We always wanted a big family, I have three brothers and my wife has two brothers and two sisters, so we were used to a full house.
As soon as we got married we went right to work and a couple of weeks later my wife was already pregnant with our first child.
Our baby girl was born about eight and a half months later, a little premature but nothing to worry about. She was extremely calm and easy, never cried, ate well, slept for ten hours straight from the very first night.
So obviously, we soon started trying again for a second, and again my wife got pregnant very quickly.
Our second baby girl was born prematurely as well but was as easy as our first one who was almost one year old by now. She also slept throughout the night, never cried and ate well.
Family members and friends with kids all commented on how lucky we were and how jealous they were that our babies were so easy.
We should have counted or blessings and stopped there, but we wanted a big family and everything was going so well, so we started trying for a third.
Immediately things were different, it took a long time for my wife to get pregnant, almost a full year, we were just about to undergo IVF treatment when my wife surprised me one day with a positive pregnancy test.
Her pregnancy was nothing like before, with the other two it had been effortless, almost no inconvenience up until the last week or so, but this time it was painful, and grueling. We assumed it was because by this time she was a bit older and her body had already been through a lot.
Seven months in she couldn’t do anything but lay in bed anymore, her belly already looked like it was going to pop even though she still had two months to go. I comforted her and told her that the other two both came early, so this one would as well.
It didn’t, three weeks after the due date the doctor had had enough and decided to do a C-section to get it out. In the hospital everything seemed fine: a healthy, beautiful baby boy. My wife was smiling again, after months of agony, and we looked forward to a happy life with the 5 of us.
It all changed when we got home. The very first night he woke up crying.
I smiled and said: “Well, I guess we’re going to go through some sleepless nights after all. I got this, honey, you’ve done enough already”.
My wife turned around and was already back a sleep when I walked into the baby’s room.
I turned on the lights and immediately cried out in horror.
It wasn’t the baby that was crying, it was our cat, its head stuck between the bars of the crib, except there wasn’t much of the head left. Our baby was in the middle of eating the skin of its face.
I immediately took him out, the cat’s head slumping down and hanging by the side of the crib.
“No, no, no” I yelled, “what did you do?”
He just smiled and licked his blood soaked lips.
After that, he got a taste for blood. He wouldn’t drink any milk or eat anything else. He started to hunt for flies and spiders around the house and eat them, giggling while tearing off their legs. When friends came over with their small dog, we were just able to pull him off as he was about to bite it.
We went to a doctor and asked him about the biting, we didn’t dare mention the cat incident. He brushed it off as normal baby behavior while teething, but to us, it was pretty clear that this was something else, we unconsciously started referring to him as “it”.
It would be playing outside and if we lost sight of it for just a minute it would be in our neighbors’ yard, eating their chickens. The next day, they would tell us about how they thought a fox had eaten them, and we would play along.
We almost accepted it, we started giving it raw meat to eat and that would calm it down.
Until one day I heard my oldest daughter cry out from upstairs, I ran up as quick as I could and there it was with its jaw locked on her arm, like a Pitbull. That’s the story we went with when we took her to the hospital: the dog did it. When we got home, I decided that enough was enough, we needed a solution. The only thing I could come up with was to lock it in the basement.
My wife cried for days, pleading me to let it stay with us, but it was just too dangerous. Every day I would open the door when it was sleeping and put down some raw, whole chickens, blood and all, bought directly from a chicken farm, and it would devour them.
We did this for over a year. A week ago I had a work meeting that ran late, I hadn’t fed it yet. On the way home I already got a bad feeling. I told my wife not to feed it, that I would do it when I got home.
I walked through the door and yelled: “Hello”.
No response, all I could hear from the hallway was a gurgling sound. I walked into the living room and there it was, on the carpet, feasting on the neck of our youngest daughter.
My wife and oldest daughter’s lifeless bodies lay discarded on the coach. It looked at me with bloodshot eyes, a grin almost as wide as its face. It started towards me, but I quickly ran to the hallway and grabbed a bat from behind the door. Just as it jumped for me, I turned around and hit it square in the temple. It fell to the floor, twitching. I didn’t hesitate and clubbed it to death.
Nobody will ever believe me, so the only thing I could do is bury them out in the woods and submit a missing person’s case for all four. The police organized a huge search party, and I walked along, looking for my dead family and the thing that I once considered my son.