Seed

by Ania Ahlborn

But when the lump began to convulse as though the person beneath the sheets were suddenly unable to breathe, Abby stared at it with a startled expression. It was moving in a nearly mechanical way—oddly jerky, like an old wind-up toy.

Abby was the one screaming. Still in her bed, she sat stick-straight and terrified, surrounded by a veritable lake of vomit. It was everywhere—Abby’s bed, the floor, the desk, dripping off her stack of precious Lisa Frank folders: glossy unicorns and colorful bears swimming in sickness. Charlie stood in the corner of the room, her chin against her chest, her hands at her sides. Unmoving. Staring through a blank set of eyes at what she’d done.

He had seen that very figure perched at the foot of his bed when he was a kid—black skin, scaly like a lizard’s, small black horns poking out of its head. Its face, so eerily human, but yet so unearthly that it had certainly come from the very pits of hell itself. When it smiled, its crooked mouth curled all the way up to its eyes, displaying a maw full of long, jagged cannibal teeth. And those eyes—they were nothing but vacant hollows. The monster was real.

“I’ll do what I want with you,” she hissed. “And I’ll take your family too.”

It was time to face the shadow with the jagged teeth and hungry smile, time to look himself in the eyes and face the demon he was and the killer he’d always be.

“So sensitive,” Charlie sang with a smirk. “Funny, you weren’t that sensitive when you feasted upon the flesh of your own mother and father.”