The Changling Knight: Chapter Two

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 The door opened downstairs and she heard Roger’s cheerful voice echo out over Bryce’s shrill wail. “Guess who had two cancellations?” he yelled out. Sydnie came down in time to see him scoop the baby out of the pen and tucked him into his chest, heading for the kitchen to warm up a bottle. Bake-at-home pizza boxes were sitting on the coffee table, along with breadsticks and salads, and Sydnie could not describe the relief that washed over her body. For that instant, she felt a sense of normalcy and closed the door behind her, determined not to bring it up until she had the chance to talk to him without freaking out Tobias any further.   

“Hey there pretty momma.” Roger smiled as she came into the kitchen and kissed her cheek. “I got the bottle going. Why don’t you go upstairs, take a shower and get a nap. I got this.” He turned on the water on the stove and placed the bottle into it to heat. “I saw Evie downtown. She was with her friends. Wanted to stay over but I told her we needed her home tonight. She’s going to go over there Friday and Saturday.”   

“Oh my god I love you so much.” Sydnie kissed him back, groaning into his soft lips and feeling comforted by the dull scratch of his beard. “I’m gonna crash. Two hours.”

“Three.” Roger said with stern brows. “Three hours.” “Make me suffer, why don’t cha.” But she smiled none the less and took advantage, vanishing up the steps. A twinge of guilt crossed her chest as she could hear Bryce still determined to make sure everyone knew his fury. The warmed-up bottle would make him fussy and his diapers would be a nightmare for the next day or so, but it would be worth it to grab a selfish nap. She flopped herself down on the bed, tucking a crocheted blanket up under her feet and closing her eyes.  

Sleep came easy, but full of unrest. In her dreams there was a figure, tall and thin, with pine needles for hair and skin like the cracked bark of a tree. It stared at her through too wide eyes full of dismissal but pointed at her none the less. “You must love him better.” It hissed in a reedy, whistling voice, as though accusing her of something. 

“Love who better? I don’t understand.”

“You are a poor mother and a weak creature. You do not love him enough.” The creature balanced itself on the edge of the crib in a frog-like pose, cooing down at the baby. It opened it’s mouth full of tiny sharp teeth and began to sing in a breezy, musical tone. Bryce was in the crib, and he lifted his hands up, babbling in a more delighted tone than she’d ever heard him use for her. She walked towards the crib, but her lips pulled back in disgust. His tiny hands had fingers which were much too long, and nails which were much too sharp. A part of her longed to gaze into the crib and get the full measure of what she was seeing, but the rest of her, perhaps the wiser part of her, recoiled.  

“Weak.” The pine needle creature hissed again. “Weak and unworthy. If you knew who you served, you would be grateful for what you have been given. You would fall on your knees and be thankful, you would.”

“What did you do to him? Where is my baby?” She yelled, her voice deepening as she stormed over. She did not know what was happening, but that thing in the crib was not her child. “What the fuck did you do you twiggy bitch?”   

“Sydnie?”   

The gentle tone roused her suddenly and she turned over, blinking away the dream. It faded from her thoughts the moment she became aware that the face above her was real, and Roger was stroking through the short curls that corkscrewed around her head.   

“What time is it?” She muttered, the post nap sleepiness threatening to overwhelm her.   

“6:00.”

She snorted and smacked his leg. “I told you three hours.”

“I check on you and you were snoring so hard I thought the windows were going to fall off. So I let you sleep.” He leaned down and kissed her. “Pizza is in the oven. Salad is on the table. Officer Hanover stopped by to let us know he’ll be coming down our street a couple times tonight.” Roger kissed her cheek again and rubbed his nose up along her’s. “You doing okay? You were moaning when I got up here. Good dreams or bad?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t remember it well.” She smacked her lips and went to rinse her mouth out in the bathroom sink. “I don’t think it was a good dream. It didn’t feel good. Felt…anxious and dark. Like something wrong was happening.” Sydnie’s mind flashed back to that afternoon and she picked up her phone from the dresser. “Look at this and tell me I’m not crazy.”

Roger flipped through the photos, squinting and adjusting his glasses. “Looks like you dug your hand into a compost heap.” He offered.

“That’s the shit I pulled out of Bryce’s mattress.” She explained. “You can go see for yourself but don’t do it in front of the kids. I don’t want to freak them out.”

“I will later. What do you think it is? Raccoon maybe?”

“You’re telling me a raccoon came in, pulled stuffing out of our baby’s mattress and filled it like this?” She raised a dark eyebrow incredulously.   “I’m not telling you anything. I’m offering possibilities. Maybe we chased one out of the attic when we re-did it for Evie. Disturbed its nest.” Roger drew his fingers across the screen, enlarging the image.   

“Well then why wouldn’t it just leave? I don’t think it’s a raccoon.” Sydnie told him firmly. “I mean I don’t know what it is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a raccoon. And I really don’t think a raccoon caused everything that happened last night.”

“I don’t think so either. But at the moment I don’t know what to tell you besides we need to get a new crib mattress.” Roger said. “You should keep the pictures just in case.” 

“That’s not all.” She decided to tell him before they went downstairs; steal a few more moments before kids bombarded them. She hurried over to the laundry hamper and pulled out the sheets. “I found this.” She unfolded it, showing him the long dark marks on the edged. Roger’s lips pulled into a frown and she could see a flash of concern in his eyes. 

“…well those don’t look like raccoon prints.” He muttered, inspecting them. He held his own hand up to them, but the lines were much thinner and longer than his. Roger held the sheet tightly in his fist and his brows made a little bump above his nose. “Maybe we should go to a hotel.”   

“I really don’t want to do that. I feel like that’s telling the kids there really is something wrong.”

“Well if there is something wrong then it’s better for us to get them out of harms way.” Roger told her. “But, Officer Hanover is gonna be cruising nearby. And whoever it might have been…”

“So we’ve gone from possible raccoon entry to defiantly human.” Sydnie couldn’t help but bring up. A little part of her had wanted this to vanish, to let herself believe it had been some easily explainable vermin which could be solved by a few traps.   “I don’t know. But what I’m saying is, we probably scared them off and if we didn’t a cop car is going to. If you wanna let the kids go somewhere else for a few nights I get it. If you want us to pack up and go to a hotel after dinner, I get it. I just wanna know what’s gonna help you feel safe.” Roger touched her cheek and bent in, kissing her brow, her cheek, her lips. He was making little circles on her back with his finger tips, trying to soothe her. “Okay? You tell me what you want to do.”

Sydnie gave a relieved sigh and crooked her fingers into his shirt, breathing in the faded scent of his cologne. It was absolutely not fair to be horny and disinterested in sex at the same time. “I think we’re gonna be okay. And if all else fails we will defend ourselves with another lamp and baseball bat. Worked pretty damn well last time.” She laughed, and he smiled at her, tucking his hands around her back and squeezing her in close.   

“There’s my warrior.” He whispered, and they were rewarded with another few seconds of solidarity before a yell from downstairs told them that Evie and Tobias were arguing over something. “Alright. Let’s go stop our children from murdering one another.”   

The evening passed smoothly. Pizza and breadsticks went a long way to soothing the chaos of the last day. Evie was going on about Derek and how he was cute, but not worth her time since he couldn’t be bothered to decide if he would rather flirt with her or Susan more. 

“Susan told everyone that we got broken into by an ax murderer.” She brought up as if this were an expected exaggeration for high school. “I told her that was stupid 'cause number one we were all alive and number two if there were an ax murderer on the loose wouldn’t somebody have heard about an ax murder at some point? Chicsehaw County hadn’t had a murder in something like two hundred years.”   

“And you’re well versed with the history of this county huh?”

“It’s called Google, dad. It’s not that hard to search. Police records are a matter of public record and it took like five minutes to go through them. Did you know Derek’s dad got five years for manslaughter? Derek told everyone he was up in Chicago working.”

“Don’t go spreading people’s private business around, Evie.” Sydnie warned her firmly.   

“He’s so full of bullshit though.”

“That may be, but when you start spreading around other people’s business it’s like inviting them into yours.” Evie dipped a Parmesan coated breadstick into the garlic butter. “What are they going to find out about this family? You know, besides my mom was in a rock band in college.”

“Excuse you! Black Blooded Queens was an afro-punk band and we were amazing.” Sydnie chastised her with a knowing grin. They had only ever played a handful of gigs and open mic nights where they drank most of their pay before the first set was over. But it had been empowering at the time to be the only all black, all female, punk rock band they knew of. To this day she refused to let Evie read some of the lyrics for the songs. Roger damn near fell off the bed laughing when he read ‘Big Snake Daddy’.   

Evie rolled her eyes with the same amount of disbelief held by all teenagers at the very idea that their parents had ever been at the top of the social food chain. “I started talking to Susan and she said this area used to be known for witches and stuff. Not like weird cursing and dumb stuff like that. But like old grannies who know how to cure chicken pox and keep your cattle from going dry. This area was really poor, like poorer than it is now. And people couldn’t afford doctors and vets and stuff, so they would go to these witches and the witches were supposed to help them out.”

“Let me guess, one of those witches lived in this very house.” Roger held up his hands in a gnarled position.

“Come on! Get real. No, she said this was like in the Great Depression era. The realtor said this house is only like fifty years old. That means it was built in the sixties. Great Depression is like late twenties and thirties.” Evie bit into her now saturated breadstick with clear delight.   

“Next time you get a D in History, I’m gonna ask you why.” Sydnie challenged her. “Cause the shit they teach in class is boring. It’s all about memorizing stupid shit and vocabulary words. This is actually interesting. So she said, Susan said, that this witch had people in the forest she talked to, but nobody else could ever find them. She’d get someone who’d come to her for a cure or something, and she’d go into the woods, talk to her friends, and come back with all this really esoteric knowledge about how to help cure a sickness. And they paid her in chickens and pies and stuff.” Evie, quite pleased with her recitation of Susan’s knowledge set back to munching on the breadstick, sucking the garlic sauce off her fingers. “Maybe that’s why all this weird shit is happening.”

“You’ve officially used up your quota of the word shit.” Roger told her and Evie stuck her tongue out at him. “And there was no weird shit. We had a break in. It happened in Chicago without the benefit of local folklore and history. But I’m glad you’re taking an interest in our new home. God forbid you be a typical teenager who gets furious with us at forcing you to move away from all your close friends.”

“I aim for originality.” Evie snagged another piece of pizza and gnawed on it. She didn’t seem to be aware of the look her parents were giving one another over her head. “Susan said the witch would leave stuff out for her friends.”

“What kind of stuff.” Sydnie asked, ignoring the slight disapproval on Roger’s face.   “Honey, butter, bread. That sort of thing. I didn’t get a chance to look it up before lunch was over.” She pulled out her phone and Roger coughed. 

“No phones at the dinner table.” He said promptly. “You know the rules.” 

Sydnie watched her daughter put it away and tossed the idea around in her mind. What Roger had said was true. Break-ins and intruders didn’t need a supernatural explanation. But the oddity of the mattress combined with this new information seemed strange enough to warrant further explanation. A part of her started to toy with the concept of local kids playing a nasty prank on the city folk, orchestrated by Susan. Honestly, she’d welcome it at this point. A perfectly reasonable explanation with an easy solution; namely calling the cops on the little dicks and giving them a good scare.   

But something clung to the back of her mind, a sharp, uncomfortable feeling she could not quite get rid of. Sydnie waited until dinner was over before starting the dishwasher and sitting down with Bryce for his bedtime feeding. She tugged her phone out and looked at the mattress photo again. She focused and unfocused the image, changed it to different filters, teasing it like pushing a loose tooth with your tongue. But nothing seemed to manifest itself. Since the crib was out of commission, Sydnie took a large laundry basket and put a flat cushion down in the bottom, using it as a makeshift crib until they could get to the store tomorrow. Maybe Bryce was just as exhausted as she was, falling asleep without any of his usual fussing and crying. Roger tucked into bed next to her, kissing the back of her neck as then settled into their usual spooning position, his arm slung up around her body.   

~Window alarms.~ Sydnie thought absently as she started to drift back into sleep. Tomorrow she would talk to her husband about putting in window alarms.   

She did not know how long she was asleep. She did not know if she was dreaming again, but there was a tender, soothing noise in her mind that lulled Sydnie deeper into her bed. Like the mellow, hollow noise of wooden windchimes in the breeze, and her eyes fluttered in half sleep. 

There was someone in the room. 

Her mind didn’t quite wrap around it at first. The connection hit her and Sydnie jerked up, staring at the crouched, gnarled figure as it leaned down into the laundry basket. She reached for the alarm clock on the nightstand and her movement attracted it’s attention. The creature reared up and hissed at her, it’s tiny sharp teeth perfectly white from between the lipless mouth.   

“Move, and I will kill your man.” It warned.“Try to stop me, and I will kill your man. Go back to sleep, weak human woman, and forget this ever happened.”   

Sydnie didn’t need to think twice. She threw the alarm clock at the creature face and launched herself over the laundry basket at her, yelling in rage. The creature screeched and them tumbled back, Sydnie slamming her full force into the wood  closet doors. The snapping noise might have been from the closet or the creature, Sydnie couldn’t tell. A smell like a woodchipper vomiting out mulch filled her nostrils and the thing raked it’s fingers across her face. She screamed as blood washed over her eyelid, blotting her vision when it threw her back. It crouched and crawled across the floor, headed right for the laundry basket with ragged determination. Sydnie reached forward, sharp pricks slicing into her palm as she tried to yank the creature back, or at the very least stall it from getting to Bryce. “Roger! Roger!”   

Her husband lay there, mouth lax as he snored, utterly oblivious to the battle going on in their bedroom. There was a noise like a hoarse, guttural laughter echoing from the creature, and Sydnie saw it’s elongated fingers reach into the make-shift bassinet. 

“No! No! You fucking..!” She pulled back, blinking through the blood and looking for anything she could use to defend her child. She started bringing her fist down on the back of the creatures knee blindly, feeling a satisfactory snap as she did so.   

The blunt groan caught her attention and the thing turned towards her, ignoring the child and launching itself towards her now. It took her by the shoulders and shoved her back with such force that she went sailing across the room, slamming into the white crown molding and falling to the floor. Sydnie grunted when she hit and forced herself up on her palms. This creature didn’t want her. She was simply in the way of it’s target.

 “You were warned, mortal. When I finish with the child, your man will die next.” It hissed and reared up like a snake ready to strike, baring it’s vicious teeth at the now screeching infant below.   

She had no time to think on why Roger was not waking up. No time to try to fit the eldritch in with the reality that had been her experience up till this moment. She shot herself forward again and just kept swinging and punching and attacking. Whatever it took, whatever she had to do to defend her baby, she was bound and determined to do it. They landed on the nightstand and it shattered under the weight of the two of them.   

“Stupid woman!” It snapped at her, biting down into Sydnie’s shoulder and relishing her screams. It ran it’s tongue over it’s mouth, tasting her blood as it’s eyes whirled. “I take no pleasure in this hunt. It is beneath me. But as I am commanded, I must obey.” It drew out a thin bladed knife, the shine of it glinting in the dim light of the hallway. “If I must leave a trail of dead mortals underfoot, than so be it.” 

Sydnie remembered being mugged once. The sense of helplessness, of powerlessness that had stayed with her for years after. The realization that in the moment, no amount of bravado helped. She was so much smaller, so much less than her attacker. It had been a humbling, earth shattering moment. But this time she was fighting for so much more than her purse. She grabbed at the wrist which held the blade and pressed in on the artery with the point of her nail. She felt flesh, tender and weak and realized that whatever wood this creature had, it was not a part of it’s being, but armor like, guarding the person underneath. A sudden ferocity seized her and Sydnie bit down on the artery, forcing the creature to drop the blade. Sydnie let go and fumbled for it on the ground as the thing clutched at it’s injured wrist. She grabbed the hilt clumsily and began to go on the offensive, slashing and hacking messily at the attacker as Bryce continued his shattering wail.   

“Stop! Stop!” It howled, it’s arms trying to shield itself from her onslaught, thick brackish blood oozing from it’s cuts. “You know not whom you meddle with!”

Sydnie did not respond. She didn’t care. She was determined to cut until she hit something vital or until this invader to her home ran, or until he got the knife back and killed her with it. She surprised herself by shoving the blade down and feeling it sink past the space between the bark, the tender meat of a body splitting before the force of the cut. Sydnie let go and stared as the tall creature clutched dumbly for the hilt gurgling before it’s knees hit the floor.   

It stared up at her through what she could now tell was a mask. It seemed just as flummoxed as she was as it gurgled to form words. “Fool. Foolish human. You have no idea what you have done.” It lurched forward, clawing now towards the window, clutching at the sill as it tried to pull itself out of the house.   

Sydnie couldn’t move, she wasn’t sure she was breathing. The whole room was frozen, broken only by Bryce’s panicked screams of terror and fury. She watched the thick trail of congealing green blood soak into the woodwork and heard a rough, grating noise as it vanished out the window and down the roof tiles. There was a sound like air being sucked out of the room. Roger sat up with a snort, hacking and coughing. He muttered something about getting up this time and their surroundings caught up with him.   

Sydnie was kneeling on the floor, eyes locked on the window, scratches all over her face, arms and hands. Bryce was in the overturned basket, lifting his head up for the strict purpose of wailing louder. There was blood on the floor, blood on the wall, and many broken things scattered through out the room. Sydnie curled her knees up into a fetal position and started crying, hurting and shaken by everything. “B-bryce.” She managed. “It-it was trying to kill Bryce.”