At the

Cradle Foot

WELCOME

TO BLACK BUTTERFLY SHORT STORIES

Something was moving at the foot of the crib, some thing dark and threatening, something evil. He felt powerless, like a thousand unseen hands held him back and, strain against them as he might, he could not move towards the helpless, innocent child. His child

  Jack Lamb woke with a sudden jolt, sweat soaking his pyjamas, fear freezing his soul. It was the same dream, the dream that had woken almost every night for six months. Desperately, he tried to clear his head, to recognize that it was just a dream and to allow the relief to flood through him, but the gut clenching fear remained, pricking his skin and making the need to get up and go to the baby's room urgent.

  His rational mind, what was left of it, told him that this was an obsession. That the thing he feared did not exist. There was no such thing as evil, except in the very corporeal form of a Hitler or Stalin or any other right or left wing bogeyman that haunted the past. Certainly there was no experience in his life before bringing his daughter to this house, that led him to believe that malice existed in places. Stone was stone and even in a house as old and steeped in history as this one was, stone absorbed nothing but what was physical,

  And yet he felt it, ice cold and close, an indefinable presence that stank of hatred for his innocent daughter. It wanted that innocence, had craved it from the moment that he and Julie had brought their daughter home from the hospital, a tiny scrap of life, entirely dependent on them

  Julie, felt nothing. Her daughter's cries in the night were simply natural, some thing to be endured until the child started to sleep through.

  Julie had been there, done that, got the T shirt. An experienced mother who had lost her son to her first husband because she was mentally ill and he was a better lawyer, had more money. Now, the boy lived with his rich father in America and Julie spent her time working to become an even better advocate than her ex-husband and maybe richer so that one day, she might win back her precious son.

  Did she, Jack wondered, feel about her children as he felt about his books; the first draft was always the best? It seemed that way sometimes. She had certainly started back to work quickly enough after Jessica s birth. Maybe that was a sign that she trusted him to care for the child. Some times, when he wasn't dog tired or scared out of his wits, he could be trusted.

  The baby cried and Jack swung his legs out of bed, padded bare foot down the hall to the nursery.

  The room was in darkness, but as he reached for the switch, his hand froze.

  The baby was suspended in the air above the cradle, wrapped in darkness as ghostly arms rocked her almost gently. Could evil be gentle?

His mind refused to function a rational level. All he recognised as fact was that the evil he feared had triumphed. His sleep deprived brain refused the reality and clung to the fantasy that he could alter.

  He lunged in to the room, snatched up the child and put her, screaming, in to the cradle. With a single, continuous movement, he grabbed the bedside light and smashed it in to the evil thing that had held his daughter. Again and again, he smashed the demon. He did not feel his wife's warm blood cover his bare feet as she slumped to the softly carpeted floor.

  Some said that he was mad, influenced by the stories that surrounded the old farmhouse that he and his pretty wife had so lovingly restored. Some said that he was bad, seeing another woman or jealous because the child was not his.

  The court concluded that he was probably a bit of both and locked him away in a secure hospital, just to be on the safe side.

  Jessica was given, like a bequest in a will, to her only living relative, her father's sister, Kate, and Kate loved her like she was her very own.

  Jess could remember her father, her Mad Dad, only vaguely from visits when she was three or four years old. For a time, he had seemed to get a little better but that hadn't lasted and Kate had decided that it was not good for the child.

  When Jess was around seven, Kate had met and married an American psychiatrist called Bill Mackenzie, Mac and they had all moved out to New York.

  Mad Dad had faded in to the background of Jessica's life like an only half remembered dream. Occasionally, she would trot him out to frighten her high school friends, but mostly she left him in one of the darker cupboards in her mind to speak his poetry and write his scary books while she got on with being an all American girl, happy, intelligent and, at the age of twenty one, quite independent. She had her own apartment, subsidised by Mac who was always some where in the background, keeping a fatherly eye on her.

  Meeting Pete was a bonus. He was the most charming, witty and intelligent man she had ever met. He was older than her by almost ten years, but the way he acted, the way he joined in, he was some times very like a college kid.

  The attraction had been immediate and when they had got talking and she had found out how much they had in common, it seemed to her that they were meant to be together.

  They had started dating seriously on her twenty first birthday and he even managed to impress Kate and Mac , some thing rare with Jessica's boyfriends.

He was always nice and polite and Mac was impressed by his Harvard education and his good prospects. He was a young man going places and he seemed bent on taking Jessica with him. Jessica liked him because he didn't pressure her.

   On a hot night in June, the kind of night that New York is famous for, Jessica woke from a dream about her father that troubled her. She never normally dreamed about him. Maybe, she thought, there was some thing wrong with him that intuition was kicking in after all these years.

  Only gradually did she become aware of the figure at the bottom of the bed. She froze. Terror gripped her insides and made her heart pound. Every New Yorker's worst nightmare and it was happening to her.

  Jessica thought it had to be a man but he didn't move. She could hear him breathing. Not heavy, not fast just controlled, normal. Her mind filled with a million questions. Who was he? What did he want? How did he get in? He must have come in off the street. She was on the eighth floor.

  She thought about trying to reach the bedside light but that might draw his attention and she had no idea what he would do. God, she thought, he could have a gun. Mostly they did, even if they only came to rape.

  Oh please dear Jesus, don't let him be a rapist.

  With all her heart, she wished that this could be a dream.

  "I know you re not asleep." The voice was flat and dead and very quiet but chillingly familiar. "I saw you wake up."

  Jessica risked reaching for the light but, before her fingers touched it, there was a sound, recognised from a hundred cops and robbers movies, the metallic click of the safety coming off a pistol.

  "Oh Jesus," she whispered.

  "Don't even think about switching on the light."

  "What do you want? I don't keep money in the apartment."

  "It took me a long time to find you, Jessica."

   Her mind cleared a little. She recognised the voice. It was Pete, but what the hell was he playing at.

  "I had to make sure that you were who I thought you were and not just some one with a similar background. I used my dad's investigators to check you out. When I was sure, I moved on you. It is amazing how a little charm can get you what you want in this life."

  "I don't understand," she stammered, fear choking her and making her voice small and weak.

  "You don't have to understand," his voice was harsh, angry but still quiet. "All you have to know is that twenty one years ago, your father murdered my mother." He laughed with out humour and Jessica felt sick. "Our mother," he said. "I bet you thought that my restraint was old fashioned good manners."

  She didn't want to hear any of this but he was the man with the gun.

  "I remember every thing about my mother. Her eyes, how she did her hair, how soft her hands were. I loved my mother." He said it firmly, like she had dared to contradict him.

  "I always thought there might have been a chance she get me back. Your father robbed me of that. All those years when I was growing up, never being good enough for my father, nothing between me and his temper. If my mother had been around I wouldn't have had to put up with all his five and dime women, his 'ladies' as he called them; with their cheap perfume, their dyed hair and their flashy clothes. Clothes he bought them when he could have spent his money and his time on me but she wasn't there. She wasn't given the chance to try and get custody. I could have at least tried to make a life with her and you, maybe. I might have been your devoted elder brother. Looking out for you, casting an eye over your boy friends maybe I would have been the object of your girl friends' fantasies. I had a lot of time to think about all this, to imagine what it would have been like. Hell, I might even have got along with your old man but it didn't happen that way. Your father saw to that."

  She tried interrupting, putting in a plea for her father, for herself. He was sick, she said but she knew that her tiny voice made no impression.

  "He killed her and now I now I have to kill you."

  She tried to beg for her life, to appeal to him on a human level. There was a flash, a loud bang. Nothing.

  Professor Brian Fenner had given a specific instruction that his patient was not to be informed of the girl's death. It might have been his right to know but Professor Fenner was not about to take the consequences to the man's mental health if he was told. Now, looking at the latest Lamb poem, he could only assume that some one had told him. Why else would he have written some thing like this? All right Jack Lamb didn't write light hearted stuff but he was insane and some times very depressed. But this, this was just too close to the truth. He held the page at arms length and read the words out loud to the still protesting nurse as if that was the final evidence that the nurse had said some thing to Lamb about his daughter's death. The last lines of the poem echoed in the silent office;

  " And at the cradle foot from first drawn breath,

  Waits, in future shadow dark and brooding, death."