Night Cursed
by Barbara Nickless

I ran from Ed on a night when the wind howled at the house like a beast eager to savage.

I finished packing two hours after Ed left for the tavern. The copy of Io's birth certificate had arrived that afternoon, and I'd decided to leave that night. I couldn't bear another day under Ed's hands. I loaded the bags in the trunk, then hurried down the hall for Io.

She was sleeping with her arms stretched across the confines of her crib. I lifted her, warm and heavy, and placed her in the car seat.

With my pulse throbbing in my throat, I punched the button to open the garage door. This was the most dangerous moment. If Ed walked up the drive now, how could I explain myself? Where would I be taking the baby in the middle of the night?

Where, but away from him?

The sidewalk stretched bone-white on either side of the house, empty of everything but the shrapnel of autumn leaves. The neighbor's dog had fallen silent, and even the wind had paused to catch its breath.

Then a shadow moved near the sidewalk, fifty yards away. Ed. I cowered into the garage as the keys slipped from my fingers. I scooped up the keys, jerked the car door open, and scrabbled for the ignition. I was trapped in shadows, with the monster that was my husband somewhere behind me.

In the back seat, Io woke and cried.

"Shhh, Io," I said. The key slipped into the ignition, and the Taurus leapt out of the garage with a roar.

I caught a glimpse of Ed's face, his handsome features contorted into something inhuman by the play of light from the neighbor's porch. He saw me and began a dead run for the car.

"Harriet!" he shrieked. His voice ripped the night.

But he was only flesh and blood. Even Ed wasn't a match for the Taurus. Tires squealed as I gunned forward, out of his sight.

The interstate was a dull gray ribbon across southern Colorado, broad and nearly straight from Denver to Mexico.

I picked Mexico because, generations ago, my ancestors came north from there. I had learned Spanish at my grandmother's knee. Never mind that Ed's family, too, was from Mexico. It was a big enough country. Ed couldn't find us.

At noon I stopped at a hotel twenty miles from the border. Io played while I lay down to sleep. But my heart began a wild race and I stared, sleepless, at the ceiling, watching a spider make its predatory way across the tiles.

I met Edmund Katapa while working at a Denver magazine. He'd come to talk to my boss about a group of picketers at the Art Council's office. I listened eagerly, having heard of his brilliance.

"They'll choke the life out of the arts," he roared. "They wallow in their holier-than-thou shit and can't see it. God, they'll be burning the artists, next."

His passion made my own heart leap in soul-searing rhythm. He was a large man, over six feet, with a bull-like chest and a rough peasant face that comfortably carried a heavy jaw and long nose. His hands plowed through the feeble resistance of the air. It was his hands I fell in love with. That night he took me to dinner. Six months later we were married.

Disillusionment began the night of our wedding, when his beautiful hands landed me in the hospital with two cracked ribs after I'd tried to walk out over a petty argument. I'd only wanted to give him time to cool down, but I learned very quickly that Edmund Katapa is fierce in his ownership and determined in his follow-through.

The lies came easily, for who wants to confess to making the worst mistake of their life? My mother thought we were happy. I stopped calling friends who asked about my bruises. My coworkers believed my stories about walking into walls. No one had any idea of what went on behind our doors. And even while it was happening, even as I lay weeping afterward, I thought I could still salvage my dream of a perfect marriage as easily as my ripped dress, piecing fabric and dream back together with thread and needle and hope. Ed had, after all, experienced a dreadful childhood. It would take time to undo what his family had done to him, and what he was, in turn, doing to me. We only needed time.

Then came the baby. Conceived while I was taking birth control pills and drinking Jim Beam every night with Ed. She ought to have been a mess.

I jerked awake. The spider was long gone. Io was fretting. I held her against me, rocking her, running my fingers through her soft, coal-colored curls and looking into her eyes, which were as startlingly dark as nightfall. "It's all right," I murmured. "We'll be fine."

I drove for days, taking elaborate detours and only stopping to feed Io. We'd sleep for a few hours in hotels where cockroaches skittered in the corners and neon lights buzzed outside the windows. I paid for everything with cash, using a different name at each stop. I woke each night, sweating, from dreams where Ed pursued me through endless mazes. But the rooms never held anything but the baby's breathing and my own.

At the end of two weeks, I buried myself deep in Mexico, in a town called Morales.

My abuela had spoken often of the oceanside village her mother had come from. I'd counted five circles labeled Morales on my map and visited every town, but found something wrong with each. Too large, too small, not remote enough. This one felt like home. The long, green hills in which the town was set, the steep, cobbled streets filled with dark-skinned pedestrians and the scent of sun-warmed dust, the air hazy with brine where the ocean unfurled at the base of the hills, this Morales could have been the very one my great-grandmother had known.

I found an apartment in an ancient adobe building perched on the top of a hill. Io and I could hear the hiss of the waves as we drove up the narrow, winding road with all the car's windows rolled down to let in the thick air. The building looked as if in a few years it would tumble down the hillside to beach itself on the sand. But right now, white geraniums sat in clay pots on every balcony and the westering sun tossed patterns through the latticed shades onto red-tiled floors. The apartment the landlady showed me was furnished, with a white-washed kitchen and two small, clean bedrooms. A brisk breeze blew through the open windows.

"I'll take it," I told her.

The landlady was short and stout with lustrous hair. "Bueno, bueno. Nina bonita," she said, touching Io's cheek. "I have a crib for her."

"Gracias. Su nombre es Iorana," I said. "After her grandmother."

Below us, we heard a child shouting. Senora Trujillo laughed.

"Such a bad boy, that one," she said. "Always a racket."

When she left, I threw open the doors to the balcony, and Io and I sat in the sunshine, sheltered from the wind by the thick walls. I listened to the shouts of children playing a soccer game in the courtyard below us and overheard a wife asking her husband to go to the market. I smelled tortillas frying and beans cooking and heard a child laughing in the apartment next to ours. The ocean stretched brilliantly blue beneath us, promising new horizons. I felt safe.

My pregnancy had been rocked with nightmares, but the baby was born healthy and on schedule. I'd hoped her new life would rekindle ours.

But when she was just a year old, Ed came home from a night of drinking, ready to rut. He slammed me against the stove and shoved my skirt up.

"Damn it, Ed," I said. "You're hurting me."

"You like it that way," he breathed in my ear.

"You'll wake the baby."

Down the hall, Io began crying. Ed got to her before I could, and when his poor attempts to soothe her failed, he shook her, hard. Io fell abruptly silent. I snatched her from Ed, cuddling her, listening for her breathing. Ed looked horrified by the depths of his anger, but I'd seen that look before. It meant nothing.

Io began having nightmares after that, shrieking in the still-born hours of early morning.

She looked at me now and gurgled. I carried her through the warm evening to the oceanside market. The roar of the ocean and the tide of human voices grew louder as we descended the hill. Women argued over the remaining tables of yellowfin tuna and bonito, baskets of corn, tomatoes, avocados and peppers. Their men stood in groups, smoking and talking, watching the women with sly eyes. The air was sharp with salt and fish and sand; the hiss of the ocean as it fanned across the beach seemed to say you're free, you're free, you're free.

When we returned to our apartment, I gave Io a bottle, then wrapped her in a blanket. We sat on the patio and ate slivers of fish wrapped in corn tortillas. I pointed out the constellations to her until she fell asleep.

I lay her in the crib and tucked the blanket around her. After checking the deadbolt on the front door, I turned out the lights and went to bed. For a time I lay awake, wondering how we would manage over the next few years, until Ed lost steam and gave up looking for us.

The wind gently rattled the patio door and finally soothed me to sleep.

Something woke me from dreams of dark passages. As I lay in the dark, Io screamed. I ran to her room and held her to my breast and rocked her. In the moonlight trailing through the window, she looked at me with frightened eyes.

"Hush, hush," I murmured.

"Bad," she cried into my neck. "Bad girl."

"Hush," I said again. "Io is a good girl."

Inwardly, I cursed Ed for her nightmares. I rocked her until her breathing calmed. She didn't stir when I lay her back down.

The wind had coaxed the patio door open. I pulled the door closed, noticing a sheen of water on the floor. It must have rained, though now the sky was clear and filled with stars. There was no lock, but I wasn't too disturbed. We were on the sixth floor. Tomorrow I'd ask the landlady to install a deadbolt.

In the morning we went exploring. We visited the town plaza where a fountain of leaping dolphins sparkled in the middle of a bricked patio. A church, the center of any Mexican village, ran the length of the north side of the plaza. Donkeys were lined up at a wooden post, drowsing in the heat while their owners attended mass. On the opposite end of the plaza stood a brown, single-story museum. Its windows were clean, its adobe freshly patched. When the sun climbed higher, Io and I went inside.

It was your usual small-town museum. I wandered between flamenco dresses and nineteenth-century saddles and antiquated guns. I read what I could of old newspapers, studied photographs on the wall. If I had found the right Morales, then some of these people might be my ancestors. Io alternately waked and napped on my shoulder. She was wide awake when I walked up to the bizarre skeleton that lay in a dark corner under glass.

I thought at first it was the bones of a bull. But then I noticed that below the skull the skeleton was all wrong. The limbs were long and slender, with a small pelvis and delicate hand and foot bones.

What a horrible joke, I thought. To put the head of a bull on the body of a human. Whoever would do such a thing?

For a moment I was afraid as I looked at the imprisoned bones. I imagined eyeless sockets gazing back at me and heard the click of bones on the wooden floor.

"Ah, senora, you have found our bull," said a voice.

I whirled around.

"Please forgive. I didn't mean to frighten you. I'm Juan Dominquez, the curator."

Domiquez was an old, dark man, who didn't reach my shoulder. His face was wrinkled from years in the sun and his hair was brilliantly white in the gloom. His brown eyes looked kindly.

"It's all right," I said in Spanish, though he had spoken in English. "I was just lost in thought." I turned back to the display case. "Strange skeleton."

"Si," said Juan, coming to stand beside me. "Half man, half bull."

His words, spoken matter-of-factly, made me shiver. "But surely it's a joke."

He shrugged. "Maybe. I am an educated man, but I cannot decide about these bones. An American anthropologist came to look at them once, but she didn't stay long and she never told us what she thought. Maybe she was offended. Maybe she was frightened. People tell stories..."

"What stories?"

"Not pleasant stories. Not for the ears of a pretty, young mother." He stepped away, gesturing for me to follow. "Have you seen the flamenco dresses?"

"Tell me. Please."

He sighed and came back. "Have you had lunch?"

He closed the museum and we ate menudo at an outdoor cafe. The wind ruffled our hair, while outside the awning the sun pounded on brilliant green palms.

"You are far from home," Juan said.

I laughed. "Is my Spanish so bad?"

"No." He smiled. "Not so bad. But not so good. You are running away?"

"Maybe," I said, uneasily. "Please tell me the stories. Of the bull."

"Forgive me," he said.

But whether for the question he just asked or the story he was about to tell, I didn't know.

"Long ago," he began, "a young senorita by the name of Maria Escoto fell in love with the bull of a local ranchero. Her family thought it was the ranchero's son she was seeing. They said nothing, though there were rumors that the son was a cruel man. But as the girl grew thin and pale and took to staying away all night, her family became worried. One night the father went looking for his daughter, determined to end the relationship. He found her with the ranchero's bull."

The wind rattled the awning. The waiter took our plates and brought us small cups of bitter coffee.

"What happened next?" I asked, my cup rattling as my hand shook from a sudden chill in the wind. I did not tell him that Maria was my mother and great-grandmother's name. The names were, after all, not uncommon.

"The father killed the bull. Within months, his daughter's stomach rounded and ripened, and it became apparent to all that she was pregnant. But though her father beat her, she would not name the father. The ranchero's son had disappeared, presumably to the good life in the city. When the baby was born, it had the head and torso of a bull. Its mother died soon after, torn to pieces from giving birth to such a monster. Her father would have killed the creature, but its grandmother hid it and gave it to her sister to raise."

He sipped his coffee and stared across the courtyard. After a moment, I touched his sleeve.

"Do you believe this story?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I'm an old man, entitled to believe whatever suits me. It is true that I have seen many dark things."

"But a man who is half not-a-man?"

"Many of the people in Morales came from Greece, through Spain. Did you know that? They brought with them stories of a flesh-eating bull. The Minotaur, they called it. Perhaps the Indians believed the stories, for the Spaniards were themselves brutal, killing the Indian men and fathering half-castes upon their women. For whatever reason, the stories persisted. And now we have our own set of bones." I shuddered. When I closed my eyes I could see the bones and imagine the click-click of their passing.

"There, see, I have frightened you."

"No." I opened my eyes and forced a smile. "Of course not. I love to hear the old stories, even the dark ones."

Juan reached across the table and patted my arm.

"Come again, senora," he said. "And bring your beautiful daughter. Please don't let the words of an old man frighten you."

I took his hand. Io and I had just made our first friend in Morales. I would try to forget the strange bones and the cruel Spaniards and the story of the girl and the bull.

But they would haunt me.

That night I ran in a maze. The monster hunted for me through long passageways. I could find neither a door nor my child, though I heard Io crying.

I snapped awake. She wascrying. I ran to the next room, then clutched the doorframe as, for one horrible moment, my nightmare followed me into waking and I saw a monster in place of my baby. A monster with a grotesquely large face, flaring nostrils, and a thick, woolly pelt of fur.

For just an instant. Then the creature was gone, vanished like mist at sunrise. With a cry, I snatched Io up.

She whimpered in my arms. She felt wet, slimy from something more than water. I flicked on the lamp, and saw that the crib was wet and that the moisture was faintly crimson. A trail led from the room. I followed it to the patio door, which stood open.

Behind me, the phone rang.

Startled, I whirled around, trapped between the open door and the menace of a phone ringing in the middle of the night when no one was supposed to know where we were.

"Daddy," said Io.

Dark walls of panic closed around me. I snatched up the phone.

"Darling," said Ed. "I've missed you."

"Damn you!" I screamed. "Leave us alone!"

I slammed the phone down and jerked the plug out of the wall.

After a moment I plugged it in again, thinking to call the police if he called again. The phone stayed silent.

I studied the floor near the patio. Ed had dumped the water, or whatever it was, to frighten me. I knew how his mind worked. I knew of his love affair with symbols. This water was meant to be birthing water, to tell me we would be reborn as a family.

For years I had taken his abuse. Let him hit me, do other things to me. I'd loved him, obeyed him, even honored him in a perverse way. Only when he hurt Io did I flee.

But I couldn't keep running from him. Tomorrow I would buy a gun. When he came back, I would kill him.

"Daddy is a bad man," I told Io.

I mopped up the slimy water, then dragged the kitchen table over and shoved it against the patio door. I took Io back to my room and held her in my arms, soothing myself with the warmth and silken softness of her skin and hair, the very humanness of her. When the sky began to lighten, I finally fell asleep. Later, I learned, there must have been a great hue and cry in the apartment below ours, but Io and I had slept through it.

The next morning, on my way out to buy a gun, I met Senora Trujillo on the stair.

"I am so glad your little one is all right," she cried when she saw me. "I was coming to check on you."

"What are you talking about?" She couldn't know about Ed.

"Oh, it is terrible." She sank onto a stair, mopping her broad face with her apron. "Nothing like this has ever happened."

My heart beat faster. "What is it?"

"Last night a boy died. Little Dominick Artego. In the apartment below yours."

My first feeling was relief--for this had nothing to do with Ed--and pity for the parents. But then she continued.

"Someone forced their way through the patio door and murdered the child. Oh, it is terrible what the monster did to that poor baby."

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I could hear the click-click of bones. For just a moment I was back in the abyss of night, seeing a monster in my baby's crib.

"Did anyone see anything?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No. Nothing. The police have come, but they're not talking."

I sank to the stairs beside her.

It could be that this had nothing to do with Ed. That he had followed me, and nothing more.

But it would also be very like him. He had the depth of hatred that would let him kill an innocent child as a promise to me. A promise that if I didn't return to him, and bring Io with me, he would kill her.

Should I tell the police about him? What if they didn't believe me? Worse, what if they didn't catch him? Twice, when Ed and I were still together, I'd called the police in a panic. They'd taken my statement, they'd taken Ed's. They'd left. It had only made things worse.

"I am going to buy a gun," I said, standing up. "And I'd like a lock installed on my patio door."

"Perhaps you should move away," she said, grabbing my arm. "Maybe it isn't safe."

I shook my head. "I won't run. Not anymore. But I'm getting that gun."

I turned to my only friend in Morales. When I told Juan about the murdered child, he loaned me his revolver, and gave me a quick lesson in using it. I did pretty well at knocking cans off the fence. Well enough to shoot a man Ed's size.

As we walked back toward the museum, I stopped on the steps. "The family whose daughter bore the bull. The Escotos. Are they still around?"

He shook his head. "They left long ago. They were night cursed and they left. Or so those even older than myself have said."

"Night cursed?"

"Si. In Morales, when a family has seen tragedy, we say they are night cursed."

Night cursed. I shivered in the shade of the awning. I recalled a friend of mine telling me, before Ed's and my marriage, that Ed's surname, Katapa, was the Greek word for curse. What curse had I brought upon my daughter by giving her such a father? What curse had my own family rendered? I thought of that long ago girl, Maria Escoto, dead from childbirth.

"They are just stories, Senora," said Juan. "Myths. Like the stories you Americans have about alligators in the pipes."

"Yes, of course."

That night I drank a pot of coffee and dragged a chair into Io's room. I sat with my back to the crib, facing the door, the gun in my lap. As soon as Ed walked in, I'd fire.

But despite my best efforts, I nodded off in the early hours of the morning. I awoke when a loud thump broke my dreams. I opened my eyes, immediately alert. The doorway was empty. I turned to the crib, thinking Io had fallen out.

Something was trying to climb the leg of the crib. I flipped on the light and stared.

It was the size of a large dog. Though it had human arms and legs, its upper body was covered with a dark, woolly pelt. The remaining skin was brown and leathery. Its neck was thick, its nostrils flattened. Tiny horns, that shrank even as I watched, sprouted from its brow. It turned and looked at me. I saw a row of razor-sharp teeth.

Like the minotaur, I thought.

"Play?" it said.

I screamed and reached into the crib to snatch Io up. But the bed was empty.

By now the thing had reached the slats of the crib, and it drew itself inward and popped through the bars. The tiny horns vanished. The fur melted away. My own baby looked up at me.

Not quite my baby. For in her eyes I saw Katapa. She was half his child, of course. Half cursed.

In the apartment next door I heard a scream. I stepped back, my fist to my mouth. My feet slid on the wet floor and I stared at the red-tinged water. A birthing liquid. Created each night as Io went through her metamorphosis.

I heard the click-click of ancestral bones.

From outside came the wail of an ambulance.

I dropped the gun and backed away from the crib.

Underneath my feet, a piece of paper crackled. I picked it up and smoothed it out.

"Dearest Love," read the note. "Did you think I'd leave you and my child? We are reunited in Morales, our ancestral home. Yours Always, Edmund."

"Oh, my God," I whispered. We were cursed. Edmund's family. Perhaps mine, as well. The sins of the father.

Io lifted her chubby arms toward me and kicked her legs. She began crying. It was almost a bellow. I turned and ran from the apartment. In the hallway I was nearly knocked over by two paramedics. They banged on the door of the apartment next to mine. I ran on.

Outside, I gulped air. The emergency lights on the ambulance strobed across the apartments. I stood in the shadows while they brought out a stretcher. The tiny form on it was completely covered. A woman wailed in the doorway.

"Same animal as the last child," said the cop to the ambulance driver. "Ugly, what it did."

"Miguel! Miguel!" shrieked the woman. She lunged toward the stretcher. A man pulled her back. "My baby! My child!"

My baby. My child. I'd had a nightmare. I'd left my baby alone because of some crazy story about a flesh-eating bull. I rushed back into the building and took the stairs two at a time.

But when I reached the apartment, the red-tinged water was still slick upon the floor. Clumps of black fur clung onto the slats of the crib. Io was sobbing quietly, now. She held her arms out to me. "Mommy!"

I lifted her up and held her close. I breathed in the scent of her, rubbed my cheek against hers. Could I really believe that my daughter was a monster?

I stared at the birthing water, at the clumps of fur, and knew the answer.

"Oh, Io," I murmured into her soft curls. "What have we done?"

The sound of the ambulance faded into the dawn. I sat with Io in my lap and wondered what would cause a baby to kill. I pointed toward the apartment next door. "Were you playing?" I asked her. "With the boy?"

"Playing," she nodded. "But he was a bad boy. Then I was bad Io." Her face screwed up and she began to cry again. I tucked her head into my shoulder and rocked her.

"You're not bad, Io. You just have to learn."

I stared out the patio door at the approaching dawn. Humans had found a way to live with their nightmares for millennia. Monsters had been exorcised, bad genes nurtured away. I believed that a child was only partially a product of its genes. The rest was environment. With enough love, enough demonstration of kindness and caring, even the most gene-cursed child could be taught how to behave. Io would have to learn. Just as any child would.

As I stared out at the night sky, the phone began to ring. I whirled around in the darkness. Anger festered in me like a deep thorn, deeper even than my determination to do right by my child. After tonight I'd raise her differently. But first there was something that couldn't wait.

"Come on over, Ed," I said, picking up the phone. "Your daughter wants to play with you."

Barbara Nickless is a Colorado Springs-based writer and former Colorado Gold and Front Range Fiction Writers award winner.