The child fought with renewed fury.
It was not weak like a human infant. It had weighed almost eleven
pounds at birth, and it had gained, phenomenally, more than twelve
pounds in the past six weeks. Almost twenty-three pounds now. And no
fat. Just muscle. A hard, sinewy, gristly infant, like a young
gorilla. It was as strong and energetic as the six-month-old
chimpanzee that performed in one of the carnival’s more popular
sideshows.
The bassinet toppled with a crash, and Ellen stumbled over it.
She fell. With the child. It was close against her now. No longer
safely at arm’s reach. It was on top of her. Gurgling. Snarling.
Its taloned feet found purchase on her hips, and it tried to tear
through the heavy denim jeans she was wearing.
“No!” she shouted.
A thought snapped through her mind: I’ve got to wake up!
But she knew she was already awake.
The thing continued to hold her right arm, its nails hooked in her
flesh, but it let go of her left arm. In the blackness she sensed the
hooked claw reaching for her throat, her vulnerable jugular vein. She
turned her head aside. The small yet incredibly long-fingered, deadly
hand brushed past her throat, barely missing her.
She rolled, and then the child-thing was on the bottom.
Whimpering, teetering on the wire of hysteria, she tore her right arm
loose of the creature’s steely grip, at the expense of new pain, and
she felt for its arms in the darkness, found its wrists, held its hands
away from her face.
The thing kicked at her stomach again, but she avoided its short,
powerful legs. She managed to put one of her knees on its chest,
pinning it.
She bore down on it with all of her weight, the creature’s ribs and
breastbone gave way beneath her. She heard something crack inside the
thing.
It wailed like a banshee. Ellen knew, at last, that she had a chance
to survive. There was a sickening crunch, a wet sound, a horrible
mashing, squashing, and all the fight went out of her adversary. Its
arms went slack and stopped trying to resist her. The creature
abruptly fell silent, limp.
Ellen was afraid to take her knee off its chest. She was certain that
it was faking death. If she shifted her weight, if she gave it the
slightest opening, the thing would move as fast as a snake, strike at
her throat, and then disembowel her with its spiky feet.
Seconds passed.
Then minutes.
In the darkness she began an urgent, whispered prayer: “Jesus, help
me.
Saint Elena, my patron saint, plead for me. Mary, Mother of God, hear
me, help me.
Please, please, please. Mary, help me, Mary, please . . .”
The electric power was restored, and Ellen cried out at the unexpected
light.
Under her, on its back, blood still running from its nostrils and its
mouth, the child-thing stared up at her with glistening, bulging,
bloodshot eyes. But it couldn’t see her. It was looking into another
world, into Hell, to which she had dispatched its soul–if it had a
soul.
There was a lot of blood. Most of it wasn’t Ellen’s.
She released the child-thing.
It didn’t return magically to life, as she had half expected it
would.
It didn’t attack.
It looked like a huge, squashed bug.
She crawled away from the corpse, keeping one eye on it as she went,
not entirely convinced that it was dead. She did not have sufficient
strength to stand up just yet. She crept to the nearest wall and sat
with her back against it.
The night air was heavy with the coppery odor of blood, the stench of
her own sweat, and the clean ozone of the thunderstorm.
Gradually, Ellen’s stentorian breathing subsided to a soft, rhythmic
lullaby of inhalation, exhalation, inhalation . . .
As her fear dwindled along with the steady deceleration of her
heartbeat, she became increasingly aware of her pains, there was a
multitude of them. She ached in every joint and every muscle from the
strain of wrestling with the child. Her left thumb was bleeding where
the nail had been ripped off, the exposed flesh stung as if it were