Sundancer

Sundancer
by
Raman Jalota

    Sylvia heard the cry of a little child and woke up. I must be dreaming. A little child crying ... in here? But it was so real. ... I must try and get back to sleep. She reached over for Diggy but no one was in bed. Slowly the half-sleep dissipated.
    She said aloud to herself, “Diggy is out of town and won’t be back till Friday night anyway.”
    “Unh ...huhh ...”
    There it was. A little child whimpering. A cold shiver went up her spine. She sat up in bed, her eyes wide open, trying to make sense of what she had just heard. She gathered her courage and touched the bedside lamp. A faint light filled the bedroom. She tapped it once again to get more light. The bedside clock showed 3:10. Where did that sound come from? Wasn’t it just outside the bedroom door? She pulled off the blanket and stood up. She grabbed her bathrobe and clutching it around her throat, stepped out to the passage. She turned left, felt the wall for the light switch and turned it on. She heard the sound of something falling down the stairs just ahead of her and froze.
    Something seemed to be tumbling down the seven steps to the landing. Then a loud thud and another whimpering sound. A giggle as if a child having fun and then a tumble down the next seven steps down to the basement. Another thud ... another whimper and then a helpless howling that slowly faded as if the child was crawling away to a corner of the basement. She hesitated.
    Slowly courage returned, “Who is it?”
    No answer.
    “Is there anybody out there?”
    She walked to the top of the stairs and turned the lights on. She scanned the top stairs, the landing and the first two bottom stairs. Nothing.
    “Anybody here?”
    I need a weapon. She went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. She slowly made her way down the steps to the landing.   She walked down to the bottom of the stairs, turned the lights on in the basement and slowly opened the basement door.
    “Anybody ...”
    She entered the basement and glanced toward the right. The washer and dryer sat next to the wall. She looked to the left and then forward. It was as it always had been. Mostly empty. Just some boxes in one corner and lots of unused space. Satisfied there was nothing there, she climbed back up and made a pot of coffee.
“I am not going mad. Those sounds were real. I heard something. What’s happening here?”

.....

    She had barely dozed off when the alarm woke her up. She applied heavy mascara around her eyes. She called Diggy soon after she got to work.
    “I ... I am scared. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s going on.”
    “What?”
    She slowly recounted last night’s events.
    “Are you sure it wasn’t the furnace or something?”
    “It was a little child I heard, Diggy!”
    “You know the house is still fairly new, maybe the floors or walls are making noises ... settling, you know.”
    “Come back now, Diggy.”
    “I will try and see if I can get a flight tonight.”
    He didn’t make it.
    She dreaded going to bed. The lack of sleep from the previous night slowly gathered force and drowned her in foreboding darkness.
    A thud and a whimper woke her up. The clock showed 3:10.
    Oh no! Not again. She lay in bed listening with her breath held back. Waiting silently for the nightmare to begin.
    Something crawled to the bedroom door and rapped on it two times. A moment later the crying began. She was frozen with fear. A few seconds later something crawled into the bedroom and slowly started to pull off her blanket.
    She screamed and turned the light on. She saw the retreating behind of a seven or an eight-month-old child with long curly blonde hair. The crying was unmistakably that of a child. This is my house damn it. Then she whispered to herself, “Do I dare?”
    She heard the sound of a child scampering on the floor toward the stairs.
    “Don’t! You’ll hurt yourself.”
    She didn’t believe she had yelled it out loud. She listened. Silence. She put on her robe and walked out of her bedroom. A small child with dark eyes and grayish white face, clad in a diaper and a torn tee shirt sat near the head of the stairs, staring at her.
    Sylvia was petrified but she slowly walked toward him.   The child raised his arms as if he wanted to be picked up. She looked into his eyes. They were black ... Dull black ... Lifeless.
    “Who are you? What are you? What do you want?”
    The child pointed down the steps with his right hand and promptly tumbled down.
    She stood there, unmoving. The sound of the child tumbling down and then crawling into the basement and howling painfully echoed uncomprehendingly through her brain.

.....

    She sat shivering, “I can’t take it any more. This is real and scary. I want to get out of here.”
Diggy talked her back into normalcy, assuring her he’d make it by nighttime.

.....

    On their way back from the airport, he suggested they see the Browns. Turner Brown was the dean of the school of psychology. He may know something about these things. He was sitting on the sofa, smoking a pipe.
    “How the hell you been, Diggy? Is there something wrong Sylvia? You look like you are sick or something.”
    “You won’t believe it. We may have a ghost or something in our house.   A little child has been appearing the last two nights around 3 O’clock, scaring the hell out of Sylvia. Do you know anything about this kinda stuff?”
    “Well ... a little bit. My parapsychology knowledge is very sketchy. You could have a ghost or an ‘apparition’ as they call it.”
    “What do we do?”
    “What has it done when it appears?”
    “Last time it pointed toward the basement stairs and tumbled down the steps and crawled into the basement, screaming.”
    “I would think that it’s trying to tell you something. Be careful, how you handle any future contacts. Didn’t you say this started all of a sudden ... maybe it will stop by itself.”

.....

    And nothing happened the next three nights. Sylvia felt relieved and became relaxed. Monday morning, Diggy had left by 6:30, she was ready by 7:00 and walked into the garage. She turned the key and her car started. She pressed the garage-door-opener. Nothing. She pressed it again. Her car sputtered and stopped. What the hell? She tried to start the car again. Nothing. She tried to open the garage door. Nothing. Frustrated, she stepped out of the car.
    The door leading to the house stood ajar. The same little child was sitting at the foot of the door, staring at Sylvia with unmoving, unblinking dull black eyes.
    She gasped as her eyes grew wide.
    “What do you want?”
    The child lifted his arms up, the same gesture he had made the last time. She moved toward him. I can’t do anything else. Help me God!
    He stayed, unmoving till she got near. He raised his arms and she picked him up. He was cold ... moist and cold. He put his arms around her neck and pointed to the door, as if asking her to take him inside. His hands felt like ice around her neck. She shivered and slowly pushed open the door. This is not too bad. He is not trying to harm me ... so far.
    The child pointed toward the steps leading to the basement. There must be something there that he wants or wants me to see.
    “What is it?”
    She didn’t expect a response and his dull black eyes stared fixedly at the steps. She took a deep breath and walked down the steps to the basement. She opened the door and looked inside. The same old empty basement stared back at her.
    The child pointed to the far left corner. She glanced in the direction quickly and then stared at the empty corner.
    “What is it? What do you want?”
    The child gently placed his hands on her eyes. The basement looked foggy. And the colors were gone. Everything seemed like in an old black and white movie. There were faint voices coming from the left corner.
    A stocky built muscular man was struggling with a slightly built woman with a baby in her arms. The same child that Sylvia was holding. The woman screamed, “No, don’t hurt the baby. I’ll do whatever it is you want. Just don’t hurt the baby.”
    He swung his arm and a loud slap sent the woman hurling to the wall. She collapsed on the floor, clutching her crying child, terror in her eyes. The man grabbed her dress around her throat and picked her up, he raised his right fist and slammed it straight at her mouth. She fell down in a heap at his foot. The child was screaming.
    He bent and picked the child by his hair and flung him at the wall. His head cracked open and blood splattered on the wall. He grabbed his hair again ... Sylvia’s knees gave up and she collapsed, unconscious.

.....


    Turner was serious, “I know that the baby is connecting with you. He will contact you whenever he can. He needs to resolve this for himself.”
    Diggy looked into her eyes, “Do you want us to leave the house and go somewhere else? Whatever you want ...”
    “No, I love our house. There’s something strange about this whole thing. Even though I am scared, I feel I must do what I can to help the little baby.”
    Turner patted her shoulder encouragingly, “See if you can get his name next time. The neighbors that I talked to remember a couple with a little baby. They remember a few loud domestic arguments ... maybe the cops were called. I will find out from the Arapahoe sheriff what he knows. Who did you buy the house from?”
    “We bought it from a bank that had repossessed the home ... apparently the owner skipped ... Do you think he killed them both and skipped town?”
    “Very possible, Diggy. Let’s see what Sylvia can find out next.”

.....

    Sylvia felt almost back to normal by Wednesday. She had decided to resolve whatever was happening before she could resume her normal life.   After her second cup of coffee, lying on the sofa, she was half awake, half asleep. She awoke with a start, something cold had touched her face. The little boy stood holding the edge of the sofa, his hand on her face. She sat up abruptly. He stumbled and fell backward. He turned around and looked at her, his dull eyes pleading.
    “What can I do for you? I am here to help you any way I can. What’s your name?”
    He blinked his eyes and lifted his hands up. She anticipated the cold touch of his body as she lifted him up. He pointed towards the basement and giggled.
    “What is it that you need? Can you tell me?”
    He shook his head. At least he understands.
    Slowly she made her way to the basement, holding the cold, hard body of the little boy in her arms. Almost instinctively, she closed her eyes as he reached up and covered her eyes with his hands.
The fog was still there. The stocky man held an unmoving child by his hair. He laughed wickedly and threw the child at the woman kneeling on the floor, wiping blood from her eyes. She screamed and gently cradled the baby in her arms.
    “You bastard, you’ve killed my baby. You are not getting away with this.”
    She looked at the corner of the basement that had a pile of two by fours. In a split second she had dropped the dead child and grabbed a two by four in her hands. She swung it with all her might. The man reached out and grabbed it out of her hands. He hit her on the head repeatedly with the two by four till she stopped crying.
    Sylvia stood in the doorway terror-stricken but transfixed. The man turned towards her and ran through her and up the steps. He came back in a few minutes with a dark rug. He wrapped the two bodies in the rug and taped it up. He carried it up to the first floor and out the backdoor. Sylvia followed him unmoving.
    The night was faintly lit by a small thin moon. He threw the rug at the south-east corner and hurried back in. He came out with a shovel and started digging a hole in the eery moonlight.
Sylvia’s knees started to shake as the darkness overwhelmed the light of the moon. The ‘thwuk’ ‘thwuk’ of the shovel was echoing in her head as she regained her senses. She stared at the south-east corner of her house in the innocent broad daylight and reached for the phone.

.....

    Turner came in almost immediately after the police cars arrived. The cops were not sure exactly what they needed to do.
    “Why don’t you call the sheriff? He knows about the guy who used to live here. I had talked to him two weeks ago ... he was going to look into it.”
    The cop who had introduced himself as Jones called the headquarters. He turned to Sylvia, “The sheriff says they had traced Bill McDaniel to California. He told the Freemont police that his wife had left him with his son. He is living with his girlfriend currently.”
    “I know he’s lying. He killed his wife and son and buried them in the backyard.”
    “How do you know that?”
    Turner stopped Sylvia from answering and dialed the Arapahoe sheriff. In two hours a truck with a backhoe arrived and the digging began.
    Turner whispered to her, “All they need is to find the bodies. They will be able to put the facts together and arrest that bastard.”
    “I hope that’s the end the little boy was trying to reach. Too bad I never found his name. He seemed to understand me, but he never said a word. I asked him several times.”

.....

    The ordeal was over within weeks. Diggy finally took her down to Hawaii for the long promised week. Sylvia had all but forgotten the whole thing in three months.
    As she came out of the doctor’s office she smiled. Life is good. No, life is complete. Hawaii was good. Righting the wrong for the little ghost boy was good. Getting pregnant is even better.
    She pondered several names as she drove back home. She neither picked the name nor thought of “Sundancer”.

THE END    2495 words

Copyright © 2004 Raman Jalota. All rights reserved. No part of this electronic publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

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