Not a single one of you is probably going to believe this, but I need to get this story out before the end. I mean, calling it a story isn’t quite right, because it’s not fake, as fantastical as it is, but you know what I mean. I need to tell someone my story. Someones, I suppose if I’m posting it here.
So this all started with Sarah. God, she was beautiful, with brown hair and brown eyes, which I’m a sucker for both. Actually, when I met her she dyed her hair blonde, and she was still gorgeous of course, but I secretly, selfishly hoped someday she would stop dying her hair, and she did, eventually. We met when we were nineteen, and I shit you know I went home the night after I met her and called my mother and told her I had met the woman I was going to marry.
I saw her at a grocery store, of all places. She worked there. I went through her line. I didn’t even notice her at first, I just hopped in the shortest line, tired from a long day of classes, it was a store close to my college. She was the same age but didn’t go to school. It turned out that her first day at that store was the day I had met her. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life at that point, and she lived nearby and her parents had told her to get a job if she wasn’t going to college and she wanted to still have a place to live. So she did.
I ended up giving her my number, and she text me the very next day. We set up a date for that weekend, and we were engaged within three months. I know that probably sounds crazy to a lot of you, but for us, it was just normal. Our love was so damn intense, and we just knew we were meant to be with one another. I guess sometimes you just get that. Someone can be so fuckin’ perfect for you that you can’t imagine life without them and not marrying Sarah as soon as I could seemed like a much bigger mistake than marrying her before we had been together a year did. And that’s what we did. Engaged by three months, married just after six.
We got a little one-bedroom apartment, I worked and did school, and she worked and decided to go to nursing school. It worked for us, and soon she was pregnant.
God, how I wish that wasn’t the case. I don’t know, I guess what killed her had nothing to do with being pregnant, but after all that’s happened I suppose I just sort of lump every shitty thing that’s gone down in with that fucking devil spawn. And I know that’s not really fair either. Our son wasn’t evil, not really, his body was just used by something evil.
Sarah was eight months pregnant when she died. Car accident. It was storming, and windy, and she was driving on a little road in some farm country, coming back from visiting her Aunt and Uncle for the weekend, and a car was coming toward her and the wind had torn free this stalk of corn. Seriously, fuckin’ corn, and it blew it from the field, and it blew over this little brown fence, I’ve been down that road so many times since Sarah and my son died, hoping something would blow into my path and take me out.
Anyway, the corn blew into the road, just as Sarah was about to pass an oncoming car, and the driver of the other car was going a bit fast, and in fairness so was my wife, and the driver of the other car panicked and swerved and hit Sarah. The driver died instantly, they weren’t wearing a seatbelt.
Sarah was. She even undid the belt and got out. She walked nearly half a mile from the wreck, right down the middle of the road in the pounding rain and shrieking wind. She had a piece of glass in her throat from the windshield. She was in shock, they tell me. She eventually sat down on the side of the road and died. The baby died too. It was hours before anyone came by that lonely road.
Obviously, I could go on and on about how awful it all was. The phone call, the funeral, the everything. But that’s not what I need to tell you all. That’s not what I need to get off of my chest.
The nightmares came on quickly. First, it was just a whole lot of Sarah. I’d see her in my dreams, maybe we’d be laughing and talking, or eating dinner, or making love, and then she’d have a shard of glass in her throat and she’d be choking on her own blood. And then the dreams went on and changed. They started like that, but then when the glass came so did the belly. She’d be pregnant, huge really, and as she died I’d hear a baby crying within her, and I’d see her stomach ripple.
In one dream I was out walking on that road in the storm, water pelting painfully down upon me, soaking my shirt to my skin, making it hard to see anything. As I walked I saw her, just a dark shape on the side of the road at first, and then I’d jog forward and she’d come into clearer view and I’d see her fall backward dead, but her stomach would be moving and then bursting open and our son would be crawling out of my dead wife. The baby would look to me, impossibly small but moving, crawling, lifting itself into a standing position and smiling at me, its teeth jagged and sharp.
Those were the dreams I had for a while, and then I had a different dream. I was my son, I was the little baby, moving forward so quickly, darting across the grass in a graveyard, hurrying at night to a large white house that sat in the middle of the cemetery. People lived there, someone who took care of the graves, and their family. Lights were on in the house. I went to the door, but there was no way for me to get in, I was too short. But then, in the dream, as my demonic child I was climbing, right up the wall, to the left of the door to the nearest window, and I was hurtling through it and scampering up the stairs as a surprised shout came from below and someone moved in from another room to see what had broken the window.
There was a hall upstairs, in my dream, with open doors, but the rooms were all dark beyond except for one. I went there, to the lit room, and a child, a teenager I suppose, was sitting on their bed, doing homework. The old floorboards creaked under my little infant feet and the teen turned as I leaped forward.
I woke in a cold sweat, my heart pounding. Most of the dream rushed from my brain like milk from an overturned jug, chugging out until there was nothing left.
But it would come back to me, a few days later, as I was driving home from work. Sarah and my son had died half a year before that dream, and I had been back to work for a couple of months, but my performance was suffering. I had graduated college right before Sarah had died, and gotten a good job, and they had been as patient with me as they could, but I could tell my issues were wearing thin, and I expected to be fired at any point.
That dream all came back to me, hit me like a ton of bricks as they say, to the point where I had to pull to the side of the road and gather myself. I recognized the graveyard, it was where my wife and our son had been buried, just twenty or so miles away from our apartment. Instead of heading home, I drove there.
The gate to the graveyard was open and I pulled in as the sun fell toward the horizon and the sky turned a deep purple. I could see the house right from the entrance, and my heart skipped a beat when I saw a yellow band across the front door. It was that police tape that I had only ever really seen in movies and TV shows. Something had happened at the house. I pulled to the front of the home and got out. No lights were on, even as it became fully dark quickly overhead. I walked first to my wife’s grave, it was undisturbed, but our son was buried to the right of her, and there was a small hole there as if something had dug its way up.
My mind went crazy, of course, emboldened by the dream I had just remembered having a few days before, but I was still mostly sane then and that part of my brain told me to relax, it was just a mole or a groundhog or something, and obviously, my infant son had not risen from the dead.
I walked quickly around the cemetery and ended up back in front of the house, I had wanted to see if anyone else was in the graveyard, but I appeared to be alone. I went up onto the front porch of that house and tried the door. It was locked, but the window was broken to the left, just as it had been in my dream, and no one had patched it up or anything. There was a crisscross of two sections of that yellow tape with POLICE written in bold black letters, but I held them apart and slipped inside. The foyer was exactly as it had been in the dream I had suddenly remembered having, and I went right up the carpeted stairs. The door to the teenager’s bedroom was closed, and I pushed it open, not even thinking about my fingerprints, or contaminating anything.
The room was covered in blood. Dried blood is disgusting, a sickly dark brown color. It was on the bed, on the walls and floor, and even on the ceiling. Small placards with numbers rest here and there in the room, markers for evidence, if movies have ever taught me anything. At one point I heard the creak of wood above my head. I was on the top floor, but there was an attic, you could see the circular window at the very top of the house from the drive. I wondered if someone else was in the house, but it was more likely a mouse or even nothing. Old houses just shift and make sounds sometimes.
From there, I found blood down in the kitchen, that same dark brown, the same disgusting stench. More evidence markers. People had been killed in that home, and I almost retched thinking about it. I rushed outside, back through the window, and hurried to my car where I sat for a long while with the air condition blasting directly into my face.
I don’t want to bore you guys, and I’m not much of a writer, so I guess I can just sort of skip forward to things that are important to tell you. To tell someone. I need someone else to know this. I need that from you. I’m sorry, I know it’s a burden, but I can’t go to Hell with this all inside of me. I need to release it.
I did some research. That house stayed with me. It took me weeks, but I eventually came across the term Tiyanak. It was a Philippine myth that a demon from Hell would take the form of a dead baby or toddler, and kill and feed. There’s more to it, and maybe someone who knows more can fill anyone else in, because I’m not going to get super into it. I just sort of became convinced that my child was one of these creatures. Something had come from Hell and entered his little body. And I felt responsible for it.
On one site I found someone talking about it as more than a myth. They sounded as if they had fought with one before. They had lost a daughter very young, under one, and she had come back. Or something had come back with her face. I messaged the person and they told me about the height thing. Tiyanak’s liked to be high. Away from the Hell from which they came.
I thought about the house, the creak in the attic, the highest point in that whole cemetery. I’m not much of a gun guy, but my dad is, and that very night I went and borrowed a handgun from him. And then, that same night, I went back to the cemetery.
The window had been fixed, and the police tape was gone and there was a for sale sign by the front gate, which was closed. I parked nearby and took my gun back to the gate and hopped the fence, glad to see someone was taking care of the graves, as the place had freshly been mowed. I went to the house and it took a minute to find a way inside. I ended up breaking a little glass pane on the back door and reaching in and unlocking it. I used my phone as a flashlight, there was no power in the home, and even if there had been I probably wouldn’t have used it for fear a cop drove by and noticed the lights on.
The blood had all been cleaned up and the furniture was taken from the house. I went upstairs and found the panel in the ceiling that pulled down to create stairs to the attic. I hurried up them, sweeping my light this way and that. It was mostly empty, but there was an old armchair here, and a pile of rags and moldy blankets.
I was turned toward the front of the house, looking out of that circular window when I heard a snarl and turned. Something small and pale was at my face, launching itself toward me. I held my arms up just in time, and it slammed into my right wrist instead of my nose. I screamed as I felt its teeth bite into the soft flesh of my hand, and flung it away. My heart was going a mile a minute. I saw the thing, laying on the ground. It was a baby. My baby. My son. It looked at me with big eyes and opened its mouth. Its teeth weren’t sharp. Actually, it had no teeth. The baby began to wail, and I hurried toward it.
“I’m sorry!” I said stupidly, but my son just kept crying. I set the gun on the ground after I knelt, and then the thing was at me. I had been so stupid, it wasn’t my son, it wasn’t a baby even. Teeth slid from its gums and it moved its hands and legs beneath its body backward, so unnatural, so quickly, and launched itself upward. I scrambled backward and the thing missed me by an inch, falling back to the ground. I didn’t think. I don’t know I had never been put in an instance before where I needed to just run on pure adrenalin and instinct, but I did pretty well. I dove for the gun and took it up in my hands and aimed at the creature as it prepared to jump again. I fired
And I hit it. I hit my son or the thing that had taken his body and it flew backward. It was up in an instant but it was howling, and it was hurt and it went running. I fired again and missed it. And again. It ran for me, around me, and smashed through the circular window. I was up and running for the window and watched as the Tiyanak raced away.
Months passed before I saw it again. I became obsessed. I quit my job, and I started following murder stories, in my town, in towns fifty miles away, and then in other states. I got on his trail, I was out of money, I had lost the apartment, I was sleeping in my car and stealing food from gas stations and paying for the gas with what I could beg in an afternoon every other day. All I could think about was how it was my responsibility to kill this damned monster. I blamed it for everything. Maybe it had killed my wife, maybe it had sent that corn into the road and that car into Sarah’s, just to get at our baby. I still don’t know if that’s true, but I think it is, now.
Eventually, I was pretty sure it had gotten to Tennesee and I headed down. First, there was this lonely house in the woods, these two old people who had been married for nearly fifty years had been found by their son dead in their home. Their deaths sounded awful, and I had thought my son was in the area. I went down and missed him by a couple of days at the most, finding a nest high up in a tree that he had made.
Then I heard about this woman who had been killed in a town called Deepwood Valley and headed there. Her son had played a soccer game and she had stayed too close up the little snack shack there at the fields and was found near the edge of the woods with trauma to her throat. Deepwood Valley was a charming little town, one of those places they don’t really have anywhere outside of old TV shows. It was small, with a lot of buildings all along one main strip, including City Hall, complete with an old-fashioned clock tower.
I’m ashamed of how many people died as I searched for my son before I realized he had made his nest up in that clock tower. It was high, away from the Hell he was so intent on escaping. The mayor died, and his daughter, and a handful of other townsfolk. I went to get my son, determined to not let him escape again. I was so scared, walking up the stairs to the top of that tower, hot stinging sweat in my eyes, my heart pounding so loudly in my ears it sounded like a war drum. He was there, and he tried his trick on me again, tried to draw me in, acting like a baby, acting like my son. But I didn’t fall for it, and I finished him.
I’m sure that seems anti-climatic, just saying it like that but this isn’t a story meant to entertain you, to thrill you, it’s my life, and it’s the end of it. I killed my son. That thing, in my son, I guess it really is, but to me, it was my son. He killed Sarah, and I killed him and I can’t go on. Whatever was in my son, my boy that I was going to name Henry, after my own father, it was gone when I shot it in the heart. But my son, he remained. His little body, white and red and cold. I can’t stop seeing him. Henry.
I don’t know how I’ll do it yet, but I know I can’t go on. Maybe I’ll wait and I’ll see if telling you all this has helped and if maybe I can move on, but I’m not holding my breath. I don’t think there is any way forward, not doing what I did, not seeing the things I saw. For the people killed by the thing that wore my son, I’m sorry.
Kevin Green
Mary Green
Gregory Green
Helen Lyle
Arthur Lyle
Rosa Ramirez
Jack Whitney
Lisa Whitney
Carl Sanders
Megan Lee
Anita Gorman
People deserve to know your names. I’m sorry.