Small Wonder
Author’s note: I experienced this story as a nightmare one evening soon after one of my kids was born. It woke me violently such that I could not get back to sleep. By the time the sun came up, I had it typed up on my laptop. It unsettles me to this day.
Bob McGowan was a happy man. A successful entrepreneur in his mid-forties, Bob had life by the tail. His business was successful beyond his most foolish hopes, and financially he lacked for nothing. He and his wife Margaret had restored a beautiful old house in a good part of town, and Bob now had the time to pursue those things which made him happy. A truly respected reputation on the tennis court and a half dozen immaculately-restored grandfather clocks stood in triumphant testimony to the way Bob spent his time of late. The child had been the key. Little Robert had resurrected both his mental health and his marriage, but it had been a very iffy thing, a very iffy thing, indeed.
Bob and Margaret, like most professional couples foolishly believing themselves to be in control of their lives, had decided to start a family after four years of marriage. On the appointed day, Margaret had actually fixed a special dinner replete with candles and music to celebrate the Pill's imminent departure from their lives. They had enjoyed an extraordinary meal, ferried the last two months of her prescription out to the trash can together, and retired for the evening. Bob and Margaret retired similarly on a regular basis over the succeeding several months but to no avail. A child was simply not forthcoming.
After ten months, Margaret grew worried and consulted a specialist. Months of drugs, doctors, and institutionalized dehumanization followed with similar results. Then one day Bob had a crisis that came up at the plant, and they missed an appointment. With silent consent, they just never rescheduled.
As time passed, talk of diapers, strollers, and nurseries gradually faded from Bob and Margaret's lives. Their relationship grew cold, as both sought hobbies and recreation to fill the void in their hearts and their schedules. With an unspoken resignation, Margaret had finally tucked the baby name book in her closet behind her shoes and outfitted the spare bedroom in antiques and a canopy bed, solemn in the realization that the room would never be a nursery. Bob's business flourished, if for no other reason than the amount of time he devoted to it.
The accident had been a real scare for Bob, an emotional klaxon that reminded him that absolutely nothing in his life was permanent. Margaret had been out walking along her standard route near the park, on the back side where the road bordered the national forest, when she felt a piercing squeal in her ears and collapsed. She had emerged sometime later on the old county road spattered with mud and sporting a brutal bruise to her forehead. An illiterate black man who sold produce from his pickup truck spotted her and took her to the hospital.
The doctors gave Margaret a thorough once-over and ordered a CAT scan. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, they pronounced her fit and released her to her terrified husband. Theories among the physicians ranged from an unexpected bump to an unrepentant motorist to a loss of footing on the road's shoulder to her succumbing to dehydration on a torrid August morning. Margaret had no recollection of the fall.
It had only been at Bob's dogged insistence five weeks later that Margaret had dug through the medicine chest and produced the test. As she reluctantly urinated on the toothbrush-looking instrument she shook her head at Bob's unrealistic assessment. Margaret was an athletic woman and had always been a little irregular. The nausea she felt had all the markings of the virus currently making the rounds at the school where she substituted. Regardless, the bump had only recently disappeared on her forehead, and there was no telling what odd side effects might be produced by the prodigious crop of drugs the doctors had fed her while in the hospital. Margaret was so unconcerned as to the outcome of the endeavor, that she had set the indicator down in the bathroom to percolate and started cleaning up the kitchen, losing herself in her work. She forgot about the test entirely.
Her first indication that something was amiss had been when Bob had stumbled wide-eyed into the kitchen and mumbled something unintelligible. She had responded with a confused stare, looking her insane husband over until she spied the indicator dangling limply from his fingers. With a shocked flush, she rushed to her husband to see for herself. To her unbridled amazement, she saw that the spot was pink. At forty-one years old and after so many years of trying and failing, she was going to have a baby.
Bob's employees thanked the stars that their maniac boss now had something other than work on which to spend his time. Margaret's friends threw her baby showers until the house veritably swam with changing pads and diaper bags. Bob bought a bag of diapers each week and stashed them in the hall closet, determined to plan the event in advance as much as possible. Bob's friends thought him pathetic.
The doctors warned Margaret to slow down and take it easy. They reminded her that she was on the very edge of the envelope as far as safely carrying a child was concerned and that, at her age, one never knew what to expect. Margaret took vitamins and attended a maternity aerobics class.
The boy was born six weeks prematurely and weighed just over four pounds but, considering the circumstances, was as healthy as could have been hoped. Bob felt things he never knew existed and, had some bizarre circumstance demanded it, he would have unflinchingly died for the little pink bundle right there in the delivery room. Generally an unemotional man, Bob had held his wife and cried hard and long, trying and failing to assimilate gracefully the changes that had just been visited on his life.
They named the boy Robert and, after a week in the hospital, took him home snuggled into the most expensive baby seat on the market. The child was almost unexceptionally quiet, and the nurses all commented that he had the most gorgeous green eyes and the sweetest disposition.
Bob and Margaret divided the responsibilities evenly and rationally, working through the feedings and the schedules and the occasional bout of crankiness with the efficiency of a Swiss-made watch. Little Robert grew like a rocket and quickly made up the deficit on the weight charts that he had lost by arriving six weeks too soon. At six months, Robert was a healthy little boy, normal in every way.
It was a Tuesday evening, and Bob was on duty. After an uneventful bottle at 11:00 and a world-class burp, Robert had settled down for the second leg of his evening without so much as a whimper. At 3:30 Bob awoke to the now-familiar howl signaling an empty stomach or a wet diaper or both. Rolling out of bed, he mechanically checked the clock and slipped into his bathrobe. He was trying vainly to locate his left slipper in the dark when he heard glass breaking down the hall.
Awareness flooded Bob's being as though he had been doused with ice water. He charged into the hallway, shattering a floor lamp, and was to the baby's door in three strides. He threw his weight against the door before he had fully turned the knob and tore a substantial piece of door facing loose from the wall.
The sight which met him in the dim glow of the night light seemed to stop his heart. The bottom quarter of the glass was shattered and shards of storm window glittered in the soft light where they lay strewn across the carpet. The thing which now stretched hungrily from the broken window to the baby's bed was a brown mottled color and as thick as Bob's thigh. Bob would have at first thought it a huge snake were it not for the wide bifurcated appendage that now gently but firmly lifted his son over the crib's rail. The two leaf-like limbs on the end of what he could only subconsciously register as a tentacle wrapped fully around young Robert and over his mouth, their muddy color a stark contrast to the child's wide white eyes.
Bob willed himself against the thing without conscious thought. He dove across the room and wrapped his arms around the trunk of it as he screamed for Margaret to bring a knife or hatchet or something. The arm was cool to the touch and immensely strong yet seemed to lift the child with a tenderness incongruous with its monstrous nature. Bob anchored himself firmly to it but was dragged helplessly back toward the window.
Margaret arrived at the door with an inhuman shriek but, driven by Bob's screamed orders, had disappeared into the hallway to find a tool or weapon. She reappeared a moment later with a butter knife left over from her late-evening snack, the only blade of any substance anywhere near the baby's room. Bob wrenched the blade into the tentacle until the butt of it pierced his palm but succeeded only in bending it double and losing a fingernail. He put no more than a scratch on the pebbled hide of the thing holding his child. Bob was pressed against the window facing now, screaming and crying as he futilely fought to keep the last three feet of the monster inside his house. After what seemed a lifetime, Margaret reappeared in the doorway, this time with a carpet knife she used to cut silk flowers.
Bob seized the little knife from his horrified wife and extended the blade as far as it would go. He slammed the steel in a brief arc and dug as deeply into the thing as the geometry of the tool would allow, wrenching and twisting to deepen the wound. The arm spasmed violently but held the child gently above the floor as Bob tore and twisted with the razor-sharp blade, spilling dark sticky fluid liberally over himself and the room.
With the rage of a madman, Bob ripped deeper into the tentacle, tearing through gristle and sinew-like material with the energy of a man possessed. Margaret simultaneously tore desperately but vainly at the appendages folded around little Robert. With an inhuman grunt, Bob leaned against the blade and cut through the last of the toughly corded material in the thing, dropping the last three feet of it and the baby to the floor with a sudden rush. In a thick spray of fluid, the stump of the tentacle slithered quickly back out through the shattered window.
Bob could not speak. Clawing for breath, he ripped the sticky brown pads from around his son and ran into the hallway, dragging his wife behind him with a hand now slick with organic fluids. He caught a glimpse of the severed thing quivering on the floor of the nursery as he left.
Bob stopped himself in the hallway and looked through the front windows, breathing harshly and clinging to his son with one arm and his wife with the other. Colored lights sped across the glass in a rhythmic fashion, and he breathed a prayer of thanks that someone in his neighborhood had called the police. Terrified, he felt a knot grow in his stomach as he recognized the lights not to be red or blue but rather pink, orange, green, and several other colors for which descriptors seemed to fail him. As this information began to register on his stunned mind, he threw his shoulder into the glass door of his gun cabinet, shattering it into the floor. Passing young Robert to his hysterical mother, Bob retrieved the Remington 12-gauge he used to hunt turkeys and began feeding shells into the loading gate on the bottom.
Margaret's screams changed in timbre, and Bob felt a small shudder through the soles of his bare feet. Shotgun shells spilling onto the floor, Bob recognized that the weapon's magazine was full and cycled the slide to charge the big gun, casually noticing blood from his torn hands glistening on the blued receiver. Bob had just wrapped his left arm around his wife and son and turned for the back of the house when the floor jerked violently. The entire house then twisted at an insane angle.
Bob fell hard against a wall but regained his balance just long enough to be thrown to the floor by the acceleration of the house moving rapidly upward. Summoning all of his strength, he pulled himself across the canted hardwood to where his wife curled insanely around their child. Glancing briefly out the dining room window he caught a horrible image of his neighborhood spinning away as the house was lifted violently into the sky by some unimaginable force.
Bob dropped the weapon and wrapped both arms tightly around his wife and son. Tears streamed down his face. In a short moment his wife stopped shaking and lifted her head from over the child, turning to look at Bob with a stunned terror too deep to describe.
Above the crashing of crystal and the splintering of furniture, amidst the twisting of timbers and the banshee howl of the wind screaming past the house as it ascended, the ambient temperature dropped and their ears popped with altitude. Husband and wife were simultaneously drawn to the placid countenance of their infant son. The six-month-old infant, looking upward and speaking plainly for the first time in his life, kept repeating softly in a voice they had never before heard,
"Home…
home…
home…
home…"