What is Creepy?

The creepiest things are the ones that tinker with your sense of reality. The things that defy the evolutionary expectations of your brain.

My mother was the youngest of eight children, so my grandparents were always ancient to me, as was their house that eternally reeked of moth balls, boiled chicken, and, for whatever reason, roses. Not ones to stray from a theme, their toy box was a motley collection of Lincoln Logs, tractors, spinning tops, and other miscellaneous carved wood and rusted steel artifacts that would have been more at home in a museum and, to a kid obsessed with all things Atari, were about as appealing as Grandma's bean soup. (The woman never met a food that couldn't be improved by letting it sit in hot water for 8 hours.)

Nevertheless, when the choice was to risk splinters and tetanus or to listen to adults blather on about the crops or whatever Estelle across the street's grandson was currently serving time for, I always found myself on the big braided rug with whichever toys were left over after my asshole brother and cousins were done fighting over them, which meant stacking blocks in the sweltering July heat and pondering, in my five-year-old logic, if the passage of time was an illusion.

It was in this altered mental state that I first noticed it. The blocks were rough wooden building blocks with hand-carved pictures and letters. An "A" with an apple, "C" with a cat, plus an assortment of shapes and letters designed to stimulate the brain of an infant, not a kid who was reading Encyclopedia Brown. However, it was the "B" block that sticks with me even today. Looking back, it seems the logical picture to carve was a ball. Simple, straightforward, easy for even the most unskilled artisan to knock out in a minute or two. I'll never know why the creator chose a baby. The best explanation I can come up with is that manifesting the horrific visage was his way of exorcising the dark thoughts that would otherwise have had him searching for the nearest axe or clock tower.

We're evolutionally hard-wired to find babies adorable. It's why we don't just leave them by the side of the road on the way home from the hospital instead of going through long days and sleepless nights of endless feeding, changing, wiping, burping, and constantly saving them from the inexplicable attraction they all seem to have to sharp corners and high ledges.

But this baby was different.

This was the Gerber baby if Gerber had hired the marketing firm of John Carpenter and Tim Burton. You wouldn't so much leave this baby by the side of the road on the way home from the hospital as you would go searching for an old priest and a young priest. It was the eyes, I think. They were too small. Too dark. Too deeply set within tumorous cheeks. They were the eyes of a baby who had gazed long into the abyss, and the abyss had gazed back into it. Then the abyss had said, "Fuck that."

I don't know where those blocks are today. If they're buried in a landfill or in the toybox of some kid who got the world's worst garage sale mystery box, but that "B" block and its demon baby will live forever in my nightmares.