Cherub

By David C. Hayes

Just in time for Valentine's Day.

He wasn't like the other boys. Too rough. Even on the day he came out of Momma's belly. When Momma died, though, they sent him away to a terrible place. A doctor place... but the people there didn't act like doctors. They called him Cherub and they made him do awful things. Wet things. Hurty things. Until he met his angel, that is. She made it better and the pain went away. For awhile. Nothing lasts forever except a mother's love.

Written by David C. Hayes, Illustrated by Sean Seal, Cover by Justin Coons

• Language: English
• Publisher: Source Point Press
• Release date: Jul 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781945940743

Book preview

Cherub

David C. Hayes

and

Sean Seal

Copyright © 2019 David C. Hayes

Illustrated by Sean Seal

Edited by Karen Koehler

Cover by Justin Coons

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1-945940-74-3

www.sourcepointpress.com

Dedication

We are profusely sorry.

PROLOGUE

1966

Lightning flashed across the sky, making the dark gray clouds appear brighter for a fraction of a second. The brightness was fleeting, though, and the dreary dark quickly returned. Southeast Michigan, existing nearly on the border of Ohio, was desolate. A sea of brown and gold leaves stretched out for miles around. In other parts of the state, the crisp November air invigorated the soul and put springs in the steps of early Holiday shoppers.

In Brockton, however, that crisp November air tasted like trouble, especially today. The dark clouds were swollen, pregnant with some kind of torturous frozen onslaught, and the townies of Brockton, Michigan could feel something in the air. It was a sour day. A bad day. It was no coincidence that the tiny medical center that served as Brockton’s only line of defense against disease was in use.

Marie Richmond, spinster, was in dire need of medical help. Inexplicably, she was pregnant (and, by her own assertion, she had never lain with a man). But the town talked, and, based on Marie Richmond’s parentage, she was already a few nickels short of a dollar to begin with. There was one family in every small town that took the brunt of the ridicule in rural areas. Whether it was the townie’s own low self-worth, an actual threat to the community, or just plain meanness, the reason was never known. Marie Richmond’s family was that family.

And now, here she was. Soon to be very non-pregnant, her stomach distended and painful looking. It appeared larger, more unwieldy, than a normal pregnant belly. There were stretch marks, sure, but it actually appeared that Marie’s skin was tearing apart. The entire baby area looked as if it could fall off at any moment like some kind of gigantic polyp.

Marie screamed in pain as she lay on the small examination table. Two nurses, looking frazzled and, well, spooked, held her shoulders down to prevent Marie from harming herself (or them). Doc Gunderson, age seventy, was unprepared for anything like this. Sure, he’d practiced medicine in and around Brockton for the past forty-three years. Scrapes, wounds, hunting accidents… all of these fell under Doc’s purview at one time or another. He had functioned as a replacement veterinarian when Doctor May was called out of town, and he had even delivered Marie into the world (and never believed the Richmond family were Satanists).

This labor, though, this was something different.

Doc sat, perched, at the opposite end of the examination table. Marie’s legs were up in stirrups and tied down, again for her own safety. Thunder rocked the small clinic, and lightning flashed again. Marie’s painful screams echoed the storm, and Doc believed wholeheartedly that the storm sat squarely above the clinic and nowhere else like a chorus heralding the birth of… of whatever this was destined to turn out to be. Doc had gotten used to the vantage point by the fourth hour of labor. What he saw, though, would be burned into his mind for the rest of his life.

Marie Richardson claimed she had never lain with a man, and, according to the townies, no fit male would have her. Doc Gunderson’s first look at Marie’s genitals told a different story. After gazing at the bruised and discolored area, Doc made the mistake of asking Marie about what had happened down there and she had clammed up. He couldn’t get her to utter a word outside of, Baby’s comin, for the first hour.

Hunkered down, staring at Marie’s birth canal, made a man think strange things. Doc had started calling the general area a bruise-colored Rorschach Test. He hoped he wouldn’t accidently say it out loud at some point. Marie Richardson may have never consented to lay with a man, but some man, somewhere, had taken some liberties with Marie Richardson. From the looks of her beaten, cigarette-burned, and scarred labia, he had been taking these liberties up until Marie entered the clinic.

"Dear God!" Marie screamed.

Doc Gunderson popped up to see Marie arch her back in extreme pain. The nurses dug their sensible shoes into the floor and held Marie’s wrists with all their might. Marie’s abdomen, huge and grotesque, rumbled. Doc didn’t believe it at first, thinking another round of thunder had struck, until the sound repeated itself. Like a large truck barreling down a highway, whatever Marie had conceived in that womb made a sound… and this time it moved. Marie’s abdomen stretched outward and Doc Gunderson swore to God, or whomever one wanted to believe in, that the shape formed in Marie’s outstretched skin was the hand of a young child.

Not a newborn. Not a toddler. A young child.

Mercifully, at this point, Marie passed out from the pain. With a strangled cry, she slumped backwards. Doc Gunderson took her vitals, didn’t see a threat, and let the exhausted nurses step away for a moment.

After this night, Gunderson would only live another three years. He would be out of the clinic in six months, and most of his remaining time would be spent in a brightly lit home with a beautiful garden. Doc would sit in that garden for hours and hours, staring at the foliage growing around him without saying a word. The last year and a half of his life he wouldn’t speak at all. His family and friends cited that very evening, under the storm, when Marie Richardson gave birth, as the reason Doc Gunderson just gave up on life. The deep thinkers in Brockton, both of them, thought that, just maybe, life gave up on Doc and showed him something horrible.

The sound he heard that night was something akin to brittle wood splintering and snapping. Doc and the nurses had never heard anything like it in the clinic before and jumped at the sound. The cracking sound was quickly followed by a wet squelch, like a fist hitting Jell-O. The confusion came to an abrupt end as Marie Richardson’s left leg snapped back at the hip joint. Crack, snap, squelch…skin tears, blood flows and the leg was pressed against Marie’s ribs in the opposite position a normal leg should be.

Doc couldn’t move. The nurses, being a little less invested in the patient’s well-being, used those sensible shoes to beat a hasty retreat. Doc, the consummate professional, moved forward. He wasn’t sure what he should do with the leg, much less what had caused the leg to fling itself backwards, so Doc opted to attend to the reason Marie had come here in the first place: imminent labor.

Doc came around the table again, back to his former position, when the right leg began to move. Crack, snap, squelch… repeat. Marie’s right leg pressed against her ribs. Both legs torn from the hip joints; they flopped, slapping against Marie’s side. Doc looked up, saw that either Marie was still out or she had come to and went back out again. Doc looked down, staring at Marie’s genitals. He knew he should have moved to stop the bleeding since, technically, tearing legs out of joints should be considered some sort of compound injury, but Doc Gunderson couldn’t pull his eyes away from Marie’s vagina.

Dilated to approximately eighteen inches, the cause of Marie’s leg issues had become readily apparent. Two child-sized hands emerged from Marie’s birth canal. Still new and never used, the hands were simply a precursor to a large—very large—ball of flesh that pushed itself through and into the real world. It had to have weighed forty pounds. Marie’s pelvic bone gave a final, splintering crack as the bulk of the baby created its own episiotomy. Amniotic fluid and its mother’s blood covered the hunk of flesh. The forty-pound flesh ball slid to the floor, landing in a pool of biological matter that defied description. It shivered for a moment, the real world being cold and, without prompting, bellowed. It did not cry. It did not take its first breath scream to the ether. It roared.

Doc Gunderson did what he could with Marie Richardson. He used the toe of his shoe to try and move the fleshy, bellowing lump out of the way as he bent Marie’s legs back and did what he could to put her back together again. Doc Gunderson’s powers of concentration were great and, as he worked, he managed to nearly ignore the thing on the floor. He never looked over, but he did hear sounds. It sounded like it was feeding at some point, and the only thing Doc Gunderson thought could sustain it was the inordinately large amount of placenta that eventually followed the thing to the floor.

Marie survived, as did her son (it turned out to be a boy). Doc Gunderson retired immediately thereafter, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Marie and the child never returned to the clinic. Marie was relegated to the use of polio leg braces and a cane for the rest of her life.

The boy? Well, the boy grew up.

CHAPTER ONE

TODAY

The smell first alerted authorities. When the tiny Brockton police department was called out on a bizarre smell case, it usually turned out to be one of two things: either a raccoon had died underneath someone’s home or in a chimney, or an elderly resident, bereft of family, had fallen for the last time and had not been able to get up. When the department got the call from Sandy Martinsen on Coon Lake Road about her neighbor’s house having a funny smell that took the cake. Her nearest neighbor was a full mile away. Her neighbor was also Marie Richardson.

The Richardson place had been a bone of contention with the township for years, long before Marie became the sole owner. The Richardson family had a stink of weird on them that wouldn’t let go no matter what they did. That stink was passed down from generation to generation (the Richardson family was one of the first to settle Brockton in the early 1800’s) and, after a while, the family wore it like a badge.

No one could remember what the initial hullabaloo was about. Matthias Richardson could have had improper relations with a neighbor’s cow for all anyone knew, but that was how small towns worked. There was no clean slate, and one could