The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [64]
“A woman really wanted to have a baby,” she began.
John resigned himself to listening, figuring that at least if she was telling stories, she couldn’t ask more questions.
“She went to the shaman and said, ‘We have been trying to have a baby, with no luck.’ The shaman told the woman, ‘You will have a baby, but you must promise me that you will feed and care for this baby no matter what happens. No matter how the child looks or acts, you must love it and show it to everyone.’ The woman agreed. The shaman danced and said some spells over her. She went home and soon was pregnant.”
John interrupted her. “And then let me guess. The baby was born with a giant-ass mouth. I think I get the rest.”
The girl ignored him. “This was in the old times when a woman gave birth by herself or only with the help of her mother. This woman was in the back of the sod house, and the people didn’t have walls then, in those underground houses, only grass mats that they used for beds and for privacy. She made her mother leave and gave birth behind one of the grass walls. She didn’t let anyone see the baby, and she just tucked it away in the back of the house, in a dark little corner, and covered it with caribou hides and grass mats so no one would see it.
“The baby would cry and cry and the mother would tell her daughter that she shouldn’t be ashamed of it and she needed to breast-feed it and show the child to everyone like the shaman said. But the daughter refused. The daughter would go to the back of the house to feed the baby, and never showed it to anyone. The mother finally peeked between the grass strands in the wall and could see the baby. It had a mouth that covered most of its face, stretching from ear to ear. And the teeth. The baby had rows of long, sharp white teeth.
“The mother reminded her daughter not to be ashamed of the baby, but she still refused. She kept the child in the back of the dark house, always covered. One night the mother heard a strange crackling noise coming from the back of the house. She lit the seal-oil lamp and peeked through a crack in the wall and could see it. The baby could already crawl, and he sat on top of his mother. He’d been breast-feeding and eaten his way into her chest. Blood covered his face, and the crackling she heard was the crunching of her daughter’s ribs.
“The mother quickly put on her parka and ran to the men’s house. She told them the Big Mouth Baby had eaten her daughter and would come for them next if they didn’t escape,” the girl said. Her voice dropped to a whisper, as if she’d scared herself with her own story. “The people quickly and quietly ran away from the village and never returned.”
“That’s it?” he asked, with a chuckle. “That’s your scariest story?”
“Well, there’s more, but that’s the scary part,” she said.
“What’s scary about that?” he asked.
She wiggled her sleeping bag closer to him and pulled the top closed until she was speaking through a small, mouth-sized hole.
“The Big Mouth Baby is still out there,” she whispered, “still crawling around in the brush along the river, looking for people to eat.”
23
He crawled back into the snow cave and closed up the entry hole with the old woman’s garbage can lid. On his hands and knees he crept to his sleeping bag, which the girl had pulled out for him. He thought the girl and the old woman were asleep, tired from the day’s journey, but they weren’t. They waited until he settled in.
“What does it look like?” the girl asked then. “Did you see anyone?”
“I couldn’t see much,” he said. “Still a ground blizzard. The wind is letting up some, though. I could see plenty of buildings still standing. I could see the air tower, some houses. The big fuel tanks look different—burned up, I think.”
“You seen any lights?” the old woman asked.
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. He didn’t know what he saw. The town didn’t exactly look inviting. And he couldn’t say for sure if he’d seen anything at all.
“This is bad. No one’s alive in Bethel either?” the girl asked in