Christopher Ransom - The Birthing House

His breathing came in ragged gulps like he'd been punched in the balls.

And it was a lovely summer day.

She doesn't feel like coming home? And why should she? She's got Shirley from Akron to keep her company.

'Fuck Shirley, fuck Shirley's baby, and fuck you Jo, fucking Oscar-The-Grouch-cheating-ass-bitch.'

Easy. Deep breaths. He would go to Wal-Mart and buy a new phone, and maybe sign up for whatever shitpoke regional coverage worked out here, because his Verizon mobile still wasn't working in this house and he just wanted to put the stupid thing in the garbage disposal. Later. Right now he needed to calm down and figure out what to do with the next two weeks until his wife deigned to visit him in their new home. He needed to think about his freak-ass snake eggs, and the fucking hundred year-old photo album full of ugly fucking women he burned because he was too afraid to turn the page.

He poured himself an oceanic glass of iced tea and drank it in one go. God, he could never remember being so thirsty. The summer air was so thick you could drink by wagging your tongue in front of your face. He refilled, walked upstairs and thought about Los Angeles. Rachel, the girl from the bookstore. Oh, he should have given it to her upside down and from behind when he had the chance. He went to the bathroom and tweezed the saucer shrapnel from his face, squeezed the cut like a pimple, swabbed it with witch hazel.

Luther and Alice followed him from a safe distance. They were staring at him and he stared back, all three of them panting. He opened all the windows in the library and the master bedroom. He finished the second glass of iced tea. Properly brewed iced tea with no lemon or sugar was better than most water. He wished he had brought the whole pitcher with him so he could fucking bathe in it.

Conrad fell into bed with his dogs beside him, pulled one pillow over his eyes and thought about showering in a golden waterfall of iced tea, some Edenic setting with sprigs of mint growing from rocky walls, drinking and drowning in the pure wash of it. Ice cubes floating around his balls in the basin, tea seeping into his pores until his skin was stained brown, tea-swamped and purified. With his belly full of the stuff, Conrad drifted and cooled and soon fell into the deluded reprieve of an angry, deviant nap.

Later, he woke in darkness to the sound of the dogs stirring from their crate beds, the click-click-click ing of their nails on the hardwood floor. Abruptly they stopped. And he sat there waiting for the dogs to jump on to the bed.

'Come on, Alice,' he said, realizing he was about to pee the bed. Too much iced tea.

Silence.

When the clicking started again, the sound was different. Instead of going click-click-click in timed groups, now he heard them individually. Not the dogs, the clicks.

Click . . . silence . . . click . . . silence . . . click . He smiled at the image of Alice tiptoeing, stepping on a single claw at a time, but the smile vanished as the next click drew closer and he realized there was no weight behind the sound. This was not the sound of a dog at all. It was something else.

He found the lamp, twisted the knob, and crunched his eyes shut until his pupils adjusted to the flood of light. He blinked at the foot of the bed, waiting for the next click to offer a clue as to the dogs' whereabouts.

But it's not one of the dogs, and I think you know that now, don't you?

Conrad leaned over. Nothing on the hardwood floor.

Click.

There - on the other side of the bed. It was in the room, whatever it was.

'This is ridiculous,' he said to the room. Before he could talk himself out of it, he jackknifed belly down over the covers to see into the blind spot on Jo's side.

Between the dog crates and the bed was a two-foot path of wood floor. A pair of Jo's panties collecting dust sat crumpled in one corner, the lavender Victoria's Secret ones he liked on her. Down this little wooden path, at the foot of the bed, there appeared to be twin Popsicle sticks jutting out from the post of the bed frame. For some unknowable reason, the flat sticks made him think of crude shoes, what you would see if you were to encounter a clown hiding behind a tree. As soon as this image came to him, as if reading his mind one of the feet jerked up perhaps two inches and stepped forward, and the rest of the doll pivoted around the post and tilted its head . . . up at him.

His heartbeat became violent even as his limbs and back seemed to fill with concrete. Blood rushed into his face, neck and scalp, making everything itch.

'Oh, for the love . . .' he moaned.

Less than twelve inches tall, the home-made doll looked like a finger puppet or some poor child's art project. The legs were thin sticks attached to the flat feet and the cloth stitched over the body was of faded pink flowers on white, frayed and yellowed with age. Just below the neckline the thing appeared jolly and fat, the stuffing wrapped inside coarse cotton, bulging in obscene contrast to the stick legs. The doll had no neck, but it had a head.

It did not have a face.

Under the dry and stiff black hair that sprouted from the crown, where there should have been button eyes and a cute cross-stitch of a nose there was only a blank pad. Most queer of all, while the little rag had the hair and dress of a female, he sensed the other sex in its posture. It felt mean and hard, a little male troll that would speak in a clipped, ugly voice if it had one. He really hoped it did not speak. A few seconds passed. He was starting to doubt that he had actually seen it move when the doll took another step - click! - and then another after that one, moving with renewed purpose, as if had just found what it was looking for.

But that's crazy, because it has no eyes .

Conrad was splayed crooked on the bed, immobilized as the absurd stick figure doll, no wider than a Scarecrow Barbie, came at him in rapid steps - click-click-click-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK! - and raised its pipe cleaner arms to attack.

It wants to put my eyes out , his mind cried , damned if it doesn't!

Conrad's bladder wrenched in pain as the thing trotted alongside the bed. He flung himself away and tangled himself in the bedding as he scrambled off the other side. His right foot hit the floor and he had the crazy, self-preserving presence of mind to yank his bare foot back up in case the thing had taken a shortcut and was now coming at him from under the bed.

What if it jumps up on to the bed? What then?

How can it jump? It's only a pile of sticks, no taller than a number two pencil. Hey, it fucking walked, didn't it? No, at the end there it had started to run.

Get the fuck out of here!

His feet hovering over the floor, Conrad glanced over his shoulder - nope, not coming over the bed - and then back to the floor. He couldn't see the doll now, but he could hear it. Click-click-click . . . pause. It was pacing, maybe coming around the other side, taking the scenic route for Chrissake, but coming just the same.

Blood humming through his veins, eyes wide and snapping left to right, Conrad planted his feet, shot off the bed, and bee-lined for the open door. Approaching the threshold he ( Don't look back! No, fuck you, I have to! ) glanced down just in time to see the doll marching stiffly after him, swaying left and right, and the moment stretched into a vacuum of pre-car-crash clarity that seemed to last five minutes.

He saw the doorframe floating toward him; behind him the doll high-stepping like a Nutcracker reject. He saw the arms reaching up, but not after him this time, no, instead arcing out and back down until the tiny home-made fingers dug into the wiry black hair and proceeded to yank it out in clumps, shaking its dead growth at him with that blank pad of a face somehow conveying pure, untainted hatred.