Strange Mama

“Dada!”

The baby stood clutching her crib bars, rocking violently back and forth. It was bedtime, and as had been the case every night since the Heller’s move to the new house, she refused to go to sleep. Her reasons varied. Hungy, she sometimes claimed. Or she shivered in place saying code. Tonight, simply neh with a vigorous shake of her head. Her father stood at the edge of the carpet which underlaid the crib. The carpet was a Maginot Line for bedtime warfare; once upon its rigid threads he was in reach of the baby and her desperate, stubby arms.

“Huh pease, huh pease, huh pease,” she said, reaching for him.

“You have to lay down first, then hugs. Lay down in your crib. Now.” Dada made an attempt at the drill sergeant-strict voice he’d grown up obeying, but it sounded so hollow he heard a stifled giggle behind him.

“Sorry,” Mama said. She leaned against an aging maple desk they’d appropriated for a changing table. Like the rest of the house, it was on its last legs – a splintered mess of aged wood that creaked all night. The real estate agent sold them on the house as a ‘resilient’ property that defied Louisianian humidity to stand the test of time. Its ownership history told another story – a house hellbent on staying empty. Occupants seemed to move on after just a few months. Its longest resident lived there for forty years – and she’d been dead for thirty-two of them. His last three head hairs waving in a breeze, the real estate agent seemed in a hurry to complete the sale. He made a point to let the Hellers know there was no dishonor in breaking the sale within the first thirty days. This house, he’d said, keeps spittin ‘em out.

“No way,” Mr. Heller had said with a swell in his chest, “this is our home now.”

Upon moving in, the Hellers discovered a house that spoke loudly and often. Creaking stairs, whining doors, and a constant moaning from wood beams within the walls. It seemed to get worse at night. Unhappy lumber, perhaps in conjunction with powerful ocean winds that ripped through the Bayou, or the aging shale roof, or the lack of air conditioning, or the bugs that crawled through every crack in the wall, kept their baby awake.

“Time for your special trick,” Mama said with a smirk. Dada groaned.

Confronted with what felt like a whole new child, they resorted to the games other parents had to play from the beginning to ensure peaceful nights; a blitz of pathetic pleading, political dealmaking, and carrot-and-stick diplomacy dumbed down to toddler level. Nothing worked. Every night their daughter screamed. She snapped her head up off the crib mattress and turned to look at something off camera, her eyes glowing with tears in the monitor’s night vision. A few weeks after their move the Hellers seemed to hit paydirt. Dada watched his daughter play obsessively with a stuffed rabbit she called Bundy in her crib. She moved the cotton-filled creature up and down crying hop. Then she hopped. Then she looked at Dada expectantly, and he hopped. She cackled. A light bulb flickered on in her father’s head. He hopped one step towards her, then two steps back. She screeched in laughter as he continued forwards and back with his feet together like her toy bunny until he reached the door, turned off the light, and shut it in one semi-fluid motion. No screaming. No crying. Success. Doubly successful, because Mama laughed almost as hard as the baby watching him hop at her command. They found a fix for her crying in the moments that the room turned dark. They still had no answer for the screams that arose in the middle of the night.

Mrs. Heller laid on the bed, eyes fixed to the monitor. She watched her daughter lean on the bars at the foot end of the bed, staring again at something off-camera.

“She’s doing it again,” she said to her husband. He grunted. “What is she always looking at?”

“The closet.”

“What’s in the closet?”

“Clothes.”

A deep creak emanated from the wall behind the bed. A slight rattle trailed it, traveling from the bedroom floor to its ceiling like a climbing rat. Mrs. Heller shivered. It reminded her of a person clearing their throat, like her family were in the mouth of the noisy old house. A tink came from the wall behind her head, as if someone had tapped a water pipe with a hammer. She leapt up with a gasp, then turned furiously towards her husband.

“I’m serious! It’s stuff like that! This freaking house is always making noise! Thumps in the middle of the night and creaks and groans and fuc-freaking whispers!”

He raised his eyebrows, incredulous. “Whispers?”

“Stop LOOKING like that! It’s air or something from the basement and yeah, it sounds like whispers! What if there’s a draft blowing old air in her room or there’s a rat in the closet?”

He calculated the financial cost of his wife’s new panic. Her anxiety intensified after the baby was born, as did her nasty habit of consuming media that would inevitably trigger that anxiety. After a woman burned on the subway, she could no longer stomach public transportation. Thousands of miles away, in another city of another state, an infant was killed by the babysitter. Thus no nanny, no matter the qualifications, could be trusted. Anxiety turned to paranoia. Family walks to the park dwindled. People on the streets were looking at her, she’d say. Even staring. Someone followed her home, she thinks. So the Hellers moved to the country into a house big enough that she wouldn’t feel claustrophobic (another anxiety) but small enough that they could afford – barely. The most frightening aspect of his wife’s possible mental breakdown was that in the city he didn’t understand it. But after weeks of Mrs. Heller’s nonsense in this house, he was beginning to see the world through her eyes. While clearing decades-old debris in the yard, he felt like a deer in the woods, like a predator hid nearby and sized him up for a meal. When he turned towards where instinct identified the predator to be, all he saw were the upper windows of his own home. For a split second, they looked exactly like giant eyes, right down to the black pupils. That’s what scared him most: that he was beginning to fear his own home.

“There’s nothing in that closet,” he responded firmly, “there’s also nothing in the basement. No one is following you around the house, just like no one followed you back to the old apartment. No one watched us or stalked us back in the city, and there’s no one even out here TO BE WATCHING US IN THE FIRST PLACE.”

The baby woke up to darkness. Talking resumed in the house; its walls moaned, and from somewhere down the hall came the faint sound of muffled shouts. The baby didn’t understand time, but she did know routine. Back in the city, she knew what days grandmama took her to the park without knowing what Wednesday meant. She knew on Sundays that Paw would soon drive her to the big stone building with the colorful windows and the statues, though she didn’t know the words mass or priest or body and blood. A new routine formed in this talking house. When Dada said goodnight and closed the door, the air started to buzz. Soft crackles snapped in the darkness as if it conducted electric current, like defibrillators to a dead heart. Groans traveled up and down the walls, sounding more like words every day.

Had Mama and Dada not been busy arguing, they might have seen on the monitor that their daughter suddenly rolled over to stare into the lower-right corner of her crib, which happened to face the nursery closet. They would have seen their daughter cover her eyes and peek through her fingers. Close inspection might even have revealed beads of sweat rolling down the wall behind the crib.

The baby prepared herself for another night of a new routine. She was blind to the room, the only slim source of light coming from a dim hallway lamp that cast weak rays under her bedroom door. But sound was alive and well. Whirring from over her head intensified as the old ceiling fan spun faster and faster – spreading a sudden chill and an awful smell – until it died. A quiet stillness hung for minutes on end, and the baby almost fell asleep again. Then a rhythmic creaking echoed from a near corner; the rocking chair swayed as if spurred by the wind, though no window lay open. Squeaking came from the other corner, an area of her room the baby was terrified of: the closet. Squeak, flutter, Squeak, flutter. As if metal hangers were being separated by unknown hands. Through her tiny interlocked fingers, the baby spied a shape emerge from the closet. A shadow in the dark, visible even in the lightless room. Something unnatural. It was tall and slender, with wild long hair like black needles. It emerged from the closet and walked slowly towards the nursery door. Perhaps because of her pounding heart, or her desperation, or because the slim figure with the long hair was shaped something like her mother, the baby did something it shouldn’t have. She called out to the shadow.

“Mama?”

The shadow, which had moved parallel across the baby’s vision, now stopped and turned slowly towards the crib. Something pale glowed on its head. Two somethings. A pair of eyes. The baby trembled. She knew instantly she should not have said anything. It felt safer to simply pretend she was asleep. But now it looked at her, and her little heart pounded. She babbled the first word that came to mind. 

“Hop?”

The baby was deathly afraid, so desperately afraid that she sought out her parents in the shape. If she’d had the vocabulary, she would be begging the shadow to play a game. Anything but silence. Anything but that cold, awful smell which triggered primitive impulses buried deep in the DNA of all humans. Fight or flight. She stood at the bars like she had with Mama and Dada. Her whole body trembled. She was beginning to experience delirium. Maybe the shadow actually was Mama. A Strange Mama.

“Hop?” the baby cried. She hopped in place to demonstrate the game. Strange Mama didn’t move. Somewhere in her subconscious, the baby saw the game as a way to get rid of the shadow. That is, after all, how Dada played it. Hop out of the room. Just as the stillness grew too menacing and the baby accrued the courage to scream, Strange Mama moved up and down. Its hair flared out unnaturally as It did, as if each strand had a mind of its own. To the baby’s relief, It remained just as far from the crib as before the hop. She shifted to her left, hoping Strange Mama would match her and correspondingly move towards the door. It didn’t.

“Hop?”

Strange Mama hopped again. This time It landed closer to the crib. The baby almost cried. Her voice cracked.

“Hop?”

Again the shadow moved up and down, landing again closer to the crib. The baby could make out more in its shape; freakishly long arms, crackles of tiny lights on Its skin that would appear and disappear in fractions of seconds, and dark shapes like beetles that moved over Its pale irises.

“Hop! Hop! Hop! Dada!”

Each hop brought It closer. Its needle-like hair whipped through the air as it jumped, each landing ending in a wet sound like a viscous liquid pooled onto the nursery floor. By the time the baby screamed for Dada, Strange Mama stood over the crib and clutched its bars from the outside, the baby falling back into her mattress.  

The nursery door suddenly flung open. A light flickered on but went out immediately, doing little more than to act as a flash camera in the darkness. Mama, real Mama, flesh-and-blood Mama, stood in the doorway. What she saw in that brief flash was so putrid, so mind-numbingly awful, all she could think to do was scream. And scream. And scream. She and the baby screamed for several moments, echoing down the halls of a noisy house that was no stranger to the sound. Another set of guests convinced to leave willingly, or not at all. The house made the decision for them.

After a few moments, the screaming abruptly stopped.

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