Bogleech.com's 2015 Horror Write-off:

" Eggs "

Submitted by Ethan Edelen

            The night began like any other, with me sitting in front of my computer screen after midnight, poring over my work. My line of work was a demanding one, and so I was expected to stay up until very early in the morning. My computer was located in the room in my house that I had turned into my office. It was a small room, located at the end of a hallway in my house that connected to the living room, kitchen, stairs, and, across from my office, a bathroom. My office was also messy, with papers scattered around, and I sat in the center of it at my desk, racking my brain to solve a problem that had been plaguing my colleagues for weeks. My head ached, the need to sleep aggravating an ever growing headache.

            It wasn't until I started to brainstorm about the problem in silence that I began to hear a noise: a shuffling sound that seemed to be coming from the kitchen. At first, I simply dismissed the sound as my son getting a drink, but then a loud crack rang out from the kitchen and the kitchen's light abruptly turned on, a sliver of light creeping into my office. I got up, and rushed into the kitchen, afraid that my wife or son had fallen and broken something. However, when I entered the kitchen it was empty, not a person in sight.

            I walked around my empty kitchen, look at my stove, refrigerator, and countertop, trying to see if something was out of place. I even bent down to look at the checkerboard patterned floor to see if food had fallen onto it. Nothing was out of place, except for one thing: when I got back up I noticed that there was an egg sitting on the granite countertop in the center of the kitchen. It had not been there before, which confused me. "Did someone sneak up on me?" I wondered aloud. I picked the egg up, and, upon discovering it had no peculiarities, I turned it over.

            A wave of fear swept over me as I gazed down upon the human face that grew out of the side of the eggshell, the same white color as the thing it jutted out of. The face was screaming, eyes shut, mouth twisted open in agony, but no sound came from its maw. Surprised, I dropped the strange egg, it then shattered into little pieces on the floor, and its yolk spilled out. Immediately, a massive wave of sound washed over me, which knocked me to the floor. Screaming rang out through the entire house, gradually decreasing in volume until it ebbed away, leaving me dazed and confused on the floor.

            I got up slowly, my tired mind still processing the impossible events that just happened, and my headache intensified, interrupting my thinking. I decided that I was starting to hallucinate from sleep deprivation, and that what I had just seen and heard wasn't real. I looked down at the floor, and it was clean, not a yolk in sight. Flicking the light off, I started to climb the started to climb the stairs to the second floor, to my waiting bedroom. I climbed into my bed, pulling covers over my body, too tired to undress. I rolled over, looking at the shape of my wife under the covers.

            Somehow the shape didn't seem right in the darkness. I grabbed the covers and pulled them off, revealing a massive human-sized egg under the covers where my wife should be. Gasping, I fell out of bed, and backed away from the egg, towards the doorway. I ran out of my bedroom and towards my son's room. I rounded the corner to his room and stopped dead in my tracks. Blocking the way to my son's room was an egg the same height as me. It had white human legs and the front of its shell was cracked away, exposing the egg's insides.

            Inside I could see flesh; bright-red unhealthy flesh sizzled and bubbled like it was being cooked, while a multitude of eyes that covered the flesh blinked sporadically. One suddenly popped, dripping liquid down the thing's face. I turned around and ran, back down the stairs, past the kitchen, where eggs spilled off all the countertops onto the floor, through the living room, where man-sized eggs ay in each chair, and out the door. I ran across my lawn down my driveway onto the road, where I ran, ran, and ran, until my feet threw themselves out from underneath me, and the road rushed up at me and everything went blank.
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            I woke up inside a round, cramped space with something warm and wet pressing against my face. I opened my eyes to see an eye staring at me, sizzling flesh pressing against my face and body, growing in size. I pressed my back against the wall of the space and felt the cold, white eggshell. I opened my mouth to scream, and baking red flesh, covered in watering, bulging eyes flowed into my mouth.



-The End-