Sorry: Wrong Dimension

Excerpt

So the baby had a pet monster. And so nobody but baby could see it. And so a couple of men dropped out of thin air to check and see if the monster was licensed or not. So what's strange about that?

Baby didn't cry all day, because he had a monster for a playmate. But I didn't know he had a playmate, and much less did I know it was a monster. The honest truth is that for the first time since baby was born, I had my nerves under control, and I didn't dare investigate why he wasn't crying. I got all the ironing done—all of it, mind you—and I got Harry's work-clothes mended and I also read three installments of a Saturday Evening Post serial I'd been saving. And besides this Mabel, my neighbor, and I had a couple or three cups of coffee. We also had a giggling fit. I remember once we went off into hysterics at the picture of ourselves we had—two haggard old wrecks of women, worn out at twenty-three from too much work around the house. "But thank Heavens baby hasn't cried all day!" I gurgled when we came out of it.

"Neither has mine," said Mabel, who isn't due for six months.

"Mabel, honest, you kill me," I said, "and excuse me while I comb my messy hair—because I'm not a wreck. Harry said so. He says I'm still the best hunk of female pulchritude he's met since high school—and we've been married two years!"

I went into the bathroom leaving Mabel choking hysterically behind me. When I came out of the bathroom, she was hysterical but in a different way. She'd discovered why Harry, Jr., wasn't crying. She'd been in the nursery. Her face was white as an egg-shell.

"He's playing with something," she chattered. "It's alive. I heard it cooing back."

I ran three steps to baby's crib ... one on the corner of Little Jack Horner, one on the sheep of Little Bo Peep, one on the cupboard of Old Mother Hubbard. "Baby!" I almost screamed. But baby cooed and gurgled and laughed and rocked back and forth on his diapers. He was playing with his teething ring, but something was trying to jerk the teething ring out of his hands. And baby liked it.

Baby lost his hold on the teething ring, and fell on his back. The teething ring stayed up in the air and then by itself moved toward baby's waving hands and let him get a hold of it.

Mabel screeched through her teeth, "Baby's got it, the monster's got it, now baby's got it!" She began to collapse.

"Don't faint," I snapped, "and don't let's play tennis." I was shaking. I reached into the crib. My hands closed around something that put ice-water in my vertebrae. It was a monster.

"It's got fur!" I whispered. I felt some more. "And clammy scales!" I lifted it out of the crib. "And a trunk!" I was determined to save baby. Baby cried!

We got some chairs and sat there for ten minutes close together while baby played with the invisible monster. "I don't know what to do!" I said. "It's alive. Maybe it's poisonous. But it's friendly. Maybe it's another baby!"

"From another dimension," said Mabel.

"Rot," I said; I think I picked that up from the detective in the Saturday Evening Post serial. "Let's keep our heads."

"If baby keeps his," said my friend Mabel.

That got me. "I've got to call Harry," I chattered. "They don't like him to be called at work, but I've got to call him."

"You'll just worry him," said Mabel....