Page 1 of House of Kallan
Tatum
For a facilitythat was barely two years old, it’d seen as much death as a graveyard. But these were violent, painful deaths. The terror and scars ran deep. I was confident that more than one ghost roamed the halls. Not a monstrous ghost, but an unsettled human spirit, still existing in their pain and untimely death.
Haven was a relatively new division within The Harem Project. We currently had a single 130-room building, hidden from as many eyes as possible and connected to the primary portals at the heart of The Harem Project—corporate, research, and the matching buildings all ran off the same halls.
I was thankful, honestly. When they asked me to be the director, I knew in my heart that this was my calling. I needed to be with these humans and try to help right the unforgivable wrongs done to them.
I supposed that’s my angelic calling.
I was brought in right after the first rescue of impregnated human females from a Silence facility just over two years ago. The things they birthed were almost tame compared to what we’ve been recovering recently. These werethe things of nightmares. Inhuman and strange; they were new monsters that we didn’t understand.
We’ve lost more women to the birthing of their monstrous babies than I’d care to admit. No matter how closely we monitored them if a child decided to claw or eat their way out, it was usually a sudden instinct on their part. By then, it was kinder to kill the woman outright than it was to let the newborn continue to tunnel its way out.
But not all births ended badly. Some were relatively easy, even easier than regular human births. That didn’t mean they were all well and good.
I knocked gently on the door and pushed it open. Lydia was a new mother; one who had a very easy birth. Basically, the baby was small and just kind of… slipped out. All rather cool and interesting until you looked at the child.
Lydia was curled up in her bed with her knees bent to her chest. There were dark circles under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept in months. It’s possible that she hadn’t. Poor woman had likely not slept since she was abducted.
We’d learned that the first few rescues that came to us had been raped and impregnated that way. And then the experiments to change the genetics of the fetuses were conducted in utero. Most of those babies were relatively “normal” as far as monsters go, if not slightly deformed from time to time.
It wasn’t until later, about fourteen months ago, that we learned that if the humans were raped, it was due to the monsters’ cruelty and not for the purpose of conception. That was done by implanting genetically mutated DNA.
The things that we were seeing now were morbid.
I touched Lydia’s hand and she startled, looking up at me. “How are you feeling today?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’m okay,” she whispered, keeping her voice low. But even that little sound roused the baby. He always responded to his mother’s voice.
“Have you taken him out?” I asked.
Lydia shook her head, her eyes widening in fear. To be terrified of your own infant must be a traumatic experience all on its own.
I crossed the room and pulled the cover off the wet bed that her infant was currently laying in. His shiny black eyes were almost alien. No whites. No color. All black and glossy. Instead of limbs, he had four tentacles. Instead of hair, he had tentacles. And on all of the suckers of his tentacles were little teeth. Yes, lots and lots of teeth on this one.
He was eight days old and had barely been taken out of his little wet bed. There was an inch or so of warm water, constantly filtered and kept at a very balmy temperature. Because we weren’t sure how much of an escape artist he was going to be, we kept a lid on the bed. Just in case.
“Hi, precious,” I cooed to the little one. He blinked up at me. When I reached in, his little arm tentacles reached for me. They wrapped around my wrists, the little suction cups just learning to hang on beyond what he innately did in reflex. I could feel all the little teeth. Right now, they tickled, but I would wager a bet it wouldn’t be long before they sharpened and became lethal.
I lay him on the padded changing table and wrapped him snugly in a blanket with a damp cloth inside. He wasn’t a species that existed, so we weren’t sure how much moisture he needed to survive. Until he was old enough to tell us what he needed, we were just going to have to work with him based on instincts.
The oldest child living in Haven was just about two. Now that he was beginning to truly learn about the world and himself, we had been working on getting a foster/mentor program in place so that these monstrous babies could be placed with monstrous families who were most like their kind to learn from in a safe environment.
When the mothers survived, they had the option to join the children. There was a time that no matter what we did, the mothers did not survive. It didn’t take us long to realize that they were basically kept as incubators for Silence. They werenever meant to survive. And the unlucky few that did were bred again.
Once the boy was swaddled, I picked him up and hugged him to my chest. If it weren’t for his strange eyes, being wrapped like this, you’d think he was a normal child. I pulled the chair from the side of the bed and brought it close to Lydia before sitting down.
She glanced over with wide eyes.
“You know, some mothers nurse their children for a very long time. That means the kids may start teething and accidentally bite. It’s the mother’s responsibility to teach them not to,” I said.
Lydia looked at me, biting her lip.
“There’s no difference here. They don’t know any better and they’re just learning their bodies.” I brushed my finger gently over the newborn’s face. “Did you name him?”
She shook her head.
We sat silently for a long time as I rocked the little one in my arms with Lydia watching. The fear in her never fully disappeared, but it did fade the longer I stayed there.
