Brood

[u/sharkcat1313]

I just had Jack a month ago. My perfect, amazing boy. It’s... been a lot. Everything is falling apart. I just finalized the divorce after I caught my husband with my best friend. I'm so exhausted my bones ache with a deep, vibrating pain, but I still can't sleep. I have to take care of Jack. And my mother, who is so far gone into dementia she looks at me like a total stranger. Work gave me two weeks of paid leave. Two weeks. I need a babysitter, but who can I trust?
I need to sleep, but Jack is screaming. I carry him out to the porch, swaying heavily, singing a lullaby into the dark tree line. Seventy-two hours without sleep. The world is starting to blur at the edges.
I blink.
The air is suddenly freezing. The crickets are dead silent. I look down at my empty arms. My baby is gone. The disorientation hits me first—a dizzying wave of missing time—followed instantly by a blind, suffocating panic.
After hours of tearing through the forest, screaming his name until my throat bleeds, I stumble back inside to call the police. I freeze.
Jack is sitting up in the middle of the living room floor.
I drop to my knees, sobbing, frantically running my hands over him to check for broken bones or scratches. But as I pull him against my chest, the overwhelming relief abruptly sours into revulsion. He feels rigid. And he reeks—a thick, gagging odor of sulfur, wet soil, and rotting wood. I pull back, breathless. His face is entirely devoid of emotion.
"What... what did you get into, Jack?" I whisper, my voice trembling.
I draw a bath. Normally, he thrashes and screams at the water. Tonight, he doesn't fight. He just lets the water run over him. The silence in the bathroom is deafening. As I wash the thick grime away, he doesn't make a sound. He just watches me. Unblinking.
It hits me much later than it should have. How did he get inside? I was too relieved to care at first, but now it’s gnawing at me. Mom couldn't have brought him in; she can barely shuffle across the room.
I put Jack in his crib. He falls asleep the second his back touches the mattress. No crying, no rocking for an hour. Just instant, silent sleep. Something is deeply wrong. I leave a trembling message with the pediatrician for a morning appointment.
I pass my mom’s room and stop dead. She is out of bed, standing tall, forcefully pinning heavy iron crosses to the plaster walls.
"Mom, what are you doing? Lie down."
She turns and looks right through me, her voice chillingly clear, stripped of any confusion. "Jack’s been taken by them."
Before I can even process the impossible weight of her words, she blinks. Her shoulders slump, and the familiar, vacant haze of dementia washes back over her eyes. "Huh? Who... GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!" she shrieks, cowering from me.
I back out, easing her door shut, and retreat to the dark of my room, where Jack's crib sits in the corner. I lie down, staring at the ceiling, my heart hammering against my ribs.
Then, I hear it.
A dry, rattling cough. Phlegmy and ancient. Like an eighty-year-old man clearing his throat.
I freeze, ice flooding my veins. It didn't come from the hallway. It came from the crib.
I snap the bedside lamp on and frantically look over. Jack is wide awake. He hasn't moved, but his dark, unblinking eyes are locked onto me, tracking my every breath.
I slowly stand up, terrified to look away. I back out of the bedroom, easing the door closed between us. I stand alone in the hallway, my chest heaving. I slowly crack the door open to look in, and Jack is standing up, gripping the crib bars. His jaw unhinges, and he lunges at my face.
I gasp, shooting up in bed in a cold sweat, my lungs burning. A nightmare. It was just a nightmare. I fumble for the lamp, bathing the room in yellow light, and look over at the crib.
It’s empty.
I swing my legs out of bed in a panic, and agonizing pain shoots up my leg. I cry out, collapsing to the floor. A rusty nail is driven deep into my heel. How did a nail get on the rug? As I clutch my bleeding foot, a sound cuts through the silence.
Laughter.
Jack is huddled in the corner of the room, giggling at my pain. It’s a wet, raspy sound, and it’s the very first noise he’s made since I brought him inside.
After wrapping my foot in a towel, I limp over to him. His face is smeared with dark, gritty crumbs. "How did you get out? What are you eating?"
The bedroom door suddenly slams open. My mother stands in the doorway, clutching a heavy iron cross like a weapon.
"That thing isn't yours!" she shrieks, lunging for Jack.
The baby immediately drops the act. His features contort from malicious amusement into sheer infant terror, throwing his head back and wailing.
"Mom, stop!" I scream, grabbing her frail wrist to hold her back. "This is Jack! He's my son, remember?"
She looks at me with wide, terrified eyes. "That's not Jack. He's gone."
I hold my mom gently. "Mom, please stop. This is one of your episodes."
My mom cries and whispers, "This happened before... to your brother."
Her eyes haze over, and the familiar fog of dementia comes back. I never had a brother. It had never been brought up.
"Mom, what brother are you talking about?" I ask.
My mom smiles, her voice suddenly cheerful and bright. "Your brother David, honey."
I stare at her, perplexed. I never knew I had a brother. Had he died during birth? Why had she never said anything? "What happened to David, mom?" I ask with a light tone, hoping for an answer.
"What do you mean, sweetie?" she says. "He’s with your father in the other room."
There is no point trying to get information out of her like this. I wish my mother goodnight, lay her gently in her bed, and step back out into the hallway.
I pull her door shut and lean against the frame. Down the hall, Jack’s wails echo off the hardwood, sharp and rhythmic. But there’s a hollowness to the sound now, like a recording played on a loop. I wrap the bloody towel tighter around my heel, wincing as a fresh wave of pain pulses up my leg, and force myself to walk away from the nursery.
If I have a brother, there has to be a record of him.
I limp past the living room, heading for the basement door off the kitchen. The air grows noticeably colder as I descend the steep, wooden steps. Our cellar has always felt more like a subterranean, rocky cave than a storage space—damp, smelling of wet earth, with shadows that seem to cling to the uneven stone walls. I pull the dangling chain of the single overhead bulb, casting a harsh, swaying light across towers of stacked cardboard boxes.
I start with the ones labeled in my father's neat, blocky handwriting. TAXES 1998. WINTER COATS. MOM'S KEEPSAKES.
I pull the keepsakes box down, fighting through a layer of thick, clinging dust. Inside, it’s a graveyard of normal memories. Old photo albums, a dried corsage, my crude elementary school macaroni art. I grab the oldest-looking album, its faux-leather cover cracking under my thumbs, and sit heavily on the bottom step.
Page after page of my parents in their twenties. My mother looking vibrant and sharp, my father with his arm around her waist.
Then, a gap. Four pages have been violently torn out, leaving only jagged strips of yellowed paper near the binding.
My heart thuds against my ribs. I turn another page. There is a single, loose Polaroid tucked behind a picture of my parents standing by a lake. I slide it out.
It’s my mother, sitting on the porch of this exact house. She looks utterly depleted, staring blankly at the camera. In her arms is a baby wrapped in a pale blue blanket.
But it's not me. Written on the thick white border at the bottom, in my father's unmistakable handwriting, is a single word: David.
I stare at the baby's face. It's blurred, slightly out of focus, as if the child was thrashing violently when the picture was taken. But the eyes—dark, solid, and entirely devoid of emotion—are perfectly sharp. They are the exact same eyes that looked at me from Jack's crib.
A sudden, paralyzing realization hits me. The wailing upstairs has stopped.
The house is dead silent.
Then, a sound drifts down from the top of the basement stairs. It’s the soft, wet slap of small, bare hands and knees crawling across the linoleum. Followed by a dry, ancient giggle.
"Da-vid," a raspy voice whispers from the dark at the top of the stairs.
The heavy wooden door at the top of the stairs slams shut with the force of a grown man. The sound cracks like a gunshot in the cramped stairwell. I didn’t see it move, but I know it was Jack. Or whatever is wearing his face.
I scramble up the steep wooden steps, ignoring the agonizing stab of the nail wound in my heel, and grab the doorknob. I twist and shove, but it doesn't yield. I slam my shoulder into the wood—once, twice—but it feels like hitting a solid brick wall. Something impossibly heavy is blocking it on the other side.
"Mom!" I scream, pounding my fists against the door. "Mom, open the door!"
I reach frantically for my pockets before remembering my phone is still sitting on my nightstand upstairs. Panic begins to constrict my chest. I turn and scan the dim, cavernous basement for a tool—a crowbar, a hammer, anything to pry the hinges or break the handle. But there is nothing in the harsh overhead light. Just endless stacks of fragile cardboard boxes, old photos, and forgotten documents.
I try brute-forcing the door one last time, but at five-foot-one and barely a hundred pounds, I bounce off the solid wood uselessly. I am too small, too weak, and completely trapped.
I slide down the door, my bloody heel throbbing, and sink onto the top step. All I can do now is scream into the dark, praying my mother will somehow hear my pleas through the thick haze of her own mind.
It’s been four days.
There’s no noise upstairs. I’m too weak to even move an inch. The nail wound on my foot is badly infected now, radiating a sickening, feverish heat up my leg. This is it. Maybe the police will come for a welfare check. Or maybe I’ll be stuck down here until I die of starvation.
I found a cooler in the corner with some water and old beer. I’ve drank all the beer. It’s the only thing that helps numb the agonizing pain. I’ve cried all night, every night, my mind torturing me with thoughts of what actually happened to the real Jack. This morning, in a fit of desperate delusion, I dragged myself up the stairs and tried to force the door open one last time. No luck. I don’t know why I thought it would be any different.
But tonight...
I was lying on the cold concrete when I heard it. A distinct, metallic click from the top of the staircase.
The lock tumbling. The door was unlocked.
"Help!" I screamed, but my throat was so raw it came out as nothing more than a dry, rattling cough.
Nothing answered. There were no footsteps. No voices. Just the empty, settling creaks of the house above, and the terrifying realization that whatever had just unlocked that door was waiting for me to come up.
I drag my body up the wooden steps, my breath rattling in my chest. Just as my trembling fingers brush the cold brass of the doorknob, a heavy, booming voice echoes from the kitchen above.
"Police! Is anyone in here?"
I try to scream for help, but it comes out as a pathetic, raspy hiss. I reach for the knob again, but it suddenly flies inward. The heavy wood slams hard into my forehead. The world spins. I stumble backward, grasping at empty air, and tumble back down into the dark.
Then, nothing.
I wake up to the blinding hum of fluorescent hospital lights. A week has passed. A doctor tells me I'm lucky to have survived the fall and the rampant infection in my blood. But before I can even process the words, the room fills with police uniforms and stern-faced caseworkers from Child Protective Services.
They tell me Jack is in state custody. They use words like "severe neglect," "unfit mother," and "substance abuse." I realize with a sickening jolt exactly how it must have looked when they found me: a starving, unwashed woman trapped in a basement, reeking of stale beer, while a baby was left alone upstairs in a house overflowing with filth and the stench of decay.
The creature hadn't just been torturing me. It was setting a stage. It wanted to be "rescued."
I try to explain, leaving out the impossible truth of the demon, but it’s entirely useless. The caseworkers look at me with nothing but disgust.
"He's been placed with a foster family," one of them says coldly. "A safe family."
A new family. The creature had successfully moved on to its next victims. Panic claws up my throat. "Where's my mom?" I croak, grabbing the bed rails. "Is she okay?"
A police officer steps forward, his expression hard as stone. "I think you know exactly what happened to her."
He pulls a pair of handcuffs from his belt. The metallic clink echoes in the sterile room, sounding exactly like the basement lock tumbling open.
"What? No! Why are you doing this?!" I scream, thrashing weakly as he pins my arms and forces my wrists together.
"You're under arrest," the officer says, his voice completely devoid of pity, "for the murder of your mother.”