Fosterling of the Old Ones
Fosterlings of the Old Ones are from Ramsey Campbell's "The Faces at Pine Dunes (fiction)".
Description
The bulk glistened as though flayed; in the dimness it looked pale pink, and oddly unstable.... For a moment he saw the huge head, a swollen bulb which, though blanched by moonlight, reminded him of a mass dug from within a body. The glistening lumpy forehead was almost bare, except for a few strands that groped restlessly over it - strands of hair, surely, though they looked like strings of livid flesh.... Before he could see the rest of the figure, a vague gigantic squatting sack, the shadow flooded the clearing. As it did so, he thought he saw his mother’s face sucked into the head, as though by a whirlpool of flesh. Did her features float up again, newly arranged? Were there other, plumper, features jostling among them? He could be sure of nothing in the dark.
— Ramsey Campbell, "The Faces at Pine Dunes (fiction)"
Fosterlings of the Old Ones are bastard children born by the Outer Gods or Great Old Ones on human women, usually by sending a dream to an expectant mother in which the genetic structure of the child is corrupted and altered into that of the alien parent.
The children of such a pairing will normally resemble a human child at first, until maturity, when a shockingly rapid transformation into a monstrous form resembling the alien parent occurs - an "awakening", with the resemblance to the parent deity growing more pronounced and less humanoid with each generation, as the DNA for the change is inherited over generations and reinforced by repeated intervention of the parent deity through generational involvement in Mythos cults. The children also inherit a genetic memory of what the parent deity has seen and experienced, including terrifying visions of cult rituals, horrors experienced on alien worlds, and worse. The children will probably also inherit the parent deity's alien mind and personality, increasingly so with each generation, resulting sooner or later in children who are born incapable of feeling human empathy or seeing the world from a human perspective at all, and probably also resulting in children who seem unsettlingly - even repulsively - old and wise beyond their young years, and likely also gifted with something of the alien parent's capacity for psychic or magical powers, technological aptitudes, or strange, protean physical abilities.
Within several generations, the transformation becomes so extreme that it becomes eventually possible for two or more such children - such as playmates within the same cult, or twins - to "grow together" as part of their transformation, joining together into one monstrous body. By this time, the transformation is so severe, it is impossible for the maturing children to conceal their alien ancestry anyway.
Heresies and Controversies
Associated Mythos Elements
- deity: Outer Gods, Great Old Ones, Elder Gods
- race: Son of Yog-Sothoth (compare/contrast)
- location: Severn Valley
- cult: Human Cultists (typically the mother, or several generations of parents, are members of a cult)
References
- fiction: Ramsey Campbell's "The Faces at Pine Dunes (fiction)"
- fiction: John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos
- film: Village of the Damned (1960 film) (and its remakes)
- sourcebook: Malleus Monstrorum
