The Last Lullaby

In the autumn of 1994, in the small town of Ashwick, I was seventeen. My best friend Claire and her boyfriend, Marcus, had just welcomed their daughter, Elsie. She was born a few weeks early, but she was a fighter, with a cry that could pierce the thickest walls. You could hear her from the front porch of their old farmhouse, even when you were out by the apple orchard. She was their everything, and they tended to her every whimper, day and night.

Then, one week, they vanished. No lights, no noise. I went to check on them, and found their neighbor, old Mrs. Kettle, who told me that Elsie had been taken to the hospital in the neighboring town. She was coming home that day, after a scare with her feeding. I felt a wave of relief, but as I walked back, the phone in my own house rang. It was Marcus. Elsie had stopped breathing in the hospital, her heart just gave out. She was only two months old.

Claire and Marcus were shattered. They blamed each other, yelling for days that shook the orchard. I tried to be there for them, but they pushed me away. I gave them space, hoping time would heal. But a week later, I saw a light in their bedroom window at midnight. I went to check on them, and found them sitting in the dark, staring at a baby monitor. Marcus turned to me, his eyes hollow, and said, ‘She still cries. We can hear her.’

The baby monitor crackled with static, but beneath it, I heard it—a faint, muffled wail. Not a baby’s cry, but something wrong. They had set up the nursery again, complete with a bassinet, and they would rock an empty blanket, humming a lullaby I’d never heard. I tried to tell them it was grief, but they insisted she was there, that she was hungry, that they had to feed her.

Weeks passed. They stopped leaving the house. The smell of sour milk and decay began to seep from the windows. One night, I couldn’t sleep, and I saw Claire walking to the orchard with a shovel. I followed. She dug a small hole near the old oak tree, and from a cloth bundle, she pulled out a withered, desiccated thing—a baby, mummified by some dark process. She placed it in the hole, whispering, ‘Mommy’s here, Elsie. Don’t cry.’

I gasped, and she spun around, her eyes black and without whites. She smiled, and her mouth opened too wide. ‘She wants you to sing with us,’ she said, and I heard the cry from the monitor again, louder now, coming from the house. I ran. I never looked back.

I moved far away, but sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear that cry. It’s not a baby’s cry. It’s a hunger that never sleeps. And I know, one day, they’ll come for me, to sing the last lullaby.