Cthulhu's Nephew: Part Three of Four

“What? Where am I?” Were her first words looking around the room. Baby blue plaster walls with thin growing cracks crawling up to the ceiling. It could be mistaken for a nursery room. On one of the walls is painted a faint sun bleached mural of a landscape: a farm, a dog, a horse, a fence, and three figures looking back at her, waving. The male figure is wearing a straw hat. Next to him is a woman in a yellow dress. Her face is too sun faded to recognize any features, a pale face with dark brown hair. She is holding hands with a child. It is a boy in dark blue bib jeans. He seems to be frozen forever skipping in place with one knee up and one foot about to jump off the ground. The dog casts a silent bark at the family, or maybe at the viewer. The barn house in the background has lost its red color from sun’s rays seeping through the window over the years. A window now boarded up. Beyond the barn is a grassy horizon with a happy painted sun peeking out.

Attempting to get up a sharp cramp in her abdomen caused her to fall back to the mattress. Letting out a faint painful remark she clutched her stomach and felt something moving, something like bubbles. Her head lay almost parallel with the floor.

The door opened across the room. She registered footsteps in her ears and saw the black boots approaching.

“Hello my dear.” He bent his tall lengthy legs like a spider to help her back into a more comfortable position on the mattress. “It is not good to strain yourself in your condition. We wouldn’t want you to disrupt our children’s development.”

Confused and tired eyes look up at his. Eyeliner streaks down the side of her cheeks. Large loop earrings dangle in her ears and the remnant smear of bold red lipstick streaks across her face.

“We wouldn’t want you to stress yourself out my dear.” He sets a small bowl on the floor next to the bed. Steam rises from the contents. Next to it he methodically places a clean silver spoon. It clinks on the hard wood. “You must be hungry. I have cooked you some breakfast. You’ve been asleep all night.”

She looks around the room trying to grasp where she is and how she might have gotten here. The boarded up window lays adjacent to her. The window that possibly once embraced a newborn infant with warmth and vitamin D so many years ago. Now that light is thin lacerations slicing up the room. Small flecks of dust float in the sundays.

“Where am I?” She asks.

“You are home. Where you are safe.” He smiles. “Here,” he pushes the bowl closer to her. “Try to eat something. You had a long night. Afterwards we can catch up on matters.” He stands seemingly twelve feet tall and exits the room closing the door gently behind. A lock clicks into place on the other side and then another.

She picks up the spoon and looks at the porridge, or oatmeal, or gruel. Whatever it is doesn’t look edible. It smells of sweat and looks thick with bits of pink tints. A tear forms in her eye and falls carrying with it a long line of dark mascara. It drips on the mattress, a stain amongst the many. She cradles the spoon and curls up into the fetal position.

“Why.” It is a plea more than a question.

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3 Weeks Later...

“I think I am ready Carl.”

“I’m so glad to hear that Bambi.” He says sitting down next to her on the mattress. She removes the bed sheet from her round belly.

“I feel a sense of joy. A sense of purpose I never had before.” She said. Fingers with red chipped nail polish gently rub the stretched skin of her stomach. They feel the throbbing of thin tight purple and dark blue veins scattering like lighting across her belly. “Is this what motherhood feels like?” She looks up at him with an attempt of a smile. Sadness brings more tears. Something wobbles from underneath the coursing dark veins of her abdomen.

“I guess so.” He says. “I guess so.”

“I can feel them wiggling in there.”

“I know,” he says. “So can I.” He places an open palm on her stomach. Something pokes
a nub outward to touch him through her skin. “I know.”

“Tell me again Carl, where is it your are from.”

“Again? I told you this story three times already.”

“I know. I’m still trying to understand.”

“I come from a star system deep within inner space many light years away. My Great Uncle Cthulhu, as some of the humans have come to know and to recognize him, traveled here eons ago. He must have been looking for something, or running away . Perhaps he became distressed when his penis fell off for the first time too. In any case, he came here, to this planet, your planet, and must have just fallen asleep, or hid in shame. He was always a hermit case. No one back home heard from him in almost an eon. We all began to worry as any family would.

I was chosen to locate him. I was the youngest and I was the most adventurous. That is why I came. I have travelled from the long distant interstellar planet of the Cthulhuians. We look gross and hideous to your species. Our faces resemble octopus tentacles dripping from cavities of large dark eyes. I do have three eyes as you first asked when we met, but not all of us do. My skin is similar to what some of your sea creatures have, leathery and scaly. My feet and hands are massive black claws. I can grow large dark wings out my back and increase my size by two hundred percent. There are nubs of bone like dull horns protruding across the entire exterior of my body. I fear my Great Uncle was suffering from an unusual illness, a skin disease that plagued him with lesions like cancer warts. He might have come here to rid himself of such deformations. I am not sure.”

Carl placed an arm around her shoulder.

“Are you sure you think you are ready now Bambi?”

“Yes,” she hesitated. “I think I am. I want to see what you really look like.”

He stood up from the mattress and approached the center of the room. Turning to face
her he began to undress. His clothes fell into a pile, as did his flowing taupe. His pale body glowed. The opening between his legs has closed and is growing a new small stem. A swirl of color danced in the room twinkling and sparkling. Where peach white flesh of leg, and arm, and abdomen once were became gray green dark matter of leather and twisted organic tissues rippling into scabs and deformations. Muscle beneath scales merged with bone and horn. Carl’s otherwise ugly human face grew elongated and began wiggling with thin long tentacles from his mouth and nose. White eyes bulged and popped into black orbs glistening light off their dark membrane surface. A third beady black eye arose from the center of his forehead and the top of his head bulged into an amniotic sack of skull and brain. Large dark wings ruptured from his back and cloak over him.

“This my dear,” his deep echoing voice said, “is my true form.”

First Image: credit Dim Media
Second Image: "Portal 3" an independent piece.