Delicate Condition

by Danielle Valentine

Her theory was that I’d experienced something called “vanishing twin syndrome,” which was a type of miscarriage that could occur when you were pregnant with multiples. One of the fetuses miscarried, but the other survived.

I had been thinking of that for one theory of what happened.

I didn’t think there was a single thing in the world that could kill my good mood. But then a notification popped up on my phone screen—and I went cold. It was the appointment I’d made, the one I’d called WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME? Someone had updated it. You can’t trust them. You can’t trust anyone.

“Does anyone else know about your doctor’s visit?” I started to shake my head—I hadn’t spoken to anyone since we’d left the hospital—but Dex surprised me by saying, “Actually Emily, Anna’s publicist, she knows.”

My chest felt tight. “You told her everything was fine with the baby?” Dex shrugged. “Yeah? Was that bad?” And, immediately afterward, I got that threatening message.

ultrasound?” Dex asked, making sure I could tell from the tone of his voice how ludicrous the idea was even before he added, “Anna…come on, that’s not possible.” “You’d be surprised what people will do when they feel like they don’t have another choice,” Kamal interjected. “And I’ve said before that whoever’s been following you could be working with someone. It could explain why nothing’s adding up.” In that moment I could’ve cried, I was so grateful to Kamal for backing me up.

Me too. He takes her more seriously than her own husband.

It suddenly occurred to me that my baby might’ve been safer when everyone thought she was dead.

I was still for long moments, staring up at the ceiling, listening for the sound of creaking wood. But the sound had stopped. I don’t know how long I stayed there listening, but I didn’t hear it again. Had it been a dream? Or had someone really been up there moving around?

And there was something else about them, a chalky flavor that I couldn’t quite place, even when I made Dex tell me every single ingredient he’d used.

I’d looked up vanishing twin syndrome when I got back from the hospital. And while, yes, some of the symptoms do fit with what happened to me, many of them just didn’t. The people who’d gone through vanishing twin syndrome all knew they were pregnant with multiples. None of my doctors had ever heard two heartbeats or seen two fetuses on my ultrasound.

Maybe her real baby died and this one is some changeling.

A cold feeling shot down my spine. Talia said a mutual friend had given her those cookies. And she saw Emily when Emily was in the New York office. My stomach was a hard lump. Emily could’ve slipped something into the cookies before I’d let her go, done something to them. How many had I eaten?

Did Talia know Meg? I dug my fingers into my scalp, pulling at my hair a little as I forced myself to breathe, to calm down. I had to be imagining things. I had to be seeing Meg in this stranger’s face. But (You can’t trust anyone) if I wasn’t imagining things…had Talia cropped Meg out of this photograph on purpose? In case I found it?

Then…a strange sensation, a sharp sting of pressure. It felt like something moving beneath my skin, like a little worm wriggling around between my skull and the outside of my head, pushing up against the roots of my hair. I jerked my hands away from my head and saw that there was hair woven between my fingers. Thick clumps of it. More hair than I’d ever lost at one time.

“Her younger sister had this horrible pregnancy—she was sick the entire time and, even afterward, she was never really the same.” Dex blinked. He was staring at the photograph on the floor now. He and Adeline were still visible beneath the broken frame. “Addy told me the whole story right after we got married. It was why she hadn’t wanted kids.”

Something flashed across his face, pain or anger, I couldn’t tell, but it made me flinch, shocked. I’d never heard him talk like this before, like a baby was something he was owed.

She’d been here. My stalker had been here, in this room, right above where I’d been sleeping. I’d been right all along. I knew this because there was another Summer Day action figure sitting on top of the dresser. It was naked, just like the last one had been, but this one didn’t have a red X drawn over her belly. Instead, someone had pulled every last hair out of its head.

I thought back on all those cruel messages she’d sent, the emails and the pictures and the threats. It didn’t seem possible that they’d all come from a teenager.

And why not? Teens cyber bully all the time and they can be very cruel

I got in touch with the head of security over at Warner Bros and, according to them, there was a break-in at their warehouse a few months ago.” I blinked fast, the sudden change in subject taking me a second to process. “There was?” “They can’t say for sure whether any Spellbound dolls were taken, but they sent me the security footage from the night of, and based on a very rough, preliminary visual ID, I feel comfortable saying it was very likely the same woman who broke into your hospital room.”

The creature at the bottom of the pool wasn’t my baby. It had a feathered, birdlike body, and there was a mouth where its eyes should’ve been, beak parting like it was looking for food.

I expected to see the raccoon’s mangled corpse. My body had stiffened, preparing to see limbs torn from its torso, chunks of meat gnawed off bones, patches of fur ripped away from skin and muscle. Proof that I’d given in to my urges, that I’d snuck out here in the middle of the night to eat a dead animal. I’d half convinced myself that I could feel something warm and tacky beneath my fingernails, that I could still taste the gamey flavor of its meat on my tongue. But the raccoon was gone. I was standing in the pool alone, surrounded by my own footprints.

And how had I’d gotten past Kamal, the security guard stationed in the mudroom just beside the front door with a gun, whose entire job was to watch the grounds for strange people doing strange things? It was like I’d teleported outside as soon as I’d fallen asleep. It wasn’t possible.

There was movement in the darkness. I shaded my eyes and now I could make out something— A woman. I could see the outline of her figure, her dark hair, but the fog and darkness obscured the rest of her. Everything inside of me constricted in fear. I couldn’t see her face; I couldn’t be totally sure whether it was the same woman from the hospital, whether it was Emily or Talia, but there was something about the way she tilted her head to the side like a bird that I recognized.

I stopped breathing. Did I leave it open like that? Did Kamal? Or was she inside with me now, hiding somewhere in the shadows?

I wasn’t yelling; I just wanted my husband to talk to me about what I’d seen.

But two months after the spell, Viv felt something moving inside of her. And she started craving things. Weird things. The ground-up hamburger in the supermarket meat aisle. The raw chicken her mother was seasoning for dinner. Her neighbor’s dog. And she’d gained weight. A lot of it, right around her belly. She figured the ritual Sofia had performed hadn’t worked after all. She must still be pregnant.

Viv was starting to…to see things. Impossible things. Sometimes, when Viv was alone in the dark, staring at the soft mound of her stomach, she could swear that whatever was inside of her could feel her watching it. She imagined she could see the shape of a hand pressed up against the underside of her skin. Except the hand…it wasn’t a normal hand. At least not a normal human hand.

I had a perfect view of my belly from my position upside down, and I watched it shift and distort beneath my tank top. It’s just gas, I told myself. It had to be.

Was it a piece of food I hadn’t digested properly? It didn’t feel like food. It felt dangerous. A paper clip. A nail. I doubled over and spat. It landed on the floor in a spray of blood, something small, and even with all the blood I immediately clocked the color: the eerie white-yellow of bone. Bone. How could I have swallowed a bone?

You prob ate that dead racoon after all.

It wasn’t a bone, though the color was the same. It was a tiny tooth.

I took one breath, then another, and then I opened my hand. The tooth wasn’t there. I could see a tiny prick of red on my palm where I’d squeezed too tightly, and it had pierced my skin. But the tooth itself was gone.

I opened my hand again, studying that tiny prick of red to remind myself that it had really been there, that I had felt it. Watching that small mark fade, taking with it all my certainty.

It didn’t look like a hand or a foot. It was too long, too thin. I tilted my head, nerves fluttering through me as I examined it. The shape didn’t actually look like a part of the human anatomy that I could think of. So what was it?

It was like the baby was doing something to me intentionally. Like she was trying to hurt me.

I lowered a trembling hand to my belly, cringing a little when I touched the place where I’d seen it. It was deeply bruised, like something had pushed too hard against the underside of my skin. But it was clear that nothing had come out. The talon—whatever it was—was gone.

I realized I had no idea what was real and what wasn’t. How did I expect Dex and my doctors to trust me when I couldn’t trust myself?

“She says there are people who want to steal the baby from her.”

These doctors always seemed to think women’s emotions were things to be hidden and locked away and fixed.

The wails she’d assumed belonged to the baby were not coming from the nursery. They were coming from Betty’s room, most likely from Betty herself, and they sounded… Wretched. Like the keening of an animal in pain.

It didn’t seem natural that whatever had been making those noises was capable of following directions. If it was, it meant the howling had been a choice.

For a moment, I felt like my body had been taken hostage, like all of my actions were being controlled—not by the baby inside of me, but by the people tasked with keeping her healthy.

It seemed ridiculous that all anyone ever told me was that I needed to take another damn aspirin.

Once, I heard his voice murmuring on the other side of the door, seeming to talk to someone. But when I knocked and asked if he was on the phone, he told me it was just a show he was watching on his computer. I thought he might be lying, but I didn’t trust myself enough to call him on it.

“As longtime followers of this channel already know, I believe there is a satanic cult operating in North America and the UK. I’ve been searching for its members for over twenty years and this, this photograph might the closest I’ve gotten to finding one.”

Through my research, I’ve been able to trace members of her cult to New York, LA, even London.” My hands clamped into tight fists. I felt a jolt move through me with each new city she named. New York City, where Talia lived. LA, where Emily lived. And London—where Adeline lived.

She believed in satanic cults stealing babies and unborn fetuses for use in depraved rituals. She thought there were normal people—doctors and nurses, men and women—selling information on pregnant people in exchange for protection from these cults.

As though sensing it was in danger the cat looked up at me, tensing. It knew something was wrong finally. But it was too late.

“I’m going to step out for a minute to call Dr. Hill. Can you just…stay here for a moment? I want to know if I can trust you to stay here on your own?” I glared at him. “Why wouldn’t you trust me?”

Cuz you freaken took scissors to your own dang legs woman!

I stumbled back into the bedroom, wondering if a woman has ever calmed down after a man told her to.

But…I could remember how it felt under my fingers, its soft fur, the brittleness of its bones. I could remember digging my teeth into its flesh, the taste of its blood on my tongue. But obviously I couldn’t really remember any of those things. Because the cat was there, perched in the tree outside of my window. It was alive and watching me with its head cocked, accusatory. I stared back, barely breathing.

guess congratulations are in order.” She didn’t sound very congratulatory.

Io’s eyes came up, meeting mine. She only paused for a fraction of a second but, to me, it seemed to last forever. Because suddenly, I knew what she was going to say. Unblinking, she said, “It was Dr. Carla Hill.”