And there had been no one more desperate than Arielle Reigns.
It was the latter reality that Arielle experienced now; a dim, dark dungeon of a hallway, wet and moist like the intestines of some rocky beast.
‘Help me.’
She couldn’t remember if it had been Jamie or Joan—JJ, as it were—who had said it, but they too had seen the cracks. And they’d wanted out.
‘This is an evil place.’ These were words spoken in hushed whispers, forever nervous that the ears sprouting on the damp walls would relay their conversation to Mother.
‘Don’t drink the milk!’
Arielle paused halfway down the hallway and shook her head, trying force away the memories that she’d so desperately wanted to remember a few months ago away. Now was not the time; now these recollections would only hinder her progress, her ability to find Hope. Her memories were something she would have to come to terms with later.
Just not now.
Not when Hope was still missing.
Turning back, she saw Jessie still slumped against the wall, the backs of his massive hands resting on his thigh, his open palms pointed upward in a gesture that could only be one of two things: a desperate man seeking salvation—filius obcisor!—or one that had lost all motor function.
Another scream echoed down the hallway, and Arielle realized that she wasn’t far from the source.
Two more steps and a flash of light struck her from the cell on her left. The change in illumination was so extreme that it took several moments for her eyes to adjust.
And when they did, Arielle wished that the hallway had remained bathed in darkness.
“No,” she moaned, bringing her hands to cover her mouth.
The first thing she saw in the cell was Melissa, the thick woman who had delivered a beautiful if tiny baby girl when Arielle had first arrived. Only she wasn’t thick now, she was enormous. Flopped in a giant wheelchair, Melissa was completely nude, her giant body spilling over in rolls and rolls of excess skin and fat. Even though her face was partly obscured by a clear mask of some sort that was hooked up to two dull silver tanks behind her, Arielle knew this woman was Melissa. She could see the scar, identical to her own, making a line down her massive stomach, following the contours of her flabby gut like a twisted snake.
The woman’s eyes were barely open, just a sliver of white peeking out from between thick lids. Her stomach rose and fell with every shallow breath, which was accompanied by a click and the sound of hissing air that temporarily fogged the mask.
Arielle realized that she was shaking her head back and forth like a petulant child, but she was helpless to stop. It wasn’t even the sight of her obese friend, nude, hooked up to some sort of breathing apparatus—as horrible as that was—that sent her tumbling over the edge.
It was her breasts. Her giant, pale breasts, completely covered in a network of dark blue veins, rested on her distended gut like overfilled water balloons. Affixed to each nipple was a suction cup. And with every breath that Melissa took, the suction cups on her breasts contracted, pulling her dark, nearly purple nipples into the cone, filling the space, and a thick squirt of milk was drawn from each. Arielle watched in pure horror as the white liquid traveled the length of long, winding tubes to a vat just behind the wheelchair.
‘Don’t drink the milk.’
Arielle gagged and spat on the floor.
The milk; this was where they got the milk from. The milk—the milk that she’d been forced to drink each and every day, milk imbued with whatever drugs that Melissa was forced to inhale. Milk that had made her fat, had made them all fat. Milk that made her see things, that altered her reality.
Movement from the corner of her eye drew her attention from the horrible scene.
There was someone else in the cell with Melissa.
At first, she didn’t even recognize that the figure was human, what with his long, spindly limbs and stooped neck.
Like Melissa, the tall man was completely nude, but that was where the similarities ended. The man was thin bordering on emaciated, all sinewy muscle fibers acting as bone coatings rather than having any functional purpose. His head was buried in the bright bare bulbs that lined the ceiling, causing her vision to halo, and nearly blinding her. Blinking repeatedly, her eyes traveled down his body, passing a thick patch of dark hair on his concave chest. When her eyes reached his penis, a thin, dark appendage that ended in a swollen, bulbous head just above his knee, Arielle gagged again and pulled herself even further away from the cage.
Somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind she knew that she should flee this place, that she should just run and find Hope and then get the fuck out of here. But she couldn’t; she was hypnotized by the tall figure’s strange, ratcheting movements as he paced across the cell.
She watched as the stick figure made his way over to Melissa and then slowly bend down, something that must have been incredibly uncomfortable given his immense height. Arielle wasn’t sure, but she thought this man might even be taller than Jessie.
As he bent, vertebrae jutted from the thin skin on his back like plates on some sort of pale, prehistoric dinosaur. And then he did the unbelievable: he pulled one of the suction cups off Melissa’s nipple and leaned over and started to suckle. Melissa’s head tilted backward, and Arielle thought the woman moaned into her mask, the fog clinging to the clear plastic for just a few seconds longer than usual.
This time when Arielle gagged, bile filled her throat, and she could no longer keep it down. Like battery acid, fluid filled her cheeks and Arielle spat it to the wet ground at her feet, her eyes bulging with the force behind it. Then she puked again. And a third time. Her guts were contorting at the sight of the milk—the sickly sweet milk—at the man’s horrible penis, and at him suckling on Melissa’s purple nipple.
When her stomach was completely void of anything—food, water, bile—Arielle wiped her eyes and then her mouth with the back of her hand.
At some point when she’d been vomiting, the man had pulled away from Melissa’s breast and was now staring at her, his lips but thin lines stretching the width of his face. He had sunken eyes and a huge, beak-like nose that cast shadows over the rest of his features.
A dribble of milk spilled from his bottom lip, and a thick, pointed tongue darted out, lapping it up before retracting into his mouth.
“You shouldn’t have come here.” The man’s voice was a mere whisper, but it seemed to reverberate in her head, causing her molars to vibrate and her vision to bounce. “A deal is a deal. A life for a life. Filius obcisor. Filia obcisor.”
Arielle screamed again.
Chapter 51
When she finally stopped screaming, the sound carried on in an extended echo. After nearly a minute, Arielle realized that the sound she heard was no longer her own. The other person’s screams from down the hall had also reached a crescendo.
Arielle stumbled away from Melissa and the thin man and continued down the tunnel, her stomach lurching. Her hand was firmly pressed against the wall now, her fingers making clear smudges in the sticky, wet substance that seemed to cover nearly everything in this dungeon.
Her legs were weak, her head light. It felt as if she hadn’t eaten in months.
She wasn’t sure how much more she could handle. As Arielle neared the next cell, she had to force herself to look.
Please be empty, please be empty.
But it wasn’t.
There was a woman in the next cell, a thick woman who was asleep on her back, a soiled sheet only covering part of her naked body. It was cool in the basement passages of 8181 Coverfeld Ave, but the woman on the gurney appeared clammy and sweaty. One thing became clear as the woman’s cheek twitched: this was not the source of the screams. This was just a woman, a woman like she had been: a desperate woman who wanted a child.
The screams were originating from somewhere further along, and for some reason, Arielle knew that finding the source would also mean finding Hope.
She
forced herself onward.
The next room was much larger than the others, and was much better stocked. Instead of a piss bucket and a soiled cot, there were several silver gurneys littered with glinting tools and kidney-shaped dishes.
It was an operating room. And in this room, Arielle finally found where the screams were coming from.
As expected, they were coming from Mother, but not for any reason that Arielle would have predicted.
The woman, all one hundred pounds of her, was propped atop a metal table at the back of the room, her feet jammed into bloody stirrups.
She was in labor.
Arielle blinked hard, trying to force what must be an illusion first from her eyes and then her mind.
Mother was old, really old; there was no way she could be giving birth.
But she was, and the baby was crowning before her eyes.
Arielle felt her stomach lurch again as she stared at the woman’s naked, leathery legs hoisted up into the stirrups, and then the dark patch of blond hair atop the baby’s head as it made its way out of the birth canal.
When Mother screamed again and her knotted, arthritic fingers grasped the handles on either side of the bed, Arielle looked away from the abomination between her legs and focused on the woman’s face.
It wasn’t the face she remembered; it was different somehow. With every moan or contraction or scream, Mother’s face seemed to shimmer, like a serene pond disturbed by a wayward stone. With every bellow of pain, her features distorted—the heavy blue eye makeup, the pale pink lips, and the wisps of gray and white hair all faded, making them somehow less real.
Arielle stumbled backward until her tailbone jarred harshly against the wall.
The baby was coming—it was coming now.
And it was coming out of Mother.
That was when she first noticed the female figure, the one lying flat on her back, completely nude, not unlike the woman on the cot in the room adjacent.
Except this woman wasn’t sweating—she was pale and dry. And there was an incision that ran the length of her abdomen, a thin line of dark red blood that stood out starkly on her pale, doughy flesh. Just seeing that incision made Arielle grab at her own stomach and scratch the network of fibrous tissue that sealed what had once been home to her daughter.
Hope.
Thoughts of her daughter and her blond hair, her long, swaying braid, brought her back to the present.
“Hope.”
The word unexpectedly came out of her mouth, and Arielle immediately brought both hands up to cover her lips, to try to reel it back in.
It was too late.
Mother had heard, and her eyes shot up.
“Filius obcisor,” the woman said, her lips returning to the soft pink that Arielle recognized.
Then Mother’s face contorted into a scream as at that moment the baby unceremoniously fell out of her in a dark, slimy, and wriggling mass.
Mother groaned once, long and loud, and then she was racked by a momentous shudder, during which the woman’s appearance flickered, shifting from the pale-lipped, blue-eyed old woman to something else. To something darker, something burnt.
Something unholy.
Then her image solidified and she grabbed the now crying baby and brought it to her face. When she opened her mouth, Arielle thought for a brief, horrible moment that the woman was going to bite down on the child and devour it.
She feared that the demon before her was going to consume the baby.
But Mother didn’t; instead, she closed her lips on the baby’s nose and sucked, drawing some horribly thick fluid into her mouth. Then Mother spat the wad onto the floor and the child immediately started to wail.
Arielle didn’t want to watch anymore—she knew now that Mother was putting on a show for her—but she couldn’t help herself. She needed to know.
Mother cut the umbilical cord next, even going as far as to tie it in a knot first. Then she hopped down off the metal bed as if she had just had her teeth whitened instead of giving birth.
With screaming baby in hand, she walked over to the anesthetized woman on the other hospital gurney and began driving her long, thin fingers into the line of blood on her stomach.
She can’t—she can’t be putting the baby in there?
But when the flaps of thick, fatty skin were pulled back, Arielle realized that that was exactly what Mother was doing.
Arielle Reigns collapsed to the floor.
Chapter 52
Melissa returned less than an hour later, slumped forward in a wheelchair, her damp, stringy hair covering most of her face.
Arielle could barely make out her eyes, but she saw enough to know that they were only partly open. She would have thought the woman dead, save for the shallow breaths that sent the tendrils of hair stirring in front of her mouth.
Jessie was pushing Melissa into the room, parading her about without shame. Showing off what was a massive baby bump.
Did she have that before? She’d always been big, but had she been that… pronounced?
Arielle couldn’t remember. Even events of a few hours ago were cloudy.
But something wasn’t quite right with this scene—something was off. A few seconds later, Arielle realized exactly what was wrong.
It was Melissa’s gown: it wasn’t naturally a dark crimson as she had first thought, but white—at least it had been white, originally.
“Mother said she is ready,” Jessie said, a strange giddiness in his voice. “Almost ready for baby.”
Arielle ignored the lumbering giant and instead focused on Melissa.
Was she okay? Where is this blood coming from?
The woman moaned then, startling Arielle out of her concentration.
The gown definitely had been white, which was obvious by the upper half, the frayed ends of the sleeves, the collar. But most of it was red now.
When Jessie turned the wheelchair, Arielle cried out.
Melissa was dripping; blood was pooling beside her on the oversized wheelchair, and had just started spilling over. It was only a trickle at first, but it soon became a steady stream.
So much blood, Arielle thought, watching the wheelchair tires spin in the tacky substance, leaving a strange crisscross pattern.
“She’s bleeding! Jessie, get her out of here!”
But Jessie didn’t listen. Instead, he spun her around once more.
“Mother says she’s ready,” he repeated.
“She’s bleeding!” Arielle screeched. She tried to bring herself to her feet, but her legs were tingling and numb.
And sleepy. She was so sleepy.
Why did I drink that damn milk again?
She tried to stand again, but her legs felt like cinderblocks. Instead, Arielle resigned herself to reaching out ineffectually for Melissa, whose entire body had started to shake.
Her hand missed and Arielle collapsed back down on the bed, her lids so heavy that she couldn’t keep them open any longer.
As sleep took hold, she heard the sound of the rusty wheelchair leave her room, followed by Jessie’s voice.
Or maybe it was Mother’s.
Arielle didn’t know.
“It’ll be your turn soon, Arielle. Your turn to have a baby. A life for a life.”
And then she heard the baby crying. It was a muffled sound, as if the baby were trapped beneath a blanket or maybe a wet washcloth.
Arielle smiled.
Baby; I’m going to have a baby soon.
Chapter 53
Arielle awoke to the sound of children giggling.
“Hope? Hope!”
She tried to sit up, but her limbs felt like dead weight and she couldn’t move them.
“Hope?” Arielle opened her eyes wide, feeling her lids separate as some tacky substance slowly relinquished its hold.
Blood? Is it blood?
Then she remembered seeing Mother giving birth and the other—she cringed—the other woman… the one with the cut in her stomach.
&nbs
p; Oh God.
Arielle managed to move her arms, and her hands found their way to her stomach where they probed the scar through her clothing.
No. It can’t be. Not my Hope. She’s mine, she came out of me.
“Hope?” She whispered the name this time, trying to shake the cobwebs from her head.
Arielle was in the operating room, but she was not alone. Mother was there, and someone had wheeled Melissa in to join her. The woman with the baby that had been transplanted inside her—oh dear Jesus—was gone.
“You,” Arielle spat, her eyes burning a hole in Mother. The woman was slick with sweat, her gray hair sticking to her face and scalp. Thankfully, she had put on some clothes—a dark robe that covered her almost to her wrinkled knees.
“Me,” Mother admitted. And then she tilted her heard back and laughed.
The reason for her awakening—children laughing—came back to her, and Arielle looked around the room, frantically trying to locate her daughter.
Eventually she found her.
Hope was in the operating room, as were the other girls, all standing in a row by the back wall, their heads bowed. They looked as if they could be quadruplets, even though Arielle knew that their ages spanned more than seven or eight years. And all their cute little blond heads of hair were pointed toward her.
“Hope?” Arielle said again, trying not to let fear creep into her voice. Her eyes focused on the girl at the end, the smallest of the group. That one was Hope; like any mother, she just knew it.
Upon hearing her name for the fourth or fifth time, Hope started to raise her head, but Mother let out a hiss/whistle sound, and the little girl quickly bowed her again.
“Hope!” Arielle cried. She tried to swing her legs off the gurney, but they still felt too weak to actually support her. She turned to Mother. “What have you done to my daughter?”
Mother laughed again. It was a horrible sound, a grating noise that sent a chill up and down Arielle’s spine.
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