It Needs

The duty to a child. Or something like a child, that screams and mewls in the dark.

IT NEEDS

It continued to scream in its endless need. Elois’ ears all but burst with the incessance. The noise was a bleating siren, modulating and twisting with every decibel so as to shred her mind and bring her back to it: the bundle which could not allow her to know quiet.

Elois tried to smother her ears with the smeared grey wool about her sleeves, but it was no use. The ungodly shrieks were a forever pulse. Physical pain could not be worse than this torture.

“Please,” she whispered, her voice dry through cracked lips. “Please, oh lord.”

Long minutes stretched with knives twisting her mind.

In each echo she was losing part of herself.

There was nothing else for it. She replaced her sleeves and stood shakily, and approached the center of the room, cast in overlapping pools of shadow.

The thing seemed to sense her approach, and though the volume of the shrieks did not decrease they became something more like wet mewling, too.

“Please,” Elois whispered again, raggedly: as if the thing might care for her begging. “Haven’t I given you enough?”

She had given so much. She was past spent; she had been for so long. What more could be given? What did they want her to give? Truly, her very soul?

Shaky fingers wrapped across the lip of the cradle, but she dared not look directly at the thing. A bundle of cotton and grime. It was just a thing; a helpless thing, perhaps. She twisted her fingers to rock the cradle from side to side. The idea of a lullaby came to her, but it seeped from her mouth like a mournful croon: a lament was all that she could muster. All she could impart to it.

The Offspring snorted – almost mockingly, and playfully - and the shrieks ebbed. A shiver danced up and across Elois’ spine. Though pain had come from the crying, the silence was coated in something else. With each syllable of quiet, she felt that the thing watched her from its cradle. Assessed her. Gazed upon her with…designs.

She regretted this. She regretted all of it.

With bleary exhaustion, she surged forward toward the door of the chamber. There was so little light here. The Child did not need light, and light was such an old memory of Elois’. The dappling of warmth on her skin – how many seasons ago had that been, now? When she had been brought here – and her life given over to the Child – had she truly understood that she would be abandoning the sun? Abandoning warmth? It seemed so unlikely that she knew what would happen: what her fate would be.

The metal door was cold to her desperately seeking fingers. Perhaps a latch. Perhaps if she pushed just so, it might creak open into light. Perhaps it was, somehow, passable.

The shrieks began again behind her, and the force of them felt as a physical scrape against her neck. At the same moment there came a rattling from the other side of the door. Elois silently begged for rescue, but the hope of it was so buried as to be meaningless. “Please,” she began again, at the rattle itself. “Please end this. I have nothing more to give.”

The rattling paused but momentarily. Eventually a deeper voice emerged from the space beyond, stern and level. “The Offspring cries for you. Will you attend to it?”

She shook her head numbly, though a fruitless gesture given the obliqueness of the intervening door. “It’s too much. Please – it’s too much,” she croaked.

“You must. You chose the Offspring. This decision was yours. It is your duty.”

She swallowed with great difficulty through the dryness of her throat.

Yes. That was right, wasn’t it. She had decided this. How long ago now had she decided this?

She turned and faced the cradle, a blot in the dark. The crying immediately became a wet rasp once more. The thing would not – could not – see her face, but somehow, she knew it was satisfied with her returned attention.

Face. Faces.

Shakily once more she staggered to the cradle. Yes, she would peer at it. She would face it. She had had courage once, hadn’t she? The courage to decide this: to decide for the offspring. And so, this was now her duty. Surely that was correct.

But she could not.

Her lacerated skin touched the cradle once more and all she felt was cold dread.

The rattling became louder and a great groan emerged as the door sidled open. She did not turn to the incursion. She did not baulk at the strong hands which grasped her and moved her. Perhaps it was for the best. If she did not commit to her duty, then she would be made to.

“The Offspring requires you,” the stern, faceless voice demanded.

She was moved like a puppet, the protective veil of wool torn away from her.

But the hands which puppeteered her did not dare reach out to the thing itself: that was not their duty. Only her flesh could know the Child. Because there the connection lay. She gasped and squirmed in the dominion of those hands and as her body was lifted and thrust toward – into – the cradle, she saw the thing.

Oh god, the thing.

The thing that was of her.

“You chose this,” the stern voice reminded her. Those hands were so strong. “Our people need it. And you chose this. That is why you are here.”

The thing had unbundled itself out of its cotton draperies.

It was not a child. It never had been, had it, though it was born of her. It was not capable of malice, or thought, only need. The need for flesh. The need for her genetic material. To grow with her, to use her and take everything from her. Until she was nothing.

No, not nothing. That had been the promise. She would be left with her life, by the end: a candle flickered down to the end of its wick, perhaps, but with life. That had been her decision.

The child-thing shivered, ovoid-shaped, and gazed out with its multitude of faces, each one bursting from another square of skin. One face seemed to sneer with derision, while another was hapless and almost serene. One face had lopsided eyes, while another was bisected by a grand, weeping, scar.

Three hands reached out from the undulating flesh-chaos. Elois closed her eyes, afraid.

The stern voice lowered, as if to placate the thing. Perhaps there was some iota of compassion there too, underneath it all. “It needs you. It can only grow if you feed it. You know this to be true. Our people can only be restored with great sacrifice. Look…!” The voice screamed at her, rattling her, as it thrust her in the direction of the many blinking faces. “They are emerging already. You have done so well. Why would you abandon your duty now? Your duty to all of us?”

Elois shuddered and writhed, her eyes sealed. She wept with tears and blood both.

It would have her.

Perhaps she was not Elois any longer. She was simply duty. She was a need. That was all she would ever be.