The Harvest

A body horror tale from the Uncanny Valley

Her eyes were all she had control over.

They flickered from the familiar form of her wardrobe to the pale rectangle of the window, to the lump of her duvet where her feet should be. Everything was in its place, but the silence was wrong. It felt like a vacuum, as if all the tiny, ambient sounds of the house had been surgically scrubbed from the air, leaving a sterile void that threatened to pull a scream from her lungs. Beneath it, a vibration started, a low thrum that resonated in the fillings of her teeth, in the marrow of her bones.

Move.

The command screamed from her brain, a bolt of pure panic. Get up. Run. Now. Her body was a stranger, a leaden effigy lying in her bed. She strained, pouring every ounce of will into her left hand, begging it to twitch. Nothing. The signal died somewhere in the useless meat of her shoulder.

The shadows in the corners of the room began to thicken, pooling and congealing. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. A pathetic whimper caught in her throat, a dry rasp of air.

A sterile, chemical cobalt blue light bloomed in the centre of the room, bleaching all the colour from her world. Her floral wallpaper turned to a greyish smudge; her own skin looked like old parchment. In it, they took form.

Two of them. One on either side of the bed, emerging from the glare as if sculpted from it. They were just as the stories said, and a thousand times worse. Impossibly thin limbs, skin the colour and texture of wet, grey clay. Swollen, hairless heads were dominated by eyes: polished black almonds of absolute emptiness, pits that drank the light and offered nothing back. She saw her own terror reflected there, a tiny, wide-eyed doll stretched and distorted on the curved, black surface.

A pressure built inside her skull, a smooth, oily intrusion into her thoughts. A smothering sensation of absolute calm was poured into her mind, thick and suffocating, trying to drown the frantic screaming of her own terror.

Be calm.

The instruction was a violation. It was an attempt to overwrite her, to deny her own fear.

Fuck calm.

The thought was pure, unadulterated rage. A spark in the leaden prison of her body. She focused on it, on the searing, white-hot fury. She gathered it all up, every last shred of defiance, and threw it at her left hand. It twitched. A spasming, agonising jolt of life. It rose from the mattress, slow and heavy, as if moving through tar. One of the figures reached for her arm with three long, delicate fingers.

She slapped it.

The contact was the dull, solid thud of striking cold marble. The creature didn't flinch. Its great head turned with an unnervingly fluid motion to look at her. It tilted its head, a slow, deliberate gesture that was not inquisitive, but mimicked the shape of consideration, a dispassionate appraisal of a malfunctioning specimen.

A single, perfect point of white-hot agony erupted in her temple, as if a nail had been driven straight into her skull. Her defiance vanished, incinerated. The connection to her body was severed. Her eyes rolled back, and the world dissolved into blackness.

---

She returned to awareness with a jarring snap. The memory of her bedroom was a distant, faded photograph. She was here.

Here was a room with no corners. The walls, floor, and ceiling were a seamless curve of pale, luminous material, emitting that same cold, shadowless light. It smelled of ozone and sterility, a smell so clean it felt sharp in her nostrils. But it was laced with something else, a faint, acrid trace of sulphur, like the ghost of a burnt-out circuit. It was the scent of power, trying and failing to scrub away a deeper, sickly-sweet perfume: the metallic tang of old blood. She was laid flat on her back, naked, on a table of metal so cold it burned her skin. The chill of it seeped into her, a deep and invasive cold.

They were with her. The two Greys moved around the table with a silent, insect-like purpose. Their sticky, cold fingers pressed into her skin, palpating her abdomen, their touch pressing deep as they catalogued her organs with an unnerving accuracy. They bent her joints to their limits, testing the mechanics of her flesh. One held her head, its fingers cool and firm on her jaw. For a brief, horrifying second, the pressure from its thumb at her temple felt almost…soothing. A gesture of counterfeit comfort that was more obscene than any pain. It forced her to look up as the other parted her legs. Her muscles were slack, obedient to their will.

Something glided into her peripheral vision. A segmented metallic arm, branching out from the wall, moving with a silent, oily grace. At its tip was a cluster of lenses, like the compound eye of a fly, and beneath it, the glint of something thin and sharp. The contraption lowered itself, positioning itself between her open thighs.

She felt the cold, metallic pressure against her flesh. A slick, wet sound echoed in the silent room as it pushed its way inside. It was a profound, absolute violation. She could feel it bury itself deep within her, a hard, invasive presence. It burrowed, squirmed, and then stopped.

A tiny, cold pulse, deep inside her. A clinical, mechanical click.

Like a seed being planted.

A chemical fire ignited inside her. It began as a pinpoint of searing heat, then blossomed, a web of agony spreading through her womb, along nerve endings she never knew she had. A furious, alien growth began, an acceleration that defied all biology.

Her paralysis held her fast, a spectator to her own desecration. She watched, horrified, the skin of her abdomen begin to shift. A tremor, then a distinct roiling motion under the surface, as if a bag of snakes were waking up inside her. A grinding pressure began to build against her spine, forcing the arch of her back to bend and strain. Her ribs felt like they were being pushed apart, the cartilage groaning in protest. She couldn't draw a full breath; her lungs were being crushed upwards into her throat.

Her eyes were the only part of her that still obeyed. She strained them to their limits, the muscles burning at the back of their sockets as she dragged her gaze from one captor to the other. She searched their blank, black faces for a flaw, a twitch, a flicker of anything other than this placid observation.

They gave her nothing. They remained impossibly still, until one tilted its huge, grey head a fraction of an inch to the left. The movement was not inquisitive or bird-like; it was the slow, frictionless motion of a lens adjusting its focus. A dispassionate recalibration to get a better view of the specimen writhing on the table.

The skin over her belly grew taut, shining with a sick luminescence under the cold blue light. It was stretched to an impossible, paper-thin transparency, burning as if every cell was being individually torn from its neighbour. Dark blue veins surfaced, branching out like lightning from the epicentre of the growth, thick and corded. This was a construction, using her as scaffolding and fuel. Every passing second was an hour of gestation, a week, a month; she could feel the furious division of cells, the knitting of bone and sinew at a speed that felt like a biological blasphemy. The process was a biological scream, and she was the one screaming it, silently, into the prison of her own skull. The immense pressure forced choked whimpers and low, guttural groans from her throat, the only sounds her crushed lungs could make.

The strain built to an unbearable, splitting crescendo. She could feel the very fibres of her muscles begin to fray, the skin stretching past tissue-paper thinness, a torment so absolute it passed beyond mere pain. Her mind had no name for this sensation; it was a biological signal so loud it became a silence, a white-hot void where her consciousness flickered and threatened to go out.

And in that moment of terrible, sensory overload, her body finally gave way.

A thin, red line appeared on her belly, a tear, weeping blood. It widened. A wet, ripping sound echoed in the sterile room, a sound followed by the sickening, final pop of separating muscle.

The creature began to harvest itself.

A thin, slick limb pushed its way through the tear. Then another. It unfolded itself as it emerged from her ruined flesh and lay twitching on her abdomen, glistening with a slick coat of her blood. It was vaguely, horribly human. A sparse down of soft, white hair clung to its overlarge scalp, matted dark with clots of her blood. Its head lifted, slick and trembling, and its eyes opened.

They were grey. Not the bottomless black of its creators, but a flat, slate grey, and far too large for its tiny face. The grey eyes locked onto hers. A moment of recognition passed between them. The creation and its ruined vessel.

One of the Greys stepped forward. Its movements were economical and swift. With delicate, three-fingered hands, it severed a glistening cord that still connected the creature to her depths. It then lifted the thing, cradling the slick, twitching form with a delicacy that was a profound insult, a pantomime of reverence.

The sudden absence was a new kind of agony. The crushing pressure was replaced by a gaping, cavernous emptiness. And in that void, a terrible, illogical grief began to tear at her. It was a monster, born of her desecration, the cause of her ruin. And it was hers. The only thing in this sterile hell that was a part of her. A silent scream of loss echoed in the hollow space where it had been, more painful than any physical tear. They had taken it. Her purpose was served.

Only then did the final command come.

Sleep.

The telepathic pressure flooded her mind, a merciful anaesthetic. Her terror began to dull, the edges smoothed away, and with it, the raw, impossible grief. Her eyelids grew heavy, and the world finally, finally went black.

---

She woke in her bed.

Sunlight, thick with dust motes, streamed through the window. Birds were singing. The silence was normal, peaceful. She sat up, her body aching with a deep, phantom soreness. A hollow feeling lingered in her gut. Just a dream, she thought, relief washing over her. The most vivid, horrific nightmare of her life.

A dull, low cramp pulled at her abdomen, an echo of a wound that wasn't there. She pushed back the duvet to look.

A single, perfect drop of blood blossomed on the white sheet.

This is a rework and profound edit of a short story I wrote eight years ago. Paid subscribers will see the original and my thought process through the re-edit.