I woke in pitch darkness. I sat up and looked around, trying to see. Nothing. Am I blind? I touched my eyelids, felt my eyeballs flick this way and that. I still had eyes in my head, but had no idea whether they still worked.
Feeling around, I found I’d been sleeping on a cot, and I was naked. The latter didn’t concern me: the warm darkness made clothes unnecessary for either body temperature or modesty. The cot was bolted to the floor, one more oddity in a very odd situation. I clicked my tongue and listened for echoes; I’d heard of some blind people doing this. I didn’t know how to interpret the echoes, but there was a noticeable delay. A big room, then.
A new sound interrupted my experiment — it sounded like a baby’s squawk. This was getting stranger all the time. I shuffled in the direction that I thought the noise came from. The next sound was the “a-kat a-kat a-kat a-kat” of a baby demanding attention. My groping hands found the crib, knocking something to the floor. I wondered where the diapers might be — he probably needed one — but when I found him, I quickly found he was a she, and naked as well.
“Com’ere,” I said, picking her up. She wrapped her hands around my neck and slobbered on my shoulder. Being a man, I had no sustenance to give her, only comfort — but for now, that seemed to be enough. Judging from her weight, she was about a year old, maybe a little older. I reached down and found what I’d knocked over: a broom. Now I had a way to probe the darkness ahead of me. I turned a slow circle, clicking my tongue. A door required a wall, after all.
I finally settled on a direction, let go the crib, began walking. The broom handle tap-tapped against the floor, left and right, the echoes coming quicker —
A light. Off to my left. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, looked around. It was there, so faint it only illuminated itself, but it was there. I turned toward it.
The baby squirmed around my side. “Nononono. Bad.” Closer to two years than one, then.
“The light?” I whispered.
“Bad. Bad.” She tried to twist my body around to the direction we’d been going, and I let her.
To my left, the light began to bob up and down, as if it were trying to get my attention. I began to turn toward it again, just as the broom found the wall. I stopped to think for a moment.
Angler fish. In the deepest oceans, where no sunlight penetrates, light becomes bait for mating and feeding. Perhaps the little girl sensed what I couldn’t about the nature of that light. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The more it made sense, the angrier I grew. It was one thing to throw a man to a — whatever it was, but a baby? I sat down, still holding her, and wrestled my rage under control. Whatever was dangling a light at us could sense us somehow — perhaps by body heat? If I could start a fire, I might be able to blind it while gaining my own sight, but what did I have to start a fire with?
A crib. And a mattress. If I could find them again. I stood and put that bobbing light to my right. Taking wide swings with the broom, I tried to remember how many steps I’d taken. On my hundredth step, the broom caught the crib just to my right.
I pulled the mattress out and leaned it against the crib, putting the girl against it with a prayer she wouldn’t wander off, before attacking the frame and woodwork. I used the broom to break some of the bars out of the crib, and pried wires loose from the frame. I used the wire to tear a strip of tough nylon from the mattress, twisting it into a cord before tying the ends to a piece of wire, making a crude bow. Broom straws and splinters from the crib bars made kindling.
With the mattress shielding us from the angler, I twisted a crib bar into the bowstring and started working the bow back and forth, keeping a loose grip on the wooden bar. After some timeless time, a faint red glow appeared and grew brighter. I stopped long enough to push my kindling into that glow and blew gently —
A tongue of flame! I fed it kindling, enough to get the mattress burning. I took up the girl in my left arm, the broom in my right, and held the broom over the flames to make a torch.
We both cringed at the shriek of the angler. I took a few running steps away from the mattress, and wished I still couldn’t see it — we aren’t made to see things like that. It was a gigantic slug with a great toothy mouth, its bait-lamp on its upper lip, and two red patches I assumed were its eyes. Behind it… a door.
I didn’t want to, but I put the girl down and charged, shoving the burning broom into that shrieking maw. It jerked, snapping the handle, rearing up. I thrust the jagged end of the handle into its underbelly and jumped back just before it slammed itself back down, impaling itself. It twisted onto its side, but too late — it thrashed then grew still.
There was just enough handle sticking out to grab and pull. I collected the girl, reached the door in the dying firelight —
From above me, a voice boomed: “Put that down!”
I leaned the gory broom handle next to the door.
“Not that.”
I shook my head and took up the broom handle. There were other monsters here — the ones who put us in this room and demanded I leave a baby behind — and I meant to find them.
