The road winds down the twilight fields like veins, corn, wheat like golden-white flesh, baked in the sun that sets over the frozen ground.

My car shot down the road. I was going faster than I should have, but no one else was on the road, and I didn’t want to get to the farm after dark.

My great-uncle was an odd man; I suppose it suited him to have a bizarre death. He was found dead in his beloved farmhouse, roots growing through his body and brain. He left me the farm when he died. Me. The farmhouse. He left me the farmhouse.

Whether cruel sarcasm or complete ignorance I couldn’t know. I thought he knew I hated that farmhouse. I thought I made it clear enough. 

I remember dark nights at that farmhouse—dark, frightening nights. My parents, leaving me with great uncle Milton because they were busy with work or hating each other. The days were fine enough, working on the fields or maybe staying inside if it was raining hard enough. But the nights, the nights are what got me. In the farmhouse, any horror seemed possible to me. In the dark, any monster could find me. 

I stop the car and get out. The ground is cold, and hard. Firm. winter was far away, but spring had not been kind to the small farm. The plants still grew well enough, but mud and frozen dirt had become the farmhouse’s end. The building was slowly, slowly sinking into the muddy brown abyss.

I approach the building. Fences and pens lined the path. Empty. No animals in sight. I walk instead towards one of the pens. I wish I hadn’t.

Dead. Every single one of them, as far as I could look. Bloody, frozen corpses of pigs and goats and things he couldn’t identify. I come up to the last pen. This one has an alive animal. A small, bloodstained white lamb. A white lamb, feasting on the corpses.

Sweat beads down me and turns to cold quicker than I can think. It wasn’t that unreasonable to think an animal, hungry and left alone, would eat anything it needed to survive. Even if that meant other animals. I walk back to the farmhouse and decided to leave the lamb alone. 

Exhausted, I drop my bags down in the dark, empty house. I check the living room. Small, with a dusty couch and an old, boxy tv. I need some sleep.

Strange things swim around in the darkness of my dreams, and I hear strange sounds I can never remember. I force myself out of bed. I don’t know what time it is and I don’t care. I get up, put on shoes, and slowly I walk downstairs, treading the creaking wood, to see what the noise was.

A lamb, small and white and stained with blood, stood in the living room, silently, watching me. I decided not to try and move it. I had decided that the lamb could do as it pleased, so long as it came nowhere near me. The lamb walked up to me.

“Well hello there,” I spoke in a friendly voice. I don’t know why. Maybe I was scared of it. The lamb sat down on my feet. 

“How did you get in here?” The lamb turned over, lying on its back and revealing its bulging belly. I looked. Years of looking after Uncle Milton’s animals meant I knew what was going on. 

The lamb was pregnant. 

Months blurred by as I slowly came to accept my surroundings. Every day, I get up, I make breakfast, the lamb that had made itself my pet would slowly get bigger and bigger, and I would do nothing about it. I would watch as it began to dismember and eat the corpses that never rotted and never ran out, and I would let it. It would go behind the barn and make strange, horrible sounds, and I would ignore it and let it do its business. 

I ran out into the field one day. I’m sure I had a reason at some point, but by the time I was out there, I had forgotten it. Plants, green and black and pink and blue, are wrapped around my boots. I can’t remember the last time I wanted to move.

I wake up again, but I had no reason to. My dreams were empty, undisturbing. I go back to sleep.

My dreams are stained with green blood and red plants, a great, beating, buzzing core of yellow and pink and warmth. 

And in those dreams, I stand there, waiting. Surrounded by the gentle warmth of those massive, impossible shapes. I can hear them talking to me, even louder now, though I still cannot remember what they say.

The lamb, I think, is due soon.

I’m going to kill it. The lamb. Somehow, I can tell, it needs to die. There’s an ax in the shed outside, and that’ll have to do it. I need to kill it. I need to kill it. I need to kill it.

I bash it’s head in-

Need to kill it, need to kill it

Ax in it’s back-

Need to kill it, need to kill it

Horns on the ground, smashed to a pulp-

Need to kill it-

Covered in blood-

I NEED TO KILL IT

And then I always wake up, and it’s always a dream. 

I’m not going to kill it. I can’t. It’s going to fight me, I know it will. It’s going to fight me, and I know that it’ll win. I can imagine teeth tearing into me, claws-

The dreams are even louder now, but the night is quiet. When I wake up, it is still dark. I go downstairs, or I try to. A strange growth has spread across the inside of the bedroom door. I guess I’ll leave through the window tomorrow. 

The lamb gave birth yesterday. I didn’t help deliver it, but I know it did. The noises it made behind the barn were accompanied by a screaming silence that told me there was another, but I never saw it. Soon I started avoiding parts of the house. Something told me that I wouldn’t need them anymore. They were the lambs now, and I had to live with that.

I want to see the baby. I need to, more to prove something then because I want to. I want to prove… What do I want to prove? That it’s a lamb? I have a feeling it isn’t. But the lamb was nowhere to be found, nor any baby lamb. 

It seemed so logical to me that the child would be a monster. Of course it wasn’t going to be a lamb. Of course it was going to kill me. 

But when I sleep, I see it clearly. The lamb was now in my dreams, and I could not leave the bedroom.

I wake up with a start. Again. I look around the room. Empty. I curse and go back to sleep.

In my dreams, I’m in the pens. It’s cold now, very cold, not warm. The chill bites at me as I try to put my hands in my pockets, except I don’t have pockets. Laughing, I open a hole in my skin, and put my hands in there. It’s very warm now, and my hands stop too much of the blood from getting out.

In my dreams, I’m alone. Alone in a massive pen. Maybe it was a pig pen, or for the chickens or the cows. But it’s massive, and I’m alone. Alone with the corpses of dead animals, all around me. And in the center of all of this, the lamb, feasting.

And behind it, something looms. Something large, obscured and growling. Something monstrous. 

I feel a quick, sharp pain. I open my eyes and I’m standing behind the barn. It’s the middle of the night and I can barely see. I make out a form behind me. The lamb. The goddamn lamb again. Just that goddamn lamb.

The lamb isn’t moving. It’s just lying there, and I figure it must be sleeping. I approach it, slowly. It doesn’t move.

I kick it slightly. I don’t feel anything. I look closer and I gasp.

After I finish getting sick on the other side of the barn, I walk back to examine the corpse. Just bones. Just a dead lamb skeleton.

I kick the bones. Screw the lamb. Screw the goddamn demon lamb. Whatever the hell it was, I’m glad it’s dead. 

At least, I hope it’s dead.

I feel my hands shaking wildly. I look closer and I see that every part of me is trembling, uncontrolled and shaking crazily. I can barely think straight. Blood beats in my brain and I can barely think and SCREW THE GODDAMN LAMB!

I think it started with my fingers. One day I just looked at my fingers and they were wrong. Like, really wrong. Crooked and twisted. It hurts to touch things now.

Well, my fingers are better now, if you could call them that. 

Hooves, I guess would be the better word. Big, bony hooves. My feet, too, I think. I don’t know for sure. I’m too scared to take off my shoes.

You know what it’s like to have horns? Of course not. You don’t have horns.

Good for you.

I can’t see anymore. I’m honestly glad I can’t. I’m afraid of what I would see if I could.

And my dreams… I don’t have those anymore. Or maybe I’m dreaming when I’m awake. Nevertheless, I see shadows, warm and welcoming. Pulpy and odd, looking at me with not a single eye. 

I can feel motion in my mouth now. Something is changing there as well. I can only hope the farm disappears with me. That in time it will sink into the mud, stagnate and crumble under the wait of the cold earth. The dark earth. The deep, waiting maws of the ground.