ohn Peacock kept his séances a secret from his wife. Melissa Peacock had her own hoard of secrets.
She came into the kitchen one morning and found the cupboard where she had stored all the baby clothes opened. The box of clothing was sitting in the center of the floor. She was staring at the box when her mother came into the room.
“Oh,” said Magdalene. “Why did you bring these clothes out?”
“I—” Melissa stuttered, “I just wanted to look through them.”
“Melissa, don’t torture yourself.” Magdalene replaced the box of clothes in the cupboard. “You shouldn’t dwell on it, honey. You know how sick you’ve been. Why don’t you sit down? Can I get you something?”
After that, the crying in the night started.
It was two forty-eight, and Melissa woke to the familiar sound of a baby crying. At first, she did not remember that the baby was gone, that there should not be any sound of crying. She pulled herself out of the bed and into the hall before the realization struck her.
She stood in front of the curtain to the baby’s nursery and stared at it.
When John came up behind her and touched her on the shoulder, she realized that the crying had stopped some time ago. She was just standing there.
“Come back to bed,” he said gently. “Come back to bed.”
When the crying awoke her the next night, she lay in bed, her legs curled up to her stomach, and waited for it to stop. During these times, she wanted to go see. She wanted to open the curtains and look in the nursery.
She might find an empty nook, or she might find something else.
There were small occurrences during the daytime. Every once in a while, she felt a pulling, sucking pain in her nipple, the illusion of being suckled. The scent of a dirty diaper would waft to her from nowhere, as she did nothing in particular. Odds and ends that she left around the house were found in unlikely places.
No one else witnessed these things. The cries never awoke John. The smells never assailed Magdalene.
The day after John received a spirit message from Melissa’s father, he and Melissa and Magdalene sat around the dinner table, eating a quiet meal. John turned over in his mind whether and how he should approach the subject of Melissa’s father. Melissa picked at her plate.
“You look tired, sweetheart,” said John.
“I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“I know. It worries me.”
“I’m sorry to inconvenience you! What can I do?”
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m not upset.”
They ate in silence.
“This is very good,” said John.
“Thank you,” said Magdalene, who did most of the cooking. “Of course, it’s Melissa’s sauce.”
“Yes, it’s the sauce that’s so good.”
“Oh, yes. Your sauce is always so good.”
Melissa was not paying attention to them. She was staring beyond them at the wall. Taking her silence to mean that praise was not welcome, John quietly resumed eating. Melissa stopped making a pretence of eating her meal. There was something unusual about the wall. It was not exactly moving, but it was also not exactly still. There was an area just to the left over John’s shoulder that was hard to look at. It wasn’t motion, or color, or shape, but there was something different about it, something not quite right about it.
As she gazed at it, the area of not-quite-rightness gained a form. She knew what the form would be before she saw it. She told her mind to stop, because like in a dream, knowing what it was would cause it to become that. The thought had already come to her, though. There was no stopping it.
The shape of a baby formed out of some distilled property of the air. It was like a blind spot in her eyes, that baby-shape. She couldn’t see it, but she could see around it. The edges told unmistakably, undeniably what it was.
Melissa jumped up and her dishes clattered on the table. She ran over to the wall, and once she was in front of it, she could see clearly. There were little marks of baby hands, marking a path up the wall, dragged up the wall.
“The hands! The hands!”
Magdalene and John came to her. She was pounding on the wall. “The hands! You see them,” she said. She looked pleadingly at the other two. “You see them, don’t you?” She looked herself at her own hands on the wall and saw that the marks were gone. “I saw them,” Melissa said, “marks of hands, baby’s hands.”
Charlotte would mumble in her semiconscious state. Her ravings were garbled and unintelligible, and no one made much sense of them.
Wish, wish, wisteria. Pockets of posies. Tick-tick-tick. You will not. All fall down.
The mirror was inside my head. The mirror was looking at me.
Melissa, Melissa, she is your baby. Melissa, Melissa, she is your child. She is angry. I am angry. The sins of the father are visited on the child. Nothing ever stops. Once it is set in motion it keeps going on, forever. It never ends. It ripples outward into the world and inward into our minds. It goes on and on.
The baby is angry. It has inherited everything. It has inherited the blood curse.
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