Christopher Ransom: The Birthing House

Alma's body abandons its functions even as her spirit, this indomitable inside of her, lashes out for the new life it has always desired, staining the floors and walls and stones as it joins the Other Mothers who have given a life to have a life.

Child Chesapeake's cries go unanswered. She perishes in the stone walls that hide their secrets until another Great War passes and the new people of faith come bearing hope for a new life. Only then are the Daughters of Eve, the All Mother, awakened, ready to usher in new Life and Its unending need into the birthing house.

The world cuts.

40

Time became once again a thing he could sense, and the room smelled of medicine. He was warm, floating in a womb of weightlessness, surrounded by dim sounds and occasionally rocked as in a crib. He regained physical sensations of soft cotton wrapping his naked body, but still he remained heavy with sleep.

He was too weak to rise but in the darkened room there was warm flesh and the pressure in his mouth. When the cool button slipped between his teeth at first he resisted, but his hunger was stronger and so he fed. During the feedings he experienced the last of the visions that weaved her history, and he came to understand that he had been feeding this way all through the long long night.

The last he remembered was the fight, and chasing his wife up the stairs so that he could apologize to her. There were flashes of her fall that came after, but nothing beyond the stairs. He knew that he was missing an important detail from the very end, but whenever he tried to remember his wife's face it escaped him. When the pain in his stomach flared up like an umbilicus of fire, she would come again, hovering over him, feeding him, filling him up as he had filled her during the lonely nights. He did not know how much he had healed, but he felt better after, full of her.

The pain was still a fire inside of him, but he was driven from bed by the need to know. He looked under the moist cloth around his waist and saw the purple-black thread where she had sewn him up. He was able to walk, slowly, and he moved down the stairs over the better portion of an hour. He shuffled around the main floor and checked every room. He looked behind the doors in the bathroom and the kitchen pantry and in the foyer. When the dogs began to follow him he stopped to feed them and nearly fainted bending over the bowls.

He went down the stairs into the basement. He shone the flashlight on the stone foundation walls and stood in the spot where Luther had been growling and bleeding. He stared at the foundation and traced the stones with his eyes until they fell upon the one that was loose. He was too weak to remove the stone to see what lay inside, but he need not bother. He already knew what secrets the little piggy kept.

If there had been any doubt, it vanished. Not doubt that he had lost his mind, for he knew that he had. He had fallen prey to loneliness and delusions brought on by guilt and the emotional, if not completely physical infidelity with Nadia. But if any doubt remained that Alma had been real, as real as his wife, this before him ended all such doubt.

A single loosened stone. He had not noticed it when he searched before. But his dog Luther had noticed it, and knew something inside these stone walls was not right. He was for a moment, but only for a moment, relieved at the sight of it now. Because it allowed that he was not a murderer. He knew he had lost track of time - the time between Nadia leaving his bed and Jo discovering her in the garage - but he had never believed he was a true savage, a killer.

But he was guilty.

What had Laski said about hauntings?

It happens to good people, because even good people got problems. And problems is what your haunted house feeds on, son. Just like a one of them payday loan stores. So it goes, and sometimes it goes to murder. Conrad knew that he was responsible. Alma may have performed the ritual removal of Nadia's unborn, but what had given birth to Alma? Had he not fed Alma as he had fed Nadia? As surely as the girl's pregnancy and hopes were fed by his domestic duties in the kitchen, so too was Alma fed by his yearning, his desire to be a father. From his first days under her roof, he had left the door open for her return.

She had always been here, but now she was loose, reclaiming her place among the living and breathing.

He had to do something about that.

He exited the basement through the wooden door to the yard. The night was cool and he walked slowly down the path toward Our Eden.

He stopped when he reached the grave. The dirt was fresh, bulging obscenely above the grass. A small cross made of sticks had been set on top, tied with string, just as the Doctor had taught her more than a century before.

He was about to start digging when self-preservation kicked in again.

The Grums. The police. They would have scoured Eddie's trailer. They could have evidence linking him to the crime scene by now.

No, the authorities would have been here, and he would have come back to life in a hospital, or a cell. The yard would look like the site of an archeological dig, and the neighbors would be lining up with torches to burn the house to the ground.

Not yet, but they would be here soon.

He said a prayer asking for her forgiveness and turned away from the dirt. He walked in agony back up the path, over the deck, and up the stairs into the house. As he focused on each step, wincing at the fire of his wounds reopening, some trunk in his mind unlocked itself and asked the final question.

For the first time since coming back to life, he wondered if his wife was here too or in some other place, with Nadia.

41

When he reached the kitchen he saw that the living room was blinking with red and white light. His skin crawled and his heart tripped. The blood began to pool at his waist, soaking the bandages anew. He moved forward, swaying, and clutched the mantle in the living room to keep from fainting. There were no sirens yet, but through the front window, through the gauzy curtains, he could see the cars parked in front of the Grums'. The lights on top were sliding in flat rows, greetings from an alien craft.

He closed his eyes.

They knew you were lying, and they are coming for you tonight.

Another siren squelched, and then a woman screamed from the front lawn.

I'm sorry, Gail. I'm so sorry.

Elsewhere his dogs began to moan, and he knew they were not upset about what was coming, but what was already here.

42

He turned away from the windows and the red lights. The dogs were standing in the foyer where Jo had come to rest, whining with their tails tucked low. He heard footsteps above and the dogs began to bay. With his neck arched back he could see directly up the stairway and under the black maple banister to the master bedroom hallway.

Her pale legs moved under a swishing dirty hemline, her bare foot turning away from the posts as she entered the bedroom.

'Stay,' he bid them, taking the stairs.

And, as he went up to meet the author of his resurrection, they did.

THREAD

As he climbed the stairs he felt like a dead man reborn.

He had come back, but as what? His skin felt porous and his feet light, as if he were already a ghost, all spirit ready to flee the flesh. But this notion was brief and with his next step obliterated by the stabbing pain in his torn belly and the warm blood that still trickled from his near-fatal wound. In a panic he reached for his chest and found his heart beating strong, audible in the silence of his ascent. He had survived, and now he wanted to live, no matter the cost. Beyond that, he knew only that the house was dark and he was finally going to meet her with clarity and purpose. He focused on the stairs one at a time, moving slowly, absorbed in every detail even as one fated moment slid away to make room for the next.