Short Horror Stories

The Syndrome Pill

When my son Toby was first born, I remember the bursting sense of pride I had felt, my heart seeming to expand in my chest, every part of my body in pure euphoria. My wife had been radiating off pure waves of joy, despite her bed ridden appearance, her face covered in a thin film of sweat. Visitors had constantly cooed about how cute he was, and me, being the father, had to agree.

He was my child, and I loved him. I just wish I would have paid more attention.

When we first moved to Wyoming, in the small town of Casper, everyone had welcomed us warmly, dinners appearing on our doorstep almost every night, letters in the mail inviting us to lavish dinners and get-togethers. It was a very nice town, and me and my wife had felt right at home. I didn't think about it at the time, but as soon as we had moved in, the population had become 668, rather than 666. This was a bit disturbing, but I tried not to let it bother me. After all, the townspeople seemed nice enough.

However, when the townspeople found out we were having a baby, we were almost immediately given the cold shoulder. That was when we came to realize that the whole time we had been living here, not once had we seen an infant or a toddler... When we saw friends at the grocery store of gas stations they looked right past us as if we weren't there. There were a few who actually acknowledged us, but they only gave us pitying looks, never saying a word.

This troubled my wife, and she felt hated by the town. I'm not going to lie, I felt excluded and paranoid whenever I went out of the house too. It all seemed unnerving. The dinners stopped showing up and the only mail we ever got was taxes and occasionally letters from other family members.

When Toby was born, we had quickly rushed him to the house as soon as we could, feeling that the townspeople would try to do something horrible to him.

The first few weeks, we had kept his crib in our room at night and he was by our side every second of the day. We slowly felt paranoia taking hold of our minds and we almost never left the house unless we absolutely had to.

But on one particular night, a dinner showed up again-lasagna. We felt relieved and hoped that maybe the town was going to accept us again. And maybe this would be over.

That is, until we started to eat the lasagna.

We both started to feel queasy and within a few hours after we had eaten the food, had started to violently throw up. I could hear my wife's retching and hacking all night long, and we firmly came to the conclusion that we would absolutely not be accepting any more dinners.

After about a day or so if the horrid vomiting, we decided to figure out if it was food poisoning or - hell I didn't know and I was scared shitless! I didn't know if this was going to be fatal or not, and every time I sat down to eat, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and my heart started to pound in my chest.

I found out that it was in fact food poisoning, thanks to the internet. We didn't trust anyone in this town anymore, and definitely not a proper diagnosis. That is, until my wife's miserable retching reached the fatal point that she could no longer breathe and was extremely malnourished.

Having no other choice, I drove over to the nearest hospital with my wife, and it was determined that she had Severe food poisoning, as if we didn't know that. They kept her overnight for observation, and I was reluctant, to say the least, to leave the hospital.

That night, I put Toby to bed as usual and feel asleep within minutes, the stresses of the day finally catching up with me.

In the morning I woke up to the shrill ringing of the phone.

Yawning, I reached over and picked it up, trying to keep all signs of sleep out of my voice as I answered.

"Hello?" I asked, rubbing my eyes.