My name is Sam Singer, and while I usually introduce myself as a small-town reporter for the Habitsville Gazette, or the guy who has narrowly avoided all sorts. of slow and agonizing deaths, today I bear a title that is far more challenging than anything I’ve faced before.
Today, I am a babysitter.
My niece is in town staying with me while my sister and her husband take the first vacation they’ve had since Ellie was born five years ago. And since I live, work, eat, and watch mindless TV alone, I was kind of excited to have some company. Even if that company is five years old, and not much of a conversationalist.
So, there we were, in my apartment living room, watching something called “Teddy’s Big Day,” which as far as I could tell was a program devoted to showing a large cartoon bear walking through a grocery store and making smart food decisions. Ellie was sitting on the floor in front of me, eyes glued to the screen, eating every bit of it up.
Sure, I didn’t love the show, and sure Ellie’s hands had red SpaghettiOs sauce that she was getting into the carpet, but it wasn’t a half-bad way to spend a Saturday morning in Habitsville.
“This a good episode, El?” I asked, but the kid was far too engrossed in Teddy’s activities in the checkout line to answer. She sat hunched, rocking back and forth ever so slightly, definitely too close to the screen for her health.
I leaned forward to pick up my cup of coffee from the living room table. I had tried to clean up for Ellie, not that she’d notice as long as the television stayed on, but I still had a bit of debris littered around the place. My mug left a ring of brown on a missing poster for my neighbor’s cat, an orange tabby unfortunately named Mr. Fluff that I meant to try to keep an eye out for.
But as my grip closed around the mug handle, I felt something strange. It was an odd sort of pressure, as though my finger was swollen. Sure, there’s a lot of salt in SpaghettiOs’s, but this seemed weird, so I put down my coffee and examined my hand.
What I saw was oddly simple, and yet entirely inexplicable.
It was a thin red thread tied around my right pointer finger, a small bow just above the knuckle.
Needless to say, I didn’t put it there. I held it up to the little girl on the carpet. “Ellie? Did you tie this around my finger when I wasn’t looking?” She didn’t even turn to look—the bear was loading the groceries into his station wagon—but of course it wasn’t her. My niece couldn’t even tie her own shoes, let alone do some sort of slight-of-hand trick.
The knot came undone with a gentle pull. I examined the thread, but it seemed ordinary. I let it fall to the floor and tried to stop thinking about it.
But of course, I couldn’t.
I recalled some sort of old wives’ tale, or something I’d seen on television—a person might tie a red thread around their finger to remind them of something they’re afraid they’ll forget. And though I had no recollection of tying the thread on my own finger, something about this idea struck me, and I found myself trying to run through anything I might have forgotten that morning.
It was when I tried mentally retracing my steps that I heard it.
It was a strange sort of high-pitched buzzing. At first, I thought it was something on the television—maybe the bear had bought a can opener—but as it droned louder and even higher, I realized something. I have one deaf ear, that on any ordinary day, doesn’t hear a single thing. And yet, it picked up this sound perfectly, on the same level as my working one. That was when the sound began to feel wholly unnatural.
“Do you hear that El?” I asked, but my niece still didn’t answer, her attention still glued to the screen.
I looked around, but my apartment seemed as normal as it ever had. Still, the noise grew, and I got up to see if I could find the source. “I’ll be right back,” I said, and ventured towards the kitchen.
The squealing was so strong in the kitchen it actually made me wince. I checked the fridge, the appliances, but even though the sound was sort of mechanical, it didn’t seem to have an electrical source.
The noise was rising even more as I checked the cabinets, at such a volume that my eyes began to water, and I opened the pantry with blurred vision. The screeching rose a few decibels as I opened the pantry door, and I tried to scan the contents for something that could emit such a sound.
That was when I saw something. Something that filled me with a cold feeling of horror and dread, the sensation of which was only drowned out by the screeching that grew even louder, so loud I pressed my hands hard against either side of my aching head, my eyes shut tight—
“That’s right, Teddy!”
I was so relieved I could have cried. The sound had ended, not in a slow fade, but rather a sharp silence like a speaker cord being cut. The quiet felt so blissful that I actually smiled.
And then, I saw where I was.
Though I had just been standing, a hand on Ellie’s shoulder, half turned towards the door, I now found myself seated on the sofa. Ellie was still frozen in front of the screen. All was as it had been before I had heard the sound—except for two things.
One, was that Teddy had made it out of the supermarket and was now loading groceries into his car.
The second was a strange sensation around my ears. It was an odd sort of warmth and coolness, and as I brought my hand to my head, my fingers came away bloody.
I quickly felt around the other side, and that hand returned trembling and scarlet. So the sound had happened—I hadn’t dozed off into a nightmare—and it really had been loud enough to make my ears bleed. And I supposed to make me black out while I found my way back onto the couch?
“Are you okay, El?” I asked, but I could see that her ears under her pigtails were fine, and her pink shirt was unstained.
I picked up a napkin, already red from SpaghettiOs’s, and started dabbing at the blood on my head and neck. I was in somewhat of a daze, trying to understand what the hell had happened. El seemed to not have noticed anything, and I was beginning to fear I had some sort of stroke or brain aneurysm.
But then, I felt it.
An uncomfortable snugness on my left pointer finger, which had grown sticky with half-dried blood. I spat on the tattered napkin and wiped. As soon as the red of the blood had been scraped away, something else crimson remained.
A thread, tied in a neat little bow around my finger.
My mouth tasted of rust and my stomach felt sour as I stared at the string, the glow of the television flickering just behind it. There was only one meaning that felt right, even if it didn’t make sense.
I was forgetting something.
“Ellie. We need to go,” I said, the deep instinctual desire to flee taking root in a deep pit formed in my chest.
She still wasn’t answering. Teddy the bear was now helping his neighbor, an elderly pigeon, cross the road. I leaned forward to shake Elli’s shoulder, break her from the trance the children’s show had her in—or else to just pick her up and escape whatever was happening inside my apartment.
The moment I shifted my weight towards my niece, it started again. The terrible droning.
My panic rose with the volume, but still I reached for my niece. Even if the sound killed me, or drove me mad, I wouldn’t let the same happen to her.
A hand touched her shoulder—a shoulder that was warm, far too warm. Her skin wasn’t still, but it didn’t pulse with blood coursing through her veins—it was vibrating slightly, like there was a deep whirring somewhere under her skin that was generating a heat, like when I leave my laptop on a blanket for too long.
When I made that contact with Ellie, the noise became literally earsplitting, and I felt a warm trick make its way from the side of my head and down my neck.
Still, I turned her towards me, and prepared to take her and run.
I pulled her away from the television, opened my mouth to shout over the din—but when I looked into the little girl’s face, I stopped cold. There was a sight there, one so terrible it shook me to my core. It was the worst sight I had ever seen, and as the sound screamed in my head, I shut my eyes tight—
“Way to go, Teddy!”
I blinked. It was quiet.
My heart was still hammering in my chest from the horror I had seen just a moment before—and yet, the sight before me was a familiar and mundane one. I was sitting on the couch. Teddy the bear was on the television learning basic addition from a cartoon rabbit. And my niece, Ellie, was seated on the floor, her back to me.
Only, there was something… not right about all of this.
I could remember the feeling of being scared, but when I tried to remember what of, there was nothing. I grabbed Ellie’s shoulder, turned her around—and now here I was. My hands were sticky and scarlet.
I could recall the sound, the pain, the two times before I had found myself back on this couch without a memory of sitting down. And yet, that last sight, as well as whatever I had seen inside the pantry, had been wiped from my memory.
My breathing was shallow with fear, and this time, I didn’t call out to Ellie. Instead, I slowly and quietly looked down at my hand, right at the center of my left pointer finger, just above the knuckle.
There it was: a red thread, tied into a neat bow.
I was forgetting something.
I was frozen in my seat. I didn’t dare move, in case the sound started up again, and I found myself waking up to the same cursed sight.
I was racking my brain, trying to remember what I had seen—it was just there in the corner of my mind, but it was just out of reach.
Teddy was on the screen again, eating lunch. It was a sandwich. I couldn’t stay there forever. I risked some movement, inching along the sofa cushion. As I did, I could almost see Ellie’s face—the last thing I remembered looking at before I found myself on the couch again.
And as I shuffled, terrified of giving myself away to whatever mysterious force was making the screech, the glow of Teddy’s Big Day making my stomach turn, I had a curious thought.
It wasn’t just what I had seen when I had turned Ellie towards me that I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember what Ellie looked like at all.
Sure, I knew the back of her head, I’d been staring at it all morning. I knew she had her hair in pigtails, and she had on a pink shirt.
But her face was nowhere in my memory.
My heartbeat faster with fear. The sound had made me black out the moments when I got back onto the couch each time, but I didn’t think it could be taking more memories from me. I stopped moving on the couch.
It wasn’t just that I couldn’t remember Ellie’s face this morning—I couldn’t remember it from last night, either. In fact, I couldn’t recall the moment she arrived at my apartment. My sister dropping her off, tucking her in, none of it, like it had never happened.
It was then, on the edge of the sofa, in the instant that I could make out the front of Ellie’s face, that I remembered what I had seen in the pantry.
It had been two untouched cans of Spaghettio’s, and the mangled remains of something small and meaty, all that was left of which was bits of fat and splintered bone—and a few tufts of orange fur stuck to a collar that read “Mr. Fluff”, sticky from blood thick and red as tomato sauce.
The sound struck me for only a moment, and then I was gone.
“Good night, Teddy!”
I was sitting in the center of the couch. On the screen, a bird with a monocle was tucking Teddy the bear into bed, the moon grinning outside his window. I could feel the thread around my finger without even looking at it. The shape of Ellie sat in front of me, attention rapt on the screen, until the moment Teddy’s lights went out.
Then, without anyone touching the remote, the TV went black.
I sat in terrified silence as the creature stayed on the floor. Then, as my heart hammered in my aching ears, the shape slowly stood up and turned to face me.
It looked like little girl in every way but one. The face. There, framed by dark pigtails and connected to an ordinary neck, was a concave circle of metal. It bit deep into the creature’s skull, as though the original contents had been scooped out, and a chunk of machinery was installed.
The circle in the center was webbed and soft, and after a moment I recognized what it was. A speaker.
I sat and stared into the metal shape as it seemed to stare back. Then, as though speaking, it whirred slightly, the smallest hint of the metallic scream that had made my ears bleed playing through, making me wince. And then with a sound like a record scratch, a new sound came out:
“Hi Boys and Girls, it’s time for Teddy’s Big Day—”
The rest of the audio from the episode continued to play back as the creature faced me—at one point in the recording, there was some meowing that made it difficult to hear some of the dialogue, but after a sharp animalistic scream, it was gone—I could hear myself becoming increasingly panicked, and then silenced—and over the course of a half an hour, I was forced to relive the previous confusing, terrifying minutes of my existence.
It was somewhere in that replay that a single, terrifying thought was allowed to enter my mind.
I do not have a niece.
And then, the recording ended.
The creature went silent. We looked at one another, or rather, I stared into the webbing of the speaker. And then, clumsily, as though its head was very heavy, it began to walk. It tottered across my apartment floor, towards the door. It reached upwards, with much effort, turned the handle with little chubby fingered hands, and walked out.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My head and ears ached, and I was dizzy. I could only stare at my reflection in the black screen of my television, sweating and nauseous.
And then, I saw something on the carpet.
Right where the creature had been sitting, were left two objects.
One, a pair of children’s safety scissors.
And two, a small spool of scarlet thread.
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Credits
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