Lilith
by Larry LeedsIt was an evil night in an evil place. The moon's reflection mocked the shadowy trade where night merchants in dark alleys dealt what day commerce would not. From this shadow or that came ugly laughter and uglier covenants; dollar or dagger answered questions of ownership.
Lilith was going to be late. Her new husband would be worried - perhaps angry. She chanced a different path, one seldom used by day and never at night, not by respectable folk. As the unfamiliar street stretched on, the air grew cold and dense; her vision short. Fear tickled her youthful heart, but she pressed forward, anxious to be with her new husband.
She was about to return to a common road, when a stranger appeared before her, as noiseless and colorless as the palled air around him. Who was there to tell her to run - to flee with all the strength of her young legs - and not look back?
He smiled and reached out to her. Dark eyes, darker desires, drew her to him.
Inexorably, his will became her will; her life became his. The kiss, the bite, the intrusion, all became a nightmare of bliss. It was a thing of which she would never speak. After all, what harm could come from a single infidelity of an otherwise pure woman in this small town called Hawthorne?
A husband, soon-to-be new father, paced outside the bedroom while behind closed doors a midwife tended to his young wife.
Lips dry, eyes red with fatigue, he continually combed his thick hair with worried hands. She was a month past due and delivery was already in its tenth hour. He feared for her life.
Damn the baby if it brought her harm, he thought - then quickly groaned a miserable repentance.
His wife's father and three brothers loitered outside, laughing at the tales of their own wives' birthings. They were men of Hawthorne, and whiskey flowed among them.
The husband softly locked the front door to secure against their intrusion, then knocked lightly on the bedroom door. The midwife, her kerchief wilted around her beefy, red face, cracked it open. Her voice was apologetic and worn. "She's comin' around, Sir. Shouldn't be long now." His wife cried out his name; the midwife closed the door against his efforts to see.
The husband dropped his forehead against the frame and forced himself to thoughts of picnics and ponies, the best schools - a strapping son who would carry his name or a beautiful daughter who would steal his heart. He thought all the good thoughts that can be thought in a moment of anguish and doubt; could eternity be this long?
All at once there came a tormented scream so piercing, that it silenced the ugly laughter in the ugly passageways of this ugly little town. A cloak of fear fell like a pall over every soul-bearing creature foolishly awake. The husband's thoughts of bliss turned to death and funeration.
It was not the scream of new life being painfully delivered. This cry cursed the very sanctity of life in tones of unassailable horror.
More than one unsober malefactor would come to swear that at the exact same time, the moon turned away, briefly plunging its domain into utter darkness.
In the bedroom, the midwife swooned, leaving the first-time mother to fend for her sanity, to watch the miracle of life, the product of her body, chew through its own umbilical cord and devour the blood-soaked afterbirth that lay beside it. The child - gorged and swollen - turned to its mother, smiled and cooed. Blood dripped from particles that had lodged in its fully developed teeth; the veins in its neck pulsed with the energy of twin hearts.
The husband shook loose the shackles of panic and indecision and burst through the door prepared to defend wife and child, but ill-prepared for what lie before him. His wife's eyes were wild with fear and revulsion. His new child, mottled with birth fluids, lay curled upon her breast. The midwife was sprawled against chair and wall like a defeated pugilist.
The husband, sound in matters of commerce and litigation but ignorant of birthing, feared he misunderstood what appeared before him, and so fought the urge to rush to his wife's side. Instead, he reached out to help the midwife regain herself.
No sooner had the midwife found her faculties and her feet than she fled, face skewed in a holler so high-pitched, so intense that it was heard by no one. Out the bedroom door she sprang with arms flailing. Through the kitchen and out the back door she sped, a run-away carriage heading for parts unknown.
The astonished husband leapt to his wife.
His familiar voice and soft touch began to arrest her hysteria. She looked dreamingly at him and smiled. Her smile continued as she brought her focus to the thing which lay upon her breast. But then her nostrils flared and her head jerked as in seizure, and the husband watched in amazement as the mother of his child used all her failing strength to fling her baby - their baby - from her.
The husband felt the chilling hand of unreason grip at his heart. From the floor at the foot of the bed, the pink bundle of horror turned red with rage, curled its lips across razor teeth, and gurgled a sound that could easily have been a growl. No fresh-born child of Christian flesh could have pulled itself up the side of the bed, grabbing blanket hand over hand as this thing did.
Whether the husband feared for his wife's safety, or was repulsed by this pestiferous outrage, he rushed to and from an adjoining room, bringing back a single shot sidearm. When he returned, his wife was holding her trembling fingers over her mouth; from darkened eyes and a pale, bloodless face she cast a pleading look at him. The thing had crawled past her legs and was resting on her abdomen, breathing as a winded sprinter.
The husband, the new father, now dreamer of dead dreams, cocked the pistol, aimed directly into the back of what might have been, with kinder gods, his newborn daughter, and pulled the trigger.
The ball exploded through mother and daughter - flesh and blood, christening all with the viscera of an unholy act. The new mother, numb with madness, did not feel the ball pass through her.
The creature landed on the floor under the window, beneath a single, white-laced curtain that settled over it like a shroud.
The husband waved through the smoke of the black powder discharge instantly realizing his folly. He gagged and dropped the pistol, flung himself over his dead wife and wept; wept above the shouts and banging from outside; above the front door tearing loose from its hinges; the snarling voices and thunderous footfalls racing through the house. He wept above the curses and accusations that intruded on his sacred moment of mourning.
Huge hands unmercifully pulled him from his beloved, back to where life was an evil trick that only death could fix. The father and brothers took turns beating him in the cold of the night. In the distance the blasphemous dirge of a screech owl accentuated their vigor.
At first the husband welcomed that which dulled his senses, but with each explosion to his body, the creature grew clearer in his mind, until, momentarily imbued with the strength of desperate fear, he tore himself loose from his captors and raced back into the house, screaming of monsters and of evil and of godless things.
He reached the bedroom and searched for the creature that had consigned him to hell. Once more he was seized and dragged from the room, but not before he saw the tiny blood stains on a single dangling curtain as if, hand over hand, something had pulled itself up to the window's ledge; not before he saw a despoiled lump of flesh tumble over the windowsill into the darkness outside.
The mid-wife was accused of baby snatching, and was never heard from again. A bounty was set against her.
Lilith was given a Christian burial and came to symbolize the horrors of an abusive husband. Later, her family learned that grave robbers had stolen her body. It was never found.
The husband spent the remainder of his life in a single cell separated from the rest of the criminally insane. Each night before he slept, he tested all of his sixty-one steel bars. It was years before the guards understood he was not looking for escape, but insuring nothing could get in.
©Larry Leeds
Larry Leeds was born and raised in Oklahoma. A midwesterner all his life, he now resides in Kansas City, Kansas. He is a retired computer programmer of 20 years, and a part time actor (commercials) for the past few years. When he's not working in his yard, he spends a great deal of time working on his writing skills.