John Manning - The Killing Room

Tears began forcing their ways out from her tightly closed eyelids.

“Oh, baby,” she whispered.

Instinctively she reached out her hand toward the other side of the bed, the place where Karen had slept…

And she felt her.

She felt Karen’s hair.

Paula opened her eyes.

Karen was there. She rolled over and looked at Paula and smiled.

“Can’t sleep?” she whispered.

“How…?” Paula couldn’t form the words. “How did you…? When…?”

“Shh,” Karen said, and her eyes seemed to sparkle in the dark. “Do you hear? The baby’s crying.”

“The…baby?”

“Listen.”

Paula was silent. There was indeed a baby crying. From the far distance. So Karen hadn’t left at all. She was right there, right beside Paula. Everything was okay. All their problems were gone. Karen was there, and they had a baby. They had a baby…

“The baby’s crying,” Karen said again, more forcefully this time.

It was almost like an order. Paula nodded. “Yes, yes,” she said. “The baby is crying…”

She sat up and swung her legs out of the bed. Her bare feet touched the hardwood floor. The clock on the side of the bed now read 1:37. Paula stood.

“Bring me the baby,” Karen implored.

Her head was muzzy. The Ambien, she thought to herself. But Paula pushed her way through the dark, out of the bedroom and into the hallway. She could hear the baby crying from somewhere in the apartment. But where? The apartment was spacious, with two bedrooms, a dining room, a living room, and a study. But the sound seemed to come from someplace much farther away than any of those rooms. Maybe from another part of the building. Where was their baby? Someone had taken their baby!

Paula began a mad scramble from room to room. The guest bedroom was empty. Was that where they had set up the crib? No, no, it was in the dining room. It was easier to get to the baby…they’d put the crib there. But the dining room was empty. Just a roomful of shadows, sliced through by the moonlight seeping in from between Venetian blinds. Paula was beginning to panic. Where was the baby? Where was the baby?

Through the kitchen she ran into the living room, but no baby there. She listened. The crying continued. Still far away, but maybe a bit closer. She threw open the door and ran out into the corridor. Upstairs. The crying was coming from upstairs! Someone had kidnapped their baby and taken it to an apartment upstairs! Paula tried to shout, to tell her baby she was coming-but she realized she didn’t know her baby’s name.

When had they gotten the baby?

Did I give birth? Paula wondered. Did I…bring a baby into this world?

I shouldn’t have.

Oh, God no…

She began running up the stairs. They went on and on. She never knew how many stairs there were in this building. She hadn’t realized the building was so high. How many floors were there? She just kept running up and up and up…

And always the crying, just a little ahead of her. Her baby…

Finally the stairs ended at a single door. She worried the door would be locked, but it wasn’t. She flung it open and bounded inside-

And there was Karen, sitting on the couch, bouncing the baby on her knee.

“He’s fine, he’s fine,” she kept saying, even though the baby was still crying.

“What is his name?” Paula asked.

Karen lifted her eyes to her.

“You mean to say,” she said coldly, “that you don’t know?”

“Please, may I hold him?”

Karen’s eyes turned colder. Her lips tightened, and she pulled the baby to her bosom. “No,” she spit. “He’s not for you.”

“He’s my baby! I gave birth to him! I gave birth to him for you!”

“So you could give him to that room!”

“No!”

Karen stood up. She was thrusting the baby at her now. “Go ahead then! Take him! Take him!”

Paula took a step backward. “No, not now…”

The baby had stopped crying.

She could see that the child in Karen’s arms was dead.

Dead and blue. Its head dangled as if its neck had been broken.

Paula screamed.

She sat up in bed, still screaming, her heart pounding in her ears. Even though she knew now it had all been dream, she screamed once more, just to release the last of the terror that had accumulated inside her.

As if one scream could do it.

She looked over at the clock. It read 2:02.

“Dear God,” she said, bringing her hands to her forehead. She sat there in her bed, breathing heavily.

And then she realized the nightmare wasn’t over.

The baby was crying again.

She looked off into the darkness. Was she still dreaming? Was she going to have to relive that horrible experience again?

She swung her feet out of bed. Bare skin touched hard wood. She padded across the floor, opening the door to the hallway. The crying continued. But closer than it had been before. It was here this time. Here in her apartment.

This was no dream.

She peered into the spare bedroom. Nothing. Out into the dining room. Just as it been in her dream, the moonlight sliced through the darkness in a pattern of stripes from the blinds. Paula steadied herself against a dining table chair. The crying was coming from the living room.

She wouldn’t go in there. She knew what she would find. A baby. A bloody baby with its neck broken. Dean had seen such a thing once. Years ago, when Linda was pregnant with the twins. He’d woken up very much like she had tonight and seen a dead baby in his living room.

The creature screamed harder, seeming frustrated and angry that Paula would not come through the door and look upon it. She turned and headed back to her bedroom. She got back into bed and pulled the sheet up to her chin. She would not give it the satisfaction of her fear. Not twice in one night.

It cried harder and harder, breaking her heart. Surely the baby meant her no harm. Surely it was just a terrified creature, trapped between this world and the next.

But it was part of that room. It came from that room. It was part of the curse that had killed her father.

Paula lay awake for a long time, listening to the crying from the living room, refusing to give in. Finally, at 3:15, the crying ceased. Still Paula lay there, not moving, not thinking. Only as the first pink light of morning began to slip into the room did she finally fall asleep.

It wasn’t until the pilot had lifted the plane off the short runway that Douglas, pressed back into his seat by the force of takeoff, turned to Carolyn beside him and asked, “So what the fuck goes on down in that room?”

Uncle Howie had arranged for his private plane to take them from the small landing strip outside Youngsport to the nearly as small airport in Hyannis, Massachusetts, about forty minutes away by air. There a driver would meet them and take them to see a man named Kip Hobart, who had apparently tried to end the curse ten years before-and failed.

Carolyn turned her eyes to Douglas as the little eight-seater plane rose up into the clouds. “I have no idea,” she admitted.

They hadn’t discussed what Mr. Young had told him until this very moment. After their breakfast encounter the day before, Carolyn hadn’t seen Douglas for the rest of the day. Disturbed by what he’d been told, the young man had hopped onto his motorcycle and zoomed off down the highway. Mr. Young fretted all day, worrying the “little hoodlum” as he called him, would crack up his bike. “He kept saying it wasn’t possible,” Mr. Young said. “But I could see all of it coming together in his head. The manner of his father’s death. The suicides of his mother and his aunt.” Douglas hadn’t returned until very late in the day. By then Carolyn was hunkered down in the study with all sorts of papers and reports. She had also spoken with Kip Hobart to arrange a meeting. She didn’t intrude when she noticed Douglas and his uncle sequestered in the parlor. In fact, she didn’t get a chance to speak to him until this very morning, when he’d announced he was going with her to talk with Kip. Mr. Young was agreeable.