I suppose this all starts with my wife. We were a relatively normal couple. We started dating when we were both nineteen, and we ended up getting married three years later. Within six months she was pregnant, and our son was on the way. Like I said, we were normal. I suppose we started a little younger than most people do nowadays, but aside from that, there was nothing exceptional about us.

That is until the day our son was born. Samantha, my wife, went into labor precisely on her due date. When it happened, I joked that she had always been punctual. I was worried, but nonetheless excited as I drove her to the hospital.

We quickly got her into a room, which is when the waiting began. Labor can last for hours to even days, especially when it’s your firstborn. Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait for too long and a few hours later the doctor urged her to push as the baby slowly made its way out. The child was just about to crown, and I watched awkwardly from beside her with a mixture of excitement, fear, and just a little disgust.

That’s when all hell broke loose. Samantha’s blood pressure tanked, and she groaned in a way that indicated something bad had happened.

“My head,” she said through gritted teeth.

I could tell by the look on the doctor’s face that something was very wrong. He told her to stop pushing and immediately moved to stand beside her and check her pupils. Nurses swarmed around me and said that I should wait outside. I tried to argue, but they wouldn’t hear it. Within seconds I was standing out in the hallway, helpless and waiting while my wife was wheeled into a different room.

I’m not sure how long I stood there. Everything sort of got lost in a fog of worry. Eventually the doctor came out of the operation room, and my heart fell the moment I saw him. His entire posture spoke of defeat. I braced myself for what came next.

A weak arterial wall in Samantha’s brain had burst under the stress of labor. She’d had an aneurysm and died. There was nothing the doctors could do. He smiled grimly and gave me a halfhearted congratulation. Samantha had gone quickly, but they managed to perform an emergency C-section and save the baby. I was a father.

That was nine years ago. It was a tragedy, and the experience broke me for a long time. However, like all things, the pain eventually faded. I hate to admit it, but now there are entire days where I don’t even think about Samantha. I suppose that’s just the way of things. They fade.

Jackson, our son, seemed to be a healthy young boy. However, he had some oddities that have recently become so much more than I could have ever imagined.

I first noticed one of these strange quirks when he was still a baby. He would often stare into empty space for no apparent reason. This isn’t all that uncommon with babies, but it was different with him. He always seemed extremely focused, and his eyes would dance back and forth as if he was watching something move.

Once I was playing peekaboo with Jackson, hiding my face and suddenly revealing it, capitalizing on his lack of object permanence. However, when I moved my hands to reveal my face, he wasn’t looking at me. He stared over my shoulder, watching something else in the room.

I glanced behind me, but there was nothing there. Just a blank wall. I turned back and he was still doing it. His eyes moved smoothly from one side of the room to the next. This may not seem that strange at first, but the oddness of it was in the way his eyes moved.

I recalled something that I had learned at some point back in college. When we gaze across a room, our eyes quickly flick from one position to another. The motion isn’t smooth. We can only move our eyes smoothly when we’re tracking something that’s actively moving. A phenomenon called smooth pursuit movement. Jackson’s eyes weren’t flickering about, which meant he was actually watching something move around behind me. Yet I was certain there was nothing there.

I put it out of mind and went about my day. However, as time went on, I would catch him watching something move about in the same way. He was just a baby, and yet I found his behavior creepy.

Eventually Jackson got old enough to talk, and he would occasionally mention seeing an angel. He claimed it was a guardian angel that followed him around. I didn’t really see anything wrong with it at the time. I’m not religious myself, but I have some pretty devout family members and assumed he had picked it up from them. I thought of it like an imaginary friend.

Sometimes I would catch him lying on the living room floor and staring up at the ceiling. When I asked what he was doing, he would say that he’s watching his angel fly about. I played along for a while, but eventually it got tiring and I began to ignore it.

However, as he got older, he continued to insist on the existence of his “angel.” One night I told him to go to bed, as it was getting late. But he continued to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling.

“Jackson,” I said. “It’s bedtime.”

“The angel says I don’t have to,” he responded simply, still on the floor.

I sighed and rubbed my temples. Work had been incredibly stressful lately and I wasn’t in the mood for his nonsense. “Just get up off the damn floor already.”

“No,” Jackson said in that indignant tone children take when they’re about to throw a tantrum.

I raised my voice. “Get off the floor now. You should have been in bed an hour ago.”

“My angel says I don’t have to listen to you.”

“Your fucking angel isn’t real, Jackson!” I snapped. “You’re too old for that stuff now. Just listen to me and go to bed.”

Jackson stood up and turned to face me. He shot me a nasty glance, something between a scowl and a pout. “No.”

“GOD DAMMIT JACKSON! GET TO BED N-”

My shout was cut off by the sound of breaking glass. I jumped and glanced over at the counter to see that a cup had shattered.

“He doesn’t like it when you yell,” Jackson said. He hadn’t even looked at the glass. It was as if the noise hadn’t surprised him at all. Without another word, he stormed off to his room, though I could have sworn he shot me a smug glance over his shoulder.

I went to investigate the glass. It hadn’t fallen or anything. I found it exactly where I had set it last. It was still standing up and even had water left in it. It looked as if someone had grabbed the top and squeezed until it broke. There was even glass inside the fragmented bottom of the cup.

A chill ran down my spine as I examined it. Unnerved, I cleaned up the mess and threw the glass away.

That night I was woken by a strange sensation. I can’t really explain it, just something on a subconscious level. I jerked awake and my gaze immediately moved to the corner of the room. A dark figure stood there, wings unfurled. I couldn’t see its face, but somehow I knew that it stared at me with a deep hatred.

A car passed by outside and its headlights beamed into my room. The yellow spotlight slid along the wall, and in the changing light the figure disappeared. When the car had passed, it was still gone. I think that was the moment I truly began to believe Jackson’s guardian angel stories.

I slept fitfully that night, constantly waking up and checking my room for any signs of that figure’s returns. It was stupid. I’m an adult. I shouldn’t be scared of fantasies like that. And yet I couldn’t help but feel a cold sensation creep into my bones every time I thought of that dark, winged thing.

A couple days later, I got a call from Jackson’s school. He had gotten into a fight. I was surprised, as he had always been a relatively quiet and passive boy. He got good grades, and his teachers actually said they wished he would talk or interact with others more. Apparently, he spent most of the school day in complete silence and solitude. I assumed he was being bullied and had gotten into a small scuffle or something.

That wasn’t the case.

When I got to the school, I was informed that he had severely injured another student. He got into a fight with an eighth grader and broke his arm, collarbone, and nose. Jackson didn’t have a scratch on him.

The principle informed me that, while they usually only suspend students for fighting, Jackson’s attack had been vicious. She claimed he couldn’t be trusted around other students, and I was lucky they hadn’t gotten the police involved. Jackson was expelled.

As I was walking out of the office, I caught a glimpse of the boy Jackson had supposedly assaulted, a nurse bent over him. He was big, even for a thirteen-year-old. He must have been at least twice my son’s size. How could a nine-year-old have hurt him so badly?

I drove home in cold silence with Jackson in the back seat. He insisted that it wasn’t his fault. The older boy was bullying him, and his guardian angel had stepped in to defend him. Jackson claimed he hadn’t laid a finger on the boy.

Part of me wanted to snap at him, to yell at him for doing such a stupid thing. But another part of me thought about that dark figure I saw, about how it seemed physically impossible that Jackson could have done such a thing.

That night, I decided to talk to him about his guardian angel. Ignoring it wouldn’t help any longer. I found him sitting on his bed reading a book and plopped down next to him.

“Hey bud.”

He ignored me. He was pouting.

“Can I talk to you about something?”

He looked up at me. “I already told you I didn’t do it.”

“That’s not what I want to talk about. I want to ask you about your guardian angel.”

He relaxed at that. Actually, he almost seemed eager to talk about it. “What do you want to know?”

“Who is this angel?” I asked. “Is it mommy?” I don’t know what possessed me to ask that question, but it had been churning inside my brain for years now, a deep suspicion that I couldn’t shake.

To my surprise, he shook his head. “He’s just my guardian angel.”

“Where did this angel come from?”

“Bashotep,” he responded simply.

I was taken aback. “Bash… what?”

“Bashotep. He’s my angel’s master.”

“You mean like god?”

Jackson shrugged. “I guess. When I met him, he said he would give me an angel to protect me and that I was one of his children.”

I felt a cold chill run down my spine. I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. “When you met him?”

“In the cold place, before I was exhumed.”

Exhumed. That word made my hair stand on end. Why would a nine-year-old know a word like that. “What do you mean?”

“When I was exhumed from mommy.”

“You weren’t…” I trailed off. “Honey, I don’t think you know what that word means.”

“Yes I do. We were dead and I was exhumed by the doctor. That’s what he told me.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. I never told him that his mother died while giving birth. I just said she got sick when he was a baby. The doctors told me that she had died before the baby crowned and that he was in her for three minutes before they could remove him. Apparently, he had almost died too.

“Oh, okay…” There wasn’t much else to say, and I didn’t know how to pursue the conversation any further. I left him to his book.

Shaken by our conversation, I decided to try to find information on this “Bashotep” that Jackson had talked about. I scoured the internet but found practically nothing. The only reference I found was from an old thesis paper on ancient texts. It included a poem from some archaic script called The Book of Zaloch. It goes like this: