Blanky by Kealan Patrick Burke

Author:Kealan Patrick Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, ghost, grief, loss, death, witch, haunting, evil, scary, dolls
Publisher: Kealan Patrick Burke
Published: 2017-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

5

THE SUN CAME OUT; THE sun went down.

The phone rang endlessly until I smashed it against the wall.

I ignored the people knocking at the door. The Deans, I assumed. Nice people who had forever been a little too nosy, a little too eager to invite themselves into our lives. I recalled Lexi being uncomfortable at just how attentive they were to the mound of her pregnant belly, like they were auditioning for a remake of Rosemary’s Baby. How Harriet had cooed and put her face close to Lexi’s stomach and spoke as if my wife’s body was a tin can phone connected to the baby inside. And all the while, her husband Tony stood much too close to me, nodding knowingly, as if pregnancy was some great conspiracy we had let him in on. The winks, the soft punches to the shoulder, like Gee whiz, kid, ain’t this something special?, which, coming from a man who had never spawned children of his own, seemed forced and out of place.

Busybodies.

Eventually the knocking became more forceful. They must have called the police with stories of screams and falling furniture. The thin walls between our houses had probably been a prime source of entertainment for them over the years, from arguments and laughter, to loud sex and the prematurely silenced wailing of the resultant child. I imagine them sitting with their matching armchairs pressed against the walls, their heads back, eyes hooded, mouths turned up in dazed, creepy smiles like emotional vampires as they imagined what we might be doing next door. Lately, I suspected I had turned their vicarious auditory voyeurism to outright alarm.

I lay on the floor before the open screen door, relishing the chill from the wind and the rain as it blew in on me like sea-spray. My wife, or the thing that had worn her costume, was gone and I was not dead. I felt no relief from this realization as the pounding on the door worked in synch with the beating of my heart.

I believed she had been here. I could still taste damp cotton in my mouth and remembered the whispery caress of tiny fingers against my cheeks. Recalled the smell of sour milk. She had come here and she had taken me away for a spell, yanked me, or maybe just my mind, through the hollow where her face should have been into...someplace else. The place from my feverish dreams. A place I now believed to be real.

Unbidden, I thought of my parents. Good people who came from nothing and yet found a way to pay for my education, perhaps in the hope that I would make them prouder than they’d ever been able to make themselves. I remember my father, a carpenter, laboring away over a length of pine he had propped up between sawhorses. I recall the smile when he saw me sitting atop a cabinet in his workshop, watching him intently, and the wistfulness he always seemed to carry in his eyes. “You know,” he told me once, “I tell people I’m a man of the world.

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