Scary Reddit Stories

Daycare (Part-2)

I took my daughter out of daycare immediately.  I couldn’t allow her to keep going to that daycare until I found out what was going on, and even then, I still doubted I’d ever let her go back.  My boss, being a single parent herself, allowed me a week to work from home so I could watch my daughter and find another daycare center.

She wouldn’t stop singing that song though.

Every morning before I even went into her room to wake her up, I could hear her singing it.  And at night, after I put her to bed and I thought she was asleep, I could hear that song coming from her room.

It played back over and over again in my dreams and in my head.  I found it hard to focus on my job and on the search for the new daycare center.  So, when she finally stopped singing, and it was finally out of my head, my relief was immeasurable.

Silence filled the house, and for several minutes, I couldn’t imagine anything more peaceful.  It was as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders for the first time in days and I could finally suck in a full breath of air.

When the silence broke, however, my stomach knotted even tighter.  A feral, terrified scream tore through the house like a freight train.  I’d never heard anything like it.  It was a growling, screeching sound and immediately my mind leapt back into the verses of the song. 

We eat their teeth.

We eat their bones.

I leapt from my desk and followed the noise instantly.  It stopped before I entered my daughter’s room, which is where I was lead, and in that split second, my heart also stopped.  The suddenness by which the sound ceased was almost as unsettling as the sound itself.

When I stepped in, I didn’t see anything at first, not even my daughter.  Then I found her crouched in the corner with her back to me.  She looked like she was busy with something and I could hear a strange sound that even now I can’t describe.

I rushed toward her and picked her up and my hands felt a sticky wetness on her clothes.  It was warm and thick and reminded me of Caro syrup.  I turned her around and saw that what I was touching was the blood that covered the front of her shirt, and I immediately panicked.  I didn’t think of anything else other than to find out where she was bleeding.  I carried her to the bathroom and ripped her shirt off and scrubbed quickly with a washcloth to find the cut.  I found a few scratches on her arms and scrubbed harder, looking for the source of so much blood, but I found nothing else. 

In my panic to clean her up, I hadn’t noticed until that moment that she wasn’t crying or even making a sound at all.  I looked up to her face and, aside from the blood that was smeared across her chin, she looked completely fine.  Her jaw worked up and down, chewing on something, and with shaky fingers I fished it out of her mouth.  It looked like a thin piece of leather.

I threw it in the trash and wiped my fingers on my jeans, and picked up my daughter to carry her to her bedroom to investigate the origin of the blood.

In the corner of her bedroom where I’d originally seen her crouched, was a dead, bloody tangle of fur and tendons that I immediately recognized as the cat I’d adopted from the shelter only a year ago.

It was missing an ear.

I screamed at her.  I screamed out of fear and anger and panic at my daughter who just stood there next to me with blood drying on her hands, arms, and face while her blue eyes stared back at me like blank pools of water.

I put her in the bathtub while I cleaned up the mess in her bedroom.  I scrubbed with hydrogen peroxide and carpet detergent until my arms were sore, but by the end of it there was still a small brownish stain that would serve as a reminder of what had happened to my cat.

In the bathroom, I heard the echoes of my daughter’s voice as she sang the song again.

I didn’t sleep much that night.  Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw the corpse of the cat lying in the corner, and my stomach knotted up even tighter.

When I did finally fall asleep, it was only for a few hours.  I awoke at 3 to the muffled voice of my daughter through the wall.  She was praying.  She said the following prayer three times without pause:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

And when I die before I wake

I pray the lord my soul to take

We’ll play and sing among the dead

And He shall feed us blood and bread

I’ll do His work until sunrise

And love him forever, The Prince of All Lies

When she was done, she said “Amen” and I heard her crawl back into bed.  I got intermittent sleep after that, but not much.  Just like the song, that prayer was stuck in my head and it made me sick.

The next morning, I found her sleeping deeply in bed, covered in a pool of her own urine.  She hadn’t wet the bed at all since I started her in that daycare, and even before that I thought we had overcome that particular hurdle, but when I stepped in her room, the sickly-sweet scent of urine and ammonia mixed with the rotten stench of feces filled the room and made my eyes water.  I found that she’d not only wet the bed, but had also had diarrhea as well.

I gagged and picked her up and carried her, half asleep still, to the shower.

As I cleaned her and she became more conscious, she looked at me with tired eyes.  She didn’t look like she’d slept much at all.

When she spoke, her voice was dry and hoarse, but more sincere than anything she’d said over the past few days.

“You’re going to burn.”