Long Lankin
Catherine Luker
Some nights there just wasn’t any point in going to bed. Lydia stared at the flickering television, seeing but not really comprehending what was happening in front of her. She’d found an old sitcom in the depths of Netflix, an American thing full of big hair and plastic smiles. The episodes had long since blurred together into one – she’d turned the sound off, the fake laughter grating on her nerves like a piece of sandpaper taken to the soft skin of the inner arm. There wasn’t much point getting invested, not when the baby monitor could go off at any second. God, she hated that thing, hated being constantly under the red eye of her mewling overlord. The noises it made didn’t even sound human half the time. Still, she went without protest, without thinking, when the first static cry ripped from the shitty speaker. I’ve been conditioned, she thought miserably. It’s got me trained.
The climb up the stairs lasted an age, the top step seeming to draw further away even as she heaved her tired body upwards. When she finally reached the landing, all she wanted to do was throw herself back down. Not with any real intent to hurt herself. Just to feel something other than the slow trudge onwards. She wanted to feel something exhilarating. But the baby was screaming now, his tiny lungs working overtime. Lydia pushed open the nursery door. The room was warm and dark save for the yellow glow of the night light. The sour-sweet smell of new baby had begun to pervade the whole house, but it was strongest in here and Lydia couldn’t help but feel faintly nauseated by it.
“Hello, baby.” She said as she leaned over to pick him up. It always surprised her how solid he was. Part of her felt like he shouldn’t even be real, that it should have been impossible for her body to knit together such a tiny, squirming creature. “Where did you come from?”
He didn’t answer, just howled and struggled in her arms. Hard little fists beat against her chest, occasionally glanced off her chin. Lydia looked down at the red face, the gummy, gaping maw, and felt like crying herself. She could feel the tears welling up, stinging bitterly. This would all be easier if you could speak, Lydia thought. Nappy was dry, he’d already fed and didn’t seem interested in any more. Just looking for some company, then. She understood how he felt.
“God, I wish you’d shut up.” She let her mind wander as she paced, remembering an old story from the depths of her childhood. She pressed her lips to the baby’s downy head and muttered, “If you don’t shut up, I’ll leave the window open and Long Lankin shall creep in and take you away. And he’ll cut you up, and drink your blood and I won’t have to listen to your noise any more.”
Eventually his wails tapered off into disgruntled mumbling, and it wasn’t long after that that he was finally asleep, soft baby breath puffing gently against Lydia’s t-shirt. One of his hands had clamped itself in the fabric, and Lydia could feel a damp patch growing where he had started to drool. She grimaced and untangled herself from his clutches, putting him down as gently as she could. If he woke again, she didn’t know what she’d do. He murmured quietly as her hands left his tiny body, but after a tense second he relaxed, sinking down deeper into his dreams. She watched him for a second; the soft pink curve of his cheeks, the pale, almost transparent violet of his eyelids. The little rosebud pout of his mouth.
“Pretty thing,” Lydia whispered. “You aren’t so bad, are you? Not really.”
Though she knew that he couldn’t have understood her, Lydia still felt bad about what she had said to him. It had come from a dark place of exhaustion and frustration, a moment of weakness that she had regretted as soon as it had left her mouth. She went to check the window, and made sure that the latch was firmly locked before she went back downstairs.
She stood for a second in the small living room. Most of the space was dominated by the sofa, found by Lydia in the depths of a second hand furniture warehouse. It wasn’t the best sofa by any stretch of the imagination – the cushions had lost most of their bounce, and it made strange noises when you sat down, but it had been cheap and the warehouse did free deliveries so it had been a no-brainer.
But she knew from the heaviness in her head and her limbs that if she sat back down, she would fall asleep, and Lydia knew from bitter experience that falling asleep on that sofa was the last thing she wanted. The last time she had woken up aching all over, and the knot that had twisted up in her shoulder had taken days to unravel, making her clumsy and ill-tempered.
Learning from past mistakes, Lydia shut off the television, collected the hateful baby monitor from the side table and headed for a proper bed. But as she stepped into the hall, she saw something that made her stop dead.
Through the frosted glass panels in the front door, framed by the glow of the street light, Lydia could see a patch of darkness pressed up against the door. It was vaguely man shaped, with the suggestion of a head and shoulders, and whatever it was it held itself slumped. Like someone in pain.
“Hello?” Lydia called, her voice falling on the dead air like dust.
Silence.
The shadow didn’t move, gave no indication that it had heard her. Against all instinct, Lydia found that she was angry more than she was scared.
“If you’re trying to scare me, it isn’t working. Just… fuck off, or I’m calling the police.”
Again, only silence. All Lydia could hear was her own breathing, and she wondered if the figure could hear it too, if its silence was because it was listening so intently.
Lydia sucked down a breath, released it shakily. She watched herself with a strange detachment, standing by her own right shoulder as she walked the short distance to the door. She fumbled with the keys, pulling her eyes away from that smudge of darkness only for a moment to see what her hands were doing. When she looked up again the shadow had gone, leaving only the refractions of the streetlights in the glass. Cautiously, Lydia cracked open the door.
The street beyond was completely empty save for the neighbour’s cat creeping along the curb, a charcoal smudge in the dark. What Lydia had expected to see she couldn’t have said, but the relief at seeing nothing at all left her strangely light-headed. All the anger left her body in a rush, leaving behind an aching tiredness.
“Time for bed,” she said to herself, and shut the door firmly on the night, locking it with one swift motion.
She made her weary way to her room, barely remembered to set the baby monitor on the bedside table before collapsing into bed. She was asleep the second her head hit the pillow.
Downstairs, the letter box rattled.
Upstairs, Lydia was lost to her dreams, pushing her way through a dark sea of strange images. In her dream she made her way down a long hallway, following the echoing cries of a baby. No matter which way she turned, the crying was always in front of her, and no matter how far or fast she walked, it was always desperately distant. As she walked, she began to notice pale figures standing at irregular intervals along the walls. Each one looked as if it had been moulded by something that had seen a person once in passing and was a little hazy on how all the pieces fit together. Their skins had the soft sheen of wet clay, and their bodies looked as if they could barely hold up their own weight, flesh threatening to fall in on itself with every laboured movement.
They stared at her with faceless faces as she passed, thin limbs reaching out to her like children searching for comfort. Lydia tried to warn them away, but her words collapsed in her mouth, crushed by an unwieldy tongue that felt too long and heavy to fit behind her teeth. All that came from her mouth was a gloopy, bubbling sort of sound, but it seemed to mean something to the pale figures. They opened their mouths, black drooling caverns that cracked wide their soft, unseeing flesh. From those soft maws came the sound of newborn cries, their voices building over each other until the dream splintered away under the weight of the sound, and Lydia was left gasping for air as she was thrown into consciousness
For a second the nightmare hung in the air, screams echoing around the room, and Lydia found herself frozen where she lay before she realised that the screaming was actually coming from the baby’s room and not the inside of her own head. She swung herself from bed, cursing herself for not checking the monitor’s batteries. The curtains were saturated with the faint light of not quite morning, and Lydia realised she had managed four or five hours of sleep before being woken. It was a rare feat, and she felt a faint pang of guilt for it. Who knew how long he had been crying?
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” she muttered as she stepped out onto the landing, but something made her pause, her hand halfway out to the nursery door. The door stood slightly ajar, though she remembered closing it last night. She'd needed the barrier. With a sense of trepidation, with the image of that strange shadow fresh in her memory, she pushed the door open and stepped into the nursery.
The first thing she noticed was the smell. Gone was the soft scent of baby powder and sour milk. It had been replaced by something heavy and cloying, a rancid sweetness that made her think of worms squirming under warm, wet soil. It was overpowered only by the screaming.
This screaming was terror, pure pain. And underneath the screaming, a horrible sound. At first it just sounded like baby talk, soft up and down nonsense that was usually calming in its own stupid way. This wasn’t like anything Lydia had heard before. There were no words that she could hear, but the voice bubbled and spat, thick and glutinous, rolling over consonants and vowels like tar. She turned towards the sound, towards the fetid presence that had invaded her home.
Her first thought was that she was still dreaming, refusing to believe what her eyes were telling her. Crouched in the far corner of the nursery was a figure. Lydia couldn’t help but think of a spider when she looked at it – the limbs that protruded from its bulbous body looked too thin to support its weight, and they bent at sharp, strange angles. It was as if it each one had been broken, twisted and then left to set. Yet they moved with a sickening fluidity, like there was no bone to have broken in the first place. It was a man yet not a man, something that had unfolded itself from the words of half remembered ghost stories, pulled together from pieces of nightmare.
It didn’t seem to notice Lydia when she entered, its gaze fixed on the baby it held in its misshapen arms. Both their faces were partly obscured by the sparse strings of hair that hung off the pale dome of the not-man’s head. At first, it looked like it was just staring at the child, occasionally touching one long finger to his cheek, almost gentle, like it was trying to soothe the little one. It was only when Lydia saw the sharp point of the blackened fingernail, and the glistening wet of the creature’s mouth that she noticed the tiny pin pricks scattered across her baby’s face and shoulders, a gruesome set of constellations. She watched with horror as the finger reached up again, piercing soft skin to allow a bead of bright red blood to form. A grey tongue, the colour of meat left to rot, slid from between its lips and carefully licked the blood clean. Baby squirmed under its touch, his fat little arm swinging helplessly.
You could just leave, a sly little voice whispered through the horror building at the back of Lydia’s throat. It hasn’t seen you yet, just give it the baby and go.
“But he’s mine,” she whispered. “I made him, he’s mine.” And with that, before the voice could talk her out of it, she lunged forward. Up close, the thing’s stench had a physical presence, and Lydia wretched as it forced itself between her lips and down her throat, clogging her lungs. Unbalanced by the force of the smell, she fell hard against the not-man, and its body yielded soft and fibrous under her shoulder, like wood left out in the rain to rot. There was a snarl of surprise, a howl as she dragged the baby from its arms. The sound sent primordial shivers down Lydia’s spine as she scrambled for the nursery door, her tiny, warm, whimpering baby clutched to her chest.
Adrenaline pulled time into new and strange shapes, and she felt herself move in slow motion as she took the stairs two at a time, skidded down the hall. She could hear the creature as it followed, the catch and tear of its sharpened limbs against the walls, the carpet, even down into the floorboards.
Lydia darted into the kitchen and slammed the door shut. The room was illuminated only by the streetlight in the back alley, a gently flickering orange that made the entire kitchen pulse and shake. Disoriented, Lydia grasped at the top draw under the counter, pulled too hard. Cutlery cascaded onto the lino in what would have been a deafening crash if Lydia’s mind hadn’t been full of the sound of the creature tearing its way down the hall. She dropped to her knees, her free hand scrabbling for the carving knife, barely registering the pain as a buried blade scored a cut along her finger.
She found the knife, the worn wooden handle smooth in her hand, and spun to face the door. The door shook as something heavy threw itself against the wood, but held solid under the onslaught. And then there was silence, broken only by Lydia’s breath and the frightened fussing of the baby. She stood there, half collapsed against the counter.
“It’s okay, we’ll be okay,” she whispered,
The silence continued long enough that Lydia half hoped that it had given up on them and left. And then she began to wonder if she really was still dreaming, if her nightmare still had her wrapped up tight in its claws and all of this was just some dark imagining of some dark recess of her brain. The same dark crevice that had wished for Lankin to come take her baby away, that had wanted to leave him in this creature’s arms. But she could feel a damp spot soaking into her pyjama shirt where she was leaning against the sink, the sharp sting of the cut in her hand, a small hand grasping at her shoulder. The heavy weight of such a small life in her arms. His fluttering heartbeat. This wasn’t a dream.
From behind the door, there came a sharp snap, like damp wood on a bonfire, a noise like bone being fed through a meat grinder. Something dark, like a spreading stain of rot, crept from the foot of the door and materialised into a grasping hand, the sharp fingers gouging deep scores into the lino. The rest of the arm followed and then the head, the face stretched and disfigured as it forced its way through the narrow gap. Even in the dim light, the thing’s eyes, two black pits carved into the pale plane of its face, found Lydia’s, its gaze pinning her to the spot. For a second she stood transfixed as more and more of the not-man spilled out from under the door, accompanied by that sickly snapping as it twisted itself back into an approximation of its former shape.
Before it could orient itself fully, and before that snide little voice could pipe up again, Lydia adjusted her grip on the baby, tucking him more securely against her side, and slashed at the creature with all the strength she could muster.
The knife sunk in far easier than Lydia had anticipated, cutting through the creature’s flesh as if it were clay beneath a razor wire. Gouts of foul-smelling black fluid oozed from the wound, slick as oil and dark as pitch, the miasmatic haze burning Lydia’s eyes as she stabbed again and again, losing herself in the up and down slash of the knife, screams and howls ringing in her ears from all directions, a swirling mix of pain, anger, fear, hunger.
For a moment there was nothing but darkness around her, writhing and shaking, spreading until it seemed like all the world was darkness and nothing would ever be free of the vile dripping black. All that anchored her to any sense place was the warm bundle in her arms, and she clung to him, taking as much comfort from him as he ever had of her. And then like a veil falling from her face, the dark was shrivelling and withdrawing, falling in on itself like wet clay collapsing under its own weight. What moments before had been intent on eating Lydia and her child was now just a quivering black lump, glistening slightly in the dark and barely distinguishable from what had already been spilt. And then something seemed to break, the surface tension or something deep inside, and the form disintegrated into a thick fluid that disappeared slowly into the spreading stain. At first Lydia thought this was another attack, but she quickly realised that other than the stench there was little to fear. It just lay there, inert. Defeated.
The knife fell from her fingers, landing with a soft, rotten plat in the slurry. When Lydia lifted her foot it trailed in thick ropes from her sole, as if reluctant to let her go but powerless to stop her.
She tried to take a deep breath, gagged on the lingering stench, then struggled to the back door, her hand shaking almost too much to turn the key in the lock. The small yard beyond was cold, bleak concrete, but the air was clear and Lydia pulled down deep breaths as she lowered herself into one of the plastic garden chairs. Above her, clouds smudged the sky like lilac fingerprints on frosted glass, and through the gaps between the closely-packed houses, Lydia could see the first golden flashes of the sun. It was going to be a clear, bitingly cold November day.
Stiffly, her muscles and joints protesting the movement, she pulled off her dressing gown, folding it so that most of the grime was caught between the fabric, and, with a little difficulty, wrapped the clean side around the baby. With him cradled secure and warm, Lydia began checking him over, her fingers skimming over his hands, his toes, checking under his pale crescent moon fingernails, brushing a smudge of grime from his cheek. The pinpricks that dotted his beautiful skin were already fading, melting away under the sun. When she was sure nothing had been broken, that there was no lasting damage, she settled him into the crook of her arm and herself further into the moulded plastic chair.
She didn’t like to think what she looked like in that moment, with her hair wild and clogged with grime, a cut above her eye that was bleeding sluggishly down her face, her child wrapped in her filthy dressing gown and grizzling to himself in her arms. She felt like she might never be clean again, but she was too alive to care. Maybe she would feel different later, when the night began drawing in again and the shadows grew long and distorted, but for now she would sit and enjoy the sunrise and the warm weight of her baby until the cold drove them back inside and she had to go find a mop and some antiseptic.
Catherine Luker is a graduate of the University of Surrey's Creative Writing program. She lives and works in York, UK.
The climb up the stairs lasted an age, the top step seeming to draw further away even as she heaved her tired body upwards. When she finally reached the landing, all she wanted to do was throw herself back down. Not with any real intent to hurt herself. Just to feel something other than the slow trudge onwards. She wanted to feel something exhilarating. But the baby was screaming now, his tiny lungs working overtime. Lydia pushed open the nursery door. The room was warm and dark save for the yellow glow of the night light. The sour-sweet smell of new baby had begun to pervade the whole house, but it was strongest in here and Lydia couldn’t help but feel faintly nauseated by it.
“Hello, baby.” She said as she leaned over to pick him up. It always surprised her how solid he was. Part of her felt like he shouldn’t even be real, that it should have been impossible for her body to knit together such a tiny, squirming creature. “Where did you come from?”
He didn’t answer, just howled and struggled in her arms. Hard little fists beat against her chest, occasionally glanced off her chin. Lydia looked down at the red face, the gummy, gaping maw, and felt like crying herself. She could feel the tears welling up, stinging bitterly. This would all be easier if you could speak, Lydia thought. Nappy was dry, he’d already fed and didn’t seem interested in any more. Just looking for some company, then. She understood how he felt.
“God, I wish you’d shut up.” She let her mind wander as she paced, remembering an old story from the depths of her childhood. She pressed her lips to the baby’s downy head and muttered, “If you don’t shut up, I’ll leave the window open and Long Lankin shall creep in and take you away. And he’ll cut you up, and drink your blood and I won’t have to listen to your noise any more.”
Eventually his wails tapered off into disgruntled mumbling, and it wasn’t long after that that he was finally asleep, soft baby breath puffing gently against Lydia’s t-shirt. One of his hands had clamped itself in the fabric, and Lydia could feel a damp patch growing where he had started to drool. She grimaced and untangled herself from his clutches, putting him down as gently as she could. If he woke again, she didn’t know what she’d do. He murmured quietly as her hands left his tiny body, but after a tense second he relaxed, sinking down deeper into his dreams. She watched him for a second; the soft pink curve of his cheeks, the pale, almost transparent violet of his eyelids. The little rosebud pout of his mouth.
“Pretty thing,” Lydia whispered. “You aren’t so bad, are you? Not really.”
Though she knew that he couldn’t have understood her, Lydia still felt bad about what she had said to him. It had come from a dark place of exhaustion and frustration, a moment of weakness that she had regretted as soon as it had left her mouth. She went to check the window, and made sure that the latch was firmly locked before she went back downstairs.
She stood for a second in the small living room. Most of the space was dominated by the sofa, found by Lydia in the depths of a second hand furniture warehouse. It wasn’t the best sofa by any stretch of the imagination – the cushions had lost most of their bounce, and it made strange noises when you sat down, but it had been cheap and the warehouse did free deliveries so it had been a no-brainer.
But she knew from the heaviness in her head and her limbs that if she sat back down, she would fall asleep, and Lydia knew from bitter experience that falling asleep on that sofa was the last thing she wanted. The last time she had woken up aching all over, and the knot that had twisted up in her shoulder had taken days to unravel, making her clumsy and ill-tempered.
Learning from past mistakes, Lydia shut off the television, collected the hateful baby monitor from the side table and headed for a proper bed. But as she stepped into the hall, she saw something that made her stop dead.
Through the frosted glass panels in the front door, framed by the glow of the street light, Lydia could see a patch of darkness pressed up against the door. It was vaguely man shaped, with the suggestion of a head and shoulders, and whatever it was it held itself slumped. Like someone in pain.
“Hello?” Lydia called, her voice falling on the dead air like dust.
Silence.
The shadow didn’t move, gave no indication that it had heard her. Against all instinct, Lydia found that she was angry more than she was scared.
“If you’re trying to scare me, it isn’t working. Just… fuck off, or I’m calling the police.”
Again, only silence. All Lydia could hear was her own breathing, and she wondered if the figure could hear it too, if its silence was because it was listening so intently.
Lydia sucked down a breath, released it shakily. She watched herself with a strange detachment, standing by her own right shoulder as she walked the short distance to the door. She fumbled with the keys, pulling her eyes away from that smudge of darkness only for a moment to see what her hands were doing. When she looked up again the shadow had gone, leaving only the refractions of the streetlights in the glass. Cautiously, Lydia cracked open the door.
The street beyond was completely empty save for the neighbour’s cat creeping along the curb, a charcoal smudge in the dark. What Lydia had expected to see she couldn’t have said, but the relief at seeing nothing at all left her strangely light-headed. All the anger left her body in a rush, leaving behind an aching tiredness.
“Time for bed,” she said to herself, and shut the door firmly on the night, locking it with one swift motion.
She made her weary way to her room, barely remembered to set the baby monitor on the bedside table before collapsing into bed. She was asleep the second her head hit the pillow.
Downstairs, the letter box rattled.
Upstairs, Lydia was lost to her dreams, pushing her way through a dark sea of strange images. In her dream she made her way down a long hallway, following the echoing cries of a baby. No matter which way she turned, the crying was always in front of her, and no matter how far or fast she walked, it was always desperately distant. As she walked, she began to notice pale figures standing at irregular intervals along the walls. Each one looked as if it had been moulded by something that had seen a person once in passing and was a little hazy on how all the pieces fit together. Their skins had the soft sheen of wet clay, and their bodies looked as if they could barely hold up their own weight, flesh threatening to fall in on itself with every laboured movement.
They stared at her with faceless faces as she passed, thin limbs reaching out to her like children searching for comfort. Lydia tried to warn them away, but her words collapsed in her mouth, crushed by an unwieldy tongue that felt too long and heavy to fit behind her teeth. All that came from her mouth was a gloopy, bubbling sort of sound, but it seemed to mean something to the pale figures. They opened their mouths, black drooling caverns that cracked wide their soft, unseeing flesh. From those soft maws came the sound of newborn cries, their voices building over each other until the dream splintered away under the weight of the sound, and Lydia was left gasping for air as she was thrown into consciousness
For a second the nightmare hung in the air, screams echoing around the room, and Lydia found herself frozen where she lay before she realised that the screaming was actually coming from the baby’s room and not the inside of her own head. She swung herself from bed, cursing herself for not checking the monitor’s batteries. The curtains were saturated with the faint light of not quite morning, and Lydia realised she had managed four or five hours of sleep before being woken. It was a rare feat, and she felt a faint pang of guilt for it. Who knew how long he had been crying?
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” she muttered as she stepped out onto the landing, but something made her pause, her hand halfway out to the nursery door. The door stood slightly ajar, though she remembered closing it last night. She'd needed the barrier. With a sense of trepidation, with the image of that strange shadow fresh in her memory, she pushed the door open and stepped into the nursery.
The first thing she noticed was the smell. Gone was the soft scent of baby powder and sour milk. It had been replaced by something heavy and cloying, a rancid sweetness that made her think of worms squirming under warm, wet soil. It was overpowered only by the screaming.
This screaming was terror, pure pain. And underneath the screaming, a horrible sound. At first it just sounded like baby talk, soft up and down nonsense that was usually calming in its own stupid way. This wasn’t like anything Lydia had heard before. There were no words that she could hear, but the voice bubbled and spat, thick and glutinous, rolling over consonants and vowels like tar. She turned towards the sound, towards the fetid presence that had invaded her home.
Her first thought was that she was still dreaming, refusing to believe what her eyes were telling her. Crouched in the far corner of the nursery was a figure. Lydia couldn’t help but think of a spider when she looked at it – the limbs that protruded from its bulbous body looked too thin to support its weight, and they bent at sharp, strange angles. It was as if it each one had been broken, twisted and then left to set. Yet they moved with a sickening fluidity, like there was no bone to have broken in the first place. It was a man yet not a man, something that had unfolded itself from the words of half remembered ghost stories, pulled together from pieces of nightmare.
It didn’t seem to notice Lydia when she entered, its gaze fixed on the baby it held in its misshapen arms. Both their faces were partly obscured by the sparse strings of hair that hung off the pale dome of the not-man’s head. At first, it looked like it was just staring at the child, occasionally touching one long finger to his cheek, almost gentle, like it was trying to soothe the little one. It was only when Lydia saw the sharp point of the blackened fingernail, and the glistening wet of the creature’s mouth that she noticed the tiny pin pricks scattered across her baby’s face and shoulders, a gruesome set of constellations. She watched with horror as the finger reached up again, piercing soft skin to allow a bead of bright red blood to form. A grey tongue, the colour of meat left to rot, slid from between its lips and carefully licked the blood clean. Baby squirmed under its touch, his fat little arm swinging helplessly.
You could just leave, a sly little voice whispered through the horror building at the back of Lydia’s throat. It hasn’t seen you yet, just give it the baby and go.
“But he’s mine,” she whispered. “I made him, he’s mine.” And with that, before the voice could talk her out of it, she lunged forward. Up close, the thing’s stench had a physical presence, and Lydia wretched as it forced itself between her lips and down her throat, clogging her lungs. Unbalanced by the force of the smell, she fell hard against the not-man, and its body yielded soft and fibrous under her shoulder, like wood left out in the rain to rot. There was a snarl of surprise, a howl as she dragged the baby from its arms. The sound sent primordial shivers down Lydia’s spine as she scrambled for the nursery door, her tiny, warm, whimpering baby clutched to her chest.
Adrenaline pulled time into new and strange shapes, and she felt herself move in slow motion as she took the stairs two at a time, skidded down the hall. She could hear the creature as it followed, the catch and tear of its sharpened limbs against the walls, the carpet, even down into the floorboards.
Lydia darted into the kitchen and slammed the door shut. The room was illuminated only by the streetlight in the back alley, a gently flickering orange that made the entire kitchen pulse and shake. Disoriented, Lydia grasped at the top draw under the counter, pulled too hard. Cutlery cascaded onto the lino in what would have been a deafening crash if Lydia’s mind hadn’t been full of the sound of the creature tearing its way down the hall. She dropped to her knees, her free hand scrabbling for the carving knife, barely registering the pain as a buried blade scored a cut along her finger.
She found the knife, the worn wooden handle smooth in her hand, and spun to face the door. The door shook as something heavy threw itself against the wood, but held solid under the onslaught. And then there was silence, broken only by Lydia’s breath and the frightened fussing of the baby. She stood there, half collapsed against the counter.
“It’s okay, we’ll be okay,” she whispered,
The silence continued long enough that Lydia half hoped that it had given up on them and left. And then she began to wonder if she really was still dreaming, if her nightmare still had her wrapped up tight in its claws and all of this was just some dark imagining of some dark recess of her brain. The same dark crevice that had wished for Lankin to come take her baby away, that had wanted to leave him in this creature’s arms. But she could feel a damp spot soaking into her pyjama shirt where she was leaning against the sink, the sharp sting of the cut in her hand, a small hand grasping at her shoulder. The heavy weight of such a small life in her arms. His fluttering heartbeat. This wasn’t a dream.
From behind the door, there came a sharp snap, like damp wood on a bonfire, a noise like bone being fed through a meat grinder. Something dark, like a spreading stain of rot, crept from the foot of the door and materialised into a grasping hand, the sharp fingers gouging deep scores into the lino. The rest of the arm followed and then the head, the face stretched and disfigured as it forced its way through the narrow gap. Even in the dim light, the thing’s eyes, two black pits carved into the pale plane of its face, found Lydia’s, its gaze pinning her to the spot. For a second she stood transfixed as more and more of the not-man spilled out from under the door, accompanied by that sickly snapping as it twisted itself back into an approximation of its former shape.
Before it could orient itself fully, and before that snide little voice could pipe up again, Lydia adjusted her grip on the baby, tucking him more securely against her side, and slashed at the creature with all the strength she could muster.
The knife sunk in far easier than Lydia had anticipated, cutting through the creature’s flesh as if it were clay beneath a razor wire. Gouts of foul-smelling black fluid oozed from the wound, slick as oil and dark as pitch, the miasmatic haze burning Lydia’s eyes as she stabbed again and again, losing herself in the up and down slash of the knife, screams and howls ringing in her ears from all directions, a swirling mix of pain, anger, fear, hunger.
For a moment there was nothing but darkness around her, writhing and shaking, spreading until it seemed like all the world was darkness and nothing would ever be free of the vile dripping black. All that anchored her to any sense place was the warm bundle in her arms, and she clung to him, taking as much comfort from him as he ever had of her. And then like a veil falling from her face, the dark was shrivelling and withdrawing, falling in on itself like wet clay collapsing under its own weight. What moments before had been intent on eating Lydia and her child was now just a quivering black lump, glistening slightly in the dark and barely distinguishable from what had already been spilt. And then something seemed to break, the surface tension or something deep inside, and the form disintegrated into a thick fluid that disappeared slowly into the spreading stain. At first Lydia thought this was another attack, but she quickly realised that other than the stench there was little to fear. It just lay there, inert. Defeated.
The knife fell from her fingers, landing with a soft, rotten plat in the slurry. When Lydia lifted her foot it trailed in thick ropes from her sole, as if reluctant to let her go but powerless to stop her.
She tried to take a deep breath, gagged on the lingering stench, then struggled to the back door, her hand shaking almost too much to turn the key in the lock. The small yard beyond was cold, bleak concrete, but the air was clear and Lydia pulled down deep breaths as she lowered herself into one of the plastic garden chairs. Above her, clouds smudged the sky like lilac fingerprints on frosted glass, and through the gaps between the closely-packed houses, Lydia could see the first golden flashes of the sun. It was going to be a clear, bitingly cold November day.
Stiffly, her muscles and joints protesting the movement, she pulled off her dressing gown, folding it so that most of the grime was caught between the fabric, and, with a little difficulty, wrapped the clean side around the baby. With him cradled secure and warm, Lydia began checking him over, her fingers skimming over his hands, his toes, checking under his pale crescent moon fingernails, brushing a smudge of grime from his cheek. The pinpricks that dotted his beautiful skin were already fading, melting away under the sun. When she was sure nothing had been broken, that there was no lasting damage, she settled him into the crook of her arm and herself further into the moulded plastic chair.
She didn’t like to think what she looked like in that moment, with her hair wild and clogged with grime, a cut above her eye that was bleeding sluggishly down her face, her child wrapped in her filthy dressing gown and grizzling to himself in her arms. She felt like she might never be clean again, but she was too alive to care. Maybe she would feel different later, when the night began drawing in again and the shadows grew long and distorted, but for now she would sit and enjoy the sunrise and the warm weight of her baby until the cold drove them back inside and she had to go find a mop and some antiseptic.
Catherine Luker is a graduate of the University of Surrey's Creative Writing program. She lives and works in York, UK.
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