Dissection

I’m not a vegetarian but I still felt guilty seeing the vacuum sealed foetal pig lying before me. Mr Latter was walking between desks and handing out scalpels, and when he threw a pair down on my desk I jumped, drawing a laugh from my partner Ned. I wasn’t the only one who’d gone quiet. Most of the class fell into a hushed silence, although a couple still carried on joking around, albeit in hushed whispers.

“Where do they come from?” I asked. Mr Latter did not stop handing out tools as he answered:

“The school sources them from local farms.”

“But I mean, they aren’t killed for this, are they?”

A few other kids turned to look, keen to hear the answer.

“They’re dead at birth,” he said. He had stopped to face the class and holding our attention he walked up to the white board before elaborating. “Sows who are pregnant and die have the foetuses extracted and they get sold on. Zoos, fertiliser, dog food, schools… Is everyone happy to continue? Carly, do you want me to fetch the wastebasket?”

All our heads turned to Carly who sat at the back, frizzy black hair framing a pallid face drained of all colour. Beside her Alec, her partner, was holding up the pig and grimacing. For a moment Carly looked as if she was about to speak, but then she suddenly leapt up and went running out of the classroom. There were gasps and Mr Latter cried out,

“Now now no need to worry. It’s common. If any of you feel like being sick you can, like Carly, use the bathrooms, or the sinks at either side of the room, or the wastebaskets by your feet. Let’s try to avoid the floor, your worktops, fellow students, and definitely, definitely, try to avoid me.”

We let out a collective laugh, and Mr Latter chuckled too.

“Sounds like that’s happened to you before sir!” someone cried out.

“I’d rather not talk about it, but let’s just say I considered a poncho.”

The laughter was raucous, and he played it up for a second or two before just as quickly calming us down. Pointing to the whiteboard he continued.

“You will start by removing the pig from the sealed packaging and laying it out on the trays you have in front of you. You will be working in pairs so maybe start deciding on who will begin the dissection, bearing in mind that everyone will get the opportunity to participate in equal measure.”

Quietly the door opened and closed, and Carly tiptoed back to her seat. Acknowledging her with a nod, Mr Latter added, “Although this isn’t an exercise in torture. If you don’t feel up for it, just raise your hand, and we’ll work something out. Right, remove the pigs and beware, they will smell.”

He’d understated that fact. The pig felt cold and pliable in my hands as I lifted it from the worktop, and as I probed it through the plastic, I realised that it felt exactly like the cuts of meat my father bought at the supermarket. Except this cut of meat had floppy ears, sleepy eyelids pressed tight, and a pink snout barely longer than my thumb. Reaching across, Ned gave it a poke and winced, and we shared an apprehensive look.

By some unspoken consent I wound up opening the packet, and as soon as the scissors pierced the plastic there was a whoosh of air and a horrific smell rose up. As the other pigs were opened, kids all around me started crying out or gagging or laughing.

“No worse than Josh in the changing rooms,” Alec cried out and even I shared a laugh, but it was hard to be distracted by the eye-watering stench.

“Come on,” Mr Latter cried out. “I’ll open some windows but it’s just something you have to get used to. If you need to leave that’s fine but if you stay, you take it seriously.”

I opened the packet further and with the plastic now slack the pig slumped to the bottom, slipping between the rubbery sheets in a slick overcoat of pale grease.

“It’s slimy,” Ned grimaced. “Shall we ask what it is?”

“I… don’t want to know,” I replied, and taking a deep breath I reached in and slid the pig out by one of its legs. It fell onto the metal tray with a wet slap, and slowly unfurled in the open air until it lay like a babe on its back.

“Right!” Mr Latter cried, once more commanding all of our attention. “The first incision will be made vertically downwards, leading from the nape of the neck down to the groin. Yes, very funny, groin. Are we still laughing about things like this? You’re sixteen. Now come on, get on with it.”

I tried to hand the scalpel to Ned, but he held his hands up and shook his head. I was about to try and persuade him into taking over from me, but a girl cried out and dropped her scissors with a loud clatter, drawing all of our eyes.

“Sir mine looks weird!” Adding to this, a few others said similar things:

“Mine too!”

“This one looks seriously gross!”

“Oh my God why does it look like that!?”

“It’s perfectly normal!” Mr Latter cried out, his voice straining for the first time that day. “Some may be a little underdeveloped, but you’re just not used to seeing them like this. Most of you have probably never even been on a farm!”

“No, sir,” said one of the girls up front, and she slid her tray forward to show him. “Look.”

The teacher’s face, which was typically plastered with a facetious smirk, was an expression of thinly veiled shock.

“Why’s the fluid all black?” the same girl asked.

Mr Latter stepped forward every single kid took it as a sign that we should get up and see, crowding forward until we were all staring at the strange thing on the tray.

“Why does its skin look like that?”

“Where are its eyes?”

“Why is it so hairy?”

Mr Latter pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. His mouth still hung open and noticing us standing there for the first time he suddenly closed it and collected himself.

“Mu… must’ve been sold a bad one by the farmers. They looked okay in the packets, I just thought it was had black colouring.” He chuckled, nervously. “Still I expect its insides are the same as the others.”

“Sir I don’t think that’s a pig,” I said.

“Don’t be silly,” he replied. “What else could it be?”

“Mine’s even worse,” one girl cried, guiding us to her desk. “Look at the eyes.”

“Uh…” Mr Latter groaned. “Uh that’s a, uh, a very good example of a mutation. A surprisingly common one, actually, in farm animals. There’s a museum in the town over where some of the farmers have preserved goats and sheep born one eye too many, or too few.”

“Yeah but… this has like, six, extra eyes,” I said. “And they’re not all on the head.”

“I don’t want to touch that thing,” Carly said, speaking for the first time since returning. “Sir it looks infected with something.”

Everyone recoiled from the pigs, pulling away in a muddled panic while crying out a thousand different theories and ideas.

“Are they contagious?”

“What about radiation?”

“What if they suddenly come back to life?”

At the last proclamation there was a brief pause and then hysterics. Even I have to admit, a quick look at the slender pink pig on my own tray sent a shiver down my spine. I thought of those wet newborn eyes opening and the cold snout heaving in an unnatural breath and I wound up involuntarily frightening myself.

“Be quiet!” Mr Latter screamed, immediately falling silent as if shocked by his outburst. After a few thoughtful moments he resumed: “Okay… okay… Right, how many of the specimens are healthy?”

“Ours is,” Ned answered.

“And mine!” cried another.

All in all, about two-thirds of the pigs looked normal, and Mr Latter quickly set about re-organising us, so we’d be in bigger groups sharing only healthy pigs. One by one he collected the malformed specimens and put them away in a small fridge at the back of the head of the class. After we were all re-seated and calm, he told us,

“Now, we all have healthy specimens, the groups are a little larger, but the plan remains the same: share the work, get your hands dirty, and if you need to be sick use a wastebasket or a sink. Don’t fight it, as soon as you feel the slightest urge get a bin. Right, now that all the fuss is over, are we all, finally, ready to begin?

“Right, well, okay, Jacob, why don’t you start?”

For some reason he’d picked me, looking across at me from the classroom as if by random. Looking down I realised I’d foolishly picked up the scalpel to fidget with as I listened, and in doing so nominated myself for a gristly task. When I looked at Ned, he merely shook his head; his expression brooked no argument.

I was holding the scalpel. Teacher had asked me.

“Just start at the neck and make one long incision down to the groin,” Mr Latter reiterated.

No one laughed this time and I looked down at the pig. It wasn’t as cute now I’d seen the other strange things that had come out of the packets, but it looked at peace and I didn’t want to the be one to violate that slumber. But everyone was looking at me with anticipation and accepting my fate, I reached out, pressed the tip of the curved blade into the base of its neck and pushed hard enough to break the skin. In eerie silence, thick black blood welled up in the depression, filling it up before flowing down the ribs like a trickle of syrup.

“That’s good Jacob,” Mr Latter said, earnestly trying to encourage me.

I pulled the blade down and opened the pig like it was the zipper on a costume, momentarily horrified by just how easily my arm had glided downwards. All of a sudden, screams filled the room, and I realised I’d been unconsciously holding my eyes tightly shut. Opening them revealed the pig’s insides unfurling from the chest cavity like expanding foam.

“Jesus Christ,” Mr Latter cried, and one-by-one the remaining kids stormed out of the classroom, retching and sobbing and screaming hysterically. But I remained, paralysed by fear and disgust. What had welled up was a frightening mass of glistening black tumorous organs, thick with sticky webbed mucus and translucent membranes. Piece by piece this repulsive slop fell aside until thin pale ribs were visible, standing rigid like the spires of a cathedral built in some cult-riddled swamp.

“Holy shit,” Mr Latter breathlessly groaned, and if I could have spoken, I would have said much worse. But I was unable do anything except glare at the strange and gremlin-like arm that had been revealed by the bubbling remains, its nubby fingers weakly quivering in the morning light.

-

Dissections were stopped at my school after that. Our head teacher spoke at an assembly and told us plainly that it was an unfortunate incident where severely deformed foetuses had been purchased by accident. She worked hard to dissuade the rumours of monsters, blinking eyes, twitching corpses, and crying pig-demons that had spread across the school like wildfire. Even Ned, who I’d been right beside the whole time, started telling belated versions of the story at lunch time but I had no appetite to put him down for it. I was the only one who’d seen the arm and it had plagued my nightmares for days.

But other than the one assembly, we were all meant to carry on with our lives as normal. And sure enough, everyone else slowly lost interest in the unusual and macabre story until, after a fortnight, I was seemingly the only one left still haunted by the dissection. Nearly all of my dreams had to turned to nightmares, and each night was spent tossing and turning with strange swine-riddled horrors. Worse still, I was suffering from night terrors for the first time in nearly ten years and there’d been a few occasions where my parents had found me screaming hysterically in the bathtub, ranting about a tiny claw groping at my window.

I had no memory of any of this, but whether I remembered it or not, it was all up there in my head churning away and the dreams hung over me like a black cloud. I wished so badly that it would soon pass, but found out, to my dismay, that we all had an upcoming field trip to a nearby farm.

Mr Latter wouldn’t say if the field trip was linked to the dissection, but when we arrived a few of us made comments about how it was a free-range farm, looking like something right out of a children’s book. Cows, sheep, and pigs roamed on open pastures and huge swathes of crop dominated the landscape. It felt like it had been deliberately chosen to undo any lasting impressions we may have formed about where our dinner came from.

I spent most of the day moping around, and when time for lunch came, I wandered off to sit quietly on a small bucket. Within a few minutes Mr Latter found me and asked if I was okay, but I told him I just needed space. Taking a deep breath, he put a reassuring hand on my shoulder and added, “I’ll come get you when lunch is over. Just don’t go wandering off.”

Left alone I turned my eyes back to the pen of pigs before me. There were five or six them milling around in an endlessly churned mud pit, their pink snouts working in a constant rumble of wet breathy snorts. They seemed quite happy, all except for one that lay helplessly on its side panting. At first, I thought it was just sunbathing; it was a hot sunny day. But as the seconds ticked on my eyes kept returning to it.

And then, suddenly, it started seizing. Its limbs thrashed frantically in the thick sop as it let rip a horrendous squeal, an unnatural and shrill scream of pain that sounded just plain wrong coming from a helpless animal. Looking around I spotted an old man wandering by, one I didn’t recognise from our group.

“Excuse me!” I cried out. “I think something’s wrong.”

The old man saw me and smiled and started shuffling over at a leisurely pace.

“Oh, she’s just pregnant,” he said when he was close enough to talk. “Although she has a month to go, I’d say, so not quite there yet.”

I sceptically eyed the pig, and once the old man decided to pay attention, he did too. Together we watched the poor animal scream and writhe as the old man’s face grew increasingly concerned.

“It’s far too early,” he muttered under his breath.

“Jesus Christ!” I cried, standing to my feet while the two of us recoiled. The pig had been rolling around in increasing pain and the others in the pen had taken to huddling in one corner when, all of a sudden, something had moved within the swollen belly. A pointed shape pushing hard against the thin skin like a knife breaking through a tent.

“Jenny!” the old man screamed, and a young woman came trotting over. “Get your brother!” he shouted. “And then go get Doc Powell on the phone. Go! Go now!”

But whatever he had planned, it was too late. With a terrible sound the stomach burst like water-balloon, spilling a greasy clear fluid over the mud and the wind quickly carried the smell over to us. I started retching, quickly realising that I’d smelled the exact same foul odour once before.

The pig had stopped screaming by now and lay breathlessly twitching on the floor as a grotesque black shape slid out of its sagging gut. Whatever it was, it had a few features of a pig (there was a snout, I think), but it was riddled with black glistening tumours that popped and hissed in the open air.

“Oh no,” the old man whined. “No no no not another one!”

-

We were told nothing about the exact circumstances of Mr Latter’s death, but vague rumours spread and we learned enough to piece together the basic outline. He had died on a fishing trip, sleeping peacefully in a tent with his wife who was apparently also missing although it was hard to know for sure with all the wild stories going around. For the most part, teachers tried their best to suppress the gory tales of slashed tents and pulped heads and jealous exes and faked deaths for life insurance money, but as long as they refused to tell us what actually happened there was no stopping the hushed gossip.

For me it had come at the worst time. Ever since the farm the nightmares had escalated and now I could remember the terrifying hallucinations, or at least that’s what I told myself they were. I’d started hearing things, seeing fleeting shapes in the corner of my eyes. It was one thing when it was a strange reflection in the window of my ground-floor bedroom in the middle of the night, or a grotesque snort coming from the shadows in my room, but when it started happening on the long summer walks home from school I had a hard time telling myself it was just a figment of my imagination.

Bushes would rustle and footsteps would clomp away as I passed the overgrown alleys between the suburban homes, often retreating into the woods just behind the town. Howling squeals would ring out from deep within the trees and disturb flocks of perched crows, and one night I awoke paralysed to the sight of glowing pair of yellow eyes glaring at me from the ceiling. At some point I fell back asleep and when morning came I was all too eager to write it off as sleep paralysis, but then I noticed how my chest was slick with a foul, clear fluid.

You wouldn’t believe what my mum suggested it was, but I had serious doubts about that. A dark idea had wormed its way into my head, vague and shapeless, and every time something strange happened it kept popping back even though it filled me with terrible dread. For a while it was just a feeling, a faint notion of something about those grotesque pig foetuses, but then one day I was walking between buildings at school when I was distracted by hysterical screaming coming from the art block.

These weren’t the urgent howls of pain, but there was still a dozen muddled shouts of hysteria and upset crying. By the time I reached the door dozens of girls and boys were flooding out of the door and from behind came Mrs Carroll pale as a sheet, her hand pressed to her chest and her mouth wide open. She was speechless, and even when I asked her if she was okay she didn’t even look at me. By now kids were filtering off to go get help, but I heard a quiet whimper from behind her and I realised someone was still inside.

I gently pushed past the teacher and went in only to find Carly kneeling on the floor before an enormous canvas. She was distressed, a large sheet of fabric clutched in her hand. I realised that she must have pulled it away to reveal her painting and looking at the madness she’d made it became clear why the class had burst into hysterics.

It was undeniably familiar, a swirling mass of glistening oily muscle set against a haunting rendition of the woods. But unlike the foetuses this monster did not have the withered atrophied muscles of a foetus. Nor did it possess any swine-like features. It was something else, something I recognised from the subconscious impression left by weeks of retched nightmares – a hulking mass of almost humanoid shape. Its outline was ill-defined, but within the cacophony of visual noise I glimpsed something glorious and terrifying in equal measure.

“It won’t leave me alone,” Carly sobbed. “It won’t stop looking.”

-

Kids walking down the street cheered when the first trucks came. Big khaki-coloured things, they rumbled along in a small convoy with their tarpaulin tops rustling in the breeze. We could glimpse nothing of the contents, nor of the people who owned and operated them. There were no military decals or symbols and they carried no plates, but with great urgency these trucks passed through the town before peeling off in the direction of a large farm just South of the town.

“Where do you think Mr Latter got those pigs from?” Ned asked.

“I heard that a farmer down there committed suicide,” I replied. “You don’t think…?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “But come on, it’s only an hour or two walk if we cut through the woods.”

It was weird that neither of us protested our own plan to go into countryside alone. Even at the time I remember feeling apprehension, but I assumed Ned felt no fear only to later find that, barely half-hour into the walk, he was twitchy and visibly afraid.

“Should we turn back?” I asked.

Looking around we were faced with the endless ash trees that surrounded us, their thick twisted boughs rocking in silent oscillations. I couldn’t escape the haunting sensation that something just over the crest of a nearby hill was watching us and when a small flicker of topsoil along that ridge was disturbed and came rolling down in our direction I had to fight to keep control.

“No,” Ned replied. “We’ll cut across into the farmer’s fields. I’d rather be accused of trespassing than stay here.”

Ten minutes of walking perpendicular (followed by a hasty climb of a tall hedge) and we emerged into a wide-open field of blooming rapeseed, the yellow flowers so bright in the midsummer sun they looked luminescent. The effect was undeniably calming for we stood in an endless chest-high expanse of golden warmth that stretched off to a far-off hill where a gloriously large tree rose alone, its canopy reaching far and wide. Without thinking we started making our way towards the hill which was roughly in the direction we needed to go.

But the relief was short-lived. Not long into the journey, Ned stopped and turned on his heel, his head darting side-to-side with panicked breaths.

“Did you hear that?” he asked.

“Hear what?”

“That… that sound, like breathing but all wet.”

“Come on,” I said, pulling him by the elbow. “Let’s go.”

We picked up our pace and I found my eyes furtively probing the featureless sea of yellow around us. The flowers rustled in a cool breeze, their stems bending and swaying in oceanic waves that rolled across the acres. But sometimes the wind would turn and bring with it a gagging, retched smell, and when it picked up into roaring gusts my ears would prick with the sound of stomping feet or heavy, gurgling panting.

About half way there and I couldn’t help but turn to look and when I did Ned stopped too. Together we stared into the undulating fields and tried hard to see something we both desperately wished wasn’t there. Suddenly Ned grabbed my arm and with wide eyes he directed me to a patch of distant flowers that didn’t sway as strongly in the wind. It was hard to know what it meant, but once I saw it I couldn’t take my gaze away.

“What…?” I started to ask, but then it changed. It started to move, barely visible like a ripple of water in an ocean, but it was coming towards us and my heart raced at the implications.

“Come on,” Ned said, and together we started out walking at first but when another stolen glance revealed that the distance between us and that moving shape had halved we both started to run.

“Where are we going?” I panted.

“Don’t. Know,” Ned breathily replied.

We ran on for another few hundred metres and only for Ned to slow to a jog. I looked and saw him staring at the space behind us. “It’s gone,” he cried out. “There’s nothing there. Look!” I saw nothing and for a brief second I breathed a sigh of relief; he was right. But the horizon was busy, and we were surrounded by endless rows of diminishing flowers, and cautiously I tugged at Ned’s arm.

“It was probably nothing,” he moaned, unmoved by my gesture. “We’re just messing with our own head.”

“I don’t like this,” I said.

“We were just…”

I didn’t hear what he said next. I glimpsed it, a shape hiding amidst the golden flowers. There was a horrifying moment where I simply didn’t register what I was looking at. It was so unnatural, so strange—an asymmetrical mess of bone and fur—that my brain simply had no reference. It wasn’t a tree, plant, or animal, or at least it bore so little resemblance to anything I knew that my brain rebelled at its failure to categorise it. Instead a rising crescendo of fear overtook me, and by the time I pieced together the significance of those amber eyes, my feet were already carrying me in a life-or-death flight.

“Where are you—” Ned cried out, but his voice was cut short. I couldn’t bring myself to look back, not even as tears filled my eyes and my heart sank with regret.

-

By the time I reached the farm night was starting to fall. Somewhere along the way I had become lost and had spent hours frantically running myself ragged in those golden fields. Only after I climbed a hedge and found a lonely country lane did I stop to rest. I found in those desperate panting moments that much of my courage had dissolved and I was close to collapse. When I resumed my journey it was as a sullen walk along the edges of the road, often having to step aside onto grassy thickets when cars and tractors passed.

Initially I found myself wishing I had a torch, or at least someway to make myself visible to the oncoming cars, but I was thankful for the stealth it afforded after those peculiar trucks came driving by in another convoy. Close behind came the smell of fire and burning meat, and I knew they were leaving the very place I was trying to reach.

I found fresh reserves of energy and carried on until, at last, I stumbled through the open gates of a dingy looking farm. The driveway was unpaved and without the full moon it would have been impossible to walk safely. Thankfully, I found a small torch hanging from one of the gateposts that led into the main yard and used that to light the rest of the way. Close by I saw animals milling around nervously in their pens, clearly unsettled by the smouldering pile of dead pigs in an adjacent field. The mountain of charred meat rose so high it rivalled the height of the house and as I approached it and saw that, while most of the animals looked normal, a few bore oily blinking tumours that popped and hissed in the blaze.

“Lost?”

I cried out and dropped my torch, momentarily dousing myself in darkness. Someone was close by and they turned their own light and pointed it towards mine that lay on the ground. I took it and used it, revealing a squirrelly looking old man in overalls.

“You lost?” he cried out. He looked like a corpse in my light with puffy eyes and a haunted expression. It was evident he was a man deep in despair.

“Y-y-y-yes,” I stammered. “Sorry.”

“What the fuck are you doing out here?” he hissed. Thinking quickly I replied,

“My friends pulled a prank on me. Left me out here on my own.”

“They ain’t your friends then are they?” he asked.

“Clearly not,” I answered. “Do you mind me asking, are you okay?”

The old man huffed and turned and only after he’d walked a few steps did he call out,

“You coming or what? I’ll get my keys and give you a lift. Got fuck all else to do now anyway.”

I followed him to his doorstep and then into his kitchen. It was a terrible mess and I saw that much of the food left out had spoiled.

“I should clean,” he grumbled. “But at this rate I’m likely to lose the place anyhow.”

“What happened?”

He eyed me for a moment before answering:

“Infection,” he said. “God knows how. Sows started getting pregnant but the piglets were all wrong. Started off small but…” He trailed off and his eyes glazed over.

“I saw the burned animals,” I said, pulling him back to the present.

“Judging by that look in your eye you’ve seen more than that,” he said with a dark smirk. “Y’know, they let me keep the cows and sheep but fat load of good that’ll do to me,” he grumbled. “Like anyone’s ever gonna buy meat from round these parts again.”

“This has happened to the other farms?”

“It’s happened to at least two others,” he answered. “I tried to keep the healthy pigs, but they wouldn’t let me. Hell, they even killed the fuckin’ boars. Wouldn’t even say what it was though I doubt they knew. No one knows nothing like this. Sows getting pregnant without insemination? That don’t make sense. When I started putting them in for the night, something damn near torn the barn down to get at ‘em. I figured it was a wild boar but…”

“It’s something else,” I said.

“You ever hear about Loki getting that horse pregnant?” he asked, a strange energy in his eyes.

“What?”

“Come with me,” he said, his voice low and menacing. But then just like that he was laughing, the shrill cackle touching my nerves. “Come on boy I ain’t gonna hurt you. Come on. I got something to show you.”

Quietly he led me through the house and towards the back. Together we walked out into the fields behind his house, the stench of burnt meat following us like a ghost. Finally, after what felt like an hour, we reached a small tool shed that looked abandoned.

“I just kept on killing ‘em,” he said. “You see one, you want to kill it, trust me. But that’s the thing, we were getting wrong. I don’t know why I thought of Loki, but something was putting babies in them pigs. They weren’t piglets, they were… well I don’t know. But this whole damn time it didn’t dawn on one of us to think that maybe whatever the hell this thing was, it just wanted one of its litter alive.”

He pushed the door open and I looked inside.

“I kept her,” he whispered. “Hid her away. The last one. It’s been a terrible fight, but I think I’ve got her to come to full term.”

It was hard to think that the thing before me had ever been a sow. It was wretched, bulbous and distended, and clearly pained with desperate heaving spasms. It had swollen to the size of a sofa and lay half-broken across the floor, easily three times as long as the one I saw in the farm. As the light caught its grossly extended belly, I saw that the skin was gossamer thin and translucent, the light of the torch revealing blue veins as thick as my thumb that tirelessly pumped with blood.

The light revealed something else, something that stirred in response to the stimulation.

“Why would Loki impregnate a horse?” the old man said, his voice close to awe. “But then again, who am I to question a god? You’ve seen it, or somewhere, somewhere deep down, you’re aware. I reckon it’s been chasing up every damn human with a trace of its babies’ scent.”

Suddenly the sow shuddered and moved belly-first towards us. Crying out I jumped backwards but the farmer stayed rooted to the spot.

“Don’t shy away,” he cried. “Look! She’s breaching!”

With the sound of tearing fabric something broke the thin-skinned stomach and a torrent of effluent and blood flooded out of the shed, washing our shoes and ankles before draining away into the soil. What remained after the amniotic fluid was gone was a flapping mess of skin draped over a huddled shape that writhed and struggled to break free.

“Boy,” the farmer said. “If I was you, I’d kneel.”

The old man fell and planted his face into the earth in a gesture of supplication. For a moment I stayed standing, scanning the surrounding fields. And then, in an instant, the shed disappeared in a braying thunder of broken metal and snapping wood.

The painting didn’t do it justice. My nightmares didn’t come close. The sky behind its towering structure warped and broke open like the peeling of burned film and revealed a bruised and sickening nebula of smoky malignant stars. I felt as if the ground beneath my feet could give way at any moment, as if the very stuff of reality was crumbling and breaking apart. Its mere presence betrayed an unspeakable power, its eyes glittering with inhuman intelligence that felt more like a force of nature. I cannot easily describe the eerie feeling that came over me except to say that I became distinctly aware of the other. This thing was not human, but it was not animal. It didn’t just rival a human, it dwarfed us.

It watched as its spawn tore its way free of the womb. It fumbled and fell at first, a grotesque mess of screaming mouths and cracking bone. It was a retched miscarriage that inspired only pity and horror, its horrible cries wracked with pain and rage. Slowly, the tumours hissed and shifted, and before my very eyes it started to change. At first, I thought it would stand there, metamorphosing in gut-wrenching agony, but with a startling shriek it launched itself forward with a single mollusc-like tongue and fell upon the farmer. He was consumed like a bacterium by a macrophage, heaving liquid flesh contracting and breaking him open. He opened his mouth, but the creature’s flesh probed the orifice with writhing cilia and, finding it pleasing, pulsing muscle soon followed.

He was broken open like a piece of fruit and his cries were cut short with an abrupt contraction. God, I tried so hard to make my legs move, but I couldn’t. I stayed there and watched even as the monstrous spawn continued its freakish transformation, crunching and snapping into place. Only when its amber eyes fixed on me did my legs obey my mind and I fled into the night, screaming and crying hysterically.

I was found in a nearby field, but of the farmer and the shed there was no sign. It took days before my senses returned to me and weeks before anyone would tell me what was found of Ned. Most people assumed we’d been attacked by a maniac and I’d fled in terror (although I wondered if the police really believed this), and I did nothing to contradict these rumours. I didn’t have the stomach to relive the full story, and the images of Ned’s pulverised corpse the police showed me only invoked guilt and shame.

I think of Loki often. Do you know how often those ancient Gods supposedly impregnated random animals? Turns out it’s a pretty common myth. It’s so weird reading about those Gods because so much of their lives are written out as relatable. They betray each other, love each other, fight, marry, break up… but every now and again they do something almost insane. They turn into monsters, eat worlds, re-shape continents, take offence at things that make no sense… I read these stories no longer as quirky tales of humanoid supermen but as fragmented accounts, glimpses of something that’s almost familiar, something you could almost piece together to make sense.

But beneath them lies a veneer of sheer insanity… Something that a human mind could never truly understand, certainly not as a whole.