An Extract from Breeding Ground

My breath throbbed in my ears, drowning all other sound out for the moment as my eyes moved on to the dead woman sitting on the carpet, slumped against the TV. Her thick legs were spread, the lower half of her body covered in blood, loose folds of skin escaping from beneath her large floral blouse, reminiscent of obese people who suddenly lose all their weight, needing rolls and rolls of unwanted flesh removed.

Staring at the blood and intestines that hung from beneath the hem of her wide skirt, my head filled with the image of my poor dead baby on our kitchen floor, and Chloe's haunting words.

I think there's something else growing inside me. A new kind of baby.

Jesus Christ. Were they all carrying something inside them? Is that what had killed this woman? Giving birth to something? Resisting the urge to turn and run I stared at her, needing more time to believe the horror of what I was seeing.

She too glistened with the light threads that covered her dazed children and most of the room, but in her case strands of it had erupted from within her, escaping through her nostrils, ears and mouth and wrapping round her body, even the corners of her eyes leaked it. Her dead body was cocooned, but done so from the inside. Had it been her last unnatural act, or had it happened post-mortem?

The rasping moan pulled my attention back to the man who'd summoned me up here, his bloodshot eyes meeting mine and reflecting my own terror, urging me to step across the threshold into his nightmare world. His jaw worked silently before he finally got the words out, his body pushed forward on the edge of the sofa in an almost impossible position. How could he stay like that? Why didn't he fall off the side?

'Help me...'

I was about to move forward, God help me I was, when from behind him, from where slick sucking sounds drifted towards me, one milky, transluscent leg, thin and sharply jointed, came over his side, wrapping round him like a lover, and I froze. I stared at the shiny footless limb in disgust, as another crept over the man, and then another until four held his limp body in place, one at his shoulders, then his waist, his knees and his feet. What the fuck was it? Jesus Christ, just what the fuck was it? And what the fuck was it doing to him?

Looking over his shoulder, I could make out the smooth curved edges of the creature's body pulsing behind him, completely inhuman, like some awful pale insect, huge and mutated.

'Help me... pleeasse'

The desperate, dying man croaked out the words, a dribble of blood escaping from his thin anguished lips, and I couldn't imagine his agony. I couldn't see past my own fear, as the legs contracted tighter around him, pulling the prey closer, and the awful round body rose up slightly as if to investigate the distraction, its milky white surface shining like mother of pearl, as for a moment the sucking stopped.

'Pleaasee...'

I moaned as I felt it look at me, really look at me, over his body from its bank of almost invisible eyes, their raised bump surfaces glistening in the same sickly colour as the rest of its body, each standing out only by the pinpoint of bright red at its centre. I knew in that moment as it locked me in its gaze that it was feeding on him, feeding on him while he was still alive, and the primeval fear at the core of me told me that this terrible huge spider thing was enjoying his pain. That it understood what it was doing.

I think there's something else growing inside me. A new kind of baby.

I remembered how Chloe had been when I'd left her, her body jolting and jerking on the sofa, something moving under her clothes, something pushing its way out of her, and staring at this monster in front of me, I let the scream that had been welling up inside of me out, let it rip free, and it released my own frozen limbs.