In a cracked brick apartment building on Highland Avenue, not that far from the eerie glow of downtown, but far enough away to instill a feeling of disquiet, lived a young couple whose affection for one another had endeared them to their neighbors. They weren’t rich, but they laughed together in grocery aisles, held hands at bus stops, and had made a small life of sharing tender moments together. People in the building would smile when they passed. “Such a sweet couple, aren't they? They’ve got it right. They have it figured out.”
But when the wife bore her first child, her breath stilled a moment after her cry of anguish left the room. After sixteen hours of struggling labor pains, she died right there on the hospital bed in the University’s maternity ward, the boy’s first wail piercing through the father’s broken sobs.
She was buried three days later in the Olivetti Cemetery just three blocks from their home, under a sky piled thick with winter inversion. Smoke and fog shrouded the mountains, rendering them invisible. The father stood by the grave, clutching his infant wrapped in a blue blanket, the child’s weight both a source of anchor and torment. When the soil first struck the lid of the coffin, he thought he heard a second cry—faint, muffled, as if rising from beneath the ground. He kept it to himself.
Back in the apartment they rented on the first floor of an old house, he faced the daily horror: the baby would not feed. He hired Mrs. Kearns, the widow from down the hall, to sit with the child while he worked nights at the Union Pacific rail yard. She tried bottles, warm milk, formula, even sugar-water, to no avail. The child screamed, coughed, and wailed without pause until dusk. And then, inexplicably, in the hollow hours after midnight—silence. It was a deep, unnatural quiet, as though there were no child on the premises at all, just the faint ticking of the clock on the mantle and the unnerving sounds of a house settling.
Three nights of this wore her down. She prayed with her rosary clutched tight under whitened knuckles, muttering through cracked lips, until one midnight, when forcing herself to stay awake, the clock’s ornate hour and minute hands showing it was 12:17 a.m., when suddenly she heard it: the faint snick and turn of the front door's lock. The air grew cold. A dark figure passed into the room, merging into the shadows alongside the infant's cradle. The baby stilled for a moment, its mewling cry replaced by the sound of small gulps, suckling. Mrs. Kearns dared not breathe.
In the morning she told the father, her voice trembling, “Your boy… he doesn’t cry at night. Something... comes for him. Someone... feeds him.”
The man stared at her as if she were daft. The look he gave her was hollow-eyed; a cigarette trembled in his fingers, smoke plumed and curled up into a sunbeam slanting in from the kitchen window. “Don’t,” he rasped. “Don’t... say that. She’s gone. I put her in the ground myself.” He looked down and stubbed the half smoked cigarette out in the ashtray, "I must be gone."
But Mrs. Kearns reached out to clutch his arm, her nails digging in, “Then why does the baby sleep like the dead after midnight? Why does he only stop crying when the door opens, though no key ever turns it?”
That evening, the father called his two brothers from Rose Park and West Valley. They gathered in the old apartment’s cramped living room, their voices low with dread. They hid a candle inside a ceramic pot, its light shielded until the moment of revelation.
“We wait,” the father urged, his voice breaking. “We see... what feeds my son.”
The hours dragged. The baby shrieked as usual until its voice was raw. Midnight arrived. Then 12:15... 12:16... 12:17.
The lock clicked. The door creaked open. A draft of cold air rushed in with the shadows.
The baby stopped crying at once.
“Now,” the father whispered, his fingers trembling as he lifted the pot and uncovered the candle. The shadows dissolved amid the candlelight's illumination.
She was there. His wife — his dead wife. Standing uneasily in her soiled hospital gown, stiff with mud and still streaked with the dried stains of childbirth. Her skin bore the waxen hue of the grave, her hair fell lank and disheveled, filled with twigs and clods of dirt. She knelt at the crib, reached in and secured the babe, cradling his little form to her chest. The baby's mouth latched with startling suddenness upon her breast, where no milk could flow.
“Dear God,” one of the husband's brothers muttered, taking a cautious step backward. The other two men stood fixed to their spot, paralyzed with revulsion.
The dead woman raised her head and looked at them. Her eyes were clouded, like the marble gravestone where her name was etched. They made contact with her husband’s shocked gaze. With some effort she opened her mouth as though to speak, and a thin, croaking rasp issued forth, “Why… did... you... leave... me... alone?”
Her arms coiled tighter around the child. The father tried to lurch forward, his hand outstretched, but his legs failed him. Her head tilted down toward the boy, then back up at the gathered men. With supreme effort, she appeared to whisper a final sound — not words, but an approximation of what can best be described as the slow hiss of soil sliding back into earth. She bent forward to deposit the babe back in its crib, then rose to stand, turned away, and shuffled quietly back out through the doorway and into the night.
The baby wailed at once, so loud it startled the men — and then fell silent. When the brothers rushed over to the crib, the babe lay perfectly still, its tiny chest unmoving, its lips tinged blue.
That night, the father paced back and forth across the apartment, almost unable to breathe, lacking the ability to weep. He thought of himself as stranded alone... when the nearly inaudible whisper drifted into his ear. It seeped from the corners, from the vents, and from the shadows beneath the crib.“You left... me in... the ground. But he... will never... leave me. He is... mine forever.” The father knew then, with a grim resolve, that she had not come just to feed the child, but to claim him.
The neighborhood outside went on as usual, the occasional bus rumbling by, the commuter rail clacking in the distance. Neon signs flickered, leaves tossed as the wind passed through the trees, but in one small and darkened apartment squatting on Highland Avenue, the deep silence of the grave lingered on.
☈ | '25 | iSsuE #45 of .jpg)
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