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Porch Ramble #7

In the darkness, he heard the quiet crying of a baby.  3 am wakings were not unheard of in the Gabler household, but Charles wasn't usually out of bed when they happened.  He got up from the rocker and threw down his cigar.  Inside, he heard nothing but the loud breathing of the first-grader.  He stood outside the door like a ninja bodyguard, ready to pounce in silently and swiftly if the need should arise.  The silence persisted, he guessed the baby had settled back down.  With all three boys asleep in one room, it was seldom worth creaking open the door for an actual look.

On his way out, he caught sight of the beer bottles left behind when date night relocated.  As he tidied up he thought he heard the cry not from within, but seeping through the screen windows on the front of the house.

The moment he stepped outside, he knew the baby was somewhere nearby.  It was outdoors too, or he'd never have heard the low but clear garbles and squeaks.  The infant was tired of crying, but its instincts wouldn't allow it to stop trying to rouse an adult.  The street was vacant and quiet aside from the overlapping rhythms of the nighttime fauna and the child's stirrings.  This was once his favorite hour, when all the world around him slept.  He would walk the dim sidewalks, criss-crossing around the city until he finally found his way home.  There was an otherworldly quality about those times, empty parking lots and deep crawling shadows gave the feeling of some dark force taking root while no one could see.  That old creeping feeling had taken a fast hold, and the curtain of surreality had fallen fast all around him.

His heart pounded fast and his muscles tensed as he ventured into the darkness of his neighbor's driveway.  The next doors were a kindly older couple that frequently left in their RV for weeks at a time.  It was a life he envied, exactly how his own grandparents had spent their retirement together.  He didn't think he had ever seen them with a baby, or any children for that matter.  Either way, their home was away from home for the moment, they had rolled out early Friday afternoon in the Sunset Rambler.  The whimpering noise sounded close now, and not muffled as if from inside the house.  Chuck paused to let his eyes adjust to the shadow where the streetlight's reach clearly ended.  There was a small pile of cloth sitting the the center of the driveway, just past where the brick walls ended and the deeper pitch of the backyard began.  The thought he saw the rags shift as if softly kicked from beneath.  A sense of civic duty wrestled with the fresh fear brewed by the eeriness of the situation.  I should call the police, he thought as he crept forward to the small bundle.

All sound abruptly stopped as he reached out to uncover the babe.  It was enough to make him pause for a moment before tossing back the folds of what turned out to be some dirty-looking green flannel blankets.  Inside the bundle there was no sign of a baby.  He pulled on the blanket and meeting no resistance, tossed it to one side. Nothing.  It took hime longer than it should have to realize that all of the insects and tree frogs had ceased their endless chirping.  In fact, there were no sounds at all.  The shadows loomed and stretched toward him.  Glass shattered the silence, sudden and violent.  Another baby's cry, this one chillingly familiar, echoed into the night. He didn't know he was running until he couldn't stop.  He crashed sideways into the hood of the car, halting the momentum of his turn. Pain flared up from his right knee. Charles Gabler looked up from his old injury as a ragged black form leapt from his children's window.  The form stood, manlike though much more broad and vague in shape.  Billowy darkness flapped like a trenchcoat in a hurricane, and the shadow thing launched into the night sky, disappearing into the gloomy starlight with a growling rumble.  The glimpse of two terrified little faces was burned into his eyes.  The night was silent again, except for his scream.









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