Imagine you’re a time traveler.

12~ years ago.

Okay, you’ve imagined you’re a time traveler. Which means you have an imagination, very well done good sir/madam/mx. Now try to imagine something else for me. Imagine an eldritch being giving birth. Oxford, Merriam-Webster, vocabulary.com and perhaps the even more infamous Urban Dictionary describe the word eldritch to mean ‘weird, eerie, spooky’ and a series of other synonymous adjectives. This is, broadly speaking, correct, but not a pinpoint on what I am trying to get you to perceive. H.P Lovecraft described his eldritch horror Cthulhu as ‘a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on the hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind’ in his famous short The Call of Cthulhu (1926). Again, broadly speaking, this is correct as well.

Imagine putting our old pal Cthulhu through a 3D printer. Now imagine taking that 3D-printed Cthulhu and smashing it to pieces with a sledgehammer, until the pieces were completely unrecognizable from the ‘vaguely anthropoid outline’. Okay, almost there. Don’t wanna wear your imagination out, we only have so much of it these days. Now take your ex-3D-printed Cthulhu shards, compress them at such a high heat they turn to diamond, facet them, glue them back together in whatever order strikes your fancy, and shine a military-grade spotlight onto them. Just a little more, try not to lag behind.

Now take all of it, including the entire spotlight (hell, you can take the entire military too if you’d like), and run it through the Sierpinski Gasket and the Mandelbrot Set simultaneously, then remember to add a touch of the Menger Sponge and the Mandel Bulb until it occupies more dimensions than any current known shape, image or being… I’m rambling, aren’t I? Put up with me for a little longer, I promise we’re getting very close now. I know you have it in you.

Take your ∞-dimensioned fractal entity and add the smallest dash of something you recognize. I’ll go easy on you, your imagination is very limited after all: make it something a human or some other similar semi-sapient being would have. Eyes. Fingers. Could even be keratin-based. Just stretch out your arm, take a pinch (which is however much you reckon would be fitting, could be ∞-tons or ∞-milligrams, it’s all the same amount in the end, but it’s the thought that counts, really) and… sprinkle it about.

You’ve done it. Everyone, a round of applause for my friend in the back here. They’ve truly done a fabulous job at creating the most basic eldritch being. Where were we, before all the smashing Cthulhu with sledgehammers… Ah, yes. How do you think your hand-crafted horror reproduces (here’s a hint, it’s not through mitosis)?

We’re going to leave out the whole first half. How the child was created doesn’t matter. What really matters is the birth itself. Right now, perhaps coincidentally, one of Them is doing that right now in Their this-universe’s-version-of-Beverley-Hills studio. If you’re wondering how it’s possible that a being the size of every dimension piled atop each other can fit inside, let alone sign the papers for, an apartment such as this, there’s two answers. One) that eldritch beings aren’t limited to the confines of space and time the same way 3-dimensional beings are, and two) because they can borrow bodies. All those fractals and sharp-soft edges and assorted body parts can collapse and confine themselves to a vaguely humanoid outline.

Perhaps ‘borrowing’ isn’t the correct term. They’re not going to return their respective borrowed goods, after all.

They don’t age. Their bodies, that is. They eventually give way to rot throughout the ages, but one of Them can be contained inside the same vessel for centuries, millennia even if specifically well-tended-for. Kind of the same way Russian Ex-Premier Vladimir Lenin has been contained, embalmed inside Lenin’s Mausoleum since 1924.

The one of Them currently giving birth is externally female. She was chosen to receive the eldritch child in the late 19th century, and had borrowed the body of the closest well-endowed whore. She’d had more venereal diseases than you could count on your digits, and a particularly serious case of syphilis, but once she was inhabited by one of Them, all those problems wished themselves away and all the broken bones and old fractures, bruises, bloodied cuts on her body had righted themselves proper once more.

She has a name. Unfortunately, your tongue could not recite it without turning inside out in the back of your esophagus and the left lobe of your brain spontaneously combusting. Instead, she adopted the whore’s name. We will call her Mathilde.

Mathilde is very beautiful. So beautiful in fact, that Tiger Woods (or this universe’s variant of him, at least), had called her ‘the reason God gave him eyes’ on one steamy midsummer night. Frank Sinatra and Bill Clinton had said similar things, one including quite a few more bottlenose dolphins, however.

She is even beautiful in the midst of childbirth.

Her apartment is sleek, modern, and entirely monochrome. Black leather couches, a television spanning a whole wall, turned to infomercials. A glass-lined balcony overlooking the city, the flickering, blinking, spasming lights like pulsating glow worms on a cave ceiling far below. Mathilde sits on a stool, her hair like waves of molten white-gold running down her shoulders, hips, across her thighs; she sits directly in the middle of the room, wearing a loose black dress that billows ever so slightly in the breeze from the balcony. Two women, both dressed in off-blue hospital scrubs, their faces covered with cotton masks and their hair in tight nets, kneel beside her.

People had a tendency to kneel in Mathilde’s presence.

These two nurses, hired privately from their respective hospitals, had seen many childbirths. They were usually accompanied by lots of screaming, lots of pushing and/or telling the mothers to push, and lots of epidurals. Mathilde was doing none of them. The biggest question they shared was where Mathilde’s baby was coming from. Mathilde had been pregnant when she hired them. She had been pregnant when she met them on the ground floor. She had been pregnant in the elevator, all the way to the door of her penthouse apartment. The moment the door shut behind the two nurses, however, Mathilde was not pregnant. Her bump had disappeared, the lines of her dress slim and her stomach contoured.

But they were being paid a quite unbelievable sum of money to deliver a child, not to ask questions. And, unless their eyes were playing tricks on them and they were both experiencing the same hallucination as they stared between Mathilde’s legs, transfixed, a child was definitely being delivered, in this room, from this woman’s womb.

“M-ma’am… can you give us one, big push?” the younger of the two nurses chimes. Mathilde doesn’t respond. Her eyes stay locked on the city beyond the glass retainer.

The other, quite a stubborn old midwife, snaps in response, “The baby isn’t going to push itself out, woman!”

Mathilde opens her delicately curved, inexplicably painted lips in response, takes in half a breath’s worth of air, goes to say ‘It will’…

‘…It’s a nice day for a white wedding! It’s a nice day to start again! Hey little sister, who is your whip? Hey little sister, what’s your vice and wish? Hey little sister, shotgun!’

Don’t worry, Billy Idol hasn’t been birthed singing. It’s a ringtone. Not Mathilde’s, she doesn’t listen to music, nor does she own a phone. It’s also not one of the nurses, the older one likes hard rock and the other that tasteless mumble-rap that’s popular these days. Standing by the door are two men; one, incredibly upright, wringing his hands behind his back, salivating ever-so-slightly from a mouth too full of teeth. Another, a lanky, all-sharp-angles kind of man with glasses and a messy ponytail of mouse brown hair.

They are also like Mathilde.

The bespectacled man excuses himself under his breath and flips open his cell.

There’s a shudder, like an earthquake that only lasts for a fraction of a second. A crumble, a fissure in reality, as something reality can’t understand is born into it. Another one, longer this time; one of the nurses loses her footing, a painting slips from it’s perfect 90 degree angle. Some of the walls clip into the next dimension, the other nurse’s hair levitates for a moment. And then it all goes back to normal.

Blood starts to pour from Mathilde’s womb. It puddles on the floor, between her feet. She doesn’t bat an eye.

Everything breaks again. The man advertising the Wonder Bra on the television begins to sing the chorus to White Wedding. The smaller nurse goes blind for a split second.

More blood. Both nurses scream. They’re seeing Mathilde being torn apart from the cervix outwards as something that clearly doesn’t belong there forces and struggles its way out. As something ∞-dimensional tries to squeeze out of a 3-dimensional hole. The world vibrates and trembles like a glitchy old video game, like everything turned to polygons and pixels.

And then it exists. Mathilde’s child has fallen from between her bloody legs, onto the cold tiled floor. It writhes. It screams. Reality tries to deny it. Tries to reject it. It doesn’t succeed. It can’t.

Everything goes back to normal. It’s almost scarily how calm it’s become, how silent the city can be. Like you could hear the flap of a butterfly’s wings, hear its scales hit the ground, hear every whirl of dust as it flittered about. The old bag of a midwife opens her eyes, squinting at where she can hear the squirming of whatever it was that Mathilde had grown inside of her.

She saw it, red, gooey, fleshy, stuck to the tiles like a dropped raw chicken. It cried out, its voice strangled, screaming from a throat that didn’t know how to scream. Its body red raw, flailing against the ceramic, arms thrashing like weapons, fingers extending, reaching for something the nurse couldn’t see nor begin to imagine. It lay in the center of a bloody stain, a crimson blotch, unreadable patterns, like it had been summoned here, from another world, a reality so vastly different from our own.

It was a completely normal, human newborn. That, or a very tiny version of Winston Churchill.

Back to the topic of how eldritch beings reproduce; they don’t. In their true forms, they don’t have the internal environment nor the capability to create and sustain new life within themselves. They are sexless unless they inhabit a body. They are reproductive parasites.

So, when a mommy eldritch being and a daddy eldritch being love each other very much (in this case, Mathilde and the resident Billy Idol fan), they hijack bodies of the opposite sex and procreate. Yes, they fuck, everyone. Nine months later, one will give birth to a flesh-bound infant. In a normal, human body, fertilizin and anti-fertilizin react with each other when sperm comes in contact with an egg, recognizing that both the sperm and egg are of the same species, and then accepting it. It’s thanks to this that human-animal hybrids aren’t popping up all over science magazines, because mismatched fertilizin and anti-fertilizin can’t be accepted into one another. Like fitting a square block in a round hole.

The closest comparison to eldritch reproduction is the method through which a mule is created. A mule is the resulting offspring of a donkey and a horse; these two species are very closely related, and can produce live offspring, unlike, per se, humans and dogs. However, mules are sterile. Two mules cannot produce a third mule. So they must find a way to create new mules, to keep the species alive. They must utilize the procreation of a donkey and a horse to further their survival.

This means that nothing can grow inside a human womb that is not human. Mathilde’s baby is, for the moment, at least outwardly human. So are the rest of Them. But one day, the baby’s skin will rot through, in centuries its bones will turn to meal, and it will abandon its original vessel, and let its true form peek out.

The nurses would like to think they hallucinated. That someone slipped acid into their green tea and Irish coffee this morning. The world isn’t shaking. Things aren’t clipping into each other. Mathilde’s body is unharmed, no longer torn down the middle like she’d been through a log splitter. And the baby is in front of them, crying and cold on the tiles.

Mathilde doesn’t look the slightest bit fazed by childbirth. She feels relief, actually. Relief that something isn’t hiding in the corners of her true self, watching her every move, every thought, clinging to her unimaginable body like a lifeline. Relief that she doesn’t have to carry another cosmic being inside her most private of spaces, let it do what and grow how it wants. Relief that she doesn’t have to act pregnant in public anymore, and acting so pathetically human really does take it out of her…

“Mathilde. Mathilde, we have a problem.” It’s the man speaking, the one with the flip-phone and the glasses and the ponytail. The father.

Mathilde’s eyes waver from the skyline for the first time in what seems like eras; she turns to him, her irises glazed over and steady, a brilliant hazel color like the first leaves of fall. Like getting stared at by two darker but still intensely radiant suns. “Howard? What is it…?” Her voice is soft, like a whisper, like a draping of silk over a wind instrument and the faint sound that comes off it upon collision with the fabric.

“It’s Amal. We’ve been seen.”

“What should we do with them?” Mathilde gives him a Look with those brown kaleidoscopes set into her face, gesturing toward the two nurses. They were in shock, the older one slumped over and mumbling things at her hands, the other unconscious and bent at an odd angle as she lay.

The man, Howard, returns the Look, and then diverts it midcourse towards the other man in the room. The one built like a quarterback, his spine rigid and his grin toothy. Very toothy. Maybe even tremendously toothy. “Daemon. Eat them.”

And he did. Every last bite.