The American Lullaby: Rabies Bedtime Story

The American Lullaby: Bedtime Story

By Ekona Del Rey Monroe 

“Come here, sweetie,” she whispered, her voice soft as the shadows in the corner of the room. “I’ll tell you a story… but you have to listen very quietly.”

Far away, deep in the forest, there was a place that no wind dared enter. The trees bent around it, and the earth opened like a mouth. A brave man named Daniel wanted to see what lay beneath.

He found an old rope tied to a tree, and carefully, step by step, he climbed down into the darkness. The rope creaked with every motion, and the deeper he went, the colder it became. But suddenly… snap. The rope broke. He fell.

He landed on a narrow ledge. It was thin and slick with mud, clinging to the wall of the pit like it didn’t want to be noticed. At the end of it, a tiny opening curled into the blackness, almost invisible a hidden path that swallowed him completely.

Drip. Drop. Mud slid under his hands. And then he heard it: a cry.

It was small at first. Wet, ragged, trembling. A baby. But it didn’t sound like any baby Daniel had ever heard.

And then he saw them.

Little figures, crawling in the mud, half-hidden by roots and shadow. Their limbs were too long, their fingers thin and curved in wrong ways. Their heads tilted at impossible angles. Their skin was pale and stretched tight over sharp bones. Their eyes were enormous and gleaming, reflecting the faint light of the pit like tiny mirrors.

They cried, hundreds of them, all at once.

Daniel’s throat tightened. He stepped back along the ledge, trying to keep the wall between himself and the creatures. But the babies reached toward him, their mouths trembling, their cries perfectly the same.

And then, faintly, he heard music. A violin, thin and trembling, floating down from the darkness above.

A-C-B-A 40 BPM

The babies froze. Their cries softened. They swayed slightly, just like the music. Daniel looked up, and he saw her. The Mother. She wasn’t calling them to hurt. She was trying to calm them.

But they were still wrong.

Their skin stretched too thin. Their mouths opened too wide. Their fingers bent the wrong way when they reached. Their eyes too big, too reflective, too knowing looked at him, at him alone, and then back at each other.

One shifted in the mud. Another climbed over a fallen root. Their motions were jerky, almost puppet-like, but with sudden bursts of speed that made Daniel stumble back. He could see the malformed bones beneath the skin, the strange joints that bent like they weren’t meant to bend, the tiny ribs that stuck out under pale, wet skin.

They were crying still, perfectly synchronized, hundreds of identical voices coming from hundreds of grotesque, twisted bodies. But it wasn’t just sound, it was a trap. Every note of crying tugged at something deep inside him, something he couldn’t resist.

Daniel realized with a shiver: they were not separate. They were all the same child, created over and over from what the Pit could scrape together. Bones, tissue, shadows, memory… all twisted and reshaped into babies that could never live.

And one of them cried differently. Just slightly. Imperfect. An anomaly. That one got her attention.

She played her violin slower. Softer. The other babies swayed in response, reaching toward her invisible touch. The anomaly tried to follow, stumbled in the mud. The Mother’s lullaby was patient… but the pit would not let the child rest.

Daniel’s heart pounded. He could feel the ledge giving way beneath his feet. The narrow path beckoned like a tongue of shadow. The babies her Rabies shifted, moving closer and closer, sliding silently over the mud, limbs bending wrong, eyes fixed, mouths trembling.

He wanted to run. There was no room. There was no escape.

The Mother’s violin filled the pit. The Rabies reached, swayed, stumbled, climbed over each other, a writhing, crying mass of wrongness. And Daniel knew, as he clutched at the ledge, as the narrow path opened before him into a deeper black, that the pit was alive. It was patient. It was hungry for him, for the lost child, for the lullaby to be answered.

And in the darkness, he understood: it wasn’t just a story. It was happening. It was still happening. And somewhere, deep below, the Rabies waited… reaching… crying… perfect in their imperfection.

“Goodnight, sweetie,” she whispered, closing the book softly. “But sometimes, even stories like this… don’t really end.”

The End