The Baby Bin (Horror)

Al buys an old house to find a hidden stack of bones, all from young children.

It was an old house, well over a 130 years old, but all Al Johnson could afford.  He appreciated that it wasn't on a historical register.  That meant he could make changes, knock down walls between the smaller rooms, and install inside plumbing.  The house taking most of his money, he planned to gradually do the work himself.  He already had running water in the kitchen, a hand pump bringing in well water, but that was all.  No inside bathroom, but did have electricity.

It was a sturdy old home, built of solid stone and bricks.  Electric cables were laid along the ceilings, never attempting to pierce thick walls.  Even the interior walls were made of brick, covered with plywood by a later owner.

At least I don't have to worry about hurricanes, Al thought, thumping his hand against a wall and feeling its solidity.  It was a two-story home with small rooms, partially due to the depth of the walls.  

Al did notice that the cellar occupied less than half the space under the house.  He found a hole in one of the basement walls, near the ceiling.  It was only four inches square, but might herald the presence of another room.  Finding a flashlight,  Al stood on rickety wooden shelving containing moldy jars of preserved foods to shine his light into the space.

Because of the angle, almost at the heavily-beamed ceiling, he couldn't see much.  Only enough to find there actually was another room.  The light reflected off a ceiling deep inside the space.  He was aware that some of those older houses contained cisterns to store rainwater for later use. It saved time and effort in hand pumping for laundry, etc.

A rusty cobweb-covered pickax leaned in one corner, so Al decided to try to break through for a better look.  He thought that he could really use that space for storage.  Picking up the rusty tool, he spit on his hands and started swinging. 

The stones were hard, but ancient mortar chipped away easily.  He hoped the rest of the house wasn't as vulnerable.  The job was mostly backbreaking labor as, once loosened by the pick, he had to grapple and worry each stone out.  Working on one of the smaller ones, he eventually got it out to drop to the dusty floor.

After that, with the increased leverage of the first hole, they came out a little easier.  In a couple of hours, he had a hole large enough to squeeze through.  The tired homeowner considered changing to work clothes first but, after looking at himself and how dirty he was already, saw no reason. 

On his knees, he shined the light through the hole, exposing an open space inside.  Near a corner of the secret room, Al could see a large pile of something light-colored but was unable to make it out with the rapidly dimming flashlight.  The space on the other side of his hole was clear of sharp debris, so he turned off the light and crawled through the tight entrance.  

As he again turned on the light, that time from inside, Al had to stop and gasp. What he'd seen was a pile of bones, six-feet high with what looked like animal or small human skulls spotted among them.

Struggling to his feet, suddenly nervous and slightly shaky from shock and excitement, he edged closer to see if they were human.  He found that they were. The bones seemed to be of children or midgets.  

It looked like a hundred kids had been slaughtered and dumped into oblivion in that sealed room.  He didn't know how or why, but there were also dozens of freshly-picked yellow dandelions mixed in with them.  Swinging the light to the ceiling, he saw the square outline of a closed wooden trapdoor.

Feeling sick, Al hurriedly backed away. It was all he could do to get out the back door and into fresh air before vomiting.  

He was divorced but had a couple of little girls of his own -- although his wife had full custody of them.  

Upon recovering, Al hurried down the street to a pay phone -- his hadn't been installed yet -- and called the police.

***

Over a hundred years earlier, kindly Mrs. Edna Shannon finished her meal, worrying flesh from the last bone as she gathered the remains and carried them to the sink.  She really appreciated the new appliance, having running water inside for the first time in her life.  No more back-breaking labor of hauling it in from the backyard in buckets, and then taking dirty water back outside to dump.

Now, all she needed to do was pump a handle a few times and well water came right into the house.  When she was done, she could simply let it run out the bottom, into a pipe and then outside.  Ah, the wonders of modern kitchens, she thought.

She dumped the remains of her dinner into a garbage bucket to feed to the hogs out back.  They would eat anything, even other pigs. Bones would go into that hole in the kitchen floor.  

Mrs. Shannon ran a home for wayward children.  At least on paper.  Her brother was on the State Children's Welfare Board. Whenever they had a stray brat, she would have first choice as to whether she wanted it or not. She only accepted the ones that had no relatives and were also unwanted.  None of the b******s -- most of them were -- that would possibly be claimed later.

She received a small monthly stipend for each one, which she shared with her brother.  Back then, there was no agency to check on their welfare.  Children under state care were simply an expensive embarrassment.  They were available for anyone willing to take on the trouble of raising them.  Many went to savvy farmers or private industry for use as slave labor until they reached sixteen.  

She'd wait until the paperwork went through, then simply kill them, banking the income until they would have reached sixteen.

At first, she had fed the remains to the pigs, but the swine left bones lying around.  The woman would have to spend time rooting through the mud of the pen, on hands and knees, to collect and dispose of the remains.  She feared that a passing stranger might recognize human debris in her pigpen. A few did cut across her property on their way to fish in a creek out back.

One day while she was drunk, a common occurrence, Mrs. Shannon decided to try out some of the meat. She found it quite tasty and tender, something like pork.  Why not, she decided, save a little money?  Since then, she ate better than the pigs, saving the choice sections for herself.
  
In order to hide evidence, Mrs. Shannon took to carving the meat off first.  Once boned, the meat looked like pork steaks and roasts. The previous owner of the house had closed off the basement room for some obscure reason, maybe to keep the remaining space from freezing in the chill of winter?  But he'd left a small trapdoor leading to the kitchen.  Mrs. Shannon simply dumped the larger bones down the hole and forgot about them.

Expecting a delivery at any time, Mrs. Shannon kept her knives sharp.  I should really buy new ones, she sometimes thought, but the old blades still had a few months on them yet. She was very cheap and the knives very worn.

Hearing a carriage stopping outside, she looked out a kitchen window to see a man in a constable's uniform.  He reached into the backseat of his coach and brought out a bundle wrapped in a blue blanket.  Meanwhile, a little girl five or six years old stepped down and stood waiting.  The child was dressed shabbily and looking around, wide-eyed, at what she thought would be her new home.

The constable met Mrs. Shannon on the porch and handed her the baby, along with a packet of papers for her to sign.  She leaned down onto a wide porch railing and signed for the children.

"Awful quiet for a place like this, ma'am," he stated, looking around curiously.  The house was set well back from the road with quite a bit of empty space on three sides.  At the back stood a small barn, shed, outhouse and fenced-in pigpen.

"The little darlings are all sleeping.  Nap time," she told him while smiling at the frightened tyke and handing back the paperwork. "What's your name, honey?"

"Tammy.  I don' wanna live here.  I wanna go home now."  The little girl cried, tears starting to flow.

"Thanks for bringing them," Mrs. Shannon dismissed the constable and took the children inside, closing the door and locking it behind them.

"Are you hungry, child?"  she asked little Tammy, who nodded shyly.  Mrs. Shannon fixed her a meal of fried bacon and hot cakes. While the girl sat eating, she stirred a dash of yellow powder into a glass of lemonade for the tyke.  

She took the baby into her bedroom and quickly wrung its neck, feeling more than hearing a mild "crack" as it broke.  No need to put up with crying if it woke up, or diaper changing, were her thoughts.  Dropping the tiny corpse onto a dresser, she unwrapped the blanket, which went into the dirty clothes basket to be laundered.  She would throw away the diaper.

"Damn, they're getting scrawnier and scrawnier these days." She inspected the tiny corpse.  "I should complain to Jerry about the way the state feeds these animals."

Returning to the kitchen, she found the little girl had finished eating. Her head dropping onto a flat bony chest, she threatened to topple off the chair.

"You look tired, honey.  You better go out back to the outhouse and then take a nap."  She showed Tammy where the outside toilet was and waited for her to return.  

Mrs. Shannon had decided to give the girl sleeping powder rather than killing her right off.  She wanted to have the kid clean the house first and do other chores that had been piling up. The baby would give them enough fresh meat for a day or two.  

Sometimes, Mrs Shanahan did that, letting the stronger kids live and work like slaves for a while before killing them.  She had kept two ten-year-old boys for a month once, forcing the brats to dig a new toilet-hole for her.  Other times she would keep a strong or personable one briefly for companionship and odd jobs. She was getting older, sometimes craving someone to talk to.

After Tammy came back in, kindly Mrs. Shannon put her to bed in a spare bedroom before carving and boning her brother for the next day.

***

When she was murdered at a ripe old age, Mrs. Shannon's brother inherited a large bank account and the house.  At times, he had idly wondered what became of the children he gave her, but wasn't really all that interested.  All it meant to him was that he had to stop payments to her, losing his own cut of the profit.

The brother, Jerry, later sold the house.  For more than a century, it went through various owners but nobody discovered the cache until Al wanted a little extra storage space. 

***

"Well, that's the last of them, Mr. Johnson," the coroner's assistant told Al, "the room is all yours."

"What are you going to do to investigate it?"  Al asked, curious.  He would like to know where all those bones came from.  

"What can we do?  It was so long ago that we'd never find out.  In a town like this, nobody kept many records way back then.  There's no way to know who lived here, or if they owned the place at the time or were simply renting?  And most of the residents are sure to be dead by now, with no way to prosecute."  The coroner was busily packing up his equipment, the room now bare. "No reason in hell to take fingerprints or pay for a forensics team.  All we can do is give them a decent burial."

"Yeah, guess you're right.  A waste of money," Al realized. "Thanks for taking them out."

"Anytime. If it happens again, call us," the coroner jokingly told him while leaving.  He turned back, grinning, "Hey, a sort of in-house joke.  Not a suggestion."  He was laughing as he left.  To him, it was all in a day's work.

Left alone in the basement, with strong electric trouble-lights still shining into the corners, Al noticed, for the first time, how clean the room was; not dusty at all, as he would have expected.  And the floor still had those fresh dandelions lying around, mostly crushed by the workers' feet.  Who the hell had kept it clean?  he wondered, the outer room being dirty as hell.  And where did the flowers come from, with no soil for them to grow in?

***

In time,  Al almost forgot about the bones and the dandelions.  He stored excess furniture in the now-empty space and went on with life.   

His lawsuit for custody of his own little girls was disallowed by the courts, which made him even more sad.  But, on the other hand, his job was going well.  Though unhappy, Al figured he had to take life as it happened and thank God for what he did have.

***

Late one night, around midnight,  Al got out of bed and went downstairs for a drink of water.  As he turned into the kitchen, he was shocked and had to stop in his tracks.

He saw a young girl in there, looking to be ten or eleven years old. She was on her knees, dressed in an old-style long housedress bunched up above her knees, while busily scrubbing the kitchen floor with a brush.  The kid must have heard him, because she turned her head, a fearful look on a dirty face.  Only a few inches from the kitchen wall, she looked back down and scrubbed furiously.

"I'm sorry.  Don't make me leave. Please.  I can still work, see?"  She bent her little back into a bow, scrubbing as hard as she could.

"Uh, what ... what are you doing?"  Al managed, weakly holding onto the plywood paneling of the doorway.

"Cleaning.  My job.  I'm sorry.  I've been lazy.  Don't hurt me or make me leave." She sobbed again, dipping a rag into a pail of water and returning to her task.

"I won't hurt you," he told her, getting over his shock.  If she was a ghost, she didn't look dangerous.  "Come on, sit down over here and tell me who you are, where you live."  He went over to the kitchen table and sat in one of the chairs.  He had to sit down in any case, since his legs were shaking so hard.

Obediently but with downcast eyes, the girl reluctantly rose to her feet and settled into a chair across from him, hands folded primly on her lap.

They sat in silence, both lost in thought.  Finally,  Al took the initiative.  He gathered enough strength to go over to a cupboard and pour himself a stiff drink of vodka before returning to the table.

"Can I get you anything?"  he asked, almost whispering, afraid she would disappear if he took his eyes off her.  

She shook her head.

"Well, since we seem to be living together, can you at least tell me who you are and what you're doing here in my house?"

"My �" My name's Tammy.  I don't remember the other name anymore, jus �" just Tammy," she said, hesitantly with downcast eyes.  "I �" I was Mrs. Shannon's property.  She -- She made me clean the house -- a lot.  Said if I didn't she would … wouuuld eat me."

The kid broke down, sobbing loudly with head in hand.

"I'm sorry, Tammy.  She must have been a horrible woman to do that.  Little girls like you are meant for better things than to scrub floors."

"Oh, no!  She was nice to me."  She shook her head violently.  "She let me live but killed all the others, so she must’a really liked me."  Tammy nodded her head savagely, in affirmation. "Mrs. Shannon liked me, she really did, and liked my work.  I'm a hard worker -- she said so."  The last sentence sounded like a plea.

"And, uh, where is this Mrs. Shannon now?"  Al asked, already knowing the answer.

"She died a long time ago.  She was my friend, bu -- but I killed her."  Tammy's hands flew to cover her face as her head fell to the tabletop again, tears flowing. "I killed her."

They talked for hours, the little ghost girl and Al.  It turned out that Mrs. Shannon, for some obscure reason -- maybe a need for steady companionship in her old age -- kept little Tammy. 

Constantly fearful of being killed and eaten, Tammy learned to do other chores to please the woman, like keeping the knives sharp and helping control newer children on the occasions when they received several at one time.  

Like her mistress, Tammy eventually came to look at the others as food.  Aware of her meager chances for survival, Tammy tried her best to please the old woman.  As Mrs. Shannon grew older and meaner and Tammy larger, the youngster did more and more of the work, even killing, boning, and cooking other children. 
 
Eventually Tammy began thinking of boys.  There was one in particular that she wanted to keep.  Mrs. Shannon humored Tammy for awhile, a few weeks, then killed the boy herself.  She told the girl he'd escaped during the night.

Days later, a much older and weaker Edna Shannon sat at the dinner table with Tammy.  The girl thought it strange that they were eating a roast, and there hadn't been any new children in for weeks.  When she asked, she found she was eating her boyfriend.  

Tammy protested, even threw up, but Mrs. Shannon only laughed at her realization.  The bullying woman took the matter as a joke, kidding Tammy by revealing her first such meal, years before, when she had fed Tammy her own baby brother.

It was too much for the girl.  Without conscious thought, she picked up a carving knife and killed her mentor -- stabbing the thin blade into Edna's old chest.  Although fighting for her life, the old lady was no match for the angry girl.  Then, Tammy said, she hid the body by dumping it into the outside toilet, climbed upstairs to the attic and hung herself from a rafter.

"Now, you took away all my playmates," Tammy complained. "Their ghosts left with their bones.  All I have left to play with is Mrs. Shannon's, and she's not much fun," Tammy finished.

"You mean both her, and your, bones are still here?"  Al asked, sitting up straight despite all the vodka he had been drinking. "Still in the house?  And where's her bones?  I'd like to kill her again by destroying them."

"If you want to see the old hag, I'll show you," Tammy said. Rising slowly, one hand on the table to steady herself, she lead him to an ancient toilet shack outside.  

At the moment, it held an assortment of rusty trash.  Although useless, Al hadn't gotten around to tearing it down.  He hadn't even known it was a toilet, thinking it a storage shed.  He didn't see any ghosts, though.

"Where's the old broad?"  he asked Tammy, curious.

Tammy went over to the old three-hole seat, one hole still clear of rubble. 

She motioned him over. Looking through the hole, Al could see the ghostly face of an old lady staring back at him, a sneering snarling sight. Feeling weak, he jerked back toward the open door.

Once he was clear of the hole, Tammy matter-of-factually dropped her ghostly pants and sat down.

"She used to eat kids, now this is all I feed her." Tammy smiled, making a ghostly stink.

"I'm next," Al said.  Unbuckling his own pants, he waited his turn, deciding to let the hag stay right where she was -- though better fed with both of them feeding her every day.

The End.   
Charlie