All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This story is a work of fiction.
All works Copyright © 2015
“The Wall” originally published in Tesseracts Seventeen, 2013.
Sources for cover and interior Illustrations
Shutterstock.com
Dreamstime.com
The Wall
The plastic bags rustled in the back of the car. I checked the rear view mirror. Baby slept soundly in her car seat. The van’s rear windows were closed, so the rustling wasn’t the wind. The groceries looked fine. I continued driving, but when the soft quiet rustle of grocery bags started up again, I pulled over to the side of the road to check them more carefully.
I dumped every bag and checked for rodents, but found nothing.
Baby continued to sleep.
When I reloaded the car, the frozen food had melted. I left the ice-cream, orange juice and a few other soggy foods at the side of the road.
I drove the rest of the way home, relieved to finally get there.
***
My shadow on the garage wall showed a thin silhouette with my hair stuck out like devil’s horns. I hadn’t showered or done my hair in weeks. I couldn’t leave Baby unattended. It was always a challenge to shower or shop, or eat, but now she slept so quietly in her car seat I didn’t dare try to take her out. I checked under the car to make sure she was safe, and then I unloaded the groceries. When I brought the groceries to the kitchen, I checked the inside of the dishwasher to make sure there was nothing that could harm her.
I reminded myself to check the microwave.
Then, I remembered I’d given the microwave away. I hadn’t wanted those unseen waves hurting my delicate Baby.
I checked inside the oven and found Lolly, our pet cat, curled asleep inside.
Who had put her there?
I shooed her outside.
I wouldn’t give her the opportunity to steal Baby’s breath.
I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d shopped, made a long stop at the side of the road, found nothing untoward inside the house, put away groceries, and avoided an encounter with the Wall, and Baby slept through it all.
I carried Baby upstairs to her crib, wondering if I should wake her. I wanted to give her a bath, but hadn’t given her one since the day I brought her home. If she slipped under the water I’d never forgive myself. Baby wouldn’t sleep tonight after this long nap. When I got to the nursery I saw that my luck had run out.
The Wall was there.
Waiting.
The Wall had appeared in the second trimester of my pregnancy. It looked like nothing more than a simple shadow, and I paid it no attention until the day after I had Baby’s room painted light green. That was when I noticed it.
It was small – only three meters in length and half as high as a regular wall. It looked like a wall – just the same as any other wall in any other house – only difference was the Wall was just a shade darker than any of the other walls in the room – no matter which room it chose to appear in. It was alive. It had eyes, catlike eyes, that reflected a dark green glow, but worse than the glowing green of its eyes, it had feet, small clawed paws that it shuffled and scraped along the floor as it crept, pulling its long flat serpentine like shadowy form from place to place.
***
It re-appeared the day I brought Baby home. I laid her in the crib. The Wall crept upstairs. I think it had hidden in the basement. The Wall stayed opposite her crib. It grew denser, thicker and darker in hue.
This wasn’t the first time that I had seen the Wall.
At twelve years old, on hot summer days I would sit in the garage to get cool and be alone. One afternoon I heard a soft rustle and shuffling from under my dad’s tool bench. I looked, thinking it was a rat or an open air duct. That’s when I first saw the Wall. My mother had mentioned it in one of the many stories she told before bedtime.
“Watch for the Wall,” she had warned me. “It tried to take you once, when you were small.”
I had always thought it a fairy tale.
The Wall was smaller that day in the garage, but it was still big enough to scare me. It hid, long and flat like a dark stain tucked beneath my father’s workbench. A mother-rat and her nest of babies curled near the Wall. The rat’s soft movements must have excited the creature because a small area of the Wall liquefied into a mouth opening and it swallowed some of the rats whole, vacuuming up the bodies like dirt from the floor.
Then the Wall became transparent. I was terrified by what I saw beyond its membrane. A hellish land of fire and a creeping demon with the head of a monkey with alligator jaws. I watched anxiously as the Wall deposited each hairless baby rat into that place on the other side the demonic creature devoured the babies. Its long sticky froglike tongue lashed around searching for the mother rat. She screamed as the demon grabbed her and bit down.
The beast slunk away and the Wall returned to its former opaqueness.
The Wall stared at me with its narrow green cat’s eyes – never blinking. I was frozen with terror as I watched the Wall’s membrane bulge in one spot; the spot where the rats had gone through. I smelled a choking odour like car oil.
The Wall approached me, shuffling across the garage floor. It stepped on a plastic bag and dragged it along under its feet, making a loud scuffing noise.
I tried to run, but was paralyzed with fear.
The Wall drew nearer.
It brushed against my hand with its horrible, black liquid mouth opened wide. I wanted to vomit. The Wall’s long whip-like tongue unrolled and struck at me. The disgusting tongue hit my yellow dress leaving a black stain, ruining it. It was then that I finally ran.
Later, I found the remains of the regurgitated rats inside sandwich bags, in the lettuce crisper, soaked bits of fur, bones and tail, sloshing in brown sludge with white bits of cheese that smelled like sour feet.
Now the Wall was in Baby’s room.
I thought the Wall might have moved closer to the crib, but I couldn’t be sure.
I was exhausted, blearily keeping my eyes open. I never should have put Baby in the crib knowing the Wall was right there. Once the Wall entered a room there was no moving it. It would have to creep away on its own. I thought Baby would be fine as long as she didn’t touch the Wall, and she wouldn’t because she was such a good baby and wasn’t rolling over yet.
I recalled one summer day when the Wall took a litter of rabbits. I had left Baby in her carriage in the yard, to soak up some sunshine. The rabbits belonged to the neighbour’s boy. He kept them in chicken wire cages in his backyard. By the end of the summer the smell of rancid bunny turds lingered in the August heat. I had grown sick of the long eared pests. I had grown tired of the way their reek had tormented Baby, only a month old. She cried loudly and often. The smell of the rabbits made her choke.
When the Wall found the rabbits, it crept slowly from the inside of my house into my backyard, like an afternoon shadow passing from end to end of the yard, and then it pressed itself up against the fence, looking like shade. It was the perfect camouflage, but the giveaway was its tiny, clawed feet and blinking catlike eyes, every once in awhile its tongue would whip out, hitting the ground with a thwack, thwack, thwack.
I crept out and opened the gate between our yards and released the boy’s rabbits on to my back lawn. They ran free but only for a moment, then they headed for the warm, dark Wall, as if an invisible force pulled them there.
I grabbed Baby from her carriage and took her inside. I watched the yard from Baby’s window. The bunnies nuzzled into the liquid mouth that spilled over them and the tongue, like an oily lawnmower cord, grabbed them and wrapped them and pulled them to the other side of the Wall. I was so excited to see t
he baby bunnies go away that I sat Baby up at the window so she could see, too.
***
Yet, like the regurgitated rats, those rabbits also came back.
I was raking leaves in the yard when I found them under my boxwood hedges, inside green plastic bags, tiny furry balls of liquefying decay.
***
In the nursery, I tucked Baby as far away from that dreadful, awful Wall as possible. I laid her on her back, the monitor close to her face so I would hear her every breath on all the speakers in the house. I’d only leave her for a moment.
I returned to the garage where I’d seen a box of empty wine bottles. Someone had forgotten to take them to recycling. While I was upset that the bottles were still there, at the same time I felt a deep sense of relief. I pulled the box from the corner, checked them all for wine, but they’d been rinsed clean.
I backed the van out into the driveway. My neighbour saw me and waved hello. I waved back, but remembered the time she’d left her stupid Pomeranian in the yard to bark all day, while she was out, and Baby got no sleep. After barking all afternoon, I figured the dog might be hungry, so I offered the creature a few biscuits. My little trail of biscuit crumbs led him right to the Wall.
The next weekend teenagers found an abandoned plastic garbage bag in a fallow field. When they emptied it they found the soupy remains of a small dog. The Wall loved to regurgitate.
The garage was quiet, cool, and Baby’s soft breaths reached me through the monitor, a reassurance that she was fine. If only the Wall hadn’t settled in her room. Its presence made me numb. Frustrated by its inalterable presence, I slid a wine bottle out of the box. I threw it, watched it rotate before it smashed against the cement floor of the garage. I pitched another bottle, relishing in its complete obliteration as it made contact with the floor. It was the noise from the smashing bottles that prevented me from hearing Baby roll over and touch the Wall.
***
After Baby disappeared I linked up with a postpartum group. We met once a week and for the first several meetings I just sat there, silent, staring. The Wall had followed me. Our leader asked me what I looked at, and when I told her, she whispered, “I see it, too.”
In fact, everyone in the postpartum group saw the Wall. That’s when I found out that women in that special group saw all kinds of horrible things, not just the Wall. I considered myself luckier than the rest of them. I only ever saw the Wall.
After a few weeks of hearing their terrible stories, and for the first time since Baby’s disappearance, I felt safe enough to talk about the existence of that hideous barrier.
I was surprised by the group’s supportive reaction. My group leader, Anne, told us that she’d lost her second child to the Wall.
“I was rocking Sidra,” Anne said. “I’d just changed her and given her a bottle. She lay awake in my lap and stared over my shoulder. I turned and saw that the Wall had crept into the nursery, sneaking in on its stubby black feet like a shadowy lizard. The Wall began to liquefy and become transparent, right by Sidra. When the fucking Wall turned black again, my baby was gone.”
No one blinked. I wanted to ask her how she carried on, but the words buzzed liked a bad radio station inside my head. After Anne told her story I decided then and there I wanted to know everything possible about the Wall, and I planned to stop sitting around crying, and kick its butt.
I researched for several months only to discover not much more than I already knew.
Then one night Anne called and told me that she knew a way to get through the Wall. For a time she had practiced a dreaming technique that she’d discovered through meditation. She warned me not to expect to find Baby quickly, or spend too much time there on the other side. I’d get trapped like she nearly did, but she was willing to help me. After many sessions with Anne, I finally was ready to go find Baby.
I went into Baby’s room. I touched her blanket. I smelled the powder I had used to change her. I shook her favourite rattle. I cried at the rabbits and mice dancing on the bedroom wall.
Two nights later I dreamed lucidly about the Wall, alive and very, very aware of me. The steady beat of a drum grew closer. Just when I thought I’d found the place where the drumming was coming from, I dreamed of Baby beside me in the bed, nestled up under my arm, warm and solid; And in my dream I detected the Wall close to my ear, breathing.
I saw its small catlike eyes watching me. I touched the Wall and my hand passed through.
I sat up in bed alone, my heart pounding.
For months the dream re-occurred every night. My dream-Baby would return and sleep beside me. Eventually, we passed through the Wall together. I knew I’d actually crossed over the night I heard the cries and whines of the poor animals that had recently come through. I carried dream-Baby through that dark land of the Wall, searching for the Wall’s perimeters, but on this side the Wall had an infinite presence. I moved silently and tried to keep dream-Baby quiet, so that the ravenous demon creature that had eaten the rats when I was twelve wouldn’t notice us.
My obsession with dreaming my way through the Wall wore away at my health. I hadn’t realized how bad things were until one night I awoke after terrible nightmares. In them, Baby became a part of the cursed black Wall; her little pink mouth turned into black oozing liquid lips that tried to latch onto my breast. I woke drenched in sweat. I waited for my heart to calm before I got up. I went to the kitchen for some food
When I pulled the fridge door open the small light lit a single, plastic grocery bag on the shelf. I reached for the bag, hoping something edible lay inside. As I began to unwrap it, the sour smell of old milk and rotten meat nearly brought me to my knees, but I was so hungry. I don’t know why I took it out of the fridge and wrapped it in a dirty dish towel and put an oven mitt under it then left it on the kitchen counter.
I spent more and more time in my dreams, more and more time on the other side of the Wall. If I didn’t find Baby on the other side—well, I couldn’t go on with my life.
I dreamed of Baby every night in a land of beastly ghouls. Her face once pink and peach coloured was now blackened and bruised. Her eyes, once the colour of Forget-me-nots, were now hollow sockets. Baby had become a creature with ever-sucking purple lips wanting to come home with me. And the Wall, and its hideous demon creature, having sucked the marrow from Baby’s bones, was ready to send her back, but I didn’t want her to come home as a regurgitated bag of bones. I wanted to find her and bring her back in my arms.
The last time I went through the Wall I wandered aimlessly in the dark limbo, waiting for the sound of the drum to lead me out, but the sounds of children’s laughter and a baby gurgling drew me still deeper into the Wall’s fog. The dark, silky haze lifted quickly and sunshine revealed a bright playground, children swinging, and sliding, small babies in carriages. Mothers sat on benches.
I greeted a young woman who rocked a sleeping baby in a stroller.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“The other side of the Wall.”
“But what is it?”
She shrugged.
I looked into the stroller at her child. “She’s beautiful,” I said.
“She’s not mine. We just take care of them as they appear. I looked around. A few mothers chatted and played with the children.
Then I heard the drum. It cracked like thunder overhead. Fog rolled in and the scene disappeared.
The Wall displayed tranquil scenes of the world I’d come from, trying to entice me to return home, but I refused to return without Baby. Once in a while a small animal or a child slipped through. I would save these pitiful creatures and return them whenever I could. It was difficult to push them back. It took all my effort and afterward I was so hungry and weak I could barely function, but I had learned something about the Wall. It left raw meat for me, on the benches, in the grass. I ate without pause and then vomited up much of the meal, but there would always be a fresh meal nearby. It became so difficult to push back the small
animals and babies that came through. Eventually, I stopped returning them. The effort made me ravenous.
Once, as I was pushing one of the last of the small children back to its proper side, I saw something that terrified me. The Wall had become transparent as it often did at the very moment I returned a child. In a mirror, in the room where the Wall had settled, I saw the demon again. Its monkey face stared back at me. It mimicked my behaviour and appeared to regurgitate chunks of digested meat that dripped and fell from between its teeth. The dark hunched creature terrified me and at the same time I seemed to frighten it. It turned its back and disappeared into the black oiliness of the Wall just as I was about to turn into the soft limbo of the land on my side. Instead of fleeing I found myself staring at a small girl who drew with chalk on the Wall in her bedroom. I knew that in moments the Wall would swallow her. I raced to her and from my side bumped myself hard up against the Wall to frighten her, and it worked because I saw her jump away and cry. She returned to the protective arms of her father and the girl screamed the word monster and pointed at me.
***
The quiet here and the volumes of time are exchanged for the worries back on the other side. Anne was right, a mother can’t stay here too long, and the Wall has stopped providing for me. I am becoming ravenous, insatiable. I had dreamed that I would return with Baby in my arms, but now I dream only of escape from here back to the food I left on a dirty dish towel on the counter in my kitchen. I no longer remember what Baby looked like, but a delicious smell of sour milk and rotten meat wafts through the Wall, and the soft rustle of a plastic grocery bag draws me home.
END
Dear Readers, if you enjoyed this collection of four small tales of fright then you may like to try another Keyboard book, there are two more besides this one and another on its way. Here’s an excerpt from Star Travels, Tales of Science Fiction
Continuum Cop
Did you kill my wife ass-hole? You? Or you?
The first bell of the day rang.
I scrutinized the passive faces of the Lincoln High students as they scurried in the hall; I looked for ones with wife-killer written on their faces.
They all looked like little murderers to me.