The Lost Twin

I knew that something was wrong when I saw her smiling at me. My wife, or ex-wife, never smiled at anything due to her chronic depression. Even a basket of puppies couldn't cheer this woman up. I was about to ask her why she was smiling when I noticed that her eyes had been dug out of her skull. But her eyes weren't the only things that were missing. It was at that moment that I saw the blood oozing out from underneath her shirt. Her stomach had been slit open and the twin boys that were due in two days were missing.

I had never seen any other blood than my own, so this was surely a sight that I wish that I could take back and never see again. However, it is forever burned into my mind. The empty, bloodied sockets where her eyes used to be. Her eyelids that had been savagely ripped off.

Her stomach, sliced exactly down the middle to make one continuous red line that seemed to never meet its end. The worst was that smile. Whoever did this cut from the corners of her mouth to the tips of her earlobes and stuck a curved stick in her mouth to simulate a smile. They must have known about Mary's depression issues because it finally looked like she was at peace.

It was several years later until I had finally gotten over the loss of the second twin. I had learned that I need to accept it. As it turns out, the person who did that horrible thing seven years ago was an old family friend. They found her and she is now staying at Riverview Hospital For The Mentally Unstable. That event has only made my son and I closer and closer until that one night. I had heard something in the kitchen and I went down with a baseball bat and what I saw was something that I hope to never see again.

Such a creature wasn't in any of the mythology books that my son was into. It was covered head to toe in what looked like algae. Some sort of viscous liquid was dripping from its fingertips. The light made this object glisten as bright as the recently waxed tile floor. It looked like it had gills, but it was standing in the open air without a problem. The smell of rotten fish hung heavily in the air as the creature moved toward me. I thought that I heard it try to speak. I turned around to go and get my son out of the house and when I turned back it was gone.

I had told my son about the creature and he asked if it tried to speak. When I told him it did, he seemed overly excited, like he had been waiting for it. He then proceeded to talk to me about how the creature had visited him before and that it had a name. I couldn't remember that name now for the life of me.

He told me that it had snuck into his bedroom a couple weeks ago and had started to transmit images into his head. Images of his dead mother. I became so enraged at this comment that I threw one of my son's toys through the window. When the man would come a few weeks later to repair the window, I would not tell him what it was that broke it.

I had been doing lots of research about different creatures and hereditary diseases of the mind lately. I went out and bought a video surveillance camera that was proven to work no matter what happens. Later, on the same night that I bought the camera, the creature visited again. I couldn't tell because I was fast asleep at the computer. The light from the screen still flickering the latest monster movie that I was watching, The Creature From The Black Lagoon.

I had recently acquired a taste for these old monster movies because they made what was happening a lot less scary. I checked the film early the next morning and what I saw was the reason that made me move out of my two story walkup to this crummy apartment in Queens. The creature was standing on the counter and making gutteral sounds that sounded a little bit like a baby trying to talk. I could only make out one word and it stood out above the rest. Dada.