A woman realises that her pregnancy might be an incubation for something darker…
So, this is the third story I have written from a competition on my Instagram page, and this one was hosted when I reached the 1,000 followers milestone… four years ago! Fortunately, I’m only an independent, self-publishing author, if I was big-time I’d no doubt have had hordes of faithful fans baying for blood a good story. Anyway, it is finally here, and it’s probably one of my weirder stories. I hope you enjoy it.
Spawn
By Keelan Berry
I gave birth the day after my wedding. Daddy married me to old man Thompson’s son just in the nick of time. On the day we got married I had been pregnant for forty-eight days. I had a good sized bump by that point, and the veins on my belly were prominent, bulbous and almost luminous. It was no ordinary pregnancy, it was no ordinary birth; less strange when I tell you that what impregnated me was no ordinary man either. Old man Thompson’s son was not the father, but we had to make it look like he was. However, by the time I gave birth to what had been gestating inside of me, everyone but me disowned it and claimed no part in its creation. Everyone but me, because a mother loves her offspring regardless. I have learned that now.
*
When my daddy told me it was time to ‘stop being a little girl now’ I knew what he meant. Just as President Nixon was giving his two-fingered salute to the White House, and it looked like the war in Vietnam was all but done, my time was also over: at college, that is. I’d partied and fucked my way through all the years of study but come out the other end with flying colours from one of the most prestigious universities in the country nonetheless, and he wanted me to join the family firm straight away. That meant no more parties (unless it was one of those awful pompous gatherings in a grand hall where you have to spend a month’s wages just to get tipsy), and no more fucking… unless it was with my dull, rich husband.
Of course, I didn’t have one of those yet, I’d only just entered my twenties. But not being a little girl anymore meant a ring on my finger. I knew that. That’s what was expected if I was to join the firm and one day take over from daddy.
He suggested old man Thompson’s son when we first had the ‘time to stop being a little girl’ conversation. Thompson ran the biggest firm in the state, and daddy had been trying to gain influence with him for years, but Thompson was influenced by nobody. I once heard someone – one of daddy’s colleagues – describe Thompson as a shark. My daddy disagreed. He said Thompson was a black hole, devouring everything else around it and growing bigger. So it seemed if daddy couldn’t gain influence with him professionally, he would do it through other means. Through me.
I didn’t want to marry old man Thompson’s son, though. He was handsome enough, but he was older than me and still a bachelor, which meant one of two things: he was either gay, or something worse (and let’s not forget, he was never called up to serve in ‘Nam; sure, his daddy is rich and powerful, but they needed all the numbers they could get over there). Gay meant no fucking, or fucking others on the sly and trying not to bring shame and scandal upon the family name, or the something worse… well, I didn’t even want to contemplate what could be worse than that existence.
Fortunately, I go into most negotiations with my daddy with the leverage. If I had an older brother (or even a younger brother for that matter) I would have no say over anything. I wouldn’t have gone to college, even if I’d wanted to; I’d have been married to old man Thompson’s son, even if I didn’t want to; and the firm would have gone to my less competent sibling, all by the virtue of his cock. Daddy would have had his male heir, and married his daughter off to the most important and powerful man in the state when it came to our line of work, and his legacy would be secure. But, the fact of the matter is I don’t have a brother, or any other siblings. My mother died after bringing me into the world, and so I’m all he has.
I got to choose which college I wanted to go to (he wanted me to stay close, but I wanted some freedom before I had to fall under his tutelage again). He shot down my first couple of suggestions, and almost cried laughing at my third. My daddy, crying. Something I’d never seen before. I’d often wondered if he cried when I was born, or when my mother died. I like to think so, but I doubt it. Anyway, he laughed so hard because he thought it was a joke: he didn’t think I could get into such a prestigious institution. That was when I made a deal with him, and I was determined to win. If I got the grades, he’d let me go; if I didn’t, I’d go where he wanted me to. He stopped laughing when I made the offer. I think he saw something in my eyes, the same steely determination and ambition that had catapulted him to where he was, and I think that was the first time he ever truly saw me as his child.
So when he tried to marry me to Thompson’s son we went through a similar bartering session. I didn’t want to, I’d find my own husband, I said. He said that I’d pick some ‘stupid fucktard’ who was all looks and no brain and no prospects and would only embarrass me. I needed someone who would stand with me and support me, he said, just like mother had done for him. It was rare for him to mention her, or for us to speak openly about her, but this was the rest of my life we were talking about, and I’d already promised a large chunk of that to the firm: he wasn’t going to dominate my romantic life as well as my professional one. I bit back, and asked him if he chose mother because of her ‘prospects’. I was met with silence, and watery eyes. He cleared his throat, told me I had six months, and that he wanted to meet them before any proposal.
Obviously, failure to meet his deadline would require me to marry Thompson’s son. Just like I was determined not to have my daddy dictate my college location, I was certainly not going to let him dictate my husband.
Well, anyway, it wasn’t exactly as easy as I thought it would be. Picking guys up at a party or a club for one night was as straightforward as using a vending machine; turns out trying to tie them down for anything longer than that – even a second date – was much harder. I went back to some of the guys I’d slept with at college (ones I thought had ‘promise’ and my daddy would approve of), but either got turned down or just ended up giving them a repeat night of what they’d already had, before they went quiet on me. A few girls in the office set me up with their brothers or cousins or family friends, but all those went pretty much the same way.
Some of the girls had relatives or knew of boys coming back home from serving in Vietnam. Those were a hard pass from me. Not that I’ve got anything against a military man at all. It’s just the stories you hear about soldiers coming back from war: they don’t come back quite the same. The First World War had shellshock, and by the Second World War we knew that was actually something called PTSD, but people were coming back with all sorts of other terrible things than that, and then there was the war in ‘Nam.
I knew by then that if men came back home from that war alive they didn’t consider themselves lucky. They would live with the things they had seen forever, and they would never be the same again – you could see it in their eyes… or so they say. I don’t know anyone who served, not personally, anyway. But hearing those stories, I didn’t really think those men (little more than boys, really) made for a great date.
Not only that, but I heard a couple of girls in college a few years back talking about some of our boys coming back home with more than physical and mental scars, there was talk of some of them coming back with… things. Animals, and such. They captured pretty and unusual looking lizards and things like that and brought them back home to show off and keep as pets. Well, that I certainly didn’t want to experience.
So anyway, the dating cycle repeated until I had one week left to make daddy’s deadline, and by that time it had become clear to me from all the office gossip that old man Thompson’s son probably was a queer. But, as daddy told me with one month left to go, he’d spoken to Thompson and the old man was all too happy to apply the same pressure to his son as my daddy was applying to me and finally marry him off. My efforts increased, but I seemed to be getting less in return. The dating pool had well and truly dried up. It made me wonder how anyone actually settled down at all.
So, with a week to go I reached my last desperate attempt (no, I still didn’t give in to dating any of the Vietnam vets; I didn’t want to be a therapist or have to deal with any of the other strange things they’d come back with). One of the office girls had offered me a date with her uncle some months back, she said he was a little older but that he was a ‘young uncle’ (though when I asked how young she got all mysterious and basically started talking in riddles). I went back to her, asked if he was still single, and she said yes and that she would set it all up. It would have to be a blind date, she said, but promised I wouldn’t be disappointed.
I’d had blind dates before, but this one made me extra nervous – an uncle. Old man Thompson’s son was older than me, sure, but only by a decade, and I knew he was handsome (even if he would be repulsed by the thought of touching me). An uncle, even a ‘young’ one, made it difficult to predict the age range. Even the word ‘uncle’ didn’t conjure up images of anyone even remotely handsome, I was picturing a middle-aged, balding man. Something resembling an unpeeled potato.
Well, it didn’t matter anyway, because he didn’t show up. Of all the dates I’d had, all the disasters and the underhandedness, I’d never had anyone not show up at all. I sat there at the bar she’d picked for us for over an hour, waiting, and then when I’d finished waiting I just drank, and contemplated something I’d done so many times before: just running away. I wouldn’t be beholden to daddy anymore, wouldn’t have to run the firm, wouldn’t have to marry old man Thompson’s handsome-but-gay son.
As the thoughts swirled around my intoxicated brain, and I started to think about leaving and going to bed to sleep on whether to run away or not, a man sat down next to me and ordered two drinks (one of them mine) without even glancing in my direction. He had jet black hair that was swept back, and a pencil moustache over ruby red lips, and piercing blue eyes. He was wearing a maroon smokers jacket, and looked very much at home, although I hadn’t noticed him at all up until that point.
His age was difficult to place. His attire made it seem as though he was middle-aged, but his bright eyes and thick black hair belonged on a twenty year old. His accent was American, but twinged with something I also couldn’t quite place.
I asked him where he was from, my drunkenness giving way to the usual pleasantries, and he laughed. It was a warm laugh, hearty, and already I felt myself drawn to him. I can’t explain it, but I just felt immediately comfortable in his presence, felt as at home as he looked.
He didn’t answer my question, or many of the others I asked him that night, but he took a great interest in me. We talked at length about me. I probably should have noticed then that he was too confident, too interested, too seductive. But I’d had too many drinks, was too shaken with the endless months of bad date experiences, and I needed comfort. Old habits die hard, whether your daddy commands you to ‘stop being a little girl’ or not.
He invited me up to his apartment – above the bar (no wonder he looked so at home) – and he made love to me. It wasn’t the same as fucking my way through college, or the one night stands I’d had in the previous six months of dating, this was… special. He was gentle yet firm, and knew all the right things to do in a way that so many guys hadn’t before. Even the finish was different to anything I’d ever experienced: it felt like his thing was splitting inside me, two pieces pushing into previously unexplored regions and releasing hot liquid, hotter than I’d ever felt… and more of it, so much more. For a time I didn’t think it was going to stop.
When it did, he apologised, and I told him it was okay, nothing I hadn’t dealt with before.
We cleaned up and slept. And I was only surprised in the morning by the fact that he’d left his own apartment. I was used to them leaving in the middle of the night, or trying to get out as soon as possible in the morning, but usually they came back to my place. This was the first time since college that I’d slept with someone at theirs, and the first time ever that they’d left me alone at their own place.
The apartment was warm; there were heaters pumping hot air out in every room, as well as the radiators which were also turned on. He had a lot of plants, from little cactuses and snake plants lining the windowsills to great potted plants I didn’t know the names of in the corners of the room that held huge leaves on their twisting and reaching vines that stretched along the walls and even parts of the ceiling. The apartment was small, limited to the en-suite bedroom and an adjoining parlour room. However, there was a locked door in the latter which I felt certain must open up into a much bigger room.
Whatever the apartment was, I knew it wasn’t his regular home. It was his ‘fun pad’. He was probably married with kids and a great big house, which would explain why he hadn’t stuck around for the morning after.
I helped myself to a shower, hoping it would soothe my banging head, which is when I realised that I was pregnant.
I’d had my period just a week ago, and taken all the precautions (and post-cautions) I could, and yet here I was, stood in some guy’s shower with a healthy bump.
I felt sick. My first thought was my daddy, and what would come next: I’d have to marry Thompson’s son immediately. Then, as my brain caught up with what was happening, it finally questioned the impossible: how I had developed a bump that made it look like I was carrying something the size of a football inside my belly already.
I put a hand to it, and it moved, squirmed, pulsed beneath my touch. Something was growing inside me, and growing fast. I understood then why he had felt so different inside of me, why the finish had contrasted so much to what had come before: he put something inside me… Some… thing…
I rushed back into the bedroom, got dressed, and made straight for the door. I had to fix this. Somehow, I had to make things right. I had to do what my daddy had said and stop being such a little girl.
And yet in the time it had taken me to get from the shower to the door, my bump had already grown some more. I could feel it without touching it now, stretching my skin. I lifted my top and saw veins starting to push themselves outwards, thick and pulsing and green. I staggered backwards from the door and fortunately managed to land myself safely in an armchair, but the terror didn’t stop at seeing what was happening to my own body, it continued by noticing things I’d missed in my morning haze.
White ovals resting beneath all of the plants. Small ones, big ones, and everything in between. Dozens upon dozens of the things. Some of them were even resting in the large leaves, as though lying in a nest. Eggs.
The locked door in the parlour room opened, and he came walking out. I could only tell it was him by his eyes – still the same piercing, youthful blue they had been the night before – and his ruby red lips. His black hair was gone, his moustache had gone, and his human skin… gone.
He hissed good morning to me, his forked tongue slithering out past those ruby red lips, touching the green scales that had replaced his human pink.
I can’t remember much after that, but I’m pretty sure I screamed. People talk often about outer-body experiences, and I had mine there and then. No emotion, no reaction, just the need to get out of that warm, plant-filled apartment. And he let me leave. No questions asked, no threats, no kidnapping. His tongue just licked at me – I think involuntarily – and he hissed things at me. Things I can’t remember anymore.
As for what happened afterwards, I’m sure you can guess: I went back to daddy, worked for the firm, married old man Thomspon’s son, and forty-eight days after the night I spent with that man I gave birth to an egg larger than any of those that had been in his apartment.
And now I wait for you, my darling, to hatch in your own time…
July, 2024
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