The Cold Static Lullaby

The first time I noticed, Mabel was just shy of four months old. We’d moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of Juniper Hollow only a week before, and the place still smelled of dust and forgotten cedar. Her nursery was at the end of the hall, a room with a single window that looked out onto a field of tall, unmoving grass. I’d set up the baby monitor on the dresser, the one with the little green light that pulsed like a heartbeat. I was a light sleeper then, waking at the smallest creak.

The night it started, I woke to a sound that didn’t belong. It wasn’t Mabel’s cry, not the hungry or the wet cry. It was a voice, a low, soothing murmur, like a mother shushing a child. I thought it came from outside, maybe a neighbor walking late, but the voice was too close. I padded to the window, pushed the curtain aside—nothing but the black field and the blinking red light of a distant antenna. I was about to go back to bed when I realized the murmur was coming from the monitor on the dresser. It was a woman’s voice, soft and rhythmic, as if she were telling a story. My blood went cold. I called for my husband, Reed. He stumbled in, squinting, and I pointed at the monitor. He listened, his face going pale. ‘That’s not the radio,’ he said. He checked the baby—Mabel was asleep, her little chest rising and falling, the room noticeably colder than the hall. He felt her forehead, then shrugged. ‘Just the draft.’ We went back to bed.

But the voice didn’t stop. Over the next weeks, it came every night, sometimes just a murmur, sometimes a lullaby, a tune I’d never heard. And Mabel began to react. She’d smile at the corner of her room, coo and reach out for something I couldn’t see. I told myself it was imagination, but then the temperature in that room became a constant chill, even in summer, and the plants I’d put on her windowsill turned black and brittle.

I tried to record the voice, but the audio came back empty—just static, and under the static, a faint, papery whisper. The monitor’s green light would flicker even when the unit was unplugged. I moved Mabel’s crib into our bedroom. The cold followed. One night, I woke to find the white noise machine on, and the room so cold I could see my breath. Mabel was standing in her crib—she was only seven months old, couldn’t walk, but she was standing, her tiny fingers wrapped around the rail, staring at the doorway. Her lips were moving, but no sound came out. I grabbed her, and she was like ice. I screamed for Reed.

We moved out that week. I thought that would end it. But the story doesn’t end there. A month later, in the new apartment, I bought a new monitor, a digital one with a camera. The first night, I saw it on the video feed—a tall, thin shape standing beside Mabel’s crib, its head tilted, as if it were leaning down to listen. When I ran into the room, there was nothing, but the shape had left a condensation outline on the window, a handprint the size of a dinner plate.

My daughter, now two, has started talking to the corner of her room again. She uses a name I’ve never heard: ‘Marren.’ When I ask who she’s talking to, she giggles and says, ‘The lady who sings the cold songs.’ And sometimes, when I turn off the monitor for the night, I hear that lullaby, slow and sweet, coming from the speakers even when Mabel is silent. I don’t know what it wants, or why it chose us. But last night, I saw a new thing: the outline of a woman in the hallway, her hair long and black, and she was pressing her face against Mabel’s door. When she turned to look at me, her eyes were two dark holes, and she smiled with needle teeth. And in her arms, she was cradling something that looked like a swaddled baby, but it was limp and grey.

I want to leave, but every time I try to pack, the monitor turns on by itself, and I hear that lullaby, and the temperature drops so low that the pipes freeze. And Mabel looks at me with those knowing eyes, too old for her age, and says, ‘She says we’re going to stay forever.’ I’m writing this in the dead of night, while Mabel sleeps, and the monitor is off, but I can still feel the cold breath on the back of my neck, and I know that when I finish typing, I’ll look up, and she’ll be standing there, the lady in the cold static, with a new lullaby to sing.