This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/CIAHerpes on 2023-12-11 20:02:40.
I remember coming into the house on one cold winter’s night. The snow and icy wind blew through the front door as I stepped into the house, kicking my boots clean. I noticed a strange odor in the place. It almost smelled like stink bugs with notes of copper and bleach. I hated the smell of stink bugs.
“Hey, honey?” I said. “Where are you? I’m starving and, by the way, it smells weird in here. Traffic nearly stopped for a half-hour on I-80. A goddamned tractor-trailer flipped over in the middle of the blizzard and closed down all three lanes! We could only get around by driving in the breakdown lane until cops got there and started…” My voice trailed away as I noticed the drops of blood on the floor leading from the front hallway into the kitchen. I stopped talking immediately, looking around for signs of an intruder. I saw nothing- no smashed windows, no busted doors, no rifled-through drawers or cabinets.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, immediately going to the kitchen and grabbing the largest meat cleaver I could find from the knife block. Its edges gleamed, freshly-sharpened and ready to slice into the hardest of flesh.
I made sure not to step on the drops of blood. I didn’t want to disturb a crime scene, if indeed it was a crime scene. I stopped, thinking of calling 911. But some inner voice urged me on. It will take five or six minutes for the police to arrive, possibly longer, it said, and you need to check on your family now. Right now.
Sprinting forwards, I followed the blood trail down the hall and straight to the first-floor bathroom. The door stood closed. I tried the handle and found it locked.
“Hello?” I said, pounding on the door. “Who’s in there? Open up!”
“Isaac? Is that you?” a faint voice asked. I recognized the voice of my wife immediately.
“Open the goddamn door!” I screamed. Rising waves of anxiety and adrenaline coursed through my body, and I immediately knew something was very wrong. I could hear it in the dead tone of my wife’s voice, see it glistening on the floor in crimson droplets, feel it in the air like falling pressure before a thunderstorm. “Jenna, open the door.” I heard some slight shuffling in the small bathroom, like someone dragging themselves across the floor. Then I heard a click.
I opened the door and found a chamber of nightmares lying beyond the threshold.
My only son floated face-down in the bathtub. My wife sat back down on the edge of the tub, rocking back and forth, her eyes flat and dead.
“Why?” I whispered, horrified. “Why would you do this?”
“Don’t you know?” she murmured in a croaking voice. “Do you really not know that our son is the Antichrist?”
***
Maybe I did have suspicions that something wasn’t quite right with Max. It was more than the dead animals I kept finding strewn around the yard and under the house. It was more than the way his eyes seemed to shine in the dark when I wished him goodnight. No, it was a feeling- a cold, empty feeling that seemed to follow him wherever he went.
He had no friends at school, and animals avoided him like the plague. Dogs would start barking and howling when he walked down the street, and cats would hiss then disappear with a swish of their tail in a flash, behind bushes or up trees. These things, on their own, wouldn’t be too much evidence of anything- but they were far from the only evidence that Max was unusual.
A month ago, a couple boys had tried to bully Max at school. They ran out of the bathroom where it happened, crying and wetting their pants as blood streamed from their noses and ears. They wouldn’t tell anyone what happened, and Max just kept smiling and staring at them with his large, dark eyes. The school called an ambulance, and the doctors were baffled.
They had to sit in the emergency room for three hours before the blood stopped pouring out of their bodies. They were white as sheets by the time it finally clotted, and the doctors had no idea of the cause.
The two boys went missing a few days later. The case ended up drawing media attention. The FBI came in, but they found absolutely nothing. It seemed like the boys just disappeared out their windows and then their trail immediately went cold. Tracking dogs couldn’t find any hint of a trail. It was as if they had teleported from their bedrooms. Moreover, no neighbors had seen a thing.
A couple months later, a few hikers found the boys’ fingers growing out of a tree on the Appalachian Trail, over fifty miles away. The FBI swooped in and used DNA testing to determine that these fingers belonged to the missing boys from Max’s school. No one ever explained how the rotting fingers had become quite literally fused into the tree, however.
No one ever tried to bully Max again after that. In fact, the other kids gave him as much distance as possible.
***
I tried to watch Max when he didn’t know I was looking. He was only an eight-year-old boy, but he could put on masks like a psychopath and charm nearly anyone he met. As soon as they turned away, though, he would scowl and narrow his eyes, as if he wanted to stab them in the back.
But this was my son, after all. I loved him, and I think he loved me in his own strange way. Even my wife said she loved him, and she claims that’s why she had to kill him- a strange kind of love, I admit.
But I don’t think she’s lying. I think she did love him, and she feared what would happen when his Ascension had finished and he sat on a throne of bones, crushing out the lives of millions of people with an iron heart. She feared the consequences for him, she said- only for him, and she loved him, and so she had to kill him and stop it now before it grew into a grinding juggernaut that devoured his soul and sent him to Hell.
“Are you my true father?” Max had asked me that morning as I sat at the kitchen table. I put down my coffee cup slowly, with shaking hands, then turned to look at my son.
“Yes, of course,” I said with a trembling voice. “Why would you ask such a crazy question?” He stared at me for a long moment, his eyes so dark they looked black. They blazed with an inner light. His pale, white skin looked as smooth as a statue’s, and dark hair fell over his chiseled features. If it weren’t for his aloofness and cruelty, he would have been a very beautiful boy.
Instead, he radiated a coldness like the Moon, an aura that gave light but no heat, a kind of reptilian, psychopath detachment that extended to everything he did. He would laugh when he saw fatal car accidents on the highway, or heard the news report about wars and murders.
“I don’t think you are my true father,” Max said, still staring at me, reading me like a book. I felt myself begin to sweat.
“Max, that’s ridiculous,” I said. “Your mother and I have been married…”
“Then where does my power come from?” he asked. “Why do I possess what you never will? I know I’m related to Mother,” he spat out the word as if it were a filthy thing, Mother, “but you, I know not. I know not where my divinity comes from. You seem weak and foolish to me. At least Mother has the courage to admit that she hates me. You grovel and pretend and then, when my back is turned, you sneer at me and my Ascension. I know you do. You are a Last Man like so many others. Your kind is ineradicable as fleas, hopping all over the world without meaning or the will to power.
“You don’t understand someone like me. You could never understand someone like me. Not in a million years.”
“I don’t understand what all this business about Ascension is,” I said. “I think you’re living in a fantasy world.”
“If it were a fantasy world,” he said, “then the fruit would not be revealed. But it will be. Soon everyone will see, including you. I’ll be with my true father and become the absolute king of this world. Small men like you will grovel like worms. They’ll be crushed under my feet as I rise to heights previously undreamed of as part of my becoming. My greatness will shine like a second sun. People will remember my name with awe and terror for a thousand years.” He spoke like a much older boy. I gawked at him with an open mouth. He had a far-away look in his eyes, a fanatical gleam that sharpened his cold features.
I remembered when Max was just a little boy. Did I know it back then, when I watched him playing with his toys? Did I know what he was? I think I would have run screaming from the room if I had.
Max turned and left the room, grabbing his backpack as the school bus pulled up in front of the house. I watched him go. He walked with the confidence and straight back of a soldier.
And yet, I thought I saw an aura of swirling black shadows around him. I blinked, and like mist under the hot summer sun, I saw it dissolve into the air. I looked away, sweating and shaking.
With trembling hands, I tried to pick up the coffee cup. It immediately fell to the floor in my nervous fingers and shattered.
Fifty minutes later, I was working from home when the first of the ambulances and police cars raced by, heading to Max’s school.
***
My neighbor, a teacher at the school who the kids called Mr. Hallen, told me the story from his viewpoint later that day. I don’t know how much I believed. At the time, maybe none of it. Now- all of it.
“The day started normally enough,” Mr. Hallen said, pushing his oversized glasses up on his long, nerdy face. “The kids started streaming in for homeroom. Then the bell rang. I started preparing my lecture notes for first period.
“That wa...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/18g16c7/my_wife_drowned_our_son_in_the_bathtub_now_i_know/