Hunger

 The hunger began as a rhythmic tremor, a dull vibration against John’s ribs. By the third night, it had evolved—a low, wet grinding sound that seemed to emanate from the hollows of his intestines. It sounded less like digestion and more like a heavy stone being dragged across raw meat.

John sat in the velvet armchair of his ancestral study, the fire long extinguished, leaving the room in a shroud of suffocating, dust-moted gloom. He pressed his palms against his abdomen, trying to stifle the noise. The sound was deafening now, a guttural, wet churn that vibrated through his fingertips.

Gurgle. Snap. Squelch.

He gasped as a sharp, needle-like pain pierced his navel. He clutched his stomach, his knuckles turning white. The room felt cold—the kind of cold that smelled of wet earth and rot. He looked down at his midsection. His shirt was becoming heavy, darkening with a slow, rhythmic seepage.

He didn't scream. He couldn't. His throat felt clogged, as if something were crawling upward from his gut, filling his windpipe with the metallic tang of copper.

He ripped open his shirt. The skin of his stomach was undulating, pulsing in time with the wet, grinding growl. Then, the skin split. It didn't tear like fabric; it parted like a ripe fruit, wet and jagged.

There was no blood at first—only darkness.

John watched, paralyzed by a hypnotic, feverish horror, as a pale, translucent membrane pressed against the interior of his cavity. The sound grew louder, a cacophony of breaking cartilage and tearing muscle. He realized with a jolt of soul-shattering terror that the sound wasn't his stomach digesting food; it was something else using his body to hatch.

A long, chitinous finger, tipped with a claw that glistened with bile, pushed through the ruin of his abdominal wall. It hooked into the edge of his open skin, pulling. John slumped forward, his head lolling onto his chest, his vision blurring as his life force drained away.

He felt the wet, heavy weight of the thing as it finally breached the surface, dragging itself out of the cavern of his ribs. It was slick, pulsating, and bore a twisted, mocking resemblance to the anatomy it had just consumed.

John’s final sensation was the cold air hitting his exposed viscera, and the sight of his own pale hand resting on the floor, twitching in the dark. Beside it, the creature stood, its joints snapping into place with the same wet, grinding sound that had haunted his nights.

It turned its sightless head toward the doorway, waiting for the rest of the house to grow quiet. John, his breath hitching into a final, wet rattle, stared at his own shadow on the wall until the light in his eyes flickered out, leaving only the sound of something hungry, something newborn, and something entirely, irredeemably wrong.