Dear Reader
If you are reading this, then I have met with an untimely demise and you have found this in the draw of my desk. Know now, that you are potentially in great danger and once you reach this letters end, you will understand why.
There is something in my house, in my family, that I fear is not of this world. I would have tried to tell someone sooner, but I am sane enough to understand that what I have witnessed would seem insane. Though now I think of it, maybe an asylum would be the safest place for me, had I not left it too late.
That being said, I warn you now, what I am about to tell you may shock you into disbelief. If you are weak of heart or lack the constitution to understand that which may lay beyond our normal understanding of how our reality works, please pass this letter on. If you think that you can withstand the horror of what I am about to describe, please read on and try to understand.
I can only really liken what has happened to that of the cuckoo bird. The mother of which, unwilling or unable to raise her own chick, will lay the egg in another birds nest. This new mother, which can not give up basic instinct, will raise this intruder as her own. Even after the Cuckoo chick has hatched, grown larger than the other chicks and deposited its surrogate brothers and sisters to the ground so that it may selfishly garner all the care.
As I said before, this is not for the faint of heart.
Alarm bells should have sounded, you may say, when after the initial scan showed we would be having twins, but the second scan indicated that there was only one child residing in the womb. The doctor informed us it was perfectly normal for a twin to be reabsorbed. It would have failed to pass into the next stages of development and the body would have re-ingested the embryo.
My god, but that sounds so horrific now. I distinctly remember feeling sick, knowing that before my child had even been born, I had lost it. I focused on the surviving child though, after countless reassurances from doctors, nurses, and close friends and family.
As I write this, I cant help wonder what had really happened and I can do nothing but mourn for what might have been my Anna, and not this abomination that was birthed and raised. For an abomination it is. Do not let its childlike wonder fool you, those sparkling blue eyes that seem to look out at the world like only a three year old child could.
The first time I saw its true face, if you could call it that, was as my wife was feeding it before bed time. The night light was on, you understand, and it was but a flicker of reality revealing itself to me. I do not know why, maybe it had been the scotch whiskey I had been drinking, or the fatigue of raising a baby now toddler.
I peered in at my wife, to see how she was doing and as she smiled up at me, and I smiled back at her, for the briefest of moment it was not my child that turned its head to gaze up at me with a goofy grin, but a flowing shadow, for lack of a better description, for like I said, it was the briefest flicker in dim light. I do, however, remember seeing long thin tendrils, or tentacles, writhe about my wife’s neck and breast.
Fear gripped my very soul and tears begun to well up in my eyes as I stared, unblinking, at what I thought was my daughter. It simply turned its head back to my wife’s breast and continued its succour. It wasn’t until my wife asked if I was alight that I realised I had not taken a single breath. I doubt that not even my heart dared beat, unless it were to give away what I knew.
The next time my reality collapsed so uncaring was in the middle of the night not two weeks prior to writing this letter.
I had been roused from my slumber by Anna’s entry into the bedroom. There, standing by my wife’s side, was that grotesque flowing shadow. It still stood no taller than Anna, but it was not Anna. The street lights outside could only hint at the features of that inhuman entity. It had no face, nothing that could be described as even a head, connected to a neck and a body. It was one, singular flowing shadow that was punctuated by a puckering mouth.
I had hoped for the life of me that it was that malignant anomaly known as sleep paralysis. The sleeping mind overlapping the waking mind, imposing ones dreams upon the world as we looked out. But of course it had not been. I was simply frozen with fear. I knew this to be true because I distinctly felt its tentacled appendages group across the bed as it pulled itself up and woke my wife for a feed. My wife, ignorant to the truth, lifted the shadowed mass into the bed between us. I was barely a foot away from the very skin of the creature, and even at this close range, I could not make out a single detail of it.
I shut my eyes tight and did everything I could to stop my self from blubbering, even as one of its tentacles brushed my face. Its dry, warm appendage smelt of baby powder and ozone.
When I opened my eyes again, it was Anna that lay soundly asleep between me and my wife, spread out like she owned the whole bed.
The last time that I saw the creature for what it truly is, was not 10 minuets ago.
I was sat at my desk, writing a column for the local paper about the renovations of the market square to bring the town into the new age.
There was no mistaking it this time, there was no excuses to be made by a sleepy mind, or dim lighting, or any level of intoxication. It came to me, fully revealed and confronted me as I worked, in broad daylight.
It simply placed itself in the middle of my study and asked me if I could see it. I looked up and I can not even begin to describe the incredible entity that stood before me. Again my eyes welled up with tears brought on by the terror that comes from my understanding of reality slowly braking down. I didn’t even know what I should say, but I think I must have said yes, in a rather hoarse and utterly incontinent manner.
I would say that it stood there, motionless, but in the clear light of day, I could see writhing within that silhouette. It hugged itself with its pseudopodia, opening and closing its sucker mouth. It made no motion toward me, at the confession I had made in seeing its true form. It felt like it was judging me, deciding what to do. In the end, it simply said “OK Daddy.” and scampered out of the study.
I must admit, I broke down then. What man would not? If any would say that they would not, then they are either lying, or underestimate how it feels to have ones life so utterly torn apart.
I managed to regain my wits after a moment and felt it prudent to write this letter. Though it has taken me some time to work up the courage to properly face my new reality, I must also come to terms with trying to convince others of what I have seen.
I just hope, for every ones sake, that it is me. That I have underwent some inexplicable brake down of the hubris and that I am now living in some kind of delusional exert of reality made up by a broken mind.
Please, god, let it be so.