Pseudocyesis by Diane Oliver

September 10, 2007 on 1:51 pm | In Journey into the Dark & the Foreboding | No Comments

Pseudocyesis

by Diane Oliver, copyright 2006

Originally published by The Deepening,  ISSN 1559-7733, October 2006

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An empty womb, a demijohn filled to brimming with foul and fetid yearning.  (Horror)

Editor’s Note:  Raise a glass in toast to misbegotten.  Another unforgetable torment for your psyche’s savor from the mistress of ghoulish gruel.  —zentao

Ψ

It had been hungry.  So very hungry.

The creature’s greedy shrieks echo through the house as I sit here in our dusty, twilight-filled attic, and I lower head to hands, clamp shaking fingers over my ears, in an attempt to block the sound.  High-pitched and ravenous, the wailing bites into me on a mental level.  But it’s the physical I fear most — the physical act I myself need to carry out now, in the evening of this strangest of days.  All because of a dream and a need.

A dream, a need, and an old glass jar.

I’d crept up to the attic-room earlier this morning, when Suzanne’s blank and wan face became too much for me to look at.  Lifting heavy feet one by one up the narrow staircase, I felt guilty for not wanting to be with her.  But it was, I suppose, the only way in which I could deal with the whole mess.  I needed to be alone, to sit and contemplate what might have been, and what was to be in our marriage.  The silence between us had become intolerable, stretching from long minutes into hours, from hours into days.  So, as soon as she’d dozed off, her red hair fanning out behind her as she lay with her head on the pillow, tears finally dried on a face swollen with sore emotion, I kissed her forehead lightly and whispered warm breath on her cheek, “Sleep well, my angel,” before creeping away for solitude, not meaning to come up to the attic but finding myself here anyway, here in the room that was to have been a nursery.

Tears pricked at my dry eyes as I looked at all the old stuff up here, ancient junk left by relatives of Suzanne’s — long dead relatives — junk that had been neither looked at, nor sorted in years judging by the dust covering them.  Tottering towers of old boxes leaned against trunks.  An old bedstead, picture frames, some with pictures, most without, added to the clutter.  A wardrobe blocked what looked like a recess on one side of the chimney breast that rose from the ground floor two stories below of our mid-Georgian house — Suzanne’s inheritance a year previously.

A boon, her Great Aunt dying just one month before our wedding.  It had been fortuitous, and though neither of us talked of our great luck in that manner, we had both been relieved to hear that the old lady had made Suzanne soul beneficiary.  The house prices in London were simply more than we could manage, and we had, up until then, only rented accommodation to look forward to upon our return to England after our honeymoon in Europe.  Now, instead, we had a house.  On the wing of grief had come joy, and it was this emotion I was trying to recapture as I poked around in the attic, looking for some unknown something that might help us — something that might help Suzanne with her newest grief.

When those tears had threatened me, I’d been looking at the wardrobe.  So, to stop their stinging tracks, I shifted the heavy walnut furniture aside, grunting with the effort, but feeling better for the release of an energy that had, until then, nowhere else to go except for down my cheeks.  And that would never do.  My male pride simply would not allow it.  Dusting my hands off, I stared at what lay behind the wardrobe.

The recess was fitted with shelves and dust-covered items of various description, and I forgot my sorrow and wondered at them.  I wondered at the history and the people that had put the items in this place.  A place, it seemed, that had been specially designed for the purpose of display.

“Somewhere,” I reached for a box that held a pile of faded photographs, “there’s someone who these rightfully belong to.  Hmm.”  Feeling that I was prying, I picked up a picture from the top of the pile.  A woman dressed in black stared forlornly out at me from beneath a veneer of dust as if desperate for light, so I ran my fingertips across the surface to reveal more of her.  Guessing her dress and hair-style to be from some time around the fifties, I saw she sat holding a small bundle very close to her chest, her legs tucked demurely beneath the chair upon which she sat, nearly covered by a full, black skirt, reminiscent of those times.

Dropping the picture back into the box, I pulled another from beneath the pile.  This one showed a child with a face as dejected as the woman’s.  The same black eyes with their wistful stare looked right into the camera, yet distant at the same time.

I remembered Suzanne saying that the house had been in her family for centuries, quite possibly since its construction, and that her ancestors had originated from Europe somewhere.  Where, I did not know, but now, as I pulled yet more pictures from the bottom of the box, I guessed they may have been of Eastern European descent.  The black eyes stared out at me from each and every picture I studied.  Also, each picture showed the subjects clothed in black as though they mourned.  As though life had been one constant parade of death.

Death.

I shook my head and dropped the box back onto the shelf with a less than gentle motion, then moved on, my eyes searching for the familiar beneath the dust, quizzing the unfamiliar.  Eventually, they fell upon a row of toys.  Lead soldiers, a fortress not unlike a fairy-tale castle, maybe Austrian, and three elderly porcelain-faced dolls that unnerved me somewhat, sending the hair on my neck prickling.  While picking up one of the soldiers, I inadvertently knocked one of the dolls and it slid sideways on the shelf to stare at me through the dust veiling its painted face, its eyes.  Eyes, like those of the people in the photographs, that were black.

I found myself wondering how it was that Suzanne had such bright blue eyes, only the paleness of those people carrying over to her generation — indeed, she looked quite anaemic, a genetic skin condition keeping her out of the sun for the most part in summer’s highest months, lest she burn.  None of the longest, laziest days held any light for us;  she spent her time within shaded rooms, the gloom lit only by various lamps dotted here and there, the shadow of her workspace cut only by the light of a solitary computer monitor.  A lonely existence.  So when she’d told me of her pregnancy I had been overjoyed.  At last, here was something that made the dark days, cut off from the outside world, worthwhile.  Here was something we could concentrate on together.  A child.

She’d been thirty weeks into her pregnancy and nagging me to start on the attic room.  So I had, with reluctance, come up here to have my face brushed with cobwebs;  other people’s memories reminding me that this was not my house and making me feel that, perhaps, I was not welcome here — I did not fit.  I’d moved a few things around, packed a few boxes, but that had been all because, then, Suzanne had gone into premature labour.  The baby eager, it seemed.  Too eager.  To our horror, and through her pain, the doctors told us there was no child there at all.  Just a sack of bloody fluid and gas.  No rhyme, no reason, our baby was dead — a phantom.  …Our baby never was.

Though the doctors told us there might very well have been a child there for the first few months, and that we should try again, Suzanne was inconsolable.  She just gripped my hand and cried.  Nothing more.  And, much like the tears on her face, now, three days later as her breast milk came in — real milk for a ghost-child — it seemed her chest wept too for that baby.  She could not keep a clean t-shirt because of it.  No amount of padding helped stem the flow, and, though the doctor said it would dry up without an infant to suckle, I couldn’t help but think her lactation would last as long as her grief.  My grief.  Though I could not, would not, cry like her.

Sighing, I craned my neck, looking up at the uppermost shelves and at a large glass jar on the top, wondering if I should take it down.  The dust furring the glass and the murky fluid inside hid something, I knew — something curiosity told me I should see.  Yet even as I moved to reach upward, a primitive darkness in the depths of my mind told me I should not.  It prodded at me as I stood here in this dry and dusty attic room.  It scratched at my instinct.  It told me I should run.  But curiosity belied reason and scratched with equal insistence at my questioning mind.  In the depths of my grief, curiosity won out.

“Well,” I said beneath my breath, “it’ll have to come down sooner or later, so why not now?”

But getting the fragile and heavy container down proved more difficult than I thought.  I stretched and reached, tightened my lips as I realised my fingers could not make it.  Then, casting around for something to stand on, I spied a flat-lidded trunk nearby, so pulled it over toward the shelves.

From my precarious perch, I encircled the jar with my arms, slid it forward from the shelf and toward my chest while taking a deep breath, readying myself to take the weight.  Twice the size of a wine-maker’s demi-john, the liquid sloshed about inside as I inched it to the edge of the shelf, then off.  As the weight became apparent — more a bucket-load of liquid rather than a jar — I could feel the muscles in my arms stretch as the slippery sides of the container evaded my grasp.  The jar slid a full four inches before I was able to tuck my fingers beneath and arrest the fall.

Adrenaline prickled my skin and I breathed out.  The jar was safe, but I was not.  Now I had to turn and step down from the trunk to the floor without accident and, taking a moment to compose myself, I shuffled around to face the attic room.

“What have you found?”

Jumping at Suzanne’s sudden appearance, I felt the jar tip forward, away from my chest and, before I could bring my grappling fingers around to the front it slipped my grasp and tumbled to the floor to shatter at Suzanne’s feet.  She gave a cry and jumped back, her face rigid in shock, pale and frightened, as glass and fetid fluid sprayed everywhere.

“Suzanne!”  I barked, not wanting to, but feeling angry at both my own clumsiness and her stealth alike.  “Don’t ever creep up like tha…”

But my words faded along with the fear on her face as she looked down on what the jar had contained.  One moment, she was wide-eyed and scared.  Now…?

Suzanne’s face softened with awe, her lips trembling into a smile.  Frowning, I followed her gaze as she leaned forward, reaching out toward something, a pile of puce-coloured flesh.  “Suzanne…” Something felt wrong here.  “Suzanne, don’t touch it!”

Stopping, she turned her ice-eyes up to look at me.  “But Richard,” she whispered, “it’s a baby.”

I didn’t know what to say.  How could I?  Here was my wife, recently bereft of a child that never was, reaching out to another child that was barely different — barely.  Somehow the thought disgusted me.  The baby was dead and had been pickled, preserved like the people in the photographs for all to see.  No.  It was bad enough she grieved for a phantom, I would not have her grieving now for a child that wasn’t even hers.  I jumped down from the chest, glass crunching beneath my feet.  “No, Suzanne, don’t touch it, you…” I struggled for reason, knowing there had to be one somewhere in the depths of my mind that would belay her reaching hand, “…the fluid might be caustic,” I said.  “You’ll burn.”

But her fingers continued their needy creep and, as she touched the child — the tiny, dead baby — it moved.

Both Suzanne and I gasped together, Suzanne pulling away slightly as she blinked, then frowned.  “Richard…?”  she began.  But then, with a tiny rasping breath, a shuddering to its parchment covered chest, the child began to cry.  Thin at first, but then the sound rose as it seemed to get the hang of the human howl that is both instinctive and primal at once.

A thousand horrors arose inside me at once.  Horror at this child being alive despite being in a fluid-filled jar for God knows how many years.  Horror at those that would have done such a thing.  And the horror of knowing that this was wrong.  So utterly and completely wrong.  My mouth emptied of liquid as I watched, wide-eyed, my wife straighten, grab a blanket from a box behind her, then turn back to lift the squalling infant into it.

Then, for a second before she turned to leave the room, our eyes met.  Mine, wide with confusion and shock, no doubt.  Hers, full of pleading.  As if a puppy had followed her home, Suzanne, my wife, was asking me silently if we could keep it.

I took a deep breath and began to shake my head.  “No…no…Suzanne, we can’t…” But my actions and words went unheeded as she turned to walk away, the baby cradled over her shoulder as if she winded it.  And as she turned, my heart froze as two black eyes bored into me from the pale of bony infant skull and the child opened its suckling mouth.  A mouth full of tiny, pointed teeth.

Tearing myself from stasis, I shot after her, stopping at the top of the stairs to watch her descend with the baby.  Its eyes and mouth were now closed, my evidence gone.  “Suzanne!”  I called, my voice cracked with desperation down the narrow flight, my anxiety echoing back a dull tone.

“Not now, Richard,” she called back merrily.  “The baby’s hungry.  Oh…” she stopped and looked back up at me, her face glowing with excitement, “…you really need to get a move on with that nursery, you know.”  She smiled — beamed — up at me.  “We need it urgently now.”  Then she was gone.

What could I do?  What?  I stood there, clutching the banisters either side of me with stiff fingers, just staring down the stair-well after her, into the gloom and lamp-light of downstairs.  I knew exactly where she’d go, to our bedroom where we’d placed a beautiful old beech rocker, a nursing chair, one week ago.  She’d be there now, sitting among the cushions she’d lovingly placed on the seat, rocking, feeding that once useless grief-milk to a baby that had been birthed from an old glass jar.  A monster, my mind whispered.  An impossible and cruel monster.

I wanted to run after her, to snatch that thing away from the comfort that should have been our baby’s, but I could neither move forward, nor back.  Instead, I sank down to sit on the top stair.  To sit and think, asking myself how our lives would be changed from this moment on.  Another voice countered all argument in my mind — Suzanne’s.  As I dwelled on the wrongness of this event, she would speak gently with me.  “But, Richard, we so wanted a child, and now there is one.  It makes sense for us to keep the baby.”  She’d laugh then.  “Why, it’s so obvious it was meant to be.  Maybe my body knew anyway.”

Maybe.  I shook my head.  It was obvious.  There would be no arguing her logic I knew.  I had no solid ground from which to argue my point.  Ah, my point — which was…?

Then something inside me snapped.  “No!”  I whispered, my voice dry.  “I won’t have it because…” now I stared down the stairs again, imagining her happy face there, “…because it’s not bloody right!”

I stood then and stomped down the flight, taking with me this new and strengthening anger.  Turning sharp left onto the landing, then sharp right into our bedroom, I let my certainty propel me, full force, into a confrontation that I knew would not be pleasant.  Coming into the room though I stopped short, wavering at the scene before me.

Suzanne sat, as I expected, on the old wooden rocker, gently too-ing and fro-ing, crooning quietly to the sleeping child on her lap.  A picture of motherhood, a smiling Madonna, I couldn’t help but allow a feeling of complete love and devotion wash through me as I admitted to myself that this…this was what I’d waited to see since the day Suzanne had announced her pregnancy.  All those weeks ago.  A hundred years past.

But the glamour quickly subsided as my sight found Suzanne’s chest.  Her once-full breast lay empty now, hanging from the nursing bra she’d bought a couple of weeks ago.  Milk glistened wet around her nipple, but that was not all.  Once again, a sickening horror rose within me as I realised the milk mingled pink with blood.

I started forward.  “Suzanne…”

She looked up at me, her eyes half-closed as though sleepy.  “Shhh, you’ll wake him.”

I stopped, frowning.  “Him?”

“Yes, Richard, he’s a little boy.”

This was too much.  I couldn’t think straight at all.  Dropping to my knees before her, I took her hand in mine and stared into her eyes.  Did they seem duller?  Was her skin paler than before?  I didn’t know, though it seemed that way to me then.  “Suzanne,” I pointed to her chest, “…there’s blood.”

She looked down at her breast and laughed.  “Of course there is, silly!  He’s teething.”

Teething?  Remembering those tiny fangs as she’d carried him away, I almost laughed myself.  “Suzanne, this isn’t right.  This…creature…”

Now her eyes widened.  “Creature?!  Oh…Richard!”  Her forehead creased to frown and tears welled in her eyes.  “Can’t you see this is what we’ve been waiting for?  Can’t you see that?”

“But…it’s not natural!”  I sputtered.

A solitary tear breached and fell down her cheek.  “There…there has to be an explanation…” she choked, “the fluid must have been special, it preserved a living child!”

I opened my mouth to speak, but just then the baby stirred, hiccupping the start of a cry.  Suzanne immediately pulled her hand from mine and lifted him to her, cradling his tiny head in her hand and smiling at him.  “Are you hungry again, darling?”  she crooned, hurriedly releasing her other breast from the confines of the bra.  I stared, stupefied, as the swollen, dripping, mammary dropped, unfettered, from its binding and to the already gulping mouth of the child.  Then, abhorrence rising in me, I turned and raced back up to the attic.

I hoped, before the creature sucked my wife dry, that I might find a clue among the toys, photographs and artefacts upon the hidden shelves.  I hoped, beyond reason, that there would be something, anything, that would help me destroy this thing before it destroyed her.

My hands trembling, I began at the bottom shelf and worked my way up through the years of dust, through the years of memories, the cobwebs that no longer merely brushed at my cheeks like whisperings from the past.  Now they seemed like living things.  Memories that threatened to strangle us, our very existence, with pain instead.

My searching fingers at last fell on a book, a hand-sized leather-bound volume that seemed to be some kind of journal.  Written in clear hand, but in a language I could not interpret, I would have thrown the tome aside as useless if my eye hadn’t fallen upon a drawing sketched in a lower margin.  Scratchy, the illustration showed a man — a beast of frightening demeanour.  His black hair and eyes were all too familiar to me, but it was the teeth that sent ice to my heart.  Teeth that were about to sink into the neck of an infant.

My breath quickening, I flicked to the next page, searching for any clues of how to kill this creature;  the creature I now knew sat on the lap of my wife, bleeding her dry.  There was a full-page illustration of some kind of symbol — a circle with arrowed rays coming from it.  On the next page, the same shape, only this picture seemed to show an actual artefact, the drawing rendered three-dimensionally to emphasise.  Turning to the next page, my breath caught.  Here was the artefact in use, someone having plunged the strange weapon into the creature’s chest.  Smoke billowed from mouth and nose.  …And the eyes…

I now knew exactly what I had to do.  And now.

With almost hysterical haste, I brushed every item from each shelf, searching for the artefact.  My heart in my throat, I could feel the very seconds punching holes into that surreal reality as time slipped away.  As I neared the top shelf, my hysteria once again reverted to desperation as I felt the star simply wouldn’t be there.  But then, my fingers searching, spider-like, for that which I could not see, I finally felt something sharp and barbed and I knew, in that single heartbeat, that I had found it.

Taking a moment’s pause before I stretched to reach for proper hold on the item, I took a deep breath and held it, counting the heartbeats in my ears as the blood thrummed through my veins — a living silence.  But then the creature cried.  A screech of such piercing magnitude, soul-cutting pitch, that it snapped me into action as my skin crawled at the noise.  Finally, my fingers slid the star to the edge of the shelf and pulled it down into my waiting left hand.

Without stopping to study the simply-wrought weapon, I put my trust into it, and myself, and jumped from the trunk to the floor, the crunch of glass beneath me a reminder of this nightmare’s beginning.

I took the stairs three at a time to the bottom, then ran again into the bedroom, determined not to look at my wife’s happy face, determined her eyes should not change my mind.

But, as I grabbed the bedroom doorframe and swung into the room, the sight that met me was both peaceful and terrible at once.  Suzanne sat as though asleep, her face a mask of serene beauty, her shining hair cloaking her shoulders, framing her face in peaceful repose.  But her breasts, her chest, was a glistening gown of blood, the flesh tattered, ravaged and torn.  And the baby?  The baby was gone.

I stumbled forward, adrenaline abated by shock, and took her hands, limp, from her lap, into mine.  She was cold, lifeless.  The child had taken my beautiful wife.  Laying my head on her lap, I sobbed.  I cried for the ghost that was our own child, and cried for Suzanne, now only a ghost in my heart.

I did it.  Finally, I cried.

That was this afternoon.  Now it is evening.  I cried my tears dry, then followed the creature’s bloody tracks to the cellar and that’s where it is now in the dark.  And it’s hungry again.  Hungry for blood.  Well, there will be more blood shed in this house again tonight without doubt.

But it won’t be mine.

Copyright 2006 Diane Oliver with limited permissions to The Deepening, http://www.thedeepening.com , for exclusive presentation on the World Wide Web.