ONE CHILD

2015

Scary

The wind carried a cold that sank into the bones, blowing down from the mountains into the valley.
Alma leaned over the stable, watching the sheep that had just given birth.
The animal moaned with a rough, almost human sound.
Beside her, wrapped in blood and membranes, a strange creature stirred.

Alma froze.
It wasn’t an ordinary lamb.
It had short arms, an upright torso, and a face that seemed an impossible mixture of human and beast.
When it opened its eyes, Alma felt a tremor in her chest: they were dark, deep, far too knowing.

The sheep tried to draw near, but Alma pushed it aside.
She wrapped the newborn in a blanket and held it against her body, as if she already knew that this being belonged to her.

When Luke, her husband, entered and saw the scene, he asked no questions.
He looked at the creature, then at Alma, and nodded with a gesture that was more fear than acceptance.
That very night they took it into the house.
They named him Dan.

As months passed, Dan became the center of everything.
He walked clumsily on two legs, yet when he ran his steps struck like hooves.
He laughed with a dry bleat, and sometimes spent hours staring into the fire, entranced.
Alma treated him as her own son; Luke, though silent, would stay up entire nights watching him sleep.

The neighbours whispered.
No one understood where that strange child had come from or why they never let him outside.
Alma answered with evasions, but the questions grew like weeds.

One night, Alma woke to see him standing in the hallway.
Dan stared at the door, motionless, eyes wide.
He pointed outside.
Alma turned her head: beyond the glass, in the storm, stood a colossal figure.
A man bare-chested, his skin dark as burning coal, with two horns on his brow that seemed to tear the sky.

Alma’s heart stopped.
She needed no one to tell her: this was the father.

The being did not enter.
He merely watched her, and in his eyes burned a terrible patience.
Then he vanished into the wind.

Alma fell to her knees, praying through sobs, but her prayers broke apart.
Luke, on the other hand, was not surprised.
He only muttered:
—Sooner or later he would come for him.

In the days that followed, tension grew like a storm.
Alma’s dreams filled with blood, with dead animals, with bonfires blazing in the valley.
Dan grew restless, quieter, his gaze distant.
It was as if he already knew what awaited him.

He returned on the last night of winter.
He did not knock on the door.
He smashed it down with a thunderous crash that shook the entire house.
The candles went out at once, and the fire in the hearth roared backward, as if swallowed by a void.

Dan ran to him, bleating with a voice that shredded the ears.
Alma tried to hold him back, but the demon stretched out a hand and flung her against the wall as if she were paper.
Luke rushed with a knife, shouting, but the steel melted in his hand before it touched flesh.

One by one, he destroyed them.
Blood soaked the wood, ran through the cracks in the floor, stained the valley an impossible red.
Alma caught a last glimpse of her son, clinging to the beast’s neck, as if he had finally come home.

He carried him out in his arms, crossing the snow beneath a starless sky.
Behind them, the house burned.

In her final breath, Alma understood the truth: he had never been hers.
She had raised the son of hell, and hell always claims what belongs to it.

The valley fell silent.
Only a deep echo remained, half wail, half bleat reverberating among the mountains.