I was tired all the time. I was distantly grateful that the horrible thing never cried or made a fuss. I didn’t like looking at it, but I told myself that was because it was Arthur’s child, born of a man who was evil and God knew what suffering on Olivia’s part, the child of a man I hated and a woman I loved.
I let Alan fuss over it, since that seemed to make him happy. God help me, when Olivia tried to hurt it I told him to take care of it. I made it his especial charge. I made him responsible.
God forgive me.
It was more than a year later that I realized what I had done. We were fighting a demon possessing a dead body. Olivia was throwing spells and I was hitting it with a poker. I had to beat an already dead thing into pieces, and as I looked at its blank, rotting face, I knew.
I thought, My son is upstairs putting a demon to bed.
Olivia had told me what it was a thousand times. Neither of us had the slightest idea how to save what might once have been Olivia’s child. There was no child left, and no hope. There was one of a race of murderous, evil things in my home, and I was filled with senseless, unreasoning terror. As if that had not been the case for a year. As if I had not already betrayed my son by refusing to recognize the danger I had put him in.
As soon as the dead thing stopped moving, I left its messy remains on the rug and ran upstairs. Alan was still in the creature’s room, bending over the cradle and singing a song his mother used to sing to him. And in the cradle there was that monster, beyond the reach of human words and feelings.
I should have taken Alan then. I should have taken Alan and driven away from Olivia and the nightmare in the cradle, turned my back on it all and saved my son.
I couldn’t bear to leave Olivia. I told myself I would be careful, I would watch it, there might be some way to exorcise it, that Alan was too young to understand and he would be terribly distressed. I told myself that demons were cunning and the creature knew it was helpless and Alan was caring for it. There would be no profit for the demon in harming my son.
Only, of course, demons hurt humans for sport.
There are times when the true horror of the life I have condemned us to settles on me, like stones pressing down on my chest, and I think that soon I will be mad too. There was one day, when Alan was almost seven and came home straight from school as he always does. When Alan is at school I have to keep the creature with me in case Olivia tries to hurt it again.
It is part of his daily routine, as soon as he comes in the door, to give it a kiss and say, “Hi, Nick. Did you miss me?”
As if it could.
That done, he takes out his schoolwork and shows it to me, gold stars and teacher’s praise, the little offerings he brings in his effort to make my day brighter.
Sometimes I wish he wasn’t so good. It just makes everything else look so much more twisted, so much worse.
That day I noticed something new, though: that the creature’s eyes tracked his movements when he was in the room. They don’t track mine or Olivia’s unless we make a move that is directly related to it. It seems as indifferent to humans as if they were particularly mobile chairs. But it was watching Alan.
My blood ran heavy and cold through my veins, as if terror could turn me to stone, and I tried not to think of what bloody game or dark purpose the demon might intend for my son.
That night I went upstairs with an enchanted knife in my hand and stood over the cradle. Drowning hadn’t worked, but this knife had the strongest spells the Goblin Market knew laid on it.
The night-light was on, casting a pattern of cheerful rabbits on the opposite wall. It lay sleeping in a pool of light, but even sleeping it doesn’t look like a child.
Not quite.
I stood there sweating, the hilt of the knife turning slick in my grasp. Then from the door I heard Alan say, “Dad?”
I turned and saw him looking at me, and the knife, and the demon. My little boy’s face went so pale it seemed translucent. He looked like the tired old ghost of a child long dead.
“Nick,” he said, coming into the room, almost stumbling in his sleepy haste. “Nick, wake up.”
It doesn’t wake like normal children, grumbling or yawning or rubbing sleep from its eyes with small fists. It is simply alert in a moment, black eyes watchful and cold. Alan lifted it out of the cradle with an effort—the body is three years old and big for its age. The demon tried to squirm away. It does not seem to like being touched, but Alan clung to it, staring up at me with huge, terrified eyes.
I said his name.
“Come on, Nick,” Alan said, his voice breaking even as he tried to sound calm, as if the demon needed comfort. “I had a nightmare. I need you to come sleep in my bed.”
Alan has it trained to hold his hand and follow him when crossing roads. When he held its hand then, his knuckles were white.
As soon as he left the room I heard him break into a run, dragging the creature with him.
I went to put the knife away. I hid it and came back. Alan had dragged his wardrobe in front of the door. He’d barricaded himself in with the demon.
In the morning I had Olivia spell her way in, silently. I did not wake them as I came in over what remained of the wardrobe.
When I drew the blanket back, Alan was sleeping with one arm curled around the monster. In his other hand was an enchanted knife.
