“Lovingly Crafted, Built to Protect”
That was the tagline of the Dunwich Electronics baby monitor. My wife Allie had done her research on every bit of baby gear. She said that one was essential. More than one review had said it “saved their newborn’s life,” so that pretty much sealed the deal. I only wish now that I’d read the manual.
We brought little Lila home after spending three days at the hospital. We brought home something else, too. Something from the world beyond ours, where new souls are born and old souls wait for the chance to be born again.
Babygirl got a lot more sleep than we did, seemingly unbothered by the whole chaotic process of being brought into this world. We laid her down in her crib for the first time, and she took to it right away. If only we could have slept so soundly or for so long.
“I’ll take first watch,” I said to Allie on the first night. “You try to get some sleep.” She gave me a laugh that was somewhere between “no problem there” and “fat chance,” but she tried anyway.
I set myself up on the couch in the little nook off our bedroom, just on the other side of the wall from my former walk-in closet that was now the nursery.
I found myself looking at the Dunwich monitor constantly. I zoomed in to make sure Lila was still breathing, to see the rise and fall of her little belly, to be absolutely certain the area around her nose and mouth were free and clear. The only thing that was a bit unnerving was the camera’s night vision, which made Lila’s open eyes shine, giving her the appearance of a little swaddled demon or a cyborg baby doll.
I took a picture of the monitor to show Allie the next morning. We joked that Lila was our little Terminator.
Allie took first watch on the second night and let me get a couple hours of uninterrupted sleep. That was the plan anyway. But an ear-piercing scream just after midnight had me shoot up and out of bed.
Allie ran past me without a word. She flew to the nursery and flicked on the overhead light, screaming, “My baby! My baby! My baby!”
Groggy as I was, I had no idea what had caused the alarm. My imagination tuned itself to the worst thing it could possibly be. But when I saw Allie holding Lila, hushing her, everything was fine.
“What was it?” I asked. Allie’s dark eyes met mine and held them.
“Bugs,” she said. “Big, black cockroaches, crawling all over her and the crib. Dozens of them.”
I looked at the crib. No roaches crawled on it, nor the walls, the floor, the ceiling. No sign of them in the vents or under the mattress.
“Nothing here now,” I said. “But just in case, I’ll sit in here with her the rest of the night. Time for my shift anyway.”
Allie nodded. She had a faraway look. She did not put Lila back down in the crib, but she did hand her to me without a fuss before going to sleep.
The rest of the night passed without issue. Same for the day after.
During my first shift on the third night, our little bundle of joy slept peacefully, breathing regularly, occasionally startling herself half awake before drifting back to sleep.
When I felt myself fading, I made a cup of coffee for Allie. Then I gently woke her up and tagged her in.
“Anything happens, just holler, okay?” She yawned and nodded. “There's coffee for you in the nook.” She kissed my cheek and took up her post.
This time, the scream came at 3 a.m. Once again, Allie rushed into the nursery. Once again, I followed her in, half awake. Once again, Lila was fine, and the nursery showed no signs of anything dangerous.
“What is it?” I asked, as gently as I could. Allie was beside herself.
“A huge snake, coiled in the corner of the crib, right there.” She nodded toward the far corner. “It raised its head up to strike just before I came in and hit the lights.”
I was reminded of a pamphlet in the folder the hospital gave us: Warning Signs of Postpartum Depression. These included increased anxiety, hallucinations, thoughts of harm to one’s self and the baby. I started to mention this, then thought better of it.
There was no way Allie was putting Lila back into that crib. I asked her to take our daughter to our bed and stay up with her while I checked the nursery for any sign of a snake, knowing I’d find nothing but promising to look. Just like I promised to put a call in with pest control in the morning.
The rest of the night was uneventful. But clearly the visions had shaken Allie. I offered a solution.
“Why don’t we both stay up and watch her tonight,” I said. “Like a slumber party.” We were both pretty punchy and exhausted at this point. I wouldn’t have blamed her for snapping at me, tired as she was, worried as she was over the nightly terrors visiting our baby daughter while she slept.
Instead she just said, “Yeah, sounds good.”
That fourth night, we cozied up on the couch in the nook, monitor in front of us on the coffee table. Baby Lila slept on and on, except for regular diaper changes and feeding sessions, which we did together.
It was about 4:30 a.m. when I said, “Be right back. Just going to use the restroom.”
I had just hit the flusher when I heard Allie shout, “No! Nonono!”
I met her in the nursery as she turned on the lights. I saw nothing out of the ordinary.
“What happened?” I asked. I’m sure it was clear that my patience was wearing thin. I was doing my best. We both were.
“There was a man,” Allie said, positively shaking with terror as she clutched Lila to her. “I swear to you, there was a man right here, all in black, in shadow, leaning over the crib, reaching for her.”
She turned her big, dark, terrified eyes to me.
“Tell me you believe me,” she said.
“I believe you,” I said instantly. I didn’t say what I really thought, which was that I believed she saw the things she saw on the monitor, but that they weren’t really there. “I believe you,” I repeated, holding her as she held Lila. “Tomorrow night, we’ll watch her together, and I will not leave your side.”
On the fifth night came the storm, the fire, and the stranger.
The storm was unnerving enough, but we’d weathered worse. Lila didn’t seem to mind in the slightest. When the power went out, so did the monitor, for just a second. Then it flared back to life.
“Battery backup,” I said, trying to keep calm as the darkness pressed in around us, held back only by the glow of that little monitor.
“But the camera …” Allie said. “How is it still on?”
Before I could guess, our generator kicked in. The power came back on, and so did the camera. The monitor flickered again to reveal the nursery and the crib engulfed in black flames.
Allie did not stop to ask me if I’d seen the same thing she saw. I assured her of it just as soon as we confirmed that there was no fire in the nursery and that Lila was asleep, perfectly fine.
“What the hell is going on?” Allie hissed at me after we’d closed the door.
“I have no idea,” I said. I was glad I hadn’t openly questioned her sanity before. “But Lila’s fine. The nursery is fine.” I pointed at the monitor on the table. “That’s the problem. Maybe someone hacked it and is trolling us?”
“I specifically got one that doesn’t use WiFi,” Allie said. “I’m going to check the manual.”
“Cool,” I said, picking up the monitor while she went to dig the instruction manual out of our file drawer. “I’m going to try something else.”
In my mind at the time – my exhausted, impatient mind – taking my hammer to the cursed monitor seemed like the smart thing to do. At least until the moment it was done. The word “irreparable” came to mind.
Allie found me in the garage, hammer in one hand, shards of plastic scattered about my work bench. She was holding up the instruction manual. For just a second, she looked triumphant. Then her expression bottomed out.
“What did you do,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“I dealt with it,” I said, pointing the hammer head at the busted monitor.
“Look,” she said, taking a step toward me. “Right here.” She thrust the manual in my face. A grid of troubleshooting tips was laid out. If only I had read it sooner.
“If the power light blinks red, cycle the battery,” I read, waiting to find something worth reading. “If the screen flickers, blah blah. If you witness unexplainable phenomena, phantasms, or hordes of vermin, please call the hotline number listed below.”
I shot Allie a look. She raised her eyebrows at me in a funny sort of challenge.
“Anything in here about unsmashing the monitor?” I asked, trying to make light of a dark situation. She ignored the attempt. She already had her phone out.
“What’s the number to call?” she asked.
“It’s …” I hesitated. The number listed wasn’t a number at all. It was a solitary character I had no words for. But the longer I looked at it, the clearer it became. It was as if a 1, 2, and 4 were all laid on top of each other.
I told Allie as much. She looked at the character to confirm it.
“How am I supposed to dial that?” she asked.
“Press them all at the same time?”
She shrugged and tried it. While it rang, we went back upstairs to check on Lila. Allie stroked her hair, a surprising amount for a newborn, and only stopped when an automated voice picked up on the other end.
“Thank you for calling Dunwich Electronics. Your call is important to us. This call will be monitored via multiphasic interpolation for quality purposes.”
“What are they saying?” I asked. Allie hushed me.
“If you’re calling about our SmartTVs, press [unintelligible guttural noise]. If you have a question about our presynaptic or full-body depolarizers, press [demonic whisper]. If you are having trouble with our line of baby monitors, press 7.”
Allie pressed 7.
“We’re sorry to hear that. Please state yes or no after the following questions. Screams will not count as an appropriate response. Have you been experiencing visions that appear threatening or harmful?”
“Yes,” Allie said.
“Alright. Have you witnessed paranormal phenomena that are unexplained but ultimately disappear upon investigation?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Have you or a loved one been drawn into an interdimensional portal not of your own making and are currently seeking extraction?”
“... No?”
“I understand. Have you or a loved one physically dismantled or destroyed the device to the point that it is unable to be mended with the currently available level of anthropomorphic technology?”
“Yes,” Allie said, shooting me a dark look.
“I see. One moment please. [Distant sounds of wailing.] A technician has been dispatched to your location. Please formally invite them into your home or temporal vesicle. Thank you for calling Dunwich Electronics!”
“But wait, I haven’t given you our address!” Allie looked at her phone, then at me. “They hung up!”
“Okay, well, I guess we can …”
We were interrupted by the doorbell.
By now, the storm was really raging. Our generator was having a tough time keeping up with the surges. Lights flickered in the hall as we went to answer the door. Allie held Lila, in no way willing to leave her in the nursery.
As I opened the door, all the lights inside and out went dark. A flash of lightning illuminated the outline of someone very broad and very tall standing on our front porch.
The lights surged back on. Suddenly, the man standing before me did not seem so imposing, though his wide-brimmed hat cast a shadow so deep that I could not see his face. Rain cascaded off his trench coat, which had made him seem larger than he really was.
“Dunwich Electronics,” he shouted over the rain and thunder. “Here about the baby monitor.” The thunder clapped again. Allie and I exchanged a look. How could he have been here already?
“Do you have ID?” I asked.
“Already showed it to you,” the man said. The thunder crashed again, so close to the lightning flash that it seemed to come out of order. And with it came a memory of a business card held up to the door that said Dunwich Electronics.
But I didn’t remember even seeing the man take his hands out of his coat pockets. And with a look, I could tell, Allie didn’t either.
A deafening roar shook the walls of the house. A little puff of drywall dust came drifting down. There hadn’t even been a lightning strike that time.
“That was no thunder,” the man said. Had I voiced my thought out loud? “That’s a sixth-dimensional tornadic superplasmid, and a nasty one from the sound of it. Seems to be breaching right in your nursery wall. I could help with that, of course, warranty or no warranty, but you’ll have to invite me in first.”
Allie was the one to do it. I think. At least, I don’t remember saying it, but one second he was out in the storm, and the next he was standing in our foyer, dry as a bone.
“Right this way,” I said, trying to get a footing in this skewed reality. Allie kept Lila back at a distance as the technician followed me up the stairs. He never removed his hat and coat. Never covered his shoes with those little booties. He just seemed to float along behind me.
“Here’s the …”
The word “nursery” stuck in my throat as I saw thick tendrils of black mist curling out of the nursery, purplish lightning flickering in the air where it condensed. Something lurked in that mist, something larger than could possibly fit in that space.
“Yep, there's your problem,” the technician said, already wading forward into the mist. “Say, do you still have your monitor? You didn’t smash it beyond repair, did you?”
“I …”
The technician laughed. “Just jokin’ with ya, pal. I know you busted it up. Wouldn’t be the first one. A real handyman around the house, right Missus?”
Suddenly, he produced another monitor that was just like the one I’d smashed. I never saw him take his hands out of his pockets to reach for it.
“Gotta read the manual,” the technician said, now shouting over the discordant sounds that were pouring out of the mist flooding the upstairs floor. “The things you see in the monitor can’t hurt you or the little one, as long as you leave the monitor intact. Simple as. Without the monitor though, well, that’s another story.”
He gestured toward the inexplicable interdimensional breach that had formed in our nursery, at the thing that was trying to birth itself into our world.
“Won’t be a minute,” he said.
Whatever happened next, I can only recall in glimpses. Purple lightning flashed, smoky mist curled and eddied, the technician began babbling some multiconsonant language I couldn’t make heads nor tails of, though Allie somehow caught snippets of it. Her dark eyes rolled black, pure black, as she started to recite it.
“The flaming of the first cradle has come to pass … the Waymaker of Cebicus, Herald of the Tamareie … Remember the Kereset.”
And then, as if I’d woken up from a bad dream, everything was as calm and quiet as it had been before the baby monitor. Before the baby, even.
We were standing together on the front porch on a warm, sunlit morning. We were thanking the technician, still in his hat and trench coat, arms still at his sides and hands in his pockets. Face still lost in deep shadow. My wife was smiling and nodding along appreciatively, so I nodded, too. I only caught what he was saying toward the tail-end.
“Thank you for choosing Dunwich Electronics. Please leave me a positive review. We’re a family outfit – little squiddie in a big ocean, you know – so it really helps.” With that, he was gone.
“They really did save our lives, you know,” Allie said. Had she always had those little flecks in her eyes? The ones that looked like purple lightning? “The reviews were true. We should leave one.”
I felt like I had to agree. I felt compelled, even.
So here it goes:
Five Stars. I highly recommend Dunwich Electronics. Their customer service is second to none. (And no muddy footprints on your carpet. They leave no footprints at all!) But buyer beware: BE SURE TO READ THE MANUAL!
