Baby.

Baby.

Baby.

I wake to the sound of the voice dripping into my head like a nearby tap. It started a week ago now and has since interrupted me frequently. After Pepper and Lionel both separately said they couldn’t hear it, I stopped asking any others.

Baby.

I wash the sleep sweats from my skin at the sink and dress for the day. There is a swollen, scarlet crack in the middle of my lower lip that looks like it was recently bleeding, that I somehow acquired overnight. I am probably going mad; I am nobody’s ‘baby’. My father died when I was a child and then my mother five years ago. I’ve not had a paramour since she passed.

Baby.

The voice is my frequent companion throughout my workday in the gem mines, kneeling by the stream near the mine’s entrance to pan for precious stones. As the hours pass I can almost ignore it. Across the stream, Lionel tells me about his small daughter taking her first tentative steps. I pile the dripping, glowing stones I’ve uncovered into a healthy pyramid on the open bag beside me.

Baby.

The bell rings to signal the end of our shift. I force my stiff body to stand, brush the caked dirt from my trouser knees, and then stretch out my hunched back.

Go further in, baby.

I freeze. The voice has never given instructions before. Lionel is on his way out, is watching me. “I’ll catch up with you.”

No-one notices as I ease myself into the dim tunnel that penetrates deeper into the mines. I’ve never been in here before, am not allowed to be here. But my desperation to understand anything about the voice necessitates at least a look.

Baby.

This tunnel isn’t equipped with regular lamplight like our gem stream, but the thin, glowing veins running through the stone walls provide just enough illumination. I’m not jogging for long before I feel a sharp pain at the front of my chest, and almost trip over my feet in my haste to stop.

Leaning against a cerulean gem vein, I can see that a streak of blood is already soaking into my shirt. Peeling back the linen, a long cut runs from just above my breasts to almost my waist. At a glance it looks fairly shallow, but the blood trickles down my chest and stomach. I press my hands and shirt against the cut, staining the canvas bag that’s still clutched in my left fist in the process. The gemstones inside the bag bounce against my torso as I hurry back the way I came.

* * *

Later, at night, I am gripped by a certain loneliness and melancholy. I have applied a dressing to my chest. The bleeding has ceased. I have washed, changed into a long dress and eaten a modest dinner.

With the moon round in the sky, I hustle through the dark grasses to the clifftop overlooking our town. Under starlight this clifftop is a hotspot for lovers’ rendezvous, romantic trysts and opportune liaisons. Tonight, I have an appetite for risk, and perhaps if I am actually someone’s baby, then the voice will stop.

Baby.

I soon have company on the clifftop. There is a throat-clearing behind me, and then Aaron the blacksmith’s apprentice sits heavily beside me. He is fairly handsome and well-spoken, I think. His clothes are neat and clean. I could do a lot worse.

After some cursory small talk, he leans in to kiss me. His lips are warm in the damp air, his stubble bristly around my mouth. He glides one hand around the back of my neck, the other around my waist. I am almost enjoying myself when he pulls back abruptly, a deep frown marring his brow.

Baby.

He motions to his lip, and I realise the scab on my lip has opened, and a little blood has spread over our lips and is dripping down my chin. We might have been able to recover from that, but then Aaron catches sight of his hands; the one that was around my neck is half-covered with more blood, sticky and dark. He stumbles to his feet in an effort to retreat from me, curses quietly, and then heads back to town.

I feel around the back of my head where another long cut has opened up, this time almost horizontal across the base of my neck. I shudder.

Baby.

Why am I falling apart?

* * *

The next morning, the voice instructs me to go to the river, and I do not feel equipped to argue.

It is a beautiful, cloudless sunny day. As I approach the river, I quickly sense something abnormal. A humming, intensifying; a vibration within my bones as I near the water.

Baby.

I stop a few strides from the river’s edge, the vibration so strong that I feel like my whole being is being shaken from within. Then there is the sharp pain from yesterday as cuts open along my flesh; the ones down my chest and across my neck, certainly, but also new ones down my calf, across my thigh, along my arms. My eyes squeeze tight and I gasp, but my feet stay rooted to the earth. I doubt I could flee if I tried, but something about this feels inevitable; something to endure rather than prevent.

Baby.

My back snaps in a way completely unnatural to the human form, like a giant hand has cracked me in two. I briefly see my cottage in the distance, the opposite way to where my feet are pointing, before my view switches and I’m rising from my ruined body. My empty head stares vacantly. The skin of my belly has popped open. Vital parts that used to be inside of it are spilling onto the grass.

And I continue to drift upwards, away from the river.

Baby.

The voice is louder now, clearer. I try to twist my attention in the direction I think it’s coming from, into the blue of the sky.

Baby.

I see them then, the entities. They’re confusing to my unpractised eyes, hard to discern. Each one is some kind of swarm, undulating and dark and glittering. So am I now, I understand slowly, though they are much larger than me.

You took your time, baby, says the voice, ringing inside me with the clarity and resonance of a church bell. We’ve been waiting for you.

Not such a baby anymore, declares a second entity.

Very well, says the first. An infant.

We are rising, the circle of us, away from my town. Away from where my broken body has been split like a crustacean shell, increasingly small in the distance.

Infant.

Infant.

Soon there is only the blackness of space surrounding us, and I do feel like an infant within the sprawling cosmos, tiny and unknowing.

Ephiny Gale is the author of more than fifty published short stories and novelettes that have appeared in publications including PseudoPod, Constellary Tales and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her fiction has been awarded the Sundress Publications' Best of the Net award and has been a finalist for multiple Aurealis Awards.