What's Wrong with the Baby? Read online

  What's Wrong with the Baby?

  What's Wrong with the Baby?

  Vincent Courtney

  A

  Grinning Skull Press

  Publication

  PO Box 67, Bridgewater, MA 02324

  What's Wrong with the Baby?

  Copyright © 2018 Vincent Courtney

  Originally published as Goblins by Kensington Publishing Corporation, 1994. This edition has been revised substantially by the author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters depicted in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons—living or dead—is purely coincidental.

  The Skull logo with stylized lettering was created for Grinning Skull Press by Dan Moran, http://dan-moran-art.com/.

  Cover designed by Jeffrey Kosh, http://jeffreykosh.wix.com/jeffreykoshgraphics.

  Published by Grinning Skull Press, P.O. Box 67, Bridgewater, MA 02324

  ISBN: 1-947227-19-X (paperback)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-947227-19-4 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-947227-20-0 (ebook)

  DEDICATION

  To Beth, Connor, and Evan

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Prologue

  PART ONE: DARK LIGHT, DEAD PLACES

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  PART TWO: DEAD LIGHT, DARK BORN

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  PART THREE: MOMMA'S BOY

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  PART FOUR: DADDY'S BABY

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to the folks at Grinning Skull Press for giving me the chance to revisit a book that I wrote almost 25 years ago and to tighten it into a well-told tale with no fat on its bones.

  Prologue

  A transcript from the tapes of Hubert Carter Reese under hypnosis, recorded by Dr. David Straub on June 12, 1962, at J.M. Seward's Psychiatric Institution in Ravenstonedale, England.

  "And then what happens when you see them, Hubert?"

  "Leftenant Case orders the lads to move up the street, so I grab me Enfield, and just before our section takes off, me mate Harry explodes, and something grabs me around the neck. All wet and slimy it is, smelling of shite."

  "And what do you do?"

  "What you fhink I do? I drop me rifle and grab the bleedin' thing to get it off me. Takes me a tick to realize what I've got me hands on. It's Harry's intestines, in'it? I fling them away, but they stop short, glommed to his body like they were. And there's Harry watching the whole bleedin' thing. He'd a been laughing his arse off, if he wasn't dead as Dora."

  "Now what do you do?"

  "I grab me rifle and let go half me clip in the direction of the machine gun fire that had just ripped me mate open."

  "And, where are you?"

  "In the café. In Caen. Oh Christ, I'm in Caen."

  "What happens next?"

  "I see someone running through the smoke across the street."

  "And this is the man you told the medics about?"

  "I told you he's not a bleedin' man!"

  "Please stay calm, Bertie."

  "I mean, at first, I fhink it's a child, but when I get a better look, I see it's a shabby geezer, some Frenchie in a red cap who didn't make it out of the town before the argy bargy with the Jerrys started. Then our eyes meet for just a blink, just a blink mind you, but the look on his face makes me blood crawl."

  "What is it about him that frightens you?"

  "The feelin' I get."

  "And what feeling is that?"

  "The feelin' that the bleedin' bastard is happy to be there in that slaughterhouse, like it's the bee's knees to be at war. Damned nasty business, war. They love war, you know."

  "What happens now?"

  "A Jerry comes through the door to the café, and we see each other. I drop to a knee and cut him down before he can get his rifle on me. He looks down at the 'ole in his chest, and then he's brown bread."

  "Dead."

  "As Dora."

  "And the man in the street?"

  "I look for him and see Leftenant Case running toward the café. A shell hits and one of his arms goes flying like an Aussie's boomerang. Then, more bombs go off and me sergeant, Ernie Thayer, is laying on the ground screaming. The leg bone of his best mate, Alf Anderson, is sticking out of his Derby Kelly right above his belt buckle. I get to me feet and behind the wall again. I feel sick. I'm in command now and want to crawl inside meself and die."

  "It's a lot of responsibility for a nineteen-year-old boy from the East End. What happens next?"

  "I'm figuring out what to do without pissing meself. Then I feel someone staring at me. I look behind me expecting to see that smiling bastard Frenchie, but it's the dead Jerry. I take a longer look at him. He's about my age, and he's got a look on his face like he can't figure out why he ain't among the living. And that's when another shell explodes, and I feel meself flying. I think I'm looking down at the town and wondering what a damned silly thing to be fighting over. I land on a pile of guts that used to be a Tommy, and everything goes black.

  "When I come around, it's night. The buildings are empty, broken, and half buried. Everywhere I look I see dead Jerrys and Brits. The brave and the c'ards and the barmy and the luckless, all the geezers fighting this bleedin' war. The whole blinkin' place looks haunted. I expect the dead to get up and join me. Ghosts, we all were.

  "As I'm walking through the place, something seems off, wrong in some 'orrible way, but I can't put me finger on it. I can't put me finger on it at all."

  "Calm yourself, Bertie. You're all right."

  "And then I know what it is. It's the damned quiet. I can't hear a bleeding thing. Nufhing. I start to cry when I realize I'll never to hear me mother's sweet voice again. Or the sound of a tutti-frutti bird giggling at something clever I said or the geezers cheering on West Ham… Something… I hear something."

  "What do you hear, Bertie?"

  "A sound I should have been happy to hear, but it scares me half out me wits."

  "And what is it?"

  "It's laughing, in'it? But not the nervous kind of laughing like blokes glad to be alive or Frenchies celebrating. In the middle of all that death, someone is laughing his arse off. I think maybe I should look for him, but me gut has other plans. It's not that sudden stomach up feeling you get when you see Jerrys on the horizon. It's that creeping kind of lily-liver that crawls across your skin and leaves you in gooseflesh."

  "And from where is this laughter coming?"

  "I don't know, do I? I make me way toward it and see someone moving in the bombed-out bakery. I move closer. It's the Frenchie. He's kneeling beside one of our blokes, checking the wounds in his chest. That's when I hear the Tommy gasping for help. He's hurt bad, and the Frenchman's grinning at him. He kicks off the bloke's helmet, and I see his face. It's me mate, Sean O'Bryan. The Frenchie picks up a chunk of rock off the floor, and I see his fingers, long and gnarled like the roots of a dead tree, and I know what he's goin' to do. I go to aim me rifle, but I ain't got me bloody rifle no more, so I pull the F-S out of my sheath and get ready for a right a
rgy bargy with the Frenchie.

  "I says, 'Back up, ya fuckin' frog.' And the little bugger glares at me like he's Lucifer himself, and before I can get me knife in him, he's pitching the stone my way, busting me head open. I stagger backwards, swiping the blood out of me eyes and fighting to keep me wits so I can save Sean, but I can't get me bleedin' legs to work. I have to watch… to watch…"

  "Take your time, Hubert."

  "The black-hearted devil snatches up another stone and smashes Sean's face and head over and over. Then he takes off his cap and presses it into the pulp and the blood. I've still got me knife, but me heads swimming and I can't get me bearings. He gets up and places his cap, all soaked in blood it is, over his stringy mess of black hair. Slowly, as God is my witness, the blood starts to fade into the cap. And that's when it comes out of me swimmy head what I'm seein'."

  "What came to you?"

  "The story me mum used to tell Gray and me about what our granda saw in the trenches of Verdun during the Great War."

  "And what did she tell you and your brother that your grandfather saw?"

  "A Redcap they calls them. One of the Prowlies of the Unseelie Court."

  "And these are the faerie folk. That's what you think you saw in Caen?"

  "Not think. I seen him, dint I, you bleedin' tosser. That fuckin' goblin was coming to kill me next, and would have done if I hadn't reached under me shirt and grabbed the hex me mum had given me for protection."

  A finger pushed the stop button on the recorder.

  "I've heard enough, Dr. Straub," Police Constable Ian Tavish said, lighting a pipe. He took a puff and said through a cloud of blue-gray smoke, "The man's mad as a hatter. And this Reese chap believes everything we've just heard?"

  "Every word," Dr. Straub said. "He's been with us I believe over thirty years. A model inmate, but he's never wavered on what happened to him during the war and how it affected him. He's quite disturbed."

  "I should say so after what he did last night to the attendant and the night nurse," Tavish replied, smoothing his thick, brown mustache with finger and thumb.

  "Yes. Most unexpected and quite shocking. He had told us many times that he never wanted to be released and then… Well, you know what happened."

  "Just what did he do to get in here, Dr. Straub? You haven't told me that yet."

  The doctor took off his tortoise-shell glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He put his glasses back on his face and took a deep breath. "Hubert Reese murdered his wife and their two children. The wife and the seven-year-old girl were slashed to ribbons. Their two-year-old boy was never found."

  "Good lord," Tavish said. "And now he's escaped?"

  "Yes, I'm afraid so. Now he's out."

  PART ONE

  DARK LIGHT,

  DEAD PLACES

  One

  Marty Martin surged, stopped, and spun through the crowd of incoming and outgoing passengers at Edinburgh Airport. His eyes lit with panic. Stomach fluttering. The ten-year-old boy searched the bobbing heads of the crowd for signs of his dad but didn't spot his orange and blue Florida Gator's cap. What the heckel? Why did Dad leave him in the gift shop and not tell him that he was leaving? A flock of Japanese tourists fluttered past Marty, their indecipherable chattering adding to his confusion. He thought he heard his mom's voice, whirled, and searched the crowd.

  She wasn't there.

  His gut churned with the same sense of terror he had felt the time Meema, his birth mother, and Daddy Timmy, his stepfather, had left him at home in their trailer to go on an anniversary picnic "just for adults" in the nearby Florida woods. When his parents didn't come home at the designated time, the eight-year-old boy went out looking for them and got lost in the maze of trees and scrub arranged haphazardly by the indifferent wind and rain. He wandered for seven hours until he stumbled upon a pack of boy scouts, who returned him to his home. It was then he found out that his parents had abandoned him and been killed in a car accident on the way to South Carolina.

  And he was lost in this forest of strangers, a maze of humanity going everywhere and nowhere. No, not lost, abandoned again. His adoptive parents were ditching him just like his birth mother and his stepfather had done. The Martins didn't need him anymore since they now had a miracle baby on the way. Marty recalled the joyful expression on his mother's face when she bustled into the family room at the house and gushed, "The dumbbell doctors were wrong. They said we could never have a baby of our own, but now we are. We're finally having a baby of our own."

  "A baby of our own." The words pierced Marty's flesh. His mom saw his tears and told him that she didn't mean it the way it came out, but Marty knew that she had already begun to love the baby more than him.

  He wished that Mom had never become pregnant so he wouldn't have to share his love with anyone else. He had been down that path. Meema had told him that she loved him, but then Timmy Underwood showed up, took all her love, and married her. He told Marty that he wanted to be a good daddy and to love Marty, too, but that Marty would have to be a loving son in return. In his mind, Marty saw those big, hard hands, meaty fingers, dirty nails, reaching for his pajama bottoms.

  Suddenly, strong fingers grabbed his arms. A scream locked in his throat.

  "Where the heck did you go?" Dan Martin said.

  "Dad!" Marty gasped. He wrapped his arms fiercely around his father's waist.

  "Hey, it's all right, Bud. You just got lost. It's okay."

  Marty swiped at the tears on his face. "I was sitting on the floor in the gift shop reading a comic, and I looked up and couldn't find you."

  "I told you I was going to the can."

  "I didn't hear you."

  "Obviously WildC.A.T.s was more interesting to you than my bathroom habits."

  "I thought—I thought you might have—y'know, like Meema did."

  "We'd never leave you. Ever. You get that shit, I mean crap, out of your head. You understand?"

  Marty nodded.

  "I was scared half to death until I saw that red hair of yours." Dan ruffled the boy's curly locks.

  Marty worked up a smile. The dread buzzing in his belly had settled into a dull ache.

  "Come on now, let's go find your mother before she starts looking for us and we play airport hide-and-go-seek."

  Marty took his father's hand and followed him to the terminal where his mom was supposed to be waiting.

  Vicki Martin spotted a man who appeared to be on a passenger search. The stranger was about fifty, salt-and-pepper hair, tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, twill knickers, laced boots. A porkpie hat was perched on his head. He looked like he should've been out hunting grouse in a field instead of hunting for an American film director and his family in an airport in Edinburgh, Scotland. Vicki wove her way through the thinning crowd and tapped the man on the shoulder.

  "Excuse me. Are you looking for Dan Martin by any chance?" she asked.

  "Matter of fact, I am," the man said. He stood ramrod straight and with his finger licked at his clipped mustache. "Are you him?"

  She smiled crookedly. "Um, no, I'm his wife, Vicki."

  "You never know these days." He took off his hat. "Lionel Leighton, Esquire, Atherton Studios."

  "Pleasure. Dan's gone to the… Oh, never mind here he is."

  "Dan Martin." Her husband extended his hand to the man who tugged it twice.

  "Lionel Leighton, Esquire, Atherton Studios. I'll be managing your vampire project." He spoke the last two words as if speaking of a nasty venereal infection. He raised an eyebrow when he saw their curly, red-headed son stippled with freckles. "And who is this ginger snapper?"

  "This is Marty."

  He limply squeezed the fingers of the boy's hand. "How'd you do, young sir?"

  "Pretty good," Marty said, wiping his hand on his pants.

  Vicki could read the Englishman's mind. Mailman stop in for a special delivery? Surely, this red-headed child couldn't be the result of the union between a Miccosukee Seminole with a little
Scots blood in him and his bella donna with roots reaching back to Italy. "He's adopted," she said, instantly regretting it when she saw the look his Marty's face. She cupped his chin with her palm. "But you don't get any luckier than we did when we brought this guy home."

  "And another on the way I see," the Britisher said, nodding toward her bulging abdomen.

  "Four months to go and counting."

  After five months of pregnancy, Vicki still got excited thinking about the baby she and Dan had thought they'd never have. After a prolonged bout with anorexia during her college days, her menstrual cycle had terminated, so she and Dan skipped contraception. So certain of her sterility were they that they adopted Marty, a bright six-year-old with a disturbing past not of his making. When they heard his story, they knew he was the one they wanted, someone upon whom they could shower love and cultivate a fruitful future from the rancid soil of his past. At first, Marty had been painfully withdrawn. The effects of his deadbeat father skipping out to whereabouts unknown before he was born and his awful relationship with his mother and stepfather had buried the little boy inside himself, but gradually, over the years, their constant attention washed away the dead layers of his personality and allowed the cheerful child to sprout.

  Then everything changed three months ago when Vicki began to suffer from morning sickness. She went to the doctor wondering what was wrong. Neither she nor Dan considered she was pregnant, and when they found out, they were overjoyed. The decidedly muted reaction of their adopted son had thrown them for a loop, but Marty seemed to be adjusting to the impending arrival of his sibling; at least, that's what they hoped. The addition of Vagoona, a cat that they had adopted in the hopes that Marty and the cat would form a bond, didn't work out since the cat didn't give two shits about anyone in the family. Dan and Vicki called her the Bitch Queen. On occasions of her choosing, she did allow Marty to stroke her fur, but those times were few and far between. While on the trip, the family had left the cat at home with their neighbor, Oswald, providing her with food and water.