The Baby Killer

Contributed by Rivka Jacobs on 25/09/09

Part 1

Brittany Rollins hopped down the mossy stone stairway of the terraced garden, clutching her old stuffed bunny in one hand and dragging him bumping and bouncing after her. She heard her mother behind her, “Oh isn’t this lovely, Brittany,” and, “I’m so glad we came….”

The girl gasped as she came to the bottom of the descent and saw the meadow filled with primroses, daffodils, and bluebells shimmering before her in the morning sun. She turned to see where her mother was, squinting upward into the light. Strands of her light-brown hair lifted and floated around her face, caught on a breeze.

“Stay where I can see you,” her mother called as if right on cue, still standing higher up on one of the gray-green garden steps. “I’ll be right back. I have to let your father know we’re going for a walk.”

Brittany returned to the vista in front of her. She skipped into the meadow, bending to pluck the florets and tossing these in the air as if she were dancing in some ancient pagan rite of spring. She approached what appeared to be trimmed thickets of waving willows and tangled shrubs speckled with pink and orange blossoms. She could see one section of an uneven wall constructed of layers of weathered, flat, silver stones. A hedgerow of hawthorn, crabapple, and hazel partially overgrew the wall, and extended past it, as if marking the dimensions where the entire enclosure once stood.

The sun felt warm. The air smelled sweet. Brittany distinctly heard the glassy sound of trickling, gurgling water.

Then she heard her mother’s loud, breathless voice several yards behind her, “Honey, I told you not to run ahead of me like that. Slow down. Do not, do not go past that wall, do you hear me … Brittany! Stop!”

The girl slipped through a small opening in the branches and leaves of the hedgerow, and emerged beside a lovely, gently flowing stream. It was as if she had entered another world. The water was translucent emerald and dotted with diamond-like bubbles. Clutches of pure green lily pads drifted on the surface, each one a perfect circle, some of them interwoven, fanning around a central white bloom.

“Look BunBun, isn’t it beautiful?” Brittany exclaimed, shaking her fading and furless once-pink stuffed rabbit and grasping him to her chest. She heard her mother distantly shouting something like, “Stay away from the water,” and “Wait a minute….” She glanced up and held her breath as the sunlight beamed through the upper branches of the oak trees on the opposite bank, and flashed onto the stream, for a moment turning everything a sparkling white-gold.

Brittany squatted down on the grassy edge just above the rippling water. She sat her BunBun beside her. She thought she saw something on the lily pads, and tried to reach for them, but they were too far away. She stood and inched closer to the current, and waded in a step. She peered at the lily pads, and jutted her chin forward in astonishment. She grabbed her hair with one hand, and pulled it back out of the way as she took another step, and then another, the water making her shoes squish, saturating her socks, and then soaking her pink corduroy pants up to her knees.

She looked behind her, “BunBun, you can’t believe what’s here!”

She bent her face closer, and stared at a group of seven pads that were drifting past her. On each one was a baby. A tiny, gray-green, perfectly formed human baby. She slid her left hand into the water, to halt the movement of the lily leaves. The baby closest to her hand was no bigger than her index finger, and it was writhing, jerking it’s arms and legs, it’s pin-prick eyes crinkled up in a furious scream. At the very edge of Brittany’s hearing, like the buzzing of an insect, she could almost recognize the tiny cries.

Reflexively, Brittany scooped up the miniature infant in her right hand. It squirmed and waved its infinitesimal fists and kicked its millimeter-sized feet. Brittany straightened, cupping her hand to keep the baby from falling out. The thing felt slimy and fluttery and cold against her skin, and it frightened her, but she didn’t want to let it go. She began to back away, rearward towards the bank, letting the lily-pad nursery spin and float by. She closed her right hand some more, and grasped her right wrist with her other hand for support as she reached the mud and cord-grass at the margins of the stream. She gazed up and around her … something seemed different. Something had changed. The sunshine was gone. A mist seemed to be spreading from the direction of the oak trees.

“Oh my gosh, Brittany, what are you doing!” came the harsh tone of her mother’s scolding. “Get out of that water at once! Get out of there! What is the matter with you?”

The girl felt frozen in place, her legs unable to move. She tried to turn to face her mother as the latter approached. “Mommy, there are babies in the water,” she said. “There are babies in the water, real little babies….”

“Get out of there now, young lady!” her mother yelled, and gathered the child’s long-sleeve T-shirt, bunching the material in her angry grip, and yanked Brittany backwards and up. The girl felt herself in the air, then landed with a faint thud on her rear end in the grass.

Her mother hovered over her, her hands on her hips, “What did I tell you about going into the water? Why don’t you ever listen to me, Brittany?”

Brittany started to sob. “I want BunBun, where’s BunBun,” she sputtered.

Her mother looked around. “What a dreary place this is,” she said. “It’s bright and cheerful everywhere else, but here it’s all foggy and cold.” She sighed, trying to calm down. She glanced at the water, and thought she saw something moving, darting in a sinuous way like rainbow lightning just under the eddying surface of the stream. Then she noticed Brittany’s raised arms, the folded and locked fingers, the white knuckles, and something dark and bloody dripping down the girl’s right forearm. “What the…. Did you hurt yourself? What is that?”

Brittany opened her eyes wide, her sobs now shaking her entire frame, as she looked at her own arm, then wrist, then her clutching and tight fingers now draining a reddish liquid, and oozing greenish and blue dots of pulsating tissue. She slowly unclenched her fist. Threads of something pink, like miniscule spaghetti, slid down her thumb. She had time to identify the tiny half-smashed head, the traces of brains and severed limbs, the torn torso, before she leaped to her feet. Her high-pitched shrieking echoed around them as her mother grabbed her shoulders. She shook her hand, flinging it up and down, trying to remove the remains. Before her mother could stop her, she fell to her knees and scrambled to the water and submerge her right arm, then splashed and splashed, trying to clean it.

Her mother grasped her under her armpits and yanked her up to standing. “Whatever is the matter with you?” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it again, now several forms slithering under the water. Too big for fish, she thought. Maybe it’s seals.

“Let’s get out of here,” Brittany begged, now tugging her mother and trying to run at the same time. “I killed it.”

Her mother tried to get control of the situation once more, and had her speech about discipline ready as she restrained Brittany, gripping her shoulders, forcing the girl to look into her eyes. But then they both jumped, as a piercing sound slashed the air. A wail, a keening note, like a blast from a broken flute, rose and fell and swirled like a wind around them.

Part 2

Jenna Tregellas turned off the ignition, and sat in her 2008 Ford Focus for a few moments while she peered through her windshield at the front of the cottage. “I am annoyed,” she said aloud, to herself.

She exited the car and slammed the door. She was a successful and respected real estate agent, with an impeccable reputation in the highly competitive rental market of this part of Cornwall that appealed so much to Americans. “It’s Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall,” Jenna muttered.

She straightened her lime-green jacket and smoothed her lime-green skirt as she unlocked the front door of the cottage. She cautiously scanned in all directions. The place was a mess. What else did she expect. The family had disappeared, suddenly, without a word.

“The Rollins family,” she recalled, as her shoes clicked over the hardwood floor of the cozy living room. She checked the fireplace — it had not been used. She shoved an overturned chair cushion out of her way as she advanced to the wood-framed French doors that opened onto the terraced garden. She paused by the 32-inch television sitting on a cart in an alcove opposite the overturned couch; it was on, but set to mute. Jenna bent slightly, pushed the power button.

“What in the world is wrong with these Americans?” she said to the empty room.

She walked to the windows, slid the flowery curtains back and forth on the rods, inspecting the panels. Two of them had long gashes down the center, as if a sharp object had been ripped through.

She stepped out to the patio, the highest level of the garden. She gazed down to the property below, and across to the field, observing the antique hedgerow and the ancient wall and the woods beyond. Philip Rollins, the father, was a college professor, Jenna remembered. He was fascinated by Cornwall, and thrilled to rent a cottage with Iron Age ruins on the premises.

Jenna Tregellas spent the next thirty minutes or so inspecting the rest of the building. The bedrooms were in a sorry state, with lamps, knick-knacks, and furniture broken, tossed, scattered and torn, coated with a layer of feathers and down from the pillows. No trace of the family’s personal belongings remained. It was like they’d decamped in the night, but not before attacking and damaging the place.

“They seemed like such a nice family, too,” she said as she descended the wooden staircase, to look at the kitchen. “The mother … Kaitlin, Kaitlin Rollins, in her mid-thirties. And an adorable little girl. What was her name? Brittany, I think. Five years old, bright, kind of rude to her parents. But what do you expect from the only child of American Academics.”

She almost didn’t want to look at the kitchen. And indeed, when she stuck her head in the doorway, she was shocked enough to withdraw and say, “Oh my.”

This wasn’t the first time a family had disappeared, abandoning the cottage without warning, leaving their $2,900.00 rental deposit, and never heard from again.

Jenna once again exited to the patio, and serenely began climbing down the rough-hewn stone steps to the meadow below, noting that the garden was always left intact, that nothing ever seemed amiss with the grounds, when a family vanished.

“Yes,” she said to the willows and camelias and guelder roses of the hedgerow as she approached. “I’ve never found any disturbance here. I just don’t understand … and now people will talk. Of course they will. We will be accused of doing something to drive the Americans off so we can keep their rent.” She found the narrow passage-way through the hawthorn, hazel, and crabapple, and stepped through, into the natural grotto that had formed around this subsidiary stream of Mawgan Creek. “It’s so peaceful here,” she said. “I really just don’t understand….”

She didn’t want to get too close to the embankment, because of her expensive shoes and stockings, so she darted her eyes here and there, satisfying herself that all was well. She turned, in order to go back to her car, but then abruptly stopped.

“I thought I saw something,” she said to birds and the ferns and the elms. The stream bubbled and murmured, butterflies danced in the shafts of sunshine, the highest boughs of the oaks rustled and undulated. Jenna Tregellas gingerly picked her way closer to the edge of the water, and moved to her left several feet. “There is something there,” she said. She hesitated, because of her clothing, but the need to find some answers to all these mysteries motivated her, and she tiptoed right up to the bank. She lowered herself in a sitting position, just far enough to keep her skirt off the mud and cord-grass, and focused on a button-eye that was looking back at her. She reached out and picked up what looked to be a very worn and bedraggled stuffed animal of some kind. She rose to standing, and held the dirt-caked toy at arm’s length. “Hmm,” she said, turning it a bit by flexing her wrist. “It’s a rabbit, someone’s plush rabbit. By the looks of him, he’s been well used.”

She tried to recall if she’d seen the bunny before, but gave up, feeling depressed and angry at the same time. “What difference does it make,” she sighed, tossing the rabbit into the water. “No one ever reports them missing,. They never call, never ask for their money back. Why provoke trouble?”

Jenna Tregellas primly wiped her palms on her skirt, and began to make her way carefully back to her car, anxious to call in the cleaning crew and get the cottage ready for a new family as soon as possible.