Oh, Baby

I hope this message finds you well. I want to apologize for all the stress I’ve caused these past few months, and the least I can do is explain why I had to leave so abruptly. I do understand if this is a huge red flag to you seeing we’ve only been dating for eight months now. Here goes nothing.

October has been an anxiety overhaul since I was ten. Well, even before that if I were to be completely honest. Remember that city I grew up in? That wasn’t true. Never even been to Stockton. You’ll also understand why I don’t bring you around my family too once you’ve finished reading through this.

I grew up in a small town where just about everyone knew each other. Generations of families all living amongst one another. There was a local legend that was well known around town that dated back before I was born. Allegedly there was an odd couple that moved into town after the children of one of the oldest families had sold their property when their parents had passed. The town was very welcoming, but the couple were overwhelmingly kind with odd obsessions that I came to learn were also fetishes.

The house I lived in was right next door to them. My parents made sure I was to stay away from that house as much as the rest of the kids were told to. I wasn’t even allowed to walk in front of it. I was told to either cross the street or walk around the block, but never in front. No matter what.

The neighbor to the left of the creepy house wouldn’t even look in our direction. They couldn’t even get themselves to walk or drive past the creepy couple’s house. I watched them go all the way around the block just to borrow some of my dads tools. I don’t even remember them ever looking down our street. That’s how much that couple made people feel uncomfortable.

They always looked so sick, almost like zombies. Both were super skinny and had stringy hair in patches. Apparently they looked the same when my parents were young which made me think they were some kind of vampires or something.

Sometimes I’d catch the lady waving at me from their porch, or the husband nodding his head at me while working on their front yard with his missing hand. It wouldn’t have felt so unsettling if they weren’t always smiling from ear to ear. It seemed so unnatural. It wasn’t just me though. They looked at everyone like that, and it made everyone uncomfortable to the point where the town essentially tried their best to avoid them altogether.

I was around seven or eight when I finally got curious enough to ask my parents why they didn’t like them. I tried to not make it seem like I was made uncomfortable by them as well, but my parents knew. That’s when I learned the couple next door weren’t very normal, for lack of a better word. There was nothing worse than feeling unsafe in my own home.

My parents unloaded a mess of information on me that day. Most of which I understood at the time. Both of my parents growing up in my childhood home was as weird as it sounded. They weren’t siblings though. My parents were initially neighbors until my grandparents took in my father when he was a little boy. My dad lived on the other side of the creepy neighbors with his parents before everyone started avoiding that house.

From my understanding, the lady of the house had an odd obsession with babies and the guy was obsessed with bodybuilding. It didn’t take long for the town to figure that out. The two had given themselves a reputation after the first couple months they moved in from what my parents said. The guy went to work with my grandpa who worked for a logging company while his wife volunteered to babysit children or take care of old folks for no charge.

The guy almost made it a full month before getting let go. At first they liked him quite a bit because he would bring in high protein meals for everyone without ever asking in return. After the first week or so the guy started asking his coworkers to demonstrate different workouts on their breaks and free time. It didn’t take long for him to start making everyone uncomfortable when he began making comments on their physique. All it took was a wandering hand for him to get let go due to a workplace injury.

The lady was just weird. She could not help treating everyone like a baby, no matter what age you were. Most people thought it was cute at first, even my mom at the time, but it was short lived. Everything seemed fine until she looked after a teenager whose parents came home to find them heavily sedated in a makeshift crib while wearing a diaper.

My parents have no clue how they managed to afford anything after the two made a name for themselves. They still went about their business throughout the town as if they did no wrong. Yet, everyone avoided them like the plague. Even when the lady got pregnant. My mom said no one gave her the time of day even though she would stand there and talk to anyone whether or not they cared to listen.

Nine months passed by, and the lady was no longer pregnant. The couple who spoke highly of a child that no one ever saw. Some thought they chose to give birth at home which led to the child’s passing. Others assumed she had a miscarriage, and the couple couldn’t wrap their head around it. It was the talk of the town from my understanding.

It was five years later when the first disappearances happened in the town. The beginning of the local legend all started with my grandparents I never got to meet. My dad went to spend the evening with my mom and her parents while his parents went out for the night. My mom and dad had lived in that home ever since.

The weird couple were the initial suspects due to their odd nature. The local sheriffs picked their place clean, but didn’t find any traces of my grandparents. Case went cold for a few years until transients started to disappear as well. It started out as one or two bodies being found at a time in the woods every month or so. Each one was battered and bruised, but cleaned up and dressed in nothing but an adult diaper before being disposed of.

People started to disappear more often as the years went on, and the bodies that were being disposed of weren’t being cleaned up like before. They all seemed to have their limbs and heads violently ripped off, but that wasn’t the weirdest thing. The bodies had indications of the limbs and heads were being forced back together by driving the broken bones into the flesh. The situation got worse with each group of bodies they found. Even without evidence, everyone still blamed that creepy couple.

My parents were the ones that started the whole thing where people avoided the neighbors house. My mom and dad would race home after school and yell at anyone who tried to walk in front of the house. They’d tell them to, “cross the street,” or something, but never in front. The adults even listened. All while their neighbors just smiled and waved whenever they saw someone like everything was okay.

My parents just knew those two were evil. I think of it as a child’s intuition. Nonetheless, that was their life for many years up until I was born. My mom’s parents had passed leaving the house to my parents, and my mom and dad thought they’d do the same. The thing is, I couldn’t live there after my parents died. All because of what happened on Halloween when I was ten.

Our Halloween traditions were my mom baking and passing out candy while my dad and uncle took me out to get candy. I was getting into my costume while they all hung out downstairs just like every other year. Smelling my mom’s Dutch apple pie filling my nostrils as I put on my Zorro mask will forever be my last pleasant memory.

I went to leave my room when I heard the glass of the back door shatter downstairs followed by my mom’s screaming. My body froze with my hand gripping the doorknob. I wasn’t sure what to do, let alone what just happened.

I heard my dad yell, “What the fuck, man?!” My uncle was asking if he needed to, “call the police,” or not.

The second scream coming from my mom made me throw open the door, and run downstairs. I could hear scuffling and grunting the closer I got to the bottom. I turned the corner to look inside the kitchen with my heart dropping into my stomach. There was a giant man standing in my kitchen holding my uncle in the air by his throat, and my mom down by her hair. Both of them were fighting to get free while my dad held his head on the floor in a puddle of blood.

The man stood at least seven feet tall, and was built like a brick house. His head was deformed like no other. Not one thing symmetrical about it. It almost looked painful. Worst of all, the man was wearing nothing but a soiled diaper that looked like it hadn’t been changed in ages.

Shit was falling out from behind him every time he moved. Vomit and food caked his chest hair and down his stomach. His arms and legs were covered in blood, but they weren’t from my parents. He looked at me with his uneven eyes and yelled one thing, “Toy!”

My mom twisted her body to see me. She yelled for me to run before the giant baby man slammed her head into the ground. I couldn’t run though. I was frozen again. I could hear my dad mumbling to run too, but I couldn’t get myself to do it. The man made his way to me with my uncle’s neck still in his grip, then slammed him on top of my dad.

Like that, my legs worked again. I’m not sure why my first instinct was to run back upstairs to my room, but that’s where I headed. The baby man was skipping behind me like we were playing a fucking game. “Hide and seek!” is what he kept saying over and over again as he made his way up the stairs behind me.

I slammed the door and locked it. I wasn’t sure what to do from there except to hide. I grabbed my plastic sword before crawling under the bed. Even made sure to move some of my toys around to give me some cover.

The man stopped outside my door laughing like a baby with a deep voice, then started to whine. It was terrifying. He was throwing a fit because the door was locked. The man started beating into the door making me flinch each time he hit it.

That’s when the sound of hope came from the other side of my door. It was my mom and dad. I could hear them fighting with the guy on the other side of the door for a while. The next sound I heard was the handrail break before everyone went silent again. I waited for something, anything indicating my parents were still alive, but it was dead quiet.

I started to cry when I heard my uncle downstairs screaming my name. I opened my door, looked down from where they were to see my parents and that monster laying on the floor in a pool of blood. My mom was under the man with her head splayed open. The handle of a knife in the back of the man’s head was embedded into her eye socket. My dad laid next to them with a broken arm, leg and back, struggling to breathe.

My uncle and I made eye contact and both started to cry. He told me to wait upstairs for him, but when he walked past them on the floor the guy grabbed his leg. My uncle started stomping on him, but it didn’t seem to affect him at all. The baby man right sat up which threw my uncle off balance. He yanked my uncle’s leg right out from under him. Sent my uncle into a daze before he climbed on top of him to wrap his massive hands around my uncle’s throat.

I ran downstairs not knowing what to do. I stood behind them with my heart and mind racing. Part of me wanted to run out the front door while the other screamed for me to do something. I put my foot against the intruder’s back, gripped the knife handle and pulled with everything I had. I can still remember the suctioning sound it made when it finally gave.

The guy didn’t even budge, but my uncle had stopped kicking his legs. I just kept sticking the knife in the giant man’s back, over and over again until he swung his arm back. I moved just in time for him to miss, but fell to my back. I don’t know how he was still moving. He was a monster.

I ran out the front door to see red and blue lights flashing next door. The crowd across the street screamed when they saw the giant man in a diaper chasing me out the house, both covered in blood. I ran to the crowd screaming for help, but they all scattered and ran away from me. I felt helpless. Last thing I remember was looking back at the giant baby man before blacking out.

Next thing I knew I was waking up in the hospital all by myself. I just started crying. Nurse ran in freaking out, then ran right back out to get the sheriff who’d been sitting outside my door for as long as I was out. Unfortunately, he was also the one that gave me the news.

My immediate family was dead. The giant baby man was real, and was also dead. Apparently I ran into a poll when I turned around. Shortly after the sheriff and deputy walked out to see the commotion to find me laying on the ground with everyone running away, and that monster running in our direction. Safe to say they gunned him down right there.

They were surprised with how many holes the guy had all over his body. Sheriff also found a hidden basement dug under the creepy couple’s house next door. That’s where they found mounds of dead bodies from transients who disappeared over the years, but they assumed they stopped dumping the bodies after it got too messy. Their bodies were ripped to pieces in different stages of decomposing.

Dirty diapers covered the floor of the small room with a weight set sitting in the opposite corner. It stunk of rot and shit around the area for weeks after they finished cleaning everything up. It was bad enough that I didn’t want to be there anymore, like at all. The sheriff offered to let me stay with him, but I couldn’t do it.

I ran away. I became a transient myself, changed my name and have been on the move ever since. It’s just whenever Halloween comes around I can’t help but run away and start over again. It’s like that monster is chasing me although I know it can’t be true. I know me leaving the way I did wasn’t fair, but I hope that you can forgive me one day.