The Midwives

by Duncan Ralston

"You can't go home again." —Thomas Wolfe

"Better the devil you know than the devil you don't." — Richard Taverner

"You can't have him!" she shouted at the darkness. "He's mine!" A woman's voice, thick and gruff, called out, "You're wrong, sister! He belongs to the Mother!" "I'm his goddamn mother!"

Rosalee looked up with her remaining eye, not at her killers but past them, past the insects flitting against the streetlamp to the dark cosmos beyond. Blinking blood from her good eye, she searched the heavens for any sign of the God children who grew up in Barrows Bay knew had turned a blind eye toward them. All she saw was an endless galaxy of lifeless, indifferent stars.

Martin knew her type. She wasn't so much a fan of his writing as the genre. True Crime junkies like her were the bane of his career. They wore black clothes and dour, I've-seen-it-all expressions. They carried worn copies of Mirror Man, never his latest book and never Witch Hunter, not even the subpar collection of short stories he vanity-published fresh out of college. Not these types. These so-called fans were ghouls. Serial killer groupies. Drawn to Martin because of his close contact with maniacs. As if that evil, that danger, might rub off on them by proxy.

Readers of true crime books were savvy, with reality television and procedural crime dramas and 24-hour news. They expected not only to read about motivation but criminal profiling. They wanted to hear about the killer's troubled childhood. His bedwetting, his shyness around women, his propensity to torture small animals.

They wanted to hear about molestation and cigarette burns and mothers who prostituted themselves to pay the bills. Things that might not exonerate the murderers of their crimes, but had shaped them into the monsters society deemed should be kept behind bars for the rest of their lives, or put to death.

He knew well enough there were no bogeymen, no witches, warlocks or demons. The true monsters of this world were flesh and blood—men and women who struggled against the darkness in their own hearts and all too often gave in to temptation.

He believed they'd been..." She looked off for a moment in thought. "That they'd been defiled by the Devil." "The Devil?" "As in Satan. Mephistopheles. Beelzebub." The realization struck Martin with the force of a remembered trauma. "So Barclay wasn't after those women at all." Sheila nodded, grave-faced. "Exactly. That's where you got it wrong, Martin. He was killing their children."