^^
I awoke, suddenly, at 3am. Bewildered, I stared at the ceiling, unable to identify the cause of my sudden leap into consciousness. I hadn't jolted awake from a nightmare, yet I felt a vague, instinctive sense of unease which was subsumed quickly by the familiar torrent of grief, still relentless six months.
Turning over, I ran my hand over the absence on Catherine's side of the bed, gazing at the blank expanse of bed-sheet. My tear-distorted gaze travelled to the crib, empty, at the side of the bed. A familiar ritual, accompanied by the myriad voices of that devastating evening, voicing crushing words:
“She's losing blood,”
“We may have to let the baby go to save your wife,”
“We're losing her,”
“I'm sorry, she haemorrhaged massively. I'm afraid neither your wife or your son were strong enough”.
I knew it was self-defeating to keep the cot, maybe even the bed. Empty vessels that once contained my world, symbols of what I...
All my senses seemed to lurch simultaneously. I could taste and smell a faint tang of something acrid. I was convinced I felt an almost imperceptible breeze across my cheek. My peripheral vision detected the languid movement of the mobile above the crib at the same instant a creak emitted from the loose floorboard in the centre of the room.
The sweat on my body chilled to freezing instantly. Telling myself, demanding of myself, to be calm; to rationalise. There was nothing there. The room was defined by what was no longer there. Breathing slowly and deeply, I surveyed the room until I was satisfied I was alone.
I settled down again, and closed my eyes.
The smell returned, faint at first, but with a growing intensity. I recognised the reek of putrefaction and clamped my hand over my nose. My eyes watered and I blinked rapidly to clear the tears now streaming down my cheeks.
That was when I heard the scratching from the foot of the bed. Slow, deliberate. It sounded as if something heavy was being dragged methodically across the room, a pause as if to regain strength for another heave. Fighting my instinct to retreat into the sanctuary of my blanket, I edged across the bed, looked down to the source of the noise and gasped in terror.
It was a baby, crawling on hands and knees. It was my son at 6 months old, recognisable despite the caked, congealed blood and vaginal mucus it was swathed in. His little sharp nails scored the wood for purchase as it dragged it's burden.
Catherine.
An unbroken, but frayed umbilical cord joined my son and my wife. Or the dessicated, dried husk that was my wife. Her skin was parchment, stretched drum-tight over her bones, some of which were beginning to show through. Her lips had shrivelled back, revealing a macabre grin of agony. Her remaining hair was brittle and hung from the scalp in asymmetrical clumps. Worst of all, I stared, horrified into her empty eye sockets.
And I understood.
The child had drained her, over the last six months. Now there was nothing else and it had come looking for sustenance.
My mouth opened in a silent scream. There was no breath in my lungs to provide the sound. The baby turned it's beady, black eyes to meet mine and opened it's mouth.
The word it spoke came not from it's lips, but arrived fully-formed in my brain. Not merely the sound of one child, but legion. A cacophony of non-births: abortions, miscarriages, stillbirths echoing round my head.
The word was “Daaaadddddyyyy!”
( Boss Keloid Got your mother's maiden name tattooed on my arm, Fri 4 Jul 2008, 20:41, Reply)