell me. What happened the girls?” My heart cracked open, raw with pain even as I asked. I just wanted them home.
She took a deep breath, the wrinkles on her face more pronounced than ever as she pushed her greying hair back. “Eva. Please. I’m so sorry.”
My heart began to pound at these words. “What are you talking about?”
She swallowed hard and looked down at the photo of Anna and Kristin.
“You have to believe I did everything I could to protect them. For years. For years I did everything.”
My chest hurt now. What was she trying to say? What had happened to my daughters? What had she done?
My mother’s voice quivered, “I was so young myself then. I was only seventeen and I think that’s why they managed to get to me. My parents weren’t religious. I was looking for a place to belong. They came to my school, the people. The farm. They promised safety. A cause. Friends. An easy way to make money. And I was a lonely teenager. I couldn’t afford university, my parents couldn’t help me. It just felt like the best option at the time. And at first, it was good. I really felt like I was part of something bigger than myself. By the time I was eighteen, I had moved out to the farm. It was massive and so many of us stayed there. We earned our keep by helping out around the farm, there was a hierarchal system of tasks and the more they trusted you the more you earned. The most trusted ones on the farm would leave for the city and come back in the middle of the night, telling us stories of great parties and dances. It was a bit secluded all the way out of town but that didn’t matter really given that the farm itself was packed. The only thing was…”
She paused and took a sip of her coffee. I waited impatiently for her story to continue, my heart in my mouth and hands clasped firmly around my own coffee mug.
“The only thing was the crying. Every night. We could hear it from across the fields. It sounded like a baby. And when I asked about it, people would either look away or tell me to ignore it. It wasn’t good enough for me. So I went out there looking one night. I walked across the fields for hours, a flashlight in hand. It was definitely a baby and I was determined to find it.”
Her hands were shaking even more now and she took a long sip of her coffee. She lay her palms on the table to steady her hands.
“When I was so far from the farm, I could barely see it, that’s when it happened. Everything went quiet. The crickets used to be so loud at night. For them to fall quiet suddenly like that it would be…well, let’s just say it doesn’t happen. That was when I heard the crying again. It was right next to me. As though the baby was by my foot. I looked down and…and-“
She choked on a sob, fear making the rest of her words both quiet and loud. “Oh Eva it was this…this thing. It had the faces of six dead infants sewn around its head. Its body…too many arms…too many legs. All stitched together. It looked like someone’s grotesque lab experiment. It looked up at me with cold, dead eyes, opened all of its six of its mouths and let out this sound, this inhuman high pitched sound and I screamed and ran. I didn’t stop running until I got to the farm. I swear I could hear it chasing behind me. Some days I still can.”
I was shaking now, but I didn’t know from what. Was it disbelief or rage? She continued on with her story, clearly distraught and unable to see past it.
“When I got back to the farm, they were waiting for me. They took me into a back room and that was the first time they beat me. It was the boy who recruited me and his girlfriend who did it. They never spoke the whole time they did it. I think the message was implied. I kept asking them what that thing was. They wouldn’t tell me. I learned though. I learned what it was soon enough.”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. I could see her shoulders were shaking. After a few minutes of silence, I asked impatiently, “What does this have to do with Anna and Kristin.”
My mother now looked into my eyes. “The farm… they…kept me hungry for days, you understand. I was barely given water. At the end I would have done anything to survive. And they knew it. When I agreed to do whatever they wanted they gave me some food and water, let me rest a bit and sent me out to the city with the trusted kids.”
Her eyes glossed over with tears. “I saw what they were doing there for the first time. Oh Eva…they were stealing infants. They stole them from mothers they deemed “unfit.” Any mother who didn’t match their high standards was a target. And I…I helped them.”
She was crying in earnest now. I waited for her to catch her breath, stunned at her confession. “Mom.” I whispered slowly. “What did you do with the babies?”
“We…we sold them. It’s how they kept the farm going. They sold the ones who were ‘good enough’. The rest were left in the field beyond the farm. I think…I think that thing would take them.” She whispered, her words almost inaudible. “We stole so many children from their rightful mothers, Eva. The family said they were going to better homes but I can’t stop thinking of those mothers and their heartbreaks.” She shuddered again. “The last day I was ever on that farm, I went out to see that thing again. It was like I was in a trance. I watched it as it carried another baby off. And I…I threw something at it.”
I was shaking now, eyes wide and my head spinning.
“I wanted it to follow me. And it did. It did and I let it into room after room. It wrecked havoc on that farm. I ran away before it was done skinning it’s last kill.” She swallowed hard, the truth finally out. Her shoulders sagged.
“What happened to the girls.” I asked again, a tremor in my voice. “Please mom.”
A horrible silence followed.
“I don’t think it ever stopped following me, Eva. I tried to give it rats to keep it away. But it wanted…it wanted something else.”
I backed out of my chair, my hand on my mouth. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I’ve seen it out there for years. Outside the bedroom window. Watching. Waiting. For a way in.”
*
I checked my mother into a special care facility that very evening. She seemed all right with leaving. Even understood. Her wild story had made me realise she needed professional help I couldn’t give her.
I came home to an empty house and my grief felt so large I thought it would consume me. Collapsing on the couch, I sobbed until I couldn’t cry anymore.
That was when I heard it. The crying. Like a baby’s wail.
I lifted my head to look around the darkened living room. The moonlight shone through the window gleaming softly, turning everything into shadows.
That was when I saw it. Outside the window there was a dark shape that looked almost human but it had too many arms and too many legs. It sat on a tree branch looking in at me.
Wearing the faces of my daughters.