Mother.
My baby isn’t mine.
That’s all I could think as I lay in bed listening to the monitor. I can hear her breathing down the baby monitor tucked in her cot. Tom was in there with her, but for the baby’s own safety. To keep it away from me.
I brought her back from the hospital only a month ago. It’s such a confusing place, all those little humans wrapped up in blue and pink blankets with a name scribbled onto a whiteboard at the bottom of the cot. I stared at her. Directed to her by the nurse. Tom was thrilled, putting his hands on my shoulder and holding me close. He was smiling, but yet I felt this complete disconnection.
When the nurse handed me the release forms like I was recovering my car that had been impounded for overstaying the parking meter in downtown Manhattan. I stared at the forms, and it was as if the ink was moving around the paper. I couldn’t focus. All I could see was that sea of pink and blue in front of me, and the feeling of that something was terribly wrong.
“Come on, Ellie,” Tom said. “Let’s take our daughter home.”
Our daughter.
It sounds crazy. I know it sounds crazy. Maybe it’s the sleepless nights. Maybe it’s the being stuck in the house all day listening to it scream in the back room as I stare vacantly at the grey walls I have been trapped in the last month.
The loving touch of Tom’s skin has since relinquished, and he sleeps on the floor by its cot. He says he doesn’t trust me to be around it. He doesn’t trust me because he has seen the way I have been looking at it.
“That’s not our baby,” I said once at the dinner table while Tom fed it formula. My breasts were aching, leaking through my clothing. How sick is that? A baby cries and the mother’s breasts lactate. It’s like something has invaded my body and is controlling it.
“You’re disgusting,” he said, taking it into his arms and moving away from me. “You need to go and see a doctor.” He passed me some leaflets to help with post-natal depression. But I threw them away. I wasn’t going to see a doctor. I wasn’t going to love it. My body was betraying me. My home felt like a tomb. My husband was distant. Was I going insane? Was something happening to me?
The way it only screamed when I was alone with it. How it wouldn’t eat when I forced myself to feed it. The way I saw it sneer when no one else was looking. It was trying to drive me insane. It wanted Tom all to itself. It is trying to slowly kill me. My child, my real child is still in that hospital somewhere, alone and abandoned. Someone has switched the names, the cots or the paperwork.
I hear breathing on the monitor go silent. It pulls me from the darkness of my thoughts, and I put my ear to the small radio. Through the haze, I hear a whisper that makes my skin crawl.
“Mother…”
Like pulled up by a winch, I erect out of bed and walk along the hallway and stand at the foot of the nursery where it sleeps. Tentatively, I hover my fingers over the doorknob. I could hear something whispering inside. Something hissing, like if a serpent could speak. Its language abyssal, the feeling of the dark, of the dread that surrounds me forcing its way down my throat where it lands in my stomach growing cysts that swell and burst with tiny bugs that ravage my organs, ready to eat the backs of my eyes.
I grab the door and turn it. The whispering stops.
“What are you doing, Elle?” I turn. Tom is standing on the stairs with a glass of water.
“I heard it talking…” Such a phrase should sound absurd. Insane even. And yet, it’s the truest thing I had ever uttered.
“The baby,” he said. “The baby is asleep. You need to go back to bed.”
“But I heard it talking. It called for me to come to it.” Tom placed his glass down and moved slowly to me. What did he think I was going to do? What was I going to do? Only then did I notice the knife in my hand.
“Just come to me,” he said, moving closer. “Pass me the knife and come here.” I studied the blade, the glint of moonlight on the edge and then the look of Tom’s worried face. He was going to stop me. He was going to let it win.
I thrust the door open and stepped into the room. I went to speak, to move to it. But then I felt the cold. A paralysing bite of ice. A feeling of desolation, like standing in the artic at the foot of the great endless void.
Then I saw it standing by the crib.
Like holding onto an electrified fence, the sight of it pulsed fear through my body. It immobilised me, like staring into the eyes of a Basilisk. Something indescribable, only that of shadow. Its aura elicited one feeling. Malice.
The baby cried, splitting the sound of my heartbeat that thumped in my ear. The thing turned, its eyes a hellish glow of yellow. Its mouth opened, stretching into a long black maw, its teeth like razors.
“Mother,” it hissed in the thrum of chaotic discords like a siren from the dead.
And then they were gone.