The Babies - by J.M. Faulkner(from Ethereal Nightmares: An Anthology of Twisted Tales)

Welcome to the Dark Holme Reading Circle.Once a month, we’ll share a short horror story and talk about how it lingered, what haunted us, and what stayed in the dark after reading.

Dim the lights, get comfortable, and descend.

The Babies - J.M. Faulkner

Jack dropped from the windowsill, slipped on the bathroom tiles, and caught the sink with his elbow—crack. He sucked in a lungful of brisk air, held it, and waited for the tramping of feet and snap of light switches.

Nothing. A sluggish drip came from the corner shower basin. Jack gave his throbbing elbow a rub and puffed through the hole in his balaclava.

Behind him, the ground-floor window was raised to the top of the frame, the sash panel beside the lock smashed out. A hand reached over the debris glistening on the sill, and Jack lifted Michelle inside.

‘We go straight for the jewellery,’ he said, dragging his snowy boots on a bathmat. The age-old habit of stomping his feet clean before entering a neighbour’s house had kicked in, just beneath his level of acknowledgement.

‘I’m not thick, Jack, you don’t need to repeat yourself. No reason to believe the old lady has much cash lying around.’

‘Old ladies always hoard cash. Don’t trust the banks.’

They edged their way through the hallway in the dark, feeding the cornice of the half-panelled wall through their hands, their shoulders bumping portraits. Once they reached the living room, Jack flicked on the ceiling light.

Michelle bounded back into the hall, avoiding the glow. Her eyes were bright and incredulous in her balaclava. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Relax, Shell, I watched the house for two to three days. Old bird has to be staying with family.’

But could she have slipped in without his noticing? Three weeks on the trot, Thursday through Monday, the doddering homeowner at number 27 had left her sizable, detached house empty. When last Thursday rolled around, Jack had reversed his Fiat 500 into the gloom of an alley nearby and shut off the engine. He wasn’t drumming the steering wheel long before a taxi pulled into 27’s driveway. The routine was playing out as expected, with one exception—

Michelle shook an envelope at him, but it was easy enough to pick out the addressee written on the front: Mrs. Gretchen Jones. 

‘Can’t believe you talked me into this.’ A howl threatened to break through her whisper. The envelope scrunched in her fingers. ‘Imagine Daryl found out his parents were a couple of common crooks. Thieves!’

‘Sorry I didn’t get furloughed, Shell.’ He sighed and massaged his brow with a balled fist. ‘Look, this place is an absolute mansion. We get in, we get out. Whatever we sell will tide us over until I find a job.’ Michelle held his gaze, and Jack added, ‘Don’t think I’m proud of this. We get out and never mention it again.’

Something on the coffee table caught his attention. A bell with a brass head and wooden shaft.

‘Here.’ He walked over and raised the bell high toward the ceiling. Before Michelle could so much as inhale, he snapped his arm straight.

It must have been a six or seven-bedroom house, but at that moment, with the bell clanging inside their skulls, it felt like the building had shrunk to the size of a closet with the two of them locked inside.

The clamour dissipated, and Jack dropped the bell into the plush carpet. He wasn’t in the habit of scaring people, so the thick lipped grin that etched across his mouth took him as much by surprise as it did unease. ‘See, we get out of this unscathed, be the parents that brought the bread home during the downturn.’

‘And what about the guilt of doing it, Jack?’

Despite the unbroken harmony throughout the house following the bell ring, Jack crept upstairs with the lights switched off. Playing the big man while Michelle did an impression of Bambi in headlights was one thing, quite another was leading them into the unknown.

A creak on the landing stifled his step. His eyelids dropped like the blade of a guillotine, the voluntary darkness protecting him from whatever lurked in the involuntary. He shifted and heard the cry of his own stupid foot.

Michelle’s groan on the stairs was soon in his wake. She couldn’t disguise the triumph in her voice. ‘After you.’

 Jack edged one way in the corridor, and Michelle another. He heard the squeak of door hinges and thumping of drawers as she committed to business, room by room, like an old hand.

He found less than three digits in notes and a bunch of costume jewellery in a dresser in the master bedroom. He stuffed his rucksack full. The weight on his back, he thought about Daryl peering up at him from his pushchair, a picture of innocent adoration.

What would Daryl think of them if he ever found out about the burglary? Because that’s what it was, right? Burglary? No, the word had a severity to it that sat uncomfortably. This was a…

Jack sucked his teeth. Why did Michelle have to say that thing about guilt for?

And all this trouble for what? They were three months late on rent and the loot here wouldn’t cover half of it. To tempt Sleepy Steve into babysitting Daryl for an hour tonight, they had surrendered the last supermarket brand pizza in their freezer. They couldn’t peel back their mattress and hand him stashed change because there wasn’t any.

Last week, with the landlord banging on their front window and threatening to make them homeless—Daryl along with them—robbing the old lady felt like the only option. Damn, it felt like the reasonable option.

But the only thing Jack had accomplished was stealing a heavy conscience.

He was thinking he couldn’t let Michelle rattle him, that Daryl hadn’t started teething yet, when he slid open the wardrobe door and spotted the safe.

It squatted in the gloom, a hulking, dusk-green box that stretched the width of the wardrobe and came to his hip. It reminded him more of a treasure chest than a safe, something better discovered buried in sand than in the back of an old lady’s wardrobe. No dial. Floral and decorative feet. A rusted, brass keyhole that winked at him.

Jack pictured himself wrapping Daryl a Hornby train set for Christmas, a gift he wouldn’t feel ashamed of sharing. He’d get a job eventually, and if his colleagues were inclined to ask, he’d say: I bought my Daryl a Hornby train set for under the tree.

Now, if only he had—

‘What’s that?’

He twisted around. Michelle’s silhouette blocked the doorway, pointing to the bedside table. A baby monitor.

Amazingly, she hadn’t noticed the safe.

She crossed the room and examined the screen. ‘Why would an old lady own—’

The screen illuminated in her hands, blinding them both. Jack heard the monitor clatter between her feet, but he didn’t find out why until his sight adjusted.

A baby was beaming into the camera lens.

Neither of them was fond of baby monitors, from an aesthetic point of view. There was something uncanny about seeing your normally pink-skinned child through a night vision filter, like a criminal caught on CCTV. Using one meant they could cuddle up in front of the television of an evening, but they spent as much time staring into the monitor watching for the rise and fall of Daryl’s chest, attentive to the tin quality of his respiration, as they did enjoying themselves.

When their son slept, neither of them had to look hard to imagine the blanket inside the cot looked like the white interior of a coffin.

‘I checked every room,’ Michelle said. ‘I…’

‘Could be connected to where she’s staying. You know, with family.’ Jack swallowed, finding himself too quick to supply an answer. Unless her relatives lived next door, wouldn’t the signal have been too far away?

Whatever. What mattered now was finding the key to that safe.

‘Right. Yeah.’ She put the monitor down carefully, like doing otherwise might have disturbed the baby. ‘You can connect anywhere with the internet these days.’

‘Totally… Here, guess what I fou—’

 ‘Look, a tablet.’

 Caught off guard by the baby monitor and mesmerised by the safe, Jack had forgotten why they were here. Torches, lockpicks, tools—they didn’t have any of that. They had come with a camping rucksack, winter gloves, and hats they could roll down their faces with eye level circles cut out the front. This was strictly a smash n grab crime, not professional. A one-off.

But for a moment there, Jack had fallen into the illusion they were bank robbers on a heist, Bonnie and Clyde with a safe to bust. Picking up a tablet, though, that was the kind of light-fingered tomfoolery on par with his experience level.

‘Nice catch. Let’s bag it and get out.’

Michelle crawled across the foot of the mattress. She swooped up the tablet on the second bedside table, and Jack unzipped the rucksack, ready.

The tablet lit up in her hands. She stiffened, gasped in the dark.

‘What? Shell?’

A stifled sounding squeak escaped her throat.

When Jack was a child, his mother used to read to him until he drifted to sleep. If that failed, or if she couldn’t stay any longer because of a planned phone call with Aunt Mary Jane, he resisted sleep with the utmost intensity. A navy bathrobe hung from the bedroom door hanger, slack and completely still. In the dark, though, when the door was shut and the curtains were closed, the thing looked positively alive. The edges blurred and snaked. Jack would squint into the foggy corner, trying to chase the illusion away before it became a nightmare, and would discover it was really a bathrobe after all. Lifeless again until his eyelids came over heavy.

Michelle reminded him of that bathrobe, stirring at the edges while at the same time being completely inanimate. But if he could focus enough, squint, then maybe he would be able to make head and tail of her, see her take a breath.

‘Shell?’ Sweat broke out on his forehead. ‘Say something.’

Her eyes shone like torches on the screen.

‘Dammit, Michelle. Shell!’

Her lips fluttered, carrying out a voiceless conversation.

‘Do I have to come over there?’

‘It’s dead.’ It came out muffled. Her mouth sounded wet and trembly. ‘Purple skin, bulging eyes—Jack, it’s looking right at me.’

He made his way around the bed and slapped the tablet out of her hands. It padded on the duvet. ‘Don’t be stupid. Let’s get…’

He saw it.

‘C-can’t be real.’ His tongue lumped up in his throat. The baby was leering right into the camera, right at him. Utterly lifeless. ‘It’s fake.’

She started reaching down, and Jack wanted to launch the device across the room, but he found he could neither move nor speak under the baby’s glare. Something otherworldly held him in a ridged tangle.

‘Could be a static image,’ Michelle said, turning it over in her hands. ‘A picture. Do you think so, Jack? It could be a picture, right?’

‘What’s that?’

A crude message was scratched into the tablet’s back, as if by the point of a knitting needle through the plastic. It ran straight through the logo:

Don’t upset the babies.

The tablet slipped through Michelle’s fingers. She tried to catch it with her knee, but that only made things worse. It cartwheeled over her prying arms and whacked something in the corner of the room, hard.

And at that moment the ceiling light in the corridor snapped on and poured into the master bedroom at their feet.

Both retreated a step.

‘Jack, what the hell? Get me out of here. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to do this.’

He pinned a forefinger to his lips and shushed her, gently patted her arm. He hadn’t heard the front door open, nor was there any sound coming from the staircase. No keys jangling or scraping shoes.

‘Stay here. I need to check it out.’

A cinch from Michelle’s fingers on his underarm prevented his escape.

‘No, no, that’s how morons get…’ She appeared to be searching for the right word, and settled on, ‘in trouble.’

Trouble? He had staked out the house for days and not so much as a curtain had stirred within. A leaflet flapped in the letterbox, no one signed for the parcel that came and went back to the van, and no doting neighbours popped by to water old Gretchen’s houseplants. If ever there was a friendless hermit, Monday through Thursday she holed up in number 27. From the moment she went doddering down the path, the house had been empty. Jack was certain of it.

But he couldn’t help but recall the gust that stopped her short of the taxi’s passenger door, as though to whisper, you’ve forgotten your purse. Leaves barrelled and scraped over the asphalt. The hem of her shawl buffeted a shadow on her face.

She locked eyes with Jack through the Fiat’s windshield.

Then she was in the taxi and out of sight.

‘We’ll be fine,’ he told Michelle, although the hair on his neck pricked up, remembering how his trainers had been propped up on the dashboard, and how the old woman had taken the wind out of him—but she couldn’t have seen him. The alleyway had been as black as Hades that night. ‘She’s not due back until tomorrow evening.’

‘And if you’re wrong?’

He broke away from her and stuck his neck out the door, first left and then right. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary, except for an opulence that struck him as Victorian. Oak coloured wainscotting occupied the lower portion of the walls from the landing, down the staircase and through to the lobby visible through the banister.

Perhaps his mistake was scanning for a shawled, crone-like figure. A nose bulbous with rosacea.

 Only after he gave up searching for her did he realise the chandelier suspended from the ceiling hung like a black cobweb. Not a glimmer of light burned in its crystals. What’s more, the picture frames cramming the walls were empty. No, not empty. They were occupied with flat, reflective screens.

Baby monitors covered every inch of wall space, obscuring the sallow wallpaper peaking beneath. Feeling their way through the dark earlier, they had been unwittingly bumping and touching them.

Now they bleached the lobby and landing in light.

Jack rubbed his sweating, dirty palms on his jeans.

Michelle was pleading with him from the bedroom, but he couldn’t make out a word. Whether she was whispering, or if he had compartmentalised and mentally packaged her away somewhere, he couldn’t tell.

There was a knotty, sangria coloured smear about a foot wide in the cream carpet runner. It stretched the length of the entire landing.

Michelle’s fingers bit into his underarm. ‘Anyone there?’

He returned a weak shake of his head, not really seeing anything but the spectacle before them. The monitors hadn’t turned themselves on, that was for sure.

She pushed into the doorway so that they shared the frame and peered around, and Jack deferred completely to her reaction. Her eyes were slits, looking for a figure lurking in a corner somewhere, as he had been. When she stepped into the light, Jack determined to delegate all responsibility to her. If she couldn’t see anything, then neither could he.

The ground appeared to drop beneath her; such was the force that launched her into the wall beside him. A monitor fell loose and tumbled onto the carpet runner. It came to a standstill and switched on, a forked split in the screen illuminating like a bolt of lightning.

A baby peered up at them through the cracks.

One by one, the monitors pulsed an electric white, racing toward them.

Michelle retreated into the doorway. ‘What the fuck?’ Her chest was heaving up, up, down; up, up, down. She clutched at her heart. ‘They’re everywhere. Jack? Jack—’

‘Shhh.’ He caught her lapel and pressed her into the door frame, resisting the urge to clap a hand over her mouth. ‘Let’s not freak out, eh? We go straight down those stairs, slowly, and out the way we came in. With me?’

‘… Can’t.’

‘Only thing scarier than going out there is staying put.’

She closed her eyes, apparently clearing her head, and Jack smoothed her lapel with a feathery touch. His bid to keep her quiet had been rougher than intended, but she accepted his tactile apology without complaint, if she was conscious of it at all.

‘Right.’ Michelle exhaled through her nostrils. She peered into the landing through the doorway, where the house made not so much as a creak. ‘Slowly. Right. But don’t let go of my hand. Slow.’

Attached, they stepped over the stained runner and edged their way to the head of the staircase, where they paused to look over the handrail.

The front door—

Closed.

Shoes—

Neatly lined up.

The rug—

Spotless, without snow.

Jack puffed through his lips. If Gretchen had caught them red-handed, he didn’t know what they would have done. But he couldn’t have brought himself to hurt her. He knew that much.

Michelle squeezed his hand.

Softly, she said, ‘The babies are watching.’

‘I know.’

‘Some of them are blue, Jack. They’re…’

‘I know.’ He didn’t look up—he didn’t need to. He could feel their gaze pouring over him like cold milk down the back of his shirt. ‘Ready?’

He took a step, and the topmost stair groaned. A thousand eyes were on him, and he found himself thinking, don’t upset the babies.

‘J-Jack…’ Her fingers were wire in his palm, grounding his jitters. He could be brave for her, if not himself. ‘That blood on the c-carpet runner?’

‘Ask me later,’ he whispered.

When they reached the ground floor, the winter air leaking through the broken bathroom window stretched out to greet them. It took everything Jack had to keep from bolting. Every shadow had the potential to explode into a shrieking hag.

The old homeowner—Gretchen—had seemed short sighted, wooden, and arthritic in her movements. Vulnerable. But not now.

In the living room the bell remained on the carpet, skirt facing up, clapper poking out like a tongue. Jack doubled over and inhaled a whooping, bellyful of breath. Stress left his lungs in a quivering rush.

Michelle nudged him, her eyes kinetic with urgency.

Jack gave a tired shake of his head. ‘Minute. There’s no monitors.’ He pointed around the room in an arc. He couldn’t catch his breath, so inhaled sharply through his nostrils and let it all out. ‘If we can make noise anywhere, it’s here.’

‘You sure?’

‘Rang that bell, didn’t I?’

‘But what about Steve?’ she creaked. ‘We said we’d be back in an hour, tops. Uh-uh, he told us he ain’t a babysitter, Jack.’

‘Relax, Sleepy ain’t selfish. Daryl’s good until we get back,’ he panted. ‘Moment. Please.’

Once Jack had composed himself, Michelle insisted they move on, having gathered some of the courage Jack had burned through. They crept through the hall while keeping a shoulder width’s distance from the walls on either side. A frigid breeze rushed from the bathroom ahead, and the sweat festering beneath Jack’s clothes nipped at his skin.

In the kitchen next to the bathroom Jack saw a key rack above an unwashed pile of frying pans. Burned oil and animal fat mingled with the cold. On the left was a set of twinkling yale keys; to the right, a thick skeleton type key—something for a garden gate or chest, with an off green colour and several rust gold keychains. All of them bells.

And then Jack felt a tug on his arm. Michelle led him into the bathroom. The glacial air made him shiver, set his nose to trickling on his upper lip.

‘Careful,’ she said, ‘the floor’s wet from our boots.’ She swiped the glass debris from the sill, and it sprinkled and clinked on the floor. She mounted the sill, tottered, and landed outside with a soft pluff in the snow.

She scrubbed her coat down, then held out her arms to catch the rucksack.

But Jack didn’t budge. Her face grew blurry and distant. The key in the kitchen, that thing was big enough to be a paperweight. It had to be for the safe.

‘Jack?’

‘We went through all this trouble for nothing.’

‘What?’

‘So, we pay our bills for another month, whoopee. Before we know it, the landlord is sticking his nose through the letterbox while we cringe behind the sofa again, playing like we’re not at home.’

‘Fuck money. Daryl is waiting for us. Come home.’

He dropped his chin and gripped the window frame. ‘I can’t.’

Michelle was speechless, open-mouthed. A copper skinned innocent with a snowy backdrop. He should have kept the burglary to himself.

‘Sorry I talked you into this.’

Jack shoved away from the window, and a half-scream, half-whisper chased him inside. Gritting his teeth, he hurried into the kitchen, distancing himself from his inner voice crying, The kitchen door hadn’t been open when you came in. No bother, he yanked the jingling key from the rack and came to a halt in the living room.

The bell in the carpet. Brass body, wooden handle.

Some part of his brain said, Dinner bell. Then it adopted his mother’s lethargic tones: You can’t have the Hornby train set—put that down. You’re greedy, Jacky, that’s your problem. Oh, it’s fine now while Mother’s minding your pennies. But you wait until you’re all grow’d up like me. Greed will get the better of you, and you’ll be sorry you ever asked me for a Hornby train set.

Ahead, the hallway’s baby monitors emitted a radiant path. The hair on Jack’s neck pricked up. He thought, Last chance.

He put his head down and strode into the glow. The monitors at his flanks blinked in recognition, the babies tracking his disturbance with beady, vacant eyes.

The foot of the staircase came into view. December air from the bathroom followed and stirred up the adrenalin coursing through his veins. It proved impossible to suppress the vibrations that whipped at his solar plexus, shortened his breath.

Growing up, his mother never had enough money, either. He suspected meth and marijuana were the problem, because sometimes when she ducked behind the sofa, the landlord’s silhouette was visible through the curtain. Other times it was a branch from a maple at the end of the driveway.

And despite what his mother said, he didn’t have an Aunt Mary Jane.

Jack didn’t want that future for Daryl, one tainted by poverty, paranoia and uncompassionate landlords.

The cycle had to break.

Like ripping a band-aid off, he thought, as he spread his weight on the first step. A third step followed a second, and up and up he climbed. He kept on walking and walking…

And walking?

He peered up from the wainscoting. The staircase—an obtusely lit tunnel—stretched ahead of him. He had ascended all of three steps.

Floaters flickered in his field of vision, and he came over dizzy. He pounded for the top, but the landing fled from him. The stair runner strung out like a piece of gum, and he felt himself becoming unmoored from the ground, tumbling freefall towards the ceiling.

His boot snagged the lip of the top step. The wood groaned and Jack caught the handrail, both feet striking solid ground.

Somewhere, a baby chuckled. His bladder twinged.

Outside the master bedroom, he bent at the waist and sucked in a breath. His mind was unravelling. Sure, the baby monitors could have been an elaborate setup, a prank, but not what he experienced on the stairs.

A figure tramped across the lobby, visible through the banister.

Jack’s eyelids vaulted open. He planted his fist in the carpet to keep from passing out. Heart lurching, he ducked into the master bedroom, put an ear to the wooden door, and pushed until he heard a quiet click. His legs gave out and he slumped into the wall.

The figure’s build was too slight to be Michelle—Michelle hadn’t been able to climb through the window without his help, ruling her out. Which left who, exactly? His imagination, of course. How else could he have floated upstairs? How else could reality contort the stair runner like superheated plastic?

Fear, plain and simple. Without Michelle to protect he was a coward, because in reality she was his anchor. He was nothing before they met, and he was nothing without her now.

He kneeled in front of the safe and retrieved the key from his pocket. Same design, all right, but he fought to penetrate the lock. The bell keychains jingle jangled. Testing left and right, eventually the safe door audibly popped and yawned under its own weight.

Not a penny in sight. The safe was empty except for a propped-up baby monitor, a glowing supernova in the black of space.

Little Daryl was reading his father with round, curious eyes. He cooed and kicked his feet, one bare and without a sock.

Behind Daryl, a shadow loomed in an inky corner by the wardrobe, just in the periphery of view.

Jack’s diaphragm kicked for oxygen—no luck. When he took a breath, a sensation not unlike a pair of fists reached inside him, kneaded around, and groped his lungs. He pulled the balaclava from his head and wiped the snot collecting on his upper lip with it.

‘Steven?’

He squinted into the monitor, trying to form a face out of the jet-black background. The shadow was too short to be his friend, far too reminiscent of the figure that had tramped across the lobby moments earlier—and why couldn’t it be the same figure?

No, that was his mother’s paranoia talking.

But if the staircase could transform seamlessly under his boots, then why couldn’t the entity in the lobby and Daryl’s bedroom be one and the same, jumping between locations just to taunt him?

… To punish him.

The entity trod stiffly toward the cot. The floor creaked, and Daryl craned his neck, perhaps thinking his mother had come to feed him.

The darkness inside the room created a fuzzy illusion not unlike the bathrobe from Jack’s childhood. The entity’s arms hung low at its knees, were as thin as broom handles and finished with a bristle of claws.

Daryl sniffled.

‘Stop.’ Jack whacked the safe.

The key and spiralling keychains vaulted from his grip and splashed on the wooden floor by his knee.

The baby monitors in the hallway fluttered white hot rays, but Jack hardly noticed. He gnawed the inside of his cheek and tasted blood.

Daryl let out a bray and turned back to the camera. A tear ballooned from the corner of one eye.

Jack took the monitor in hand, stood, and screamed Daryl’s name at the top of his lungs.

The baby monitors around the house emitted a speaker breaking shrill. Jack cupped his ears and shrank to his knees. Gritting his teeth, he attempted to oust the hiss from his brain with a wail of his own. The volume surged to a zenith, scratched, and cut off.

The intruder in Daryl’s bedroom evaporated into the floor. Everything fell into a profound quiet.

Jack panted and wiped his leaky nose. He wiped the fringe and damp stuck to his forehead. In the monitor between his feet, Daryl stuck out a trembling bottom lip.

And although his son couldn’t see or hear him, Jack crouched and found himself speaking in soothing tones:

 ‘It’s okay, Daryl. When you’re poor… You know, I got greedy. I shouldn’t have. But Daddy’s here now. There you go, deep breaths. Good boy. Gooood boy.’

Michelle burst through Daryl’s bedroom door and swooped him into her arms. Sleepy Steve came blundering behind, doubling over to breathe. Jack took the monitor in hand; he couldn’t help but weep.

The mattress squeaked behind him. A spring. Something shuffled out of bed and two feet, one after the other, nailed the bedside rug.

 Jack stiffened. His tongue engorged in his throat. He knew the voice was coming before he heard it, before the knife-like bristles lay on his shoulders, before the breath disturbed the hair on his crown—a whisper burning with hostility:

‘You upset the babies.’

🩸 Let’s discuss (no critique, just reader reactions):

• Did you sympathise with Jack, or did he cross a line when he went back for the safe?

• Which image or moment is going to stick with you the longest?

• What do you think the babies really are—and why were they watching?

• Would you read a full book set in this world, or does it work best as a short story?

• Hot take: would you have gone back for the safe? Be honest.