A Mother's Lullaby Never Dies horror story.

Cradle Songs for the Forgotten

A Mother's Lullaby Never Dies

By [Dr. Nivara Bloom]

The wind sang tonight.

Not the kind of melody that calms you. No. This wind carried something old. Something broken. Something that hummed lullabies only forgotten children remembered.

Saira sat by the cracked window of the cottage, arms wrapped tightly around an old cloth bundle. Inside it, a tattered baby dress and a pacifier — all that remained of her daughter, Aleeza.

Seven years ago, Aleeza vanished.

One minute, she was napping in her crib. The next… gone. No sign of forced entry. No sound. Just silence — that terrible, suffocating silence that still lingered in Saira’s ears like a ringing bell that never stopped.

Her husband had left six months after the incident. Couldn’t take the weight. Couldn’t bear the silence. But Saira stayed — in that same old house at the edge of the woods where lullabies had once echoed through the halls like sunlight.

Until they stopped.

It began again a few weeks ago. First, the crib in the attic rocked by itself. Then came the smell — baby powder and warm milk, Aleeza’s scent — floating in rooms that hadn’t been opened in years.

And then… the lullaby.

Soft. Fragile. Sung in a voice that sounded like hers… and yet not.

"Chandni raat mein tu so ja,

Tere sapnon mein main aaun…"

Saira froze the first time she heard it. It came from the woods behind the house — the very woods where children had been going missing for decades. Whispers in the village spoke of an old spirit, a mother of sorrows who collected lost children and sang them to sleep forever.

But Saira didn't believe in ghosts.

She believed in pain. And pain was real.

That night, she followed the lullaby.

Wrapped in her shawl, barefoot, she stepped into the blackened forest. The wind circled her ankles like cold fingers. Trees creaked. Leaves whispered. And the song — that soft, broken lullaby — led her deeper into the trees than she'd ever gone.

Then she saw it.

A cradle.

Not resting on the ground, but hanging mid-air, cradled between two dead trees like a web. It rocked slowly, and within it — not a baby, but something twisted, swaddled in cloth and shadows.

She took a trembling step forward.

The cradle stopped.

The shadows inside shifted.

A girl’s voice — soft, hoarse — called out from the darkness:

“Mama…”

Saira’s breath caught. Her knees buckled.

“Aleeza?” she whispered.

Silence.

Then a giggle. Not innocent — but cold. Wrong.

The cradle turned.

And there she was.

Her daughter’s face — or what remained of it. The eyes were hollow. Her smile was stitched too wide, cheeks torn at the edges. But the pacifier in her mouth… it was the same one from the bundle in Saira’s arms.

“Why did you leave me?” the thing asked.

Saira dropped to her knees, tears streaming down.

“I never left. I searched for you. I—”

“You stopped singing,” it interrupted.

The woods darkened. The trees leaned in.

“You forgot my lullaby. So she came. The one who sings for us now.”

A cold gust whipped through Saira’s hair as a figure stepped out from behind the trees. A woman — tall, thin, draped in black — her face covered by a veil stitched with hundreds of tiny baby teeth. She held a rusted music box that played the same melody on loop.

“She keeps us warm. She keeps us still,” Aleeza whispered.

The veiled woman raised her hand — long fingers like twigs, skin like paper. Her presence sucked the breath out of the air.

Saira didn’t run. She stood.

“She’s my daughter. You can’t have her.”

The air cracked with the sound of a thousand children crying — high-pitched, echoing from every tree.

“She was forgotten,” the woman hissed. “She belongs to me.”

“No,” Saira whispered. “Not anymore.”

She reached into her bundle, pulling out the baby dress. Holding it up, she began to hum the old lullaby — the one she used to sing to Aleeza, night after night.

The forest stilled.

The cradle stopped swaying.

And the stitched smile on Aleeza’s face began to tremble. Tears, real ones, fell from her hollow eyes.

“Mama…”

Saira walked forward, arms open. The music box sputtered. The veiled woman screamed — a sound like crumbling bones and shattering glass.

But Saira didn’t stop.

She held her daughter.

Cold. Broken. But still hers.

The woods vanished.

---

They found Saira the next morning, asleep at the edge of the forest, clutching a baby dress soaked in blood. Her eyes were open. Her lips moved silently — still singing.

She never spoke again.

But every night, villagers say, a soft lullaby drifts from her cottage. And if you walk too close to the forest, you’ll hear it being sung back — by a hundred small voices, lost in the trees.

They say the cradle still hangs between the trees.

And it's never empty.

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