The Brood

The cellar was cold, and damp, and it was obvious from the long cobwebs reflecting the light of his torch that no-one had visited this place for years. The old wooden staircase creaked beneath his feet as he gingerly made his way down. The rotten last step suddenly gave way under his weight, and he fell forwards, tumbling into the blackness and landing, not onto a hard surface as he was expecting in that fleeting moment, but into a softer layer which he quickly realised was a thick, sticky layer of slime which clung to him like glue. Disgusted, he attempted to make sense of his surroundings in the gloom. Out of the corner of one eye he saw a glow - a red, pulsating glow close to the back wall of the cellar. Was that where those noises had been coming from for the past few weeks? Crawling through the gloom, with the slime stinging his exposed skin and a foul stench making his breathing laboured, he reached an old storage chest. He gathered himself, his heart thumping hard. Come on, pull yourself together. It's probably nothing.
She had been awakened by the noise, and now the light. She let her feelers gently stroke her offspring, safe in their dark, viscous lattice. They responded to the stimulus by writhing and emitting a piercingly high -pitched call. Soon it will be time. She extended to her full height and silently eased herself up the narrow gap between the brick pillar and the stout oak beam. Who or what was this intruder? How dare it disturb her babies!
The sight that met his eyes caused him to take a gasp of the thin, noxious air. He watched for several seconds, his gaze transfixed on the dark indigo honeycomb, the new life within pulsing, twisting and turning like red, glowing embers. Startled by a noise above him he glanced up. The last thing he knew was a great darkness descending upon him, and at the centre of that darkness, spiralling rows of pointed teeth, dripping, and glinting in the menacing glow of the brood......


I know, I know, it's Pancake Tuesday, not Halloween, but I wanted to take my little experiment of yesterday a bit further. This time I used a syringe to inject red food colouring into the deeper layer of bubbles and then applied blue colouring to the topmost ones, and presto! a heaving mass of aliens ready to unleash havoc on unsuspecting Earth!