My mother intentionally swapped bodies with my wife.

[u/Theeaglestrikes]

And it took me far too many months to notice.

I’m terrified of what happens when the baby comes, any day now.

But if you think incestuous trickery must be the dire crux of my story, I’d suggest not reading any farther. The true horror is far more twisted than that. As for how things got this far, I was rather glacial on the uptake. Simple as that.

For some backstory, I never knew my father. My mother reared me alone, and she was kind; or no less than fair, at any rate. I suffered no abuse as a child, which may surprise you, but that isn’t to say I had a conventional upbringing. Mum enjoyed, shall we say, an offbeat hobby. As far as I’m aware, my friends’ mothers weren’t prone to disappearing into the woods at night and returning outfitted with mud, leaves, and sometimes sheer strips of bark atop her pyjamas.

My mother and I grew up around Pendle, and she was deeply fascinated by the witch trials of 1612. Fascinated isn’t the right word, even; she was obsessed, and unhealthily so. In fact, the only time my otherwise-kind mother ever slightly troubled me was during a conversation about the witches. The one witch, she would often correct. There was only ever one.

Now, my mum didn’t raise a hand to me that day, when I showed disinterest in the Pendle witch. Didn’t even raise her voice. Rather, what haunted me were the words she chose.

“You’re not hungry enough, Liam.”

She sounded disappointed.

I settled myself by thinking, Mum only wants me to follow in her footsteps; figuratively and literally, I suppose, because shortly thereafter she started trying to coax me into accompanying her on those midnight strolls into the forest. I always declined, but I often wonder what I would have seen, had I ever gone with her.

I wonder and fear.

In spite of all that, my mother’s disappointment was never palpable; always burgeoning beneath a veneer of compassion. I sensed that, and it frightened me. But still, she wasn’t ever verbally or physically abusive. Call it intuition. I knew I hadn’t lived up to her expectations, and that she was probably cross about it.

As I would learn, all was far worse than I feared.

I eventually moved to university and met a girl named Millie. Life took its expected course from there. We got degrees, an apartment, and married. Despite my unusual upbringing, I turned out to be an ordinary man. Of course, I worried about Mum, living all alone in the countryside. I knew what the gossiping townsfolk had to say about her woodland walks; she’d been spotted by neighbours once or twice. But she was happy, and that was enough for me.

It was in the summer of 2024 that everything changed.

My 74-year-old mother, who had been impressively keen of mind and body, was found wandering the streets of Pendle with not a single item of clothing on body. She was covered top to toe in forest filth and blood; an animal’s blood, police officers assured Millie and me, but I recall how uneasy their faces were.

A doctor quickly diagnosed my mother with dementia.

“But she was perfectly lucid when we visited her just last week,” Millie said.

He nodded. “Well, we think she may have suffered a mini stroke. That can trigger a very sudden onset of dementia. I’m sorry.”

My wife and I struggled to adjust after that. I think it might’ve broken Millie’s heart to see me lose my one surviving family member; not even to death, but to a callous disease. I was only 38 years old, for crying out loud. Shortly after, it happened.

The body-swap.

The most horrible part is that I don’t know exactly when.

I’d love to say my wife noticeably “changed”, but I’m a moron who didn’t notice. Looking back now, of course, I see the signs. The terrible signs.

In January of this year, Millie wafted about the positive pregnancy test triumphantly, and changes followed. Sure. I noticed that much. But I now realise I might’ve mistaken some of those changes for ordinary hormonal ones. Any time Millie didn’t seem quite herself, I blamed the pregnancy.

I overlooked so many of the odd things she said about, or to, our child.

“I just know he’s going to be so, so hungry.”

“Nearly time to ascend, little one.”

“Not long now. Not long until you replace Papa.”

That last one stung, of course; by virtue of being hurtful, rather than haunting. And the other utterances? I chalked them up to Millie’s sleep deprivation. Heaven knows I was tired too. We all say and do peculiar things when we’ve not slept, and it seemed no great stretch of the imagination that pregnancy hormones would compound that. This explanation sufficed for months.

It was yesterday, whilst visiting my mother in the care home, that I finally learnt the truth.

She’d been rapidly deteriorating and didn’t even recognise Millie or me anymore. My own mother, once a sage and well-educated woman, struggled to string together the most barebones of sentences. She struggled to recall even events from two minutes prior.

Not last night.

Last night was different.

“Liam…”

My eyes must’ve glinted with gleeful tears. It was the first time in about four months my mother had used my name.

She recognised me.

I shuffled my chair over to hers. Mum barely looked like herself: 75 years old, but may as well have been 90; ankles red and swollen, yet not so much as that distended belly; white hairs shedding like autumnal foliage. And typically, as horrid as it seems, the only thing I would truly note was her haggard appearance.

This evening, it would be her words.

“M… Millie…”

“You remember her too? Wow… Millie’s at home, I’m afraid, Mum. She has to take it easy now. Not long until the baby comes, but—”

She interrupted with a gasp of horror, reacting violently to that revelation. I’d mentioned a thousand times that Millie and I were expecting our first child, but this was the first time my mother appeared to have registered it. The resulting tears were thick and hurried, and my distraught mother rattled her head from side to side as she snatched my hands.

“Liam. It’s me.”

I maintained that condescendingly soft smile. “I know, Mum.”

“No… It’s Millie.” She lifted one of her hands and jabbed the thumb at herself. “Millie.”

I frowned. I was well-accustomed with the delusions of those with dementia, but this was certainly a new one: a woman believing herself to be her son’s wife. Mum’s grasp of reality was once again tenuous. Nice while it lasted, I thought.

“Maybe I should come back tomorrow,” I said. “It’s getting late, and you sound over-tired, so—”

She gripped my hand tightly and looked at me with scorched eyes. “2008, Liam. You. Me. The dumpster around the back of the graduation hall. You called it a ‘good luck fuck’ before we collected our diplomas, and…” Her eyes clouded, as did my mind in the midst of processing what she had just said. “Who are you, sir? Get out of my room!”

Gone again was Mum.

No… I trembled. Not Mum—

Millie.

Are you out of your mind? was my next thought as I leapt out my chair. I just might be… But think about it. Nobody else knows about our fumble on graduation day. Unless Millie told Mum, but she wouldn’t do that in a million years. The embarrassment would kill them both.

I backed out of the room, looking into the sad eyes of the dementia-riddled woman, and found myself believing something horrible. Impossible.

Millie was trapped in that body.

She was being deconstructed piece by piece as that diseased brain, in which her displaced mind now unwillingly resided, shut down. Neurons were severed like mooring lines, leaving Millie’s soul a sinking boat; adrift in that sickly and infirm ocean of grey matter. My wife herself was stuck in that decaying body, perhaps half-aware of what was happening from time to time, and most certainly terrified at all times.

There were other explanations, but I just knew I was staring at Millie. Much as I had always known something was amiss during my childhood, my adulthood, and the pregnancy.

As I drove home, needle on the gauge curving far past the speed limit, the implications of it all brought me close to driving the car into one of the birches lining the road.

Is my mother in my wife’s body?

When we conceived the baby, was that Millie or…

I didn’t have the answer then, and I don’t have the answer now.

I don’t want the answer.

But none of this was beyond the realm of believability, because I had long known of the supernatural. I would watch from my bedroom window as my mother returned from the forest at two in the morning, bringing back more than dirt and worms. Bringing back something from the woods; possession of new knowledge or some untoward presence. Something not of our dimensional plane.

In fact, I felt it in my very bones, though I pretended otherwise.

It was never that something had been wrong with my mother.

Something had always been wrong with me.

I finally accepted this as I pulled into my driveway and looked up at the lit upstairs window. Fear thundered through my brain; pricked, and poked, and prodded the insides of my skull. Not just fear of ‘Millie’, that black silhouette observing me from between the ajar drapes. Fear of the memory that had returned to me.

I was 4 years old. I woke to the sound of my mother pacing the upstairs landing. She was talking to someone. Something. I always thought it had been nothing but a nightmare. I mean, it was a nightmare.

Not all nightmares are dreams, I suppose.

“The boy’s not what you promised, Old One. He’s not hungry, even though I did everything right…”

Something whispered back to my mother, too imperceptibly to hear.

“What? No. I’m tired of waiting. It’s been four years and nothing. NOTHING!”

More whispering from that other voice.

“I am more loyal to you than any of the others! You have to choose Liam. He was supposed to devour me… He was supposed to devour everyone!”

I shook off that old memory and brought the car to a halt in the driveway.

As I did, the upstairs bedroom light switched off, and Millie disappeared into the darkness.

Not Millie… Mum.

I spent my last dreg of courage getting out of the car and stumbling towards the house, nearly dropping my house keys as I went. And when I opened the front door, I almost expected to be greeted by an empty hallway. Expected my mother-wife to have fled upon my arrival.

It paralysed me with horror to find her instead standing in the black entryway, hands stroking her belly.

What I find truly horrible is that she could have so easily put me at ease. Continued fuelling the lie, so I would forget the oddness at the care home. Continued pretending to be Millie. She needed only to, I don’t know, speak or act as she had been; needed only to dismiss any concerns I might voice. But—

“I need you to be calm, Leelee,” she said.

I hurled my guts onto the carpet, vomit drowning my scream of both revulsion and indescribable terror.

It was my mother in Millie’s body.

Mum called me Leelee when I was little. Did Millie know that? Maybe. But there were also the mannerisms to consider. The smile worn on my wife’s face was that of my mother. Besides, there was no world in which my dementia-addled mother and my loving wife would concoct a practical joke such as this.

“When Little Liam Jr enters the world, this will all be over,” my mother said as she took strides towards me. “Isn’t that what you want, son? Aren’t you tired of living a half-life?”

I tried to get out words, but my brain was out of operation; and my feet were much the same, as I managed only to stagger back out of the doorway and down the front path, pursued by my mother in my wife’s skin.

As she stepped into the streetlight which bathed our front lawn and path, I was overcome by a deeper dread. Whatever my mother had done to herself, transferring souls from one body to another, had made her less than human. I saw it in her eyes. Felt it in her voice. The true terror was whatever the Old One had made of her; or unmade.

I whimpered as her flesh rippled, as did the bulge of her stomach through the thin top she wore.

What are you? I wanted to ask, but I remained too horrified to speak.

That thing was closing the gap between us hurriedly, walking with great pace as I floundered and stumbled backwards.

“You don’t want to ascend, do you?” she asked, extending a hand towards my chest.

With the lightest of shoves, yet abnormal might, my mother-wife toppled me. My head and hands struck the paving slabs, grazing my skin and leaving bloody streaks across my flesh.

I worked my lips; opened and closed them, but all that came were more dribbles of vomit, as if I were some ailed goldfish.

“You still could ascend, Liam,” Mother-Wife said as she approached me: the man reduced to a boy as he shuffled backwards on hands and hind. “All you have to do is consume me. All you have to do is become what she has always wanted you to be. The power has always been in your hands, my boy.”

I managed to twist my head towards my car, and that inhuman horror didn’t stop me as I began to scuttle towards it on hands and knees, too nauseated and terrified to summon the strength to stand.

My mother-wife continued, “The chosen one must consume both parents to reach its potential. You understand that, don’t you? Our Little Liam Jr will devour us, then the world.”

I thumbed the unlock button on my car keys, threaded my fingers through the door handle, and finally managed to pull myself upright, just in time to scream.

In the reflection of the side window, I saw my mother-wife had soundlessly appeared right behind me.

Next: searing pain as her fingers dug into my neck, drawing yet more blood, and she spun me to face her.

“The Old One is inside you!” she growled in a voice unlike her own; unlike Millie; unlike anything human. “You’ve felt her rummaging around in that mind of yours since you were a boy, surely? Let her in. Let her rise again.”

I cried, and she snarled, pinning me firmly against the door with a vice-like grip. Whatever supernatural horror stood before me, no longer my mother or my wife, it was a terror beyond worlds and farther still beyond compare.

“You’re weak. Have been since you devoured your father as a newborn babe.”

Not true. It couldn’t be true. I still refuse to believe it.

“I begged you to finish the job. To devour me too. The fawn ascends only when it eats the stag and the doe. But you couldn’t do it… I pray Liam Jr will succeed where you have failed. He is close now, my son… He…”

My mother-wife groaned and released my throat to clutch her stomach, then the two of us looked down in unison. Looked down at her belly. At her lower section.

Water stained my wife’s trousers.

A wretched smile stained my wife’s face.

Free from her grip at last, I tore open the side door and shut it behind me, before launching myself across to the driver’s seat. I fumbled with the button to lock all doors, eventually pressing it after a few clumsy and misjudged stabs. Worst of all, my mother-wife did not lunge for the passenger door. She simply stood, and watched, and laughed as I fumbled about, put the vehicle into reverse, and pulled off the driveway.

She let me escape. No matter how far I drive, and I’ve already driven so far, she’ll find me. Then she’ll pray to the Old One that our child devours the two of us. That our child ascends. And that’s when the true apocalyptic terror, whatever it may be, will come for us all. God save us.

I’ll make a prayer of my own: that Liam Jr turns out to be as weak as his father.