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and sightless eyes of its mother, eyes long since lost to the
world beyond and behind them.
The woman was finally delivered into a large room lit
only by a small collection of thin candles. After placing the
woman in the middle of the room, her guide waddled back
down the hallway by which it came, leaving wet shadows
in its tracks. The woman struggled against the bonds that
secured her head, arms, and feet to the gurney. However,
after careful observation, I realized the movements were not
her own, but the actions of the thing inside her. Her body—
nothing but a pulsing gestational sac—began to rapidly
swell beyond the scope of the gurney, her bulging mass
spilling to the floor and rolling across the dirty tile like thick
tides of mud. All the while, the woman’s terrified expression
never changed. Her mind and body were nothing but debris,
broken dolls in an abandoned house—but she was aware.
The thing that was once a woman suddenly burst apart
from the inside, releasing a septic spray of inhuman fluids
that drowned all the candles, save one. By the solitary
glow, the infant nightmare stripped off its mother like wet
clothing, dropping what was left of her in a steaming heap
of molted flesh. As the light played over the thing, trembling
as it described what should not be, I beheld what seemed
a demonic toddler dressed in the vintage garments of a
mortician. The breathing dream waved its dainty inhuman
hand before its eyes, inspecting the solidity of its new world,
wondering perhaps if it might vanish back into the nightmare
from which it came. Evidently quite satisfied with its new
accommodations, it smiled with a thousand tiny teeth and
walked off into the fade of the outer hallway, vanishing like
a secret.
“They’re our brides, called home from the distant cities
we’ve secretly visited, if only in dreams. Our reach is only
growing, despite the paltry fences your kind have put up to
constrain us,” the mysterious voice said behind me. “Our
breeders of fittest nightmare, those women. Men like you—
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