conviction

“Mom-my,” the girl said, trilling the second syllable in a sing-song tone that belied an incoming request. “May I have more noodles please?”

As she awaited a response, the girl hung her head to the side impishly and broke into a wide-mouthed grin, her eyes narrowing into slits as neat and narrow as stab wounds.

The woman, who was seated opposite the girl, across a rusted, folding aluminium dining table, nodded gravely in response but did not speak. Instead, she leaned forward in her chair and forked a heap of steaming spaghetti onto the girl’s empty plate from a covered bowl on the table. She smiled as she did so, but it was a smile as hollow and vacant as a looted grave; a smile akin to the dull vacuity that sucked the vibrancy from her pale green eyes. Eyes which seemed to float in their very sockets, peering as they did from out a shrunken, wizened face that gave the appearance of rapid and premature age.

Although the kitchen was quite warm and comfortable, the woman felt a shiver clutch her in its icy grip as she watched the girl ravenously set upon the food she had scooped onto the plate. The woman’s entire body began to quiver in disgust. She turned herself away from the girl as much as she could in an attempt to disguise her discomfort, even as she was fully aware of the futility of the action, conscious that the child observed her every move. But the woman dared not divert her eyes entirely, not with the girl watching, so she resisted the desire to look away, even as she felt gooseflesh beginning to rise on the backs of her arms. The woman pulled the sleeves of her sweater down as far as they could reach to conceal her pimpling skin, sealing each one from within by grabbing an end portion of sleeve in each hand.

The girl slurped an especially long noodle with an animated sucking sound and giggled to herself as she watched it wriggle its way towards her eager lips. With a satisfied smack, she swallowed it down and loosed a belch that reverberated in the confined kitchen. When a discomforting silence descended yet again, the girl broke it by beating an irregular rhythm against the edge of the table with her fingertips while she continued to shovel steaming strings of spaghetti into her mouth.

“Amy!—” the woman snapped abruptly after watching in silent horror for almost a minute. After a brief pause, she added in a softer tone, “Quiet please. Quiet, my love. Quiet now, just like Mummy taught you, remember?”

The girl ceased drumming immediately, but she also stopped eating, and the look of good humour that had previously occupied her face quickly drained from it, like bathwater let out of a tub. The girl simply sat and stared at the woman until the woman became more afraid of holding the girl’s gaze than of looking away, and she finally diverted her eyes to a bare patch of wall above the refrigerator.

They sat in silence across the table like that for sometime—the woman, staring off into empty space; the girl, watching—until the girl got bored and scraped her fork discordantly against the surface of her plate in mockery of the gloomy silence that had descended over them.

Then the girl collected her plate and utensils, and skipped over to the kitchen counter where she placed her dirty dishes next to the sink to be washed.

Without turning around to face the girl, who lingered at the counter, staring in mute intensity, the woman dismissed the child to run along and play. The girl tore out of the room without a second glance, giggling gleefully as she went. The echoes of her laughter filtered down to the woman, who remained seated at the table in the kitchen, causing her to shake involuntarily once again.

Hoping to suppress her tempestuous thoughts, the woman rose from her seat, went over to the sink, and set about washing the dishes; but her mind was a million miles away from her spartan kitchen, with its mouse-infested walls and linoleum-covered floors, where she absentmindedly rubbed a worn out washcloth against faded silverware and worn-out porcelain. Not even the dank aroma of mildew could ground her as she scrubbed each dish with mechanical disinterest. Though she looked out the window above the sink, she saw nothing of the outside world. For she was hopelessly lost in a daze of mental anguish, puzzling over what to do about the conviction that had lately settled itself into her heart, a conviction she could not shake no matter how terrifying or incomprehensible it was.

The woman’s conviction was that the girl was not her child—and she had recently even begun to suspect that, whatever it was, it wasn’t human either. It was true that when the girl laughed, the woman heard her daughter’s voice. And when the girl called out, or spoke to her, the effect was the same; the girl even trilled the second syllable of “Mommy,” just as her daughter, Amy, had always done when she had wanted something really badly. Whatever it was, it was a flawless mimic. It knew to sit in Amy’s seat at the dinner table, in the same chair the woman had helped decorate with stickers of safari animals; it always wore Amy’s favourite clothes; and it even slept on the same side of the bed as she; but the… thing… that had run out of the kitchen and up to Amy’s room was not her daughter. Of that, she was convinced.

On several prior occasions, the woman had even been able to penetrate the-thing-that-was-not-Amy’s facade—but only when she had glimpsed it sidelong, as from the corner of her eye. The effect was akin to that of an optical illusion. Whenever she looked directly at the girl, she failed to note even the slightest error in the facsimile. But when she crooked her neck just so, and caught the perfect angle, in the perfect light… well, then she seemed to be able to steal a glance of its true form. And what she saw in those momentary flashes filled her with rage, fear, dread, and anguish. A form and visage so awful, that she knew the mere memory of it would plague her for the rest of her days: a rotten, fiendish, fetid, bestial amalgamation of slime and sinew, teeth and hair.

“Ouch—shit!” the woman exclaimed, her reverie broken by a brief stab of pain and the sight of fresh blood on the tip of her right index finger. She popped the finger into her mouth and the metallic, sweet and sour taste of blood immediately besieged her tastebuds as she gazed out the window above the sink onto the dark, empty street below. She reasoned that she must have cut herself on a jagged piece of porcelain, and was about to check the sink for evidence, when a voice suddenly startled her from behind.

“That looks like it hurts,” the voice said. And the voice sounded, to the woman’s ears at least, impossibly, uncannily decrepit and distant. As if it had reached her from some bygone age. The last, dying echo in a hopelessly cobwebbed catacomb.

Then, at a volume that was barely audible, the voice spoke again: “You must miss her terribly.”

“Wha—?!”

The mangled utterance burst forth from the woman’s lips like a curse. She felt a lightning bolt of panic run up her spine that electrified every muscle and joint in her body, assaulting her already overburdened brain with the sensation of being pricked all over with pins and needles. Her ears rang and her vision clouded over. In her mind’s eye, the woman pictured the-thing-that-was-not-Amy lurking behind her in its real shape: all limbs and teeth and spit and unquenchable hunger. But when she whirled around to face it, her eyes as wide as tractor’s wheels, she didn’t see an unnameable monstrosity, just a little girl who looked exactly like her daughter, standing erectly at the foot of the stairs one room over, gazing in her direction with a bemused look on her face.

“Wh-What… did you just… say… ?” The woman eventually managed to ask, stammering out the words as if they felt awkward and unfamiliar on her tongue.

“Oh, nothing,” the girl said, and when she spoke, the woman heard nothing but Amy’s beautiful, sweet voice. “I just wanted to say, ‘Thank you for dinner, Mommy.’ It was soooo nice of you to make my favourite. Again.” And with that, she disappeared back up the stairs again, and the woman was left alone with the echoes of her laughter as she raced back to Amy’s room and slammed the door closed.

A silence as heavy and pregnant with meaning as a granite obelisk descended over the house then. All was quiet, but for the barking of a dog outside and the omnipresent hum of the refrigerator in the corner.

The woman felt another shiver assume control of her body, but her mental world was already thoroughly shaken. Because she had somehow forgotten, and the-thing-that-was-not-Amy had just reminded her, that her daughter had hated spaghetti. She had always said that the long noodles had made her feel as if she had a bunch of skinny worms trying to crawl down her throat. And yet the woman had just made spaghetti for dinner for the ninth day in a row. The realization struck her with the force of a physical blow, knocking the wind from her lungs and causing her to reach out a shaky hand to steady herself against the kitchen counter.

Waves of nausea wracked the woman and she could hear her stomach grumbling and growling as if she had just eaten a cheeseburger after a three day fast. She was belatedly grateful that she had eaten only a few scant bites of food all day. Had her stomach contained anything to eject, she had no doubt she would have eventually lost the battle to keep it down. As it was, the acidic, noxious taste of bile in her mouth caused her to spit into the sink as her stomach continued to perform gymnastic manoeuvres that left her feeling like her insides were tied up in knots.

Once she had somewhat regained control of herself, the woman walked unsteadily over to a drawer at the opposite end of the counter and pulled it open. She didn’t reach into the drawer to grab anything; she just stooped over it and peered inside. She gazed into that open drawer for hours, long after a crescent moon had risen high in the sky overhead like a dagger poised to strike and the girl had put herself to bed.

As soft moonlight fell through the window over the sink, bathing her in resplendent silver, the woman continued to stare intently into the open drawer, as if she hoped to find her missing daughter in its shadowy depths. She hardly moved a muscle.

The arrival of morning found her still standing over that same open drawer. When the first rays of sunlight began to break and spill over the horizon, glinting off the objects buried in it, the woman realized she would have to make a decision soon, before she heard the pitter patter of little feet overhead. Before the girl could catch her in her indecision, so completely unhinged as to be seriously deliberating between the inconceivable and the unimaginable… Finally, she reached out a hand, tentatively, towards the open drawer, but still she did not reach inside. Sunlight now streamed through the window over the sink and it bathed the back of her hand in gold. Its warmth reminded her of life and love and the liberation she had once felt.

Just then, a voice from behind her uttered three words, a voice that sounded like rusty blades and broken bones: “Mom-my, I’m hungry…”

The woman nodded her head slowly in response, her hand still trembling over the open drawer…