An insistent knocking begins the haunting of a pediatrician’s office- until a scrappy receptionist discovers the nature of the ghostly intruders.

I am going South- this train is taking me to Newport, Kentucky- where I am hired to work as a receptionist for my American uncle. He’s a pediatrician-obstetrician, my uncle, and I am to call him Dr. Lewiston and be grateful that he’s taken a chance on me, given the hell I put my parents through at school this year. I am to make reparations over the summer.  

Dr. Lewiston has no choice but to hire me, anyway, and I have typist training. None of the girls in Newport will take the position, he confided in his brother (my father). Parents are scared. Women are miscarrying at an alarming rate, and rumours are flying. If it’s the water supply or ancient curses, I don’t know, but everyone is healthy! Then the unthinkable happens. My last receptionist miscarries in our waiting room, with zero warning, dying later of a bloodstream infection. My reputation, lives of my friends- all are under threat. I need help, Jack. 

My father, scared of raising children and desperate to impress his physician brother, turns to me with eyes chaining like slot machines and tells me to pack. He says: Any place odds are below zero on Julia having a baby, Ed, is fine by us. She’s turning her life around. I already got to keep myself from killing the boy who turned it around in the first place. Then he sings on down the road to buy my ticket.  

Newport is amazing! Alive with night creatures, entertainment, and a kind of needy neon sickness I am already in love with. When I answer the office phone for the first time, it is like a new woman speaking: Thank you for calling Ohio River Family Care Clinic, how do you do? As if I’d been saying it all my life.  

I’m good at my job. It’s simple work and I love my budding friendships with the small-town people, learning their problems and minding their children. I make friends- with Miss Tee next door and Candace, who is older than me, married and works at the grocery store. But strange things are happening. A sensation of dread hangs in the office and disappears outside. When recording intake with patients over the phone, I hear strange clicks. Dr. Lewiston assures me the telephone lines are fussy and not to worry. When I’m alone, I’m driven mad by tiny incessant knocks. At first, I thought it was someone at the door, or tapping the doorplate out back, but I never catch anyone. I start to believe I’m going crazy. And I obsess about the clinic freezer. 

Three knocks on the doorplate- then six more, at a quicker tempo. This is Wilkes, the delivery boy. He has keys to the locked freezer and I don’t. Dr. Lewiston likes the milk to stay cold, so Wilkes comes and goes as he pleases. I wonder what he does back there besides drop off milk. I can’t ever leave the waiting room unattended, so I watch the clock and sometimes he’s in for ten minutes. There’s no money around either- just insurance paperwork and patient files- but there are expensive fish in the tank.  

One day I am lying on a picnic blanket beside the Licking River, with Candace spread out next to me. We are eating peeled grapes and sunflower seeds when a dark shadow crosses the blanket. I look up and see Wilkes, his orange threat of hair shining above a freckled glare. Get lost, creep, Candace warns. After he slinks off, I tell her about the door codes and the freezer- how I think he’s more than a milk boy.  

Candace’s mood darkens, and she tells me about Dr. Lewiston on the night of her miscarriage. There was so much blood. She lost consciousness repeatedly. Once when her husband left the room, Dr. Lewiston leaned in and whispered, You’ll be okay. Your baby isn’t big enough to make the cat jealous. Not like the others– and she won’t tell me anything he did after that. But I keep thinking something dark is going wrong inside my uncle. I promise Candace I won’t say anything, but I tell Miss Tee. Child, she says, I don’t know the good doctor, but it don’t feel right that so many babies ain’t makin’ it. Ask your questions. Miss Tee’s warning circles my head, and three nights in a row, I dream of breaking my fingernails along a cliff’s ledge, above a roaring sea, with my boyfriend screaming at me from the water. 

I wait for Wednesday, when Dr. Lewiston goes out for lunch, then make my move. I use the lockpick technique my boyfriend taught me, and I’m in the freezer lickety-split. It is horrific. Rows of giant or mini white fetuses, suspended in jars of green liquid. A Jell-O Salad of newborns floating in artificial wombs, instead of the marshmallows and pineapples Miss Tee prepares for the clinic staff. Except they move. One fetus clenches and unclenches a tiny fist. Another blinks open eyes yellower than goldenrod. Effortlessly kicks out a leg. A complicated network of machinery and tubes appear to be involved in nourishing them, keeping them alive. Not just alive- 

I’m sorry, Julia. Wilkes is pointing a gun in my face. I can’t let you leave, he whines in an awful nasal voice. The milk-splattered delivery apron is gone, replaced by a black suit, hat and sunglasses. He looks thirty years older. We’ll have to convince your father you’ve run away, won’t we, Dr. Lewiston? 

My uncle emerges from the shadows, face streaked with sweat. The yellow-eyed babies are smiling at us. They are growing up outside the womb. Already I sense vengeance shadowing their little hearts, seething in their yellow liquefied eyes, invading like the rampant ivy draping the backdoor entrance of the clinic. 

I scream and the babies scream underwater in unison. 

You’ve run away, my uncle mumbles, and his eyes become that liquefied yellow just as Wilkes pulls the trigger.