After years of my wife and I bargaining with any god that might listen, my child had finally arrived. Yet when I saw him, mewling like an angry cat in the doctor’s hands, I had a moment of revulsion. A slime and blood covered lump of flesh, it was hard to see him as human. Was it just an illusion brought by stress and exhaustion? I rubbed my eyes. When I looked again all I saw was the pink, button nose and small, unfocused eyes of a crying baby.

“How does he look?” my wife asked, voice still shaking from labor.

“Like our little boy,” I said, pushing away my misgivings.

Years later I sat with my son at the breakfast table. “See that?” he asked, pointing at the flecks of cereal floating in the milk of his spoon.

“What is it?” I replied, humoring him.

“That is a word we cannot speak,” he said as if stating a universal truth.

I looked in the spoon, the cereal having broken apart to make squiggles in the milk like some ancient script.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“What an imagination he has,” my wife said laughingly. Yet despite her tone, her eyes watched for my reaction. Confused, I said nothing.

That night I could not sleep. When I closed my eyes I saw those lines dancing behind my eyelids like fireflies in the dark. I thought that if I looked long enough I could understand what it said.

Then I heard my son’s voice down the hall, mumbling to himself as he sometimes did when he could not sleep. My wife still slumbered beside me, so I threw off the covers to go and comfort him.

Opening the door to his room, however, I was confronted by a quivering mass on the bed, it’s mottled surface shimmering in patterns that cast dancing shadows onto the ceiling. Memories of his birth returned to me; a formless glob of putrescence.

Then the form congealed back into my son, pajamas and all. “Sorry, daddy. I thought you were mommy.”

I panicked, all thought fleeing from me but the need for escape. I ran out of the house.

Crossing the porch, I felt something grab at my ankle, sending me tumbling down the stairs. My body thumped upon each bricked step. When I landed I could not move, all feeling gone but a wetness beneath my cheek, warm and damp.

On the landing above I saw the silhouettes of my family. My wife looked down at me with cold calculation.

“It’s time,” she said. “Make sure he knows what to do.”

My son came down to kneel beside my broken body.

“Daddy, can you hear me? When you see them, you need to say the word. If you don’t they’ll take me back.”

With the veil of life lifting from my eyes, I knew what to say. And of course I would say it. I’d do anything for my son.