Save the Baby
“The phone call is coming from inside the house.”
Those words from the police officer on the other end of the phone sent an electric shock through Michelle’s nervous system. The lunatic who had been frightening her with phone calls all night was right here in the house with her.
Michelle was sixteen and on her first babysitting job for this new family to the neighborhood, the Woodhouses. Their four-year-old son, Nicholas, was sleeping upstairs. Otherwise the house was empty. Well, apparently not.
The officer on the phone said he was dispatching a car and told Michelle to get out of the house immediately, but Michelle wasn’t really listening at this point. She hung up the phone while the officer was still talking, took a deep, cleansing breath, steadied her nerves and rushed into the immaculate kitchen, looking for a weapon. Michelle grabbed the biggest knife she could find in the cutlery block. She had to go upstairs and get Nicholas before she could flee the house.
The phone rang again, and Michelle knew it was him, the stalker, the maniac, maybe the killer, who wanted to prolong her torture before he finally revealed himself and did God-knows-what to her. Was he hiding upstairs or downstairs in some dark corner, Michelle wondered, shaking despite her attempts at self-control.
The second floor was pitch black and so far away from the end of the grand stairway as Michelle slowly began to climb the steps, hugging the wall for support, holding the knife out in front of her. Then, she heard a noise; did it come from Nicholas’s room? Michelle couldn’t determine, but it fueled her desire to get Nicholas and run out of this house as fast as her legs could carry the both of them.
A scream, well, a gurgling kind of sound, came from the second floor, and it propelled Michelle to run up the rest of the steps, stumbling in the darkness, then bursting into Nicholas’s room, which had its lights on now, waving the knife wildly about like a mad woman, hoping she might hit the stalker. But she found something very different from what she had expected.
The stalker lay dead on the carpet, blood oozing from a thousand separate, wicked, deep cuts. His eyes were frozen open in unbelieving horror.
Nicholas, his little eyes glowing red like a demon’s, hovered two feet over his bed in a sitting posture, a chilling smile on his pretty face. He telekinetically continued juggling a dozen dripping razor blades, circling them in the air with a tiny finger. He turned to Michelle and said, “I don’t like strangers in my house.” Michelle dropped the knife and began trembling uncontrollably.
“I’m thirsty,” Nicholas continued calmly. ”Bloodletting always makes me thirsty. How about some juice?”
