Tales from the Boer’s Head

Written by P.H. Boer

Part I: The Stirring

Eleanor Greene had always been a sound sleeper. Sixty-seven years of widowhood had taught her to respect the quiet, and her dreams, when they came, were thick things, woven of old love letters and dust-covered music boxes. On this particular night, as the wind played a lonely requiem against the loose shingles of her roof, she stirred only once: when the thing inside her began to move.

It was not gas. Not a muscle spasm. No twitch of nerve or hiccup of digestion. Eleanor knew her body. It had been her solitary temple for nearly nine decades. She knew its sounds and its silences. But this, this was something other.

A squirm.

A flutter.

It was deep beneath the cavern of her ribs, nestled in the place where once, sixty years ago, her youngest daughter had stirred before crowning in blood and bliss.

But this… was wrong.

It tickled. Like fingers dragging lightly over the inside of her womb. Like laughter behind closed doors. It drew her from the safety of sleep and into the darkness of her room, where the old floral wallpaper curled at the corners and the radiator hissed like a serpent caught in prayer.

Eleanor did not move at first. She lay still, hands atop her quilt, listening to the ticking of the grandfather clock downstairs and the faint crinkling of her own skin as her breath caught in her chest. A hundred tiny creases folding in on themselves with each pulse of fear.

Then it pressed.

A small pressure. Curious. Testing. Like a child’s palm pressing against her from within. She gasped. A thin ribbon of sound. Not enough to wake the world, but enough to mark the change.

Her hands flew to her stomach. Cold. Paper-thin. Wrinkled and loose from time’s cruelty, but undeniably hers. And underneath…

A shift.

“God help me,” she whispered, but her voice lacked conviction. God had gone quiet in her life a long time ago. He had been packed away with Harold’s ashes and the baby clothes that no longer smelled of babies.

The pressure built. Slowly at first. As if the thing inside her knew the rhythms of gestation, and had no intention of being rushed. It grew like hunger. Like cancer. And with it came a heat, wet and raw and growing behind the navel.

She could feel her organs being rearranged.

The pain was sudden. Blunt at first, then sharp as the scream she tried to hold in.

Eleanor threw off the quilt. It landed in a pile like molted skin. The gown she wore was an old thing, thin flannel patterned with violets. She tore it open with hands she didn’t know were still capable of such strength.

And there they were.

Fingers.

Pressing against her from the inside. Five of them. Splayed like a lover’s hand reaching from beneath thin white flesh. The skin stretched taut, trembling with strain. The fingers curled, knuckles cracking audibly, and then pressed outward again.

She screamed.

It was not a scream of fear. Not at first. It was a sound of denial. A refusal. A rejection of the reality clawing its way into her world.

She clawed at herself. Dug her nails into the places where the fingers moved. Skin peeled. Blood spilled. But the fingers, they pressed harder.

Something was being born.

No… not born.

Unleashed.

The first tear was wet and quiet. A seam splitting from navel to breastbone. Eleanor felt it happen with agonizing clarity. The rupture of old flesh. The cool of the night air licking her insides. The stickiness of blood sliding down her sides and soaking into the mattress below.

Her eye’s blurred. Her mouth hung open in a silent scream.

Then the demon emerged.

Part II: The Birth

The thing’s head came first, splitting Eleanor open with the slow reverence of a priest parting the veil of the tabernacle. There was no hurry. No panic. The act had waited decades. Perhaps centuries.

It wore her as a chrysalis.

The scalp crowned, smooth and wet, but not with afterbirth. It was coated in something thick, black, and laced with glimmers, like oil slicked across the surface of still water. The blood poured freely now, soaking the mattress, dripping between floorboards, trailing across old hardwood polished by mourning feet and decades of forgotten grief.

Eleanor was still alive, though barely. Her eyes wide, pupils blown like two black suns eclipsed in horror. Her mouth worked soundlessly, lips forming prayers she’d long forgotten. She had bitten halfway through her tongue without realizing.

The head pushed farther through, revealing no hair, no ears, and no fontanelle, just smoothness. An inhuman dome that pulsed like a heart, as though it contained stars instead of thought. A slit where the eyes should have been began to widen, not with sight, but depth. Twin voids that went on and on.

Black holes.

She could feel them, even before they opened. Their gaze was not visual, it was existential. They looked not at her body, but through her, into her. Every memory, every shame, every secret she’d ever whispered into her pillow or buried in a coffee tin in the attic.

The creature inhaled.

There was no sound. No mouth yet. But Eleanor felt the draw, like her soul was a loose page sucked into a furnace.

And then…

The shoulders. Wide, jointed wrong, tearing at the edges of her body. Her ribcage cracked, vertebrae unhooked themselves with tiny organic snaps. The scent of iron and old milk filled the room. A sickly sweetness. The air grew thick, like soup, dense with meat and loss.

Blood was everywhere now.

The sheets were sloshing. The walls wept it in long rivulets. Even the cross above her bed, left there more from superstition than faith, tilted in its nail and finally fell, as if unwilling to watch.

She was still awake.

Somehow.

Still feeling.

The pain had moved beyond nerves. It was part of her now. It was her. She had become a membrane of agony stretched across the edges of a new world.

And the child-demon, whatever it was, kept coming.

Now the torso. Smooth, sexless, muscle like sculpted charcoal. Symbols etched into its skin like carvings into old gravestones. They moved when you looked at them. Shifted their shapes. No human alphabet could contain their meaning, but they stank of truth.

A name too sacred to speak.

Or too hungry.

Its hands emerged last. Bone-white, jointed too many times. Fingertips like claws, but delicate. Almost gentle, as if loath to ruin the host that had birthed it. One of them caressed Eleanor’s face.

She tried to scream again. This time the voice came, wet, choking, barely more than a gurgle. The sound of a dying woman drowning in the memory of her own blood.

But the thing did not kill her.

Not yet.

It stepped from her like a god from a flayed altar. Naked in a way that had nothing to do with skin, and everything to do with revelation. Its form was only vaguely human. A suggestion. It changed in the corner of her eye. Sometimes larger. Sometimes leaner. Always wrong.

And its eyes, those holes, locked onto hers.

Time stopped.

Literally. The grandfather clock downstairs froze mid-tick. The curtains refused to stir. Even the blood in the air hung still, defying gravity. Eleanor was pinned in this perfect moment, her body ruined, her mind fracturing, her breath a staccato whisper of its former rhythm.

It spoke, but not aloud.

It entered her.

A thousand thoughts not her own surged into her mind. Images of stars being born backwards. Choirs made of insects singing through the meat of the dead. The sound of her mother’s voice layered beneath screams she’d never uttered but always feared. She understood none of it, and yet all of it.

The being knelt beside her ruined form.

Its hand, still slick with her birthing, rested on her forehead. Not cruel. Not even cold.

Claiming.

Eleanor saw, then, what it was.

What she had carried all these years without knowing. It had not been conceived through sex, or sin, or even magic. It had always been in her. A larval god coiled in her womb like a seed in fallow earth.

She had loved. She had married. She had borne children of flesh and hope.

But this was different.

This was her true offspring.

She wept.

Not from the pain. That had numbed now. Distant. She cried because she recognized the face, not in detail, but in meaning. It was her mirror. A culmination. A betrayal.

And the demon, now fully born, smiled.

Not with lips. It had none.

But with a tilt of its head. A softness in its pose.

It touched her again.

And as her eyes closed, the world slowly resumed its motion.

The clock ticked. The cross on the floor sizzled in a puddle of blood. Outside, the wind shifted and the trees no longer whispered.

Eleanor Greene, mother of three, widow of Harold Greene, and keeper of a secret older than light…

…took her final breath.

Part III: The Afterbirth

The room had become a womb.

Thick with heat, congealed with blood, perfumed by ruptured organs and something older, something bitter and sweet, like sap harvested from the Tree of Knowledge and left to ferment in the belly of Hell. The walls were no longer wallpapered but veined, pulsing gently with the echoes of what had transpired. They inhaled her final breath and held it like a hymn.

Eleanor Greene’s body lay slack, opened from hip to throat in a blossom of ruin. Skin like parchment, soaked and torn. Bones protruded like the splinters of a sunken ship. Her eyes, once a faded hazel, were still open, staring up at the ceiling like they might yet catch one more glimpse of God, or judgment, or her own mother’s hands braiding her hair.

But there was no judgment here.

Only arrival.

The creature, slick with black ichor and ancient blood, stood beside her bed in silence. Its form had shifted again. It now bore the outline of Eleanor herself, taller, more idealized, but unmistakable. Her high cheekbones, her narrow shoulders, the small knotted scar on the collarbone where Harold had once kissed her beneath the stars.

But the eyes. Still void. Still bottomless.

The demon stepped away from the bed, and with each footfall the wood beneath it creaked not like timber, but like voices. Tiny, whispered sobs. Prayers half-spoken. The floor remembered things. And now it bore witness to something it could never forget.

A trail of steaming afterbirth hung from the creature’s feet like a bridal train of rot.

It approached the dresser.

With one elongated finger, it opened the top drawer and pulled out a stack of old photographs, sepia-stained moments from another time. Eleanor on her wedding day. Her first daughter swaddled in cotton and peace. A Christmas morning where Harold had dressed as Saint Nicholas and wept laughing into his whisky mug.

The creature did not look at them. But the photos curled inward, blackening at the edges, as if recognizing something in the air and choosing annihilation over remembrance.

It turned next to the mirror.

Old. Cracked. The silver backing flaking like skin. In its reflection, the creature’s form rippled. For a moment, it appeared as it truly was, no longer cloaked in borrowed flesh. Tall, limbless, serpentine and skeletal, with rows of teeth where ribs should be, and spines that moved independently of its movements. Eyes that blinked sideways. A tongue that ended in a hand.

Then, back to Eleanor’s form again.

Back to Mother.

It smiled at the mirror and the glass shattered, not from impact, but from understanding.

The house groaned. Not from age, but recognition. Every room had watched Eleanor for years. Heard her weep. Heard her laugh to herself on lonely nights. They had kept her secrets, treasured her presence. But this, this new thing, they did not know it. And they did not love it.

The thing left her room.

It did not open the door. It passed through it, like a shadow peeling off the wall and deciding it was time to become flesh again. As it moved down the hallway, the pictures on the walls began to distort. Eyes bled in the frames. Smiles melted into gaping maws. One photo, a picture of Eleanor and her eldest daughter at the Grand Canyon, burst into flame without sound or heat, curling to ash midair.

Downstairs, the clock resumed ticking. Only… backward.

Tick. Tock.

Tock. Tick.

The demon reached the front door and paused. For a breath. A heartbeat.

The night outside was cold and full of sleeping lives.

It stepped out onto the porch, barefoot and steaming. The wind pulled at its form, trying to tug it back into the airless dark that had once kept it hidden. But it would not go back. It was not meant to stay hidden any longer.

From beneath the porch, a raccoon hissed and fled.

The streetlamp across the way flickered and died.

The Greene house would not be noticed for days. Eleanor had no visitors anymore. No children who called. No neighbors curious enough to peek in. But when they did come, when the postman finally smelled the rot, or the meter reader stepped too close, they would find a room that had aged centuries in a week. They would find the shell of a woman who had given birth to something unholy.

And they would not find what had come out of her.

Because it was already moving.

It wore her face. Her voice.

It knocked on doors and smiled with her teeth. It told stories in her cadence. It touched children’s hair and complemented their mothers in a voice made of music and mourning.

It was not here to destroy the world.

Not yet.

It was here to understand it.

To rejoin it.

To study it like a sculptor studies clay before the carving.

After all, it had waited inside her for decades.

It could wait a little longer.

And as it walked barefoot into the night, trailing blood that vanished with each step…

…the stars above blinked once.

And watched.