Kill it!
The Bible said, Thou shalt not kill. Murder was a sin. If she
strangled the baby, she would rot in Hell. A series of cruel images
flickered through her mind, visions of a Hell that her mother had
painted for her during thousands of lectures about the terrible
consequences of sin: grinning demons tearing ragged gobbets of flesh
from living, screaming women, their leathery black lips slick with
human blood, white-hot fire searing the bodies of sinners, pale worms
feeding off still-conscious dead men, agonized people writhing
painfully in mounds of indescribably horrible filth. Ellen was not a
practicing Catholic, but that did not mean that she was no longer a
Catholic in her heart. Years of daily Mass and nightly prayer,
nineteen interminable years of Gina’s mad sermons and stern admonitions
could not be sloughed off and forgotten easily. Ellen still believed
wholeheartedly in God, Heaven, and Hell. The Bible’s warnings
continued to hold value and meaning for her. Thou shalt not kill.
But surely, she argued with herself, that commandment did not apply to
animals. You were permitted to kill animals, that was not a mortal
sin. And this thing in the bassinet was just an animal, a beast, a
monster. It was not a human being. Therefore, if she destroyed it,
that act of destruction would not seal the fate of her immortal soul.
On the other hand, how could she be certain that it wasn’t human?
It had been born of man and woman. There couldn’t be any more
fundamental criterion for humanity than that one. The child was a
mutant, but it was a human mutant.
Her dilemma seemed insoluble.
In the bassinet, the small, swarthy creature raised one hand, reaching
toward Ellen. It wasn’t a hand, really. It was a claw. The long,
bony fingers were much too large to be those of a sixweek-old infant,
even though this baby was big for its age, like an animal’s paws, the
hands of this little beast were out of proportion to the rest of it. A
sparse, black fur covered the backs of its hands and bristled more
densely around its knuckles. Amber light glinted off the sharp edges
of the pointed fingernails. The child raked the air, but it was unable
to reach Ellen.
She couldn’t understand how such a thing could have come from her. How
could it possibly exist? She knew there were such things as freaks.
Some of them worked in a sideshow in this very carnival.
Bizarre-looking people. But not like this. None of them was half as
weird as this thing that she had nurtured in her womb. Why had this
happened? Why?
Killing the child would be an act of mercy. After all, it would never
be able to enjoy a normal life. It would always be a freak, an object
of shame, ridicule, and derision. Its days would be unrelievedly
stark, bitter, lonely.
Even the tamest and most ordinary pleasures would be denied it, and it
would have no chance of attaining happiness.
Furthermore, if she were forced to spend her life tending to this
creature, she wouldn’t find any happiness of her own. The prospect of
raising this grotesque child filled her with despair. Murdering it
would be an act of mercy benefitting both herself and the pitiful yet
frightening mutant now glaring at her from the bassinet.
But the Roman Catholic Church did not condone mercy killing. Even the
highest motives would not save her from Hell. And she knew that her
motives were not pure, ridding herself of this burden was, in part, a
selfish act.
The creature continued to stare at her, and she had the unsettling
feeling that its strange eyes were not merely looking at her but
through her, into her mind and soul, past all pretension. It knew what
she was contemplating, and it hated her for that.
Its pale, speckled tongue slowly licked its dark, dark lips.
It hissed defiantly at her.
Whether or not this thing was human, whether or not killing it would be
a sin, she knew that it was evil. It was not simply a deformed baby.
It was something else. Something worse. It was dangerous, both less