“MOTHER” by Jon Allen – a Sci-Fi Horror For Mother’s Day #WeirdDarkness

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Listen to ““MOTHER” by Jon Allen – a Sci-Fi Horror For Mother’s Day #WeirdDarkness” on Spreaker.

IN THIS EPISODE: This is a special Mother’s Day episode with a creepy tale by author Jon Allen written specifically for the occasion!

SOURCES AND ESSENTIAL WEB LINKS…
“Mother” by Jon Allen: http://WriterJonAllen.com

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(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)

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“I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.” — John 12:46

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TRANSCRIPT:

DISCLAIMER: Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised.

INTRODUCTION=====

Mother never spoke, at least not from my earliest self awareness. I always felt her love though. Living amongst the scorpions and rattlers and javelinas on the boiling mountain sands of the Sonoran Desert, I understood this to be normal, the lack of words. Well, normal is a descriptor that is open to interpretation but from the age of three until my forties, the only living being I’d ever known that shared our apex status on the food chain was Mother. This isn’t ad hominem or exaggerating for effect. No other soul was around. Not once in my decades in the wild did I see another advanced living creature aside from Mother. Thus, this solitude was normal to me. It was all I knew life to be.

Mother never spoke but I did. We communicated nonverbally and that was all I needed to know that I was loved. I learned English from an old RCA radio that never seemed to run out of batteries. We never seemed to run out of anything. We never left our acre or our hut, itself molded from the deathly nature that blanketed us, yet the day’s needs would simply appear come dawn. I never questioned how the game that provided our meat was sourced, or where things like clothing or other basics derived. Again, I only knew what life had shown me and the vision never extended beyond our lonely wasteland. I belonged to Mother, and Mother provided.

Somehow.

SHOW OPEN=====

Welcome, Weirdos – I’m Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you’ll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained.

This is a special Mother’s Day episode with a creepy tale by author Jon Allen written specifically for the occasion!

If you’re new here, welcome to the show! While you’re listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, enter contests, to connect with me on social media, plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you’re struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.

Now.. bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness!

STORY: MOTHER=====

The hut was simple and in recent years I’ve learned that it was quite inhumane by modern standards but it provided what was needed. I didn’t understood that things like refrigeration or air conditioning or even a mirror, basically whatever the common accoutrement to daily life were, were in fact things that existed. They simply didn’t exist. It seems unbelievable to most but I never even saw my reflection until middle age. I did not know what I looked like for half of my life, but again, I assumed that this was standard and I trusted every facet of the realm that Mother created. We were all each other had or wanted.

Mother kept the hut clean and organized. A table and a makeshift bed held real estate on one side and the butchering area and mother’s chair, which looked out of a glassless window, filled the other side. Mother spent most of her days staring into the hazy abyss as I listened to the transistor radio, wondering why the tiny man inside never came out. It seems silly now but since Mother and our little mountain acre provided all I’d seen or heard, I assumed that the other inhabitants of the society the man in the box spoke of lived the same way. I assumed everyone had a Mother who was their everything.

Mother was always pretty to me but she had eyes that looked like crumbling coal and I began to notice something about those eyes as a child. Since I barely understood normal, I was completely lost on the concept of anything paranormal. Again, though I would eventually feel discomfort at what would come from those anthracite peepers, I trusted Mother and accepted her affiliation.

It began one day as I was listening to the man in the box talk about something called a television set. Sometimes the man’s voice would change and he would command us to barter numbers for items. I now know these were commercials and salesmanship but at the time I knew not of money or goods. As I glanced over at Mother in her chair, her black eyes began to wither into a dry ash, then moisten, coagulating into a trail of sludge that looked like corroded oil as it crept down her cheeks. Before I could find myself frightened by this oddity, the man in the box stopped talking about bartering and his voice changed into a sullen tone.

“…and the bulletin is just coming in. Oh dear God…ladies and gentlemen, it is my sorrowful duty to inform you that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2 o’clock Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago. The young leader of the free world was cut down by an assassin as his motorcade toured Dallas, Texas, amongst a throng of adoring, and now shocked, Americans. Camelot as we know it is lost. May God bless President Kennedy and a mournful nation.”

As a small child I had no idea what a president was but I felt emotion for the first time as I recall, simply based on the man’s trembling timbre. Mother sat in her chair as still as the cacti outside, that curious dark grime dripping from her eyes until the ducts dried.

I continued my life with Mother as we always had and the bizarre dark tears were not seen again for another five years, as I now know. Back then I didn’t comprehend time but had grown closer in height to Mother and understood some things better, such as aging. I even understood the pop music I heard, though I was amazed that the man in the box could make such sounds.

This second round of tears seeped from her crusted pupils and morphed into an onyx waterfall. A new radio host. as I now understand the man in the box to have been, broke through twice in those two months, each shortly after mother’s charcoal corneas began to mist and slowly seep down her face.

Each announcement from the radio stirred emotions within, still a rarity that disoriented me in youth.

“Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of non-violence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. Police have issued an all-points bulletin for a well-dressed, young white man seen running from the scene. Dr. King was standing on the balcony of a second-floor hotel room tonight when, according to a companion, a shot was fired from across the street. In the friend’s words, the bullet…”

When the radio spoke to me again two months later, I was listening to two voices argue through my speaker about zoning laws in Pima County when the transmission was breached.

“We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming with breaking news. We go live to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with Robert Kennedy’s campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz.”

The voices changed.

“I have a short announcement to read, which I will read at this time. Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 AM, June 6, 1968. With Senator Kennedy at the time of his death were his wife Ethel, his sisters Mrs. Stephen Smith, Mrs. Patricia Lawford, his brother-in-law Mr. Stephen Smith, and his sister-in-law Mrs. John F. Kennedy. He was 42 years old. More information will follow. Thank you.”

Mother again sat in that corner chair, gazing at the majestic Catalina ridge. As I always did, I knelt at her feet and rested my head on her lap and she accepted, an equal expression of affection.

But the inky, calamitous eyes had become a pattern even my uneducated mind understood.

This was when I knew this death thing the radio kept regaling must be a bad thing.

And that mother was it’s harbinger.

BREAK=====

Our story, “Mother” by Jon Allen, continues in just a moment.

STORY: MOTHER, CONTINUES=====

I grew hair both under my arms and in a wispy patch above my lip. My voice changed. But aside from puberty and the confusion it cloaked me in, this young boy in seclusion in the desert mountainside carried on. Mother and life in the hut remained the same.

Until it didn’t.

The unspoken horror of her obsidian eyes came again. The very dead, inevitable black eyes that could only foretell doom.

On a day like any other in the hills, droplets of dark goo fell to the dusty ground, forming a sickly color that seemed to boil under the Sonoran sun. Then the disembodied voice from a machine that connected me to a world I’d never seen fulfilled Mother’s unyielding prophecy.

“In West Germany today at the Munich Olympic Games, eleven members of Israel’s Olympic team and four members of a terror front known as Black September were killed in a 23-hour drama that began with an invasion of the Olympic Village. It ended in a shootout at a military airport some 15 miles away as the Arab group was preparing to fly to Cairo with their Israeli hostages. Casualties included…”

The horrifying tale of the shadow universe beyond our hut tickled the steamy air and Mother sat still in her chair, silent and emotionless. Being older and wiser to the dangers the radio reported, I felt protected suddenly, more than ever. These deathly premonitions held meaning . There was a reason I’d never seen what I’d later know as another human being in my life. Below the ridges existed a pit of hell. Mother showed me this firsthand through coarse midnight tears before the radio confirmed it. I knew any life beyond ours was vile and evil and we were safe. Mother was protection and love and life. My love for her only grew.

Mother never aged but I did. As I became a young adult I inevitably began to become emboldened by life beyond our acre.

Once I ventured further than allowed and saw a bustling array of wizardry below the foothills. I now know I was watching cars zig and zag in Tucson from my high vantage but at the time it was indeed magical. That was until a weighty crow fell dead from the sky and struck me.

Then another.

Then more.

When I turned around I locked gaze with Mother, whose warning was made clear to me. That was the last time I dared challenge the boundaries she’d set. Her puffy, worn eyes, awash in hellish soot, told me only ruin and destruction could arise from fleeing our grounds.

I knew she was right. Mother knew best.

===

Words continued to befall the announcements on the radio. Tragedies I had no reference of but knew were horrifying seemed to arrive daily. I became used to the routine now, more commonplace the older I became. Hijackings, murders, Jonestown , hurricanes, it never ended. One day Mother’s ominous sobs came and the radio told me that the pleasant harmonies I enjoyed from yet another disembodied voice would no longer come.

“An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous perhaps of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.”

Then the radio gave respite and we had peace. For years I listened to music and talking heads and rested my own head in Mother’s lap and gazed adoringly at her. The radio was devoid of tales of terror. Pure peace ensued.

There was one interruption.

The final macabre radio broadcast I’d ever hear in our hut came years later into adulthood. Mother’s eyes warned me and then it happened. The man spoke.

“It is with deep heartfelt sorrow that I address you here this afternoon. At 11:40 A.M. this morning, the space program experienced a national tragedy with the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger approximately a minute and a half after launch from here at the Kennedy Space Center. I regret that I have to report that based on very preliminary searches of the ocean where the Challenger impacted this morning, these searches have not revealed any evidence that the crew of Challenger survived.

The dedicated crew members of Challenger are…”

The newsman wilted into his emotions as he spoke. Unsure what he was talking about, so did I.

“…and lastly was teacher and national hero, payload specialist Christa McAuliffe.

All early indications in the launch control center at the Kennedy Space Center have indicated that the launch was normal up to approximately 11:40 A.M. this morning, about a minute or so into the flight. Flight controllers in the launch control center…”

Peace resumed once again in our mountain hut high above the wretched otherworld below. The spaceship debacle seemed to flitter in as a reminder that fate could change at will. I valued the absence of tragic news. The radio only played catchy songs and Mother’s eyes emitted life for a time. I would continue to sit at her feet as a man nearing thirty as she watched the clouds float from her chair, grateful for every second with her. Those few years were everything to me but like the tired cliche says, all good things come to an end.

Well into being a grown man, Mother and I had our lives changed forever.

=====

It was a day like any other. Mother was throwing excess game to a family of coyotes and I sunbathed in the nude as I often did, as clothing was only necessary in cold times. I truly was feral.

Staring skyward, mystified by the giant metallic birds that roared high above, I felt bliss. Airplanes had a euphoric impact on me even though I knew nothing about the airborne behemoths back then. I only knew others like me must be inside and that was as close as I ever got to another person.

I heard a muffled voice but the radio was back in the hut. Mother didn’t speak so my confusion was paramount. My mind could not connect the possibility of what came next.

Five monsters, hideous and bereft of the features I knew, appeared from nowhere, chanting oddities in an alien tongue and waving shimmering sticks. I shrieked at the sight of this abomination and fled, screaming for Mother as the snarling beasts approached. Mother, with her premonitions, was waiting outside of the hut as it grew larger with each gallop I took. The foul creatures behind inched closer as well, impressive in hindsight as they were unable to navigate the landscape like me.

As I drew nearer I saw Mother’s black eyes, swollen and oozing that absence of light. The dead birds on the ground told me that she’d beckoned me.

But I was too late.

The skies had kept my mind adrift and I wasn’t around to notice her foreboding warning.

For the first time in my life, Mother wailed, a piercing and disturbing rebuttal to the onslaught of mutants that bore down upon us. I fought with the savage ferocity of a cornered pit bull but was taken down immediately by two of the ghastly scourges. Then I watched as the other three encircled Mother, dousing her in water and screeching their heinous confusion of words.

The last image I saw was an explosion of light. The monsters stopped their assault and Mother was gone.

She had left me stranded.

I was alone.

=====

I officially underwent some three lettered agency’s sanctioned deprogramming and learned the truth, though the latter took some time.

Mother never truly left, though. Sometimes I would have a vision of her, unaged and crying, and something awful would happen. Oklahoma City broke my heart and Columbine crushed me. The morning of September 11th was the worst yet.

As I was sequestered and prodded by the minions of evil, I fought valiantly. That was, until one day, I was shown a mirror.

For the first time in my life, after much distrust and confusion at what the glass before me revealed, I saw who I truly was.

I was a monster.

I was one of them. The entire living world outside of the safety of my hut was filled with these monsters, and I was one of them. There could be no doubt. The physical match was stunning and left questions. Mother, as I rectified, had saved me from becoming one of them for as long as she could. She’d loved me in spite of my hideous disfigurement. I never did understand how I was a beast while she was not, but such details mattered not.

Years passed before men of the cloth unearthed the real me beyond any mirror’s interpretation. As things do, it all just made sense one day. The isolation, never knowing what I looked like, Mother’s tears-it wasn’t that they were monsters or that I was a monster.

Mother was the monster.

When her eyes bled sludge, there were three eyes doing so. I did not share the rows of jagged, bladed teeth, or the ashen pallor and pronged tail. No, my name-a name, an actual name that could have been spoken by the man in the radio- was Myers Ambrose. The same Myers Ambrose whose parents were found on the side of the highway back in 1960 in enough pieces to form a jigsaw puzzle, the same child who was never found anywhere besides a milk carton.

I was even taken to The Evergreen Cemetery in Tucson and shown my parents’ graves by a woman named Cathy. She was a nice woman who had two dogs by her side, Bella and Fozzie as I remember, and the ease upon which these canines and this woman bonded was much like that of Mother and I. The gravestones were a part of a series of events that made my tale make more sense as the evidence unveiled itself.

Still, even from the cemetery I could see the peaks of the Catalina, where my heart lie.

The demon, as they dubbed Mother, must have wanted spawn of her own. And I became just that. Who knows if that was the case, it’s all theories and conjecture when concerning the unknown. Still, even after all of this, I missed Mother. Demonic or not, she loved me and we belonged together. I couldn’t care less about the reason behind our union.

The only thing that bothered me was that Mother was not a warning for doom; Mother was doom. With a few tears she could, and did, wreak havoc upon the world. I never knew why but I didn’t care because that’s the thing about family.

Love is unconditional.

I never married or had kids or lived a normal life. Mine is not a story that ends in a happy montage. My upbringing was both cursed and blessed and left me unfit for normal human behavior.

I became an adult ward of the same priests who exorcised Mother from my life but Mother was always near. As I said, she didn’t need words to communicate. I still felt her. I still saw her in visions. Sometimes I slept outside on the ground and it took me back to that place in the hills.

The more human I became, the more detached from humanity I became.

I missed my home.

I missed Mother.

=====

Another vision came recently and that’s how I’ve found myself, a man in his mid sixties, scaling the chaotic, destructive sands of the Sonoran mountains. See, in my vision Mother was sitting in her old chair, calling out without words. Her eyes grew dark and watery. It felt so real that I just knew that it was.

Two things are certain.

She is waiting for me to return home.

And something wicked is coming.

I do feel bad about the way I left. It was mid dinner with the priests and a primal urge befell me. Perhaps it was the demon in me. We all have one.

As I opened the wine key for our second bottle of Sangiovese, the opener melded into my hand like brass knuckles, with the corkscrew extended. Mother’s command flashed and I blacked out. Upon regaining consciousness I stood over the bloodied, mangled corpses of a disemboweled clergy. The corkscrew even bent from impact. My clothes are still spattered in crimson as I trek through this familiar rocky slope. There’s an old saying about apples falling close from trees.

I am my Mother’s son.

I can never return to society now but I’m fine with this. It feels right to be with her anyway-it is, after all, her day.

It’s Mother’s Day today.

Now I’ve arrived and the hut is as if it was never impeded upon by the monstrosity of man. Mother is seated, gazing at the drifting sands. It’s a struggle at my age but I kneel down and sit at her feet. My head rests on her lap and she accepts it with reciprocal love.

I am home.

As Mother’s tear ducts empty, the skies grow into rows of mushroom clouds and the nuclear detonations ravage the world. The end of days is happening and billions of horrified people unleashing their death knell in unison form the soundtrack.

It’s prettier than anything the radio ever played.

But I’m safe here in the mountains. I always have been and always will be.

We will survive, Mother and I. Maybe a few hundred people globally who’ve accidentally found themselves in such lost locales will survive too, though I doubt they’ll acclimate to the madness of isolation. Our location shields us from the collective carnage of souls. This was always her intention. She has saved me and returned me to the place I’ve always belonged.

I look at the hideous beauty of her tormented face and smile.

It exceeds all races and creeds and even the holy and unholy, I realize on this celebratory day.

No bond is greater than that of a Mother’s.

SHOW CLOSE=====

Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do! You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at darren@weirddarkness.com. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks I’ve narrated, visit the store for Weird Darkness t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, phone cases, and more merchandise, sign up for monthly contests, find other podcasts that I host, and find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on TELL YOUR STORY. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.

The fictional horror story, “Mother” was written by Jon Allen

WeirdDarkness® – is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. Copyright, Weird Darkness.

Now that we’re coming out of the dark, I’ll leave you with a little light… “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you.” – Isaiah 66:13

And a final thought… “Motherhood is the exquisite inconvenience of being another person’s everything.” —Unknown

I’m Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.