I should preface this story with one thing: I have not seen the Babadook.
I should, but I still haven’t and I definitely hadn’t seen it when I worked on this short story about a woman who receives a book for her new baby that spirals her into madness.
Or maybe she was already mad?
Maybe postpartum just sucks?
There is a clear theme with my work published during 2020-2024. Having babies is hard! Lack of sleep is hard! And gift giving can also be very, very hard.
And terrifying.
I hope you enjoy this story–and while you’re reading, I should really get to seeing the Babadook.
The Storybook
By Eve Morton
Noah was three days old when Cassandra found the storybook. It was amongst a pile of baby-things that people had delivered to the house over the course of the past week and a half, ever since she’d reached her due date. Noah had other plans about when he would arrive, and though the living room slowly became overrun with beautiful presents wrapped in blue paper announcing her baby boy, or regular cardboard boxes stamped with Amazon, she didn’t want to open them.
“It feels like tempting fate,” she told Michael, her husband, every time his gaze wandered over towards their Christmas pile without a tree. “I can’t open anything until he arrives. And we know he’s safe.”
“He’s safe,” Michael said, and often put his hands over Cassandra’s swelling belly. She’d hold her breath until the baby kicked and gave her some sign of life. When he did, because he always did, she’d smile and kiss Michael.
“You’re probably right,” she said many times and in many ways. “But I want to wait. The presents are for him, anyway. It’s rude to open something for someone who’s not here.”
At the mention of decorum, Michael would usually relent. Since they had not had a baby shower–out of busy-ness and distance from their families rather than pure superstition–he’d been hoping to open some of the presents over Skype or Zoom in order for others to watch. So even when baby Noah came, and he was nine pounds and utterly perfect, the presents had remained in a strange sort of stasis: announcing his arrival, yet in pristine condition, the world going on around them.
But now it was getting ridiculous. Had it not been for the sleep deprivation and the utter exhaustion Cassandra felt after giving birth–which, in fairness, some people had warned her about but those words now seemed like mere fairy tales to the aches from her neck down–she would have torn those gifts open the moment she was released from the hospital, decorum or Zoom be damned. She wanted to see what new toys her baby boy got; if someone had given her a harness or sling to carry him around, or if they’d need to jet out to the store (when?) to get that for themselves; and if someone had given her a parenting book at all. Because wow, she did not think that being a mom would be this hard, and without her own mother or sisters around, she did not know what she had to do from hour to hour.
Michael was napping when Cassandra finally had enough strength to move herself to the pile of presents lined up along their family room couch. Noah had fallen asleep after nursing, and though her nipples smarted and she was desperate for a shower that lasted longer than five minutes, plus a sandwich and a good stiff drink, Cassandra went for the presents. She was about to sit cross-legged, felt her stitches with a blinding ray of pain, and then decided she’d stand. Yes, standing was always better.
She opened a soft package first. More onesies, a size or two above newborn, from her aunt Abigail. Nice, wonderful, but not what she needed right now. She moved onto the next package, and then the next. A sling was there, along with some bottles and a breast pump. From her sister in law, she noted. What an odd thing to give someone–here is a machine for your breasts!–but she pushed that aside. It was a nice gesture, clearly done to make sure her brother, still the notorious slacker he’d been at fifteen in her mind, got involved. Cassandra did her best to lay each item, no matter how strange or wonderful, with the person’s card who had sent it to her, so she could write them a thank you note eventually. Maybe when Noah was five years old and in school, because that certainly felt when she’d have time again.
Just as she reached the last present, Noah cried. Cassandra let out a huff of disappointment. She was almost done! She was half-driven by madness to open the last present. No one had given her parenting books yet–she guessed that was impolite, yet breast pumps and nursing bras and nipple guards were more than kosher–but this one was book shaped. It was wrapped in red paper, an odd color but a neutral one she supposed, and it was long and hard on the surface. Clearly a book. Maybe thin for a parenting book, but perhaps parenting books were released in small bite-sized volumes to not overwhelm the birth mother too soon. She liked that idea, and even as Noah’s cries turned pitiful, she tore back the blood-red paper.
A children’s storybook.
“Huh,” she said aloud. It had not been what she expected at all. Wasn’t this kid not going to read for at least a year and a half? Can’t we wait until the first birthday before we jack up the Baby Einstein pressure?
Of course, even if Noah couldn’t understand anything beyond pooping and farting at this stage in his development didn’t mean that Cassandra couldn’t read to him. Her mother had already sent Cassandra her old storybooks when she found out she was pregnant, just for the sake of nostalgia. “I Love You Forever,” her mother had said on the phone, and Cassandra had taken too long to remember the name of the Robert Munsch book that was designed to make people cry. “Oh, it is the best thing to read to your new baby. I’m sending it right away.”
A Robert Munsch, or even a bizarre Dr. Seuss, this new storybook was not. Though the cover and the pages inside were unworn, and the book was brand new, there was a dated quality to the item. The art on the cover seemed as if it was hand-drawn, scrawled in haste more than carefully composed. Cassandra struggled to make any sense of the title across the front, since it was in cursive font, and the cover image was quite dark.
Welcome to the New World, Boy or Girl, she finally read. The cover image was, she thought, a sky at nighttime, save for a speck of light. The moon? Is this a knock-off Goodnight, Moon from Costco? Cassandra was about to see if Margaret Wise Brown was the author, but Noah’s cries were now persistent. Her breasts started to leak and milk soaked her shirt. She sighed. This felt like someone ringing the bell at the front desk of a hotel over and over, demanding service. Her body and her baby spoke without her conscious connection, whether she liked it or wanted it or not.
Even after she scooped Noah into her arms, she was still thinking of the strange book. Who the hell would send something like that to her? She hurried her babe through his feeding, and when he finally fell milk drunk against her arms, she tucked him back into the crib and returned downstairs. Each muscle smarted. Each blink she made was a heavy weight. She should have gone right into bed with her husband, who was still napping away the early morning wake up from Noah, and from talking to his mother for over an hour and a half the day before on the phone. Cassandra should have been smart like him, and rest while the baby was resting.
But she wanted to read the storybook.
Cassandra sat on the couch with the book splayed on her thighs. She swore the light on the cover had moved. It was not a moon after all, but some sort of match or flame. She peered close to the design and tried to see if there was something beneath the illustration, a layered trick of the light, or something that the baby was supposed to touch to find and sort new sensations. She ran her hands all over the book’s fine edges before she slid it open. The title page had a reproduced image of the cover, with the title and the same light in the center, but the darker night had been pulled away. It was now in grey-scale, and it revealed a small child holding the light–a candle–and a slinking black pool beneath their feet.
No, not a pool. Cassandra bent closer to the image. That’s a snake. Or maybe a dragon?
She flipped the book around to see if there was any more information on the back, like an author or Disney symbol movie-tie-in. Did they do blurbs for kids’ books? But there was nothing. Just black, nothing printed. She sought out the copyright page inside, and that was missing, too. There was no author of this work. Just the title, and this strange slithery creature.
“I don’t know how the hell this is for kids,” she said aloud. There was no sound in the house, not even the traffic out of their suburban home. It was silent, deadly silent.
So Cassandra read.
Cassandra only got to the first page, where the black creature welcomed the new little boy or girl into the world, before her eyes shut tight in exhaustion. She slumped over the book on the couch, her entire body relenting and giving into the experience she had just gone through, but had never fully processed in the past three days. So when she dreamed of the black creature slithering out of the pages of the book, and moving up her legs, over her still swollen stomach, and filling up her nursing bra with black instead of the milky white, she thought it was just a dream. A strange dream, but just a dream.
Even as the black creature slithered out of her bra and went around her neck, and then through her hairline, Cassandra could not be pulled out of her sleep. Her body was too tired. Her body had been through hell. And the black creature knew it had a home in that space inside of her where the baby had once been. Soon, it slid between her ears and into her brain, where it wanted to stay.
Just as it lay to rest, Cassandra burst into tears.
“Hey, hey.” Michael came down from the stairs. He was only wearing boxers and the same t-shirt he’d worn when she’d given birth. He rushed to her on the couch and slid an arm around her back.
“Michael!” She sobbed. She turned to him, buried her face in that shirt, and smelled the antiseptic of the hospital room. She remembered the blinding pain of being torn in two as her son came out of her. She wanted to let him go, but it had hurt so much. She fought the urge now to scream out, to yell that she wanted to stuff Noah back inside, so she could keep him safe forever.
“Michael,” Cassandra sobbed instead. Michael held her shoulders and rocked her as if she was a baby. Even as Noah cried out for attention, Michael rocked her.
Good, Cassandra thought. This is the way it is supposed to be.
Eventually, she ran out of tears. It felt like a purging, like the few times she’d thrown up in the first trimester. She was empty now. She felt better now.
“Are you okay?” Michael asked. Noah was still crying.
Cassandra nodded. “I’ll go get–“
“Let me get him. I’ll bring him to you if he needs you.”
Michael squeezed her shoulder one last time before he got up from the couch. Cassandra wiped her hands across her face, feeling the tightness of her skin from her tears as she did. She swallowed hard and tasted something bad. Like decay in her mouth, like her grandfather’s breath before he died, and when his blood sugar was too low.
Cassandra’s stomach rumbled loudly. She was soon bounding into the kitchen with a renewed energy and purpose. People had been sending food as well as gifts, and so, it was easy to locate soup and muffins. She ate a banana nut muffin with her left hand and served herself chicken noodle soup with her right. When she inhaled that meal in a matter of minutes, she went in search of ice cream at the back of the freezer. That was polished off in no time, too. She was in the middle of heating up a macaroni casserole when Michael came back into the kitchen.
“I see you have your appetite again.”
She fought a wave of anger at Michael’s smile. “What? I couldn’t eat while giving birth and I think it finally caught up to me.”
He held up his hands to show he meant no harm. “Noah’s good, by the way.”
“Right. Thank you.” Cassandra’s stomach flipped. She was supposed to be concerned with him, wasn’t she? She should have offered to feed him before herself. She should have–
“Hey.” Michael put a hand on her shoulder. She had been crying again. Right into the macaroni dish.
“Oh wow.” Cassandra shook her head, causing the tears to roll down her cheeks faster. “I don’t know what is wrong with me.”
“Baby blues,” Michael said as if it was obvious. “Hormones. Dude. You’ve just gone through a hell of a last couple days.”
“Dude?”
“You know what I mean, Mom.” All throughout her pregnancy, Cassandra had resisted that label, in much the same way she resisted the baby shower before Noah arrived. She was just a pregnant lady until then. Not a mom.
Cassandra thought she’d be elated when she heard the word now. But she felt empty. Sick. And filled with a sense of dread so profound it could not simply be hormones or the baby blues.
“Hey. Whoa.” Michael grabbed her arm. She’d been about to fall to the tile floor. He guided her out of the kitchen and into the living room again, the stacks of torn paper, gifts, and cards everywhere. She tried to apologize and explain that she’d kept track of who gave what, but he shushed her. “I don’t care about presents. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Cassandra was still crying. She wanted to say something else, but she thought if she opened her mouth, the entire world would come out. All the bad first. But then maybe, if she was good, the good parts of the world would also come out. It was a strange thought, one that didn’t feel wholly like her own.
“I don’t know who gave us the book,” she said after another fifteen minutes. Michael had been rubbing her back, trying to calm her, a face full of tension that even he, expert lawyer he was, could not hide.
“The book?” he repeated. “If it’s a parenting book, it’s probably my sister. And she means it for me, not you.”
“No, she gave me a breast pump.”
“Again, that’s not a reflection on you, but on me,” he insisted.
Cassandra didn’t want to argue that it was still her breasts that were part of the conversation. They didn’t feel like hers anymore. She went in search of the storybook instead, telling Michael about it in bits and pieces. “I can’t find it. Where did it go?”
“It sounds bleak,” Michael said. “Maybe it’s good you can’t find it.”
“No, I want to read it. I want to get to the end.” Cassandra was up from the couch, all sadness replaced by determination. She dropped to her knees on the floor, wincing as she did. Michael tried to convince her to get back to the couch yet again, but she was still in search of the book.
“Knowing my mother,” Michael said. “She probably sent it to us. It’s probably something from a yard sale she went to. Or a random thing she found at the thrift store. Nothing with actual sentimental value. We can throw it right out the window if you’d like.”
“But it looked brand new. I mean, the book itself seemed old, like a classic, but the book itself was new. Wrapped in red paper.”
“Red paper?” Michael lifted a brow. “I’m glad you’ve lost it, then.”
“Why? I want it.”
“Then I’ll get it for you again on Amazon. Cassie, please.” Michael grabbed her wrist. It wasn’t hard, but his face was edged with concern. She furrowed her brows, confused at his confusion. Then she followed his darting gaze, and realized she’d soaked through her shirt with milk. And her pants with blood.
“Oh God.” She stared at her body as if it was not her own. “Oh, God. I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I just–“
Cassandra ran up the stairs two by two, which didn’t help her stitches in the least. She didn’t care. She needed to throw up. She needed to cry. She needed to spill all sorts of substances from her body. Even though the milk was white and her blood was red, and any type of vomiting she did was a non-color like vomit always was, she expected it all to be black.
By the time she was done throwing up, her exhaustion came back. Michael was outside the door, and guided her to bed. Noah was crying–screaming, actually–and Cassandra worried he’d need her.
“Or my breasts,” she said, as if they were not part of her anymore. “He needs to feed.”
“I will figure it out,” Michael said. “You sleep.”
And she did. No arguments anymore. She slept and slept and slept, while Michael strapped his new son into a carrier and got him formula at the local grocery store. He also saw a couple parenting books, and after thumbing through them, bought the only one of the bunch that mentioned postpartum depression and psychosis.
After getting Noah to bed again, he went in search of Cassandra’s storybook. He did not find it in the mass of gifts, which in spite of Cassandra’s protests, were not organized in the least. Some of the cards had even been torn in two, as if in a rage or with her own teeth. When Michael also realized that Cassandra had put the breast pump from his sister in the trash compactor, his concern grew.
Even more when Cassandra’s storybook couldn’t be found. No Amazon store or used book retailer had ever heard of it. And without an author, or tracking number from the package, he could do nothing to verify its existence.
There was also no red paper in the living room. Not even a spec of red on any of the torn up cards.
Michael was pacing the living room by the time his sister, Ashley, called. “Hey new dad. How’s the life?”
“I think I need some help, Ash.”
Then Cassandra’s true nightmare–not the ones she had in her bedroom, about snakes and slugs that flowed through her body, repairing and revisiting her ever shrinking womb–began.
*
“Will you give this to Noah?” Cassandra asked her husband six months later.
Cassandra and Michael, plus a sleeping Noah, met in the visiting room at the local psych ward. Her bracelet, marking her time there and her condition, became visible as she slid the package across the table to her husband. Cassandra was no longer ashamed about the bracelet anymore; she used to hide it with long sleeves and had started training herself to use her right hand for most tasks, rather than the left where the bracelet was, but now she embraced it.
“We could open it now,” Cassandra said, “but I don’t want to wake him. It’s a bedtime story for him, anyway. Better to have when he can appreciate it more.”
Michael nodded slowly, but didn’t take the package. “How are you feeling?”
“Good. Really good.” Cassandra wasn’t lying. She had been seeing her therapist less and less now–though that was still once a week–and she was thriving now that she was on the right medication. The treatment she’d had at the local ward wasn’t horrifying, either. The staff was nice and understanding, and they allowed visits with her husband and son. It was the nights and some bright afternoons when Cassandra saw the black slug, and she knew she was being followed, that were difficult. But she was putting it all behind her, after putting it all down into a book.
“In fact,” Cassandra added, “Dr. Melbourne thinks I can go home in another month. I’ll be around in time for this guy to say his first word. I can read to him, too.”
Michael nodded, though his lips were thin and tight. There were bags under his eyes. His sister and mother had moved in to help with the baby, but there was only so much they could do to ease his worries about Cassandra.
“I’m better now, really,” Cassandra said. She eyed the still-untouched package. “I drew it all out. I wrote it all out. I feel so much better, really. I want to be his mom.”
“You were always his mom,” Michael said, voice weak. “And I’ve always been his dad. Even when he was the size of a pea, it was still true.”
“I know that now. And I still have his entire life to prove it, even though it sucks I’ve missed this much. That’s what I wrote about, though. That’s what’s in the book.”
Again, Michael only nodded. Cassandra’s heart sunk. He was not going to read it to their son. He was not going to read it himself. He was going to throw it in the backseat of the car and forget about it like he forgot about their dry cleaning or library books. She would have to be the one to tell Noah about the world, about light and darkness, and how there was only ever one way to rid yourself of the darkest parts.
“It’s okay,” Cassandra said, slipping the package back over to her side of the table. “Maybe I should keep it a bit longer. Get the drawings right.”
Michael seemed relieved. He put his hands on the table so he could embrace hers. She did as he wanted, and when Noah awoke, she held him in her arms. Her body had healed, and though she no longer had milk that spurted at his faintest noises, she still felt like she belonged with him. Like he belonged to her.
“Oh my baby boy,” she said, holding him so close that she could smell his baby-smell, and feel the shuddering of his tiny body in fear and delight as she whispered, “Welcome to the world, both good and bad. Remember, remember there is still a light somewhere, and momma will show you, soon enough, how to fight the dark.”
END
Eve Morton 