*
At three in the morning, the baby began to cry. The sound came from far below and outside, persistent as a cat yowling on a fence, but Nick heard it clearly enough over the constant ocean. Unholy as a siren, the baby’s cries rode the wind and wound their way into the room. Beside him, Jack Peter did not move, even as the clamor drew nearer, and Nick was tempted to wake him or bang on the door to the room where Mr. and Mrs. Keenan slept so they might hear what he heard and come to his rescue. But he did no such thing. He lay in bed beneath the comforter, stiff as a bug on a pin.
The baby did not bawl continuously but would stop and start again, each time louder than before, so that it seemed to be getting closer and closer. Nick pulled up the covers and waited helplessly in the darkness. With his foot, he nudged Jack Peter on his bum, but it was like trying to wake the dead. The body shifted slightly and then rolled back into the soft trough in the mattress. Not that his friend would have been of any use. Despite Jack Peter’s presence next to him, Nick felt desperately alone.
A gentle drumming noise made him uneasy, and he squeezed his eyelids tight so he could listen without distraction. He thought it might be the sound of hail or sleet against the side of the house. He could be hallucinating, as his mother had said about the bodies in the closet, conjuring a figment in his imagination, mistaking something quite innocent for something more sinister. Stepping from the bed, he felt the warmth of the braid rug give way to the chill of the wooden floor. The crying had stopped, and he felt it safe to go to the window to investigate, holding his breath as he approached. The shape of a tiny hand swiped across the bottom of the glass. He waited for it again, convinced that his eyes were playing tricks. Impossible. He pressed his nose against a pane, resting his forehead on the sash. No snow was falling that night, and the bright moon shone over the Atlantic, casting faint light across the waves, illuminating the rock faces upon the shore. He could see there was nothing out there, nothing to fear, and for a moment, he wondered if the noises had all been in his head. Just as he was about to turn away from the window, a fleeting motion above his head, no more than a passing change of light, convinced Nick to look out again.
The glass clinked when he forced open the sticky window, and something scratched against the clapboard overhead. Nick stuck his head through the opening and into the dark night. The frosty air smacked him in the face. He had forgotten how high up the second story was from the ground. His vertigo made him feel as if he was going to pitch forward out of the window and plummet into the sand below, but the dizziness gave way to shock at what he saw clinging to the side of the wooden clapboards. Babies, darting away on all fours in jerky bursts and hesitations, a swarm of babies, scuttling on the surface like silverfish across a page. Defying gravity, defying reason. They were familiar but strange, almost alien with their bald round heads, and they paid little heed to him, other than moving away and considering him with odd backward glances from a safe distance. Their bodies were soft and naked, their faces cold and inhuman, their eyes black as holes. One opened its toothless mouth and out came a harsh mechanical cry, and when it screamed, Nick screamed back at it. The thing crawled right for him, and Nick pulled himself in and banged the sash against the windowsill. The sickly pale creature streaked across the glass. Jack Peter was sitting up in the bed, wide-eyed and rapt at what he was witnessing, but he gave no sign of help or comfort. Nick screamed again and ran from the room.
*
When she heard the window slam and the boy cry out in the middle of the night, Holly was already awake, as though her unconscious mind had anticipated trouble. Her sleep had been fitful for weeks now, and as she opened her eyes, Holly was sure that she had not slept at all that night. And so she was not dreaming of those sounds outside, babies crying far away, or that Nicholas, too, had heard them and was now in a panic. As usual, Tim was comatose, sleeping deeply as ever. He did not revive when she hoisted herself out of bed, and he did not wake when she stepped into the hallway and threw on the light. The poor child was shivering, hunched in a corner.
“Nicholas, what’s the matter? Did you have a bad dream?”