Sow Read online

  Table of Contents

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  About the Author

  Join the Kindle Book Club

  First Edition

  Sow © 2013 by Tim Curran

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  Twitter: @darkfuse

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/darkfuse

  Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/jOH5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This is for Uldritch Oozden

  and the jelly.

  1

  Later on, Richard decided it was during the second trimester that his wife stopped being pregnant and started being possessed.

  Maybe the fifteenth or sixteenth week is when it really became noticeable. That’s when Holly ceased being a mother with child and became a host for something else entirely. She had been acting strange for some time, strange even for a first-time mother; then one night he had woken next to her, feeling a torpid heat rolling off her and smelling a sharp, almost chemical odor that clung to her like sweat. There in the dead of a warm August night, a perfectly ordinary night, he became convinced that what was lying at his side was not a woman, but a bloated and living pestilence.

  2

  But who could he turn to with that revelation?

  Other fathers he knew admitted they found their wives somewhat unsightly while they were expecting, growing larger and less feminine by the day, but what Richard was experiencing was light years beyond that. Sleeping next to Holly in the darkness, occupying the same space with her, filled him with a loathing beyond anything he had ever known before. An atavistic revulsion like plunging his hand into the maggot-swollen belly of a dead cat.

  He could barely even admit it to himself.

  The sight of her reminded him of spiders and crawling things, worms and mating insects. Malignant things that sucked blood and webbed up their prey. And worse than that, maybe, was the idea that what was growing inside her was not a fetus, but a parasite.

  Christ, what’s wrong with you? How can you be thinking such awful things?

  But he did not know. He only knew he could not stop thinking them.

  Day by day then, he could only watch the terrible change coming over her, watch her belly expand as that nameless thing in her grew fat and fleshy, leeching her of nutrients and sucking away her mind. He lost himself in the murky vacuum of denial, playing the happy, proud papa…even though his stomach was weak and his skin was literally crawling.

  He told himself it was all his imagination.

  In the morning, he’d wake with a positive attitude, more than ready to cast off all those wild and ugly thoughts that filled his mind. But one look at Holly and it all came back and he did all he could not to scream. Because there was no earthly doubt in his mind. What was inside her was not remotely human.

  She had, in effect, been invaded.

  3

  No one else saw it, of course.

  Her friends and his friends, family members…they all came to see the expectant mother, bringing gifts and good wishes. The men talked of their firstborn and the women talked of labor. They were all happy and content and so was Holly. Until they left, that was. Then the change would come over her.

  She would lie in bed, propped up by pillows, ringing her damn bell and like a salivating dog, Richard would come running, hoping beyond hope that his smiling, cheerful wife would not leave again. That that other…creature would not return. But it always did. The sallow-faced woman with the crooked grin and the shining eyes like bits of broken glass. It got so he began to tremble and perspire just reaching for the doorknob to their (her) room, which he began to acquaint with the latch of a coffin.

  After Holly’s uncle Dick and aunt Pauline left one Saturday afternoon, the bell began to ring immediately. Richard poured a shot of bourbon down his throat and went up the stairs like he was carrying a sack of bricks on his back. Outside the door, he hesitated, his guts crawling up the back of his throat. He reached out for the door…but he couldn’t bring himself to touch it. It was like reaching out to throw open the door of a mausoleum.

  Then behind the door, that rasping treble: “Well? I’m waiting, Richard. Don’t play possum…I can smell you out there.”

  He grasped the knob and threw the door in. He tried to put a smile on his face, but the best he could do was something just this side of a grimace. It was hot in the room, not just warm but torrid, sweltering, steaming and rank like a miasmic swamp. In his mind, he was seeing pale green vapors seething from her oily skin. And the smell…things pulled up from bogs and stagnant ponds.

  How? he wondered. How could the change come so quickly?

  When Uncle Dick and Aunt Pauline had been in the room, she had looked pink-cheeked, glowing, and effusive with life. The perfect little happy mother, beautiful, radiating with that warm inner glow. There had been no bad odors. Just a slight memory of lilacs and hand lotion. But now?

  “Don’t hover there like a little worm, Richard,” Holly said to him in a voice like a razor scraped over yellow bone.

  But he did hover, right there in the doorway. He was dizzy and weak and almost overcome by what he smelled, felt, and saw. This was not his wife. Richard did not know who or what it was, but it certainly was not Holly. The thing sat there, staring at him with flat reptilian eyes, hair like brittle yellow straw, an obese and obscene creature fattened in a swill barrel, engorged like a sponge soaked in grease.

  “Come here, Richard,” she said.

  She was not asking, she was demanding. He could not move. The sight of her and the aura that hung about her put his stomach into his throat. His breath would not come and his eyes began to water.

  “Richard.” Those fingers reached out to him like withered sticks snapped from a winter-dead bush, her eyes shiny like wet beetles. “Come here, Richard.”

  He stumbled forward, trying to smile, clenching his teeth tightly. As he neared her, he became aware of a fishy odor she exuded, of the rancid heat billowing off her…it was like nearing a bubbling cauldron of tallow and bones: hot and sickening.

  Holly flashed him a bloodless smile when he neared the bed. “I need something, Richard, and you are going to go and get it for me.”

  “What? What do you want?”

  “A fetal Doppler,” she said.

  He knew what that was. An ultrasound Doppler that could detect high-frequency sound waves reflected off the fetal heart. People used them to listen to their baby’s heartbeat.

  “You want to listen to…to the baby’s heart?”

  She kept smiling. “I want to hear what baby has to say.”

  Richard could not speak. He stood over her, trying to focus his eyes, trying to make sense of what she had just said. I want to hear what baby has to say. Like…well, like the baby was talking to her. But that was just insane.

  Holly looked up at him with those dull, gelid eyes. They were like depthless pools of formaldehyde. “You want that, too, don’t you, Richard? Don’t you want to know what our babies have to say?”

  Babies. Is that what she said? He swallowed. “But the ultrasound…there’s only one child.”

  She titte
red. “Was, Richard, was one. It’s been dividing, you see.”

  4

  When he came back later with the Stork Radio Fetal Doppler unit, Holly was there. Not that horrid thing, but Holly. She lay in bed, reading from some dusty old book. Her eyes were bright and blue and lovely.

  “Ah, a stranger bearing gifts,” she said when she saw the package. “What have you brought me? If it’s pastrami on rye, I’ll love you forever.”

  “No…I…do you want me to get you a sandwich?”

  “I’m just kidding, dummy.” Holly narrowed her eyes. “Are you all right, Richard? You look…you don’t look so good at all.”

  He sat on the bed. “I’m fine, just tired. I brought you the Doppler you wanted.”

  “The what?”

  “The Doppler,” he said, pulling out a box from the bag.

  “Am I forecasting the weather?”

  Same old Holly. Quick, funny. Where was that other thing? Hiding under the bed? In the closet? Waiting up in the hot darkness of the attic, sucking the blood out of flies?

  Richard showed Holly what he’d brought.

  “Oh, that’s great! I’ve always wanted one of those!”

  “You asked me to get it for you.”

  “I did?”

  He nodded. “You said…you said you wanted to hear what the baby had to say…”

  Holly started laughing. “Oh, really? I said that?”

  “You did.”

  She stopped laughing, put a hand to his forehead. “Are you feeling all right, Richard? You seem a little warm, a little…I don’t know…confused.”

  He tried to tell her what she had said, but as always she had no memory of it. She just looked at him sympathetically like he was losing his mind. And maybe he was. He only wished he’d lose it completely already. This bouncing back between madness and sanity was killing him.

  “Lay down beside me, Richard,” Holly said. “You need a rest.”

  He didn’t bother arguing further. He lay down beside her, losing himself in her scent, which was French vanilla and lilac. She smelled wonderful. She’d always smelled wonderful. At the edge of sleep, he opened his eyes, smelling something moldy and dusty. It was her book. It looked very old, one of those antique folios that were big and heavy enough to crush a rat. She was already asleep, so he pulled it gently from her fingers and set it on the nightstand.

  But not before seeing the title: Confessions of the Essex Witch.

  5

  It meant nothing, of course, and he was so good at denial by that point he actually believed it. Regardless of what he had seen, he told himself that all was right with the world and he was imagining things. Hallucinations, some weird sort of delirium brought about by stress and anxiety. What he needed to do was to admit to himself that something was going on with his head and get some help. Maybe it was chemical or metabolic or even inherited. Who could say? The idea of going to a therapist disgusted him. Like most men, he was too proud to admit he might need help. The couch was for weaklings and drama queens, not ordinary, healthy guys like him.

  But he was beginning to think differently now.

  If they can get this shit out of my head, I’ll happily sit on their fucking lap and suck my thumb if that’s what it takes.

  And these were the thoughts that flittered through his mind as he drifted off. As usual, his dreams were awful affairs where he was chased through a section of town he had never seen before and could never escape from. Walls closing in. Streets turning back into themselves. Doors that opened into black, spiraling gulfs. Stairways that climbed up into emptiness. And always, at his back, some nameless, dragging thing, a black and horrendous shadow that puffed out great clouds of white vapor.

  Just after three, he opened his eyes.

  He could smell the book right away. In the dead of night, it did not smell simply dusty and old like it had before, now it stank like the rotting hide of an animal: musky and noisome. He had no idea where Holly had gotten such a thing, but he was going to get rid of it. That’s all there was to it.

  In the moonlight coming in through the window, he could see Holly’s sleeping form next to him. Her breathing was phlegmy and rattling like that of a tubercular old man. Something had shifted in the room, something had changed. He lay there, peering into the darkness, rivers of sweat running down his face, pooling at his throat.

  “Holly?” he said under his breath.

  He reached out for her and touched her neck, immediately pulling his hand away with a muted cry. It was not the smooth, angular expanse of neck he knew so well but a greasy pelt of hoglike bristles.

  It can’t be happening again.

  Holly reached out a hand to grasp his own and it was not feminine and long-fingered, but a hideous claw, black and wrinkled like a prune.

  He knew then.

  He knew what he was lying next to.

  “Oh God,” he muttered, his mouth thick with terror.

  The air was hot and gummy like molasses and he could barely draw a breath. He turned his head slowly and she was sitting up, her eyes reflective like chips of quartz. She had something on her lap: the Doppler unit.

  “What…what are you doing?” he said.

  Her voice was ragged like well-chewed meat. “I’m listening.”

  “To what?”

  “To what’s inside me,” she said, her breath sour and pungent. “I’m listening to the music of my womb.”

  Shaking and gagging, he stumbled from the room.

  There was no earthly doubt of it: he was losing his mind.

  6

  He didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

  He dozed intermittently on the couch downstairs, sweating through myriad nightmares in which Holly gave birth to faceless monsters and slithering offspring. Things that crept into his lap and cuddled there like fetal jellyfish, wet and stinging.

  He awoke each time shivering, hot and cold, his belly full of sharp, cutting blades. Finally, he gave it up, facing another day weary and worn and threadbare like an old throw rug that had seen too many feet and too many years. He pounded the dust out of himself and a made a pot of coffee. Black, strong. After his second cup, he felt a little better. As good as he ever did these days. He hadn’t eaten in some time, but the thought of food made him want to vomit. So he sat at the kitchen table, watching the sun come up over the treetops like a great burning eye, spilling color over roofs and lawns and quiet streets.

  He drank his coffee and smoked a cigarette, knowing he had quit years ago but with no memory of starting again. All the while, his mind blazed with tapestries of madness, seamless and finely knit, vibrant in their chromatic lunacy. He thought of Dr. Frazer, Holly’s ob-gyn, and what she would say if he admitted to her what was happening to his wife. Then he thought of an exorcist. Finally he thought of committing her, but knowing the only one who would be committed was himself.

  Time passed and the coffeepot emptied and the ashtray overflowed, but through it all, there were no answers. Richard approached it from every angle, looked in every nook and cranny of his mind and in every possible crevice of reality, but there was no solution. Nothing that made sense. Nothing rational that would explain it all. There was nothing to do but smoke and chew his nails and quietly go mad. What was happening was not to be found in the real world. The explanation could only be found in superstition, located in dark closets and darker cellars, places where the light of reason did not shine. This is where Richard would have to put his hands if he wished to find answers. For only in these places, the unlit caverns of the mind, would he be able to grasp slimy and insane truths and hold them up to be studied and gasped over.

  About ten, the bell rang.

  And with it came the secret dread and mystical pain Richard knew so well. The bell kept ringing, tinny and shrill, summoning him. His hands shook and his neck went hot with sweat and his guts literally ached like a heroin addict going cold off the needle. Something inside him was wound so tightly he thought it might tear open from sheer interna
l stress and when that happened, he would himself unwind into an untidy heap of knotted string and tangled wires.

  The bell.

  Summoning him.

  Calling him.

  He butted his cigarette, decided that going crazy was simply not an option.

  He would have to look this in the face, whatever it was, identify it and only then could he hope to crush it.

  At the bottom of the stairs, he paused.

  He did not smell the badness.

  Did not feel it.

  At the top, he paused again. Still, he did not sense anything up there but his wife.

  He thought: It’s just Holly right now. Don’t let her see what’s in your eyes, don’t let her suspect what’s in your mind. She’s ignorant of it all and the truth would shatter her just as it’s shattering you. Don’t give the game away.

  And behind the door?

  Just Holly, sitting there with her pillows stacked up behind her. Her arms were folded and her blue eyes were narrowed. “Some nurse you are, Richard. Dr. Frazer tells me to stay in bed, so I stay in bed. She tells you to look after me and you’re nowhere to be found. Baby and I are half-starving to death and where are you?”

  Richard tried to smile, never realizing until of late how much effort went into that simple flex of facial muscles. “Sorry, honey. I was drinking my coffee and listening to the radio.”

  She sniffed the air. “And smoking? Oh, Richard, you’re not smoking again, are you?”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “Well, do it outside then.” She looked at him, seeing something, but unsure. “I’m starting to wonder if you’re the one who should be in bed. If you don’t mind me saying so, you look like shit.”

  “Again, guilty. Not sleeping right.”

  “Hmm. Well, fetch my breakfast, and then you can nap.” Holly began counting off on her fingers. “I want two pieces of toast with jelly, Corn Flakes, and a cup of my herbal tea. Yes, that’ll do…wait, how about a couple scrambled eggs, too?”