Chapter 1: The Bequest
Chapter 1: The Bequest
The Arizona sun beat down on the black suits with the indifference of a god. Leo Martinez felt a bead of sweat trace a path through the dust on his neck, a grimy tear for a grief he couldn’t quite touch. He stood among distant cousins and old family friends, their faces blurred by the heat haze rising from the parched earth of the cemetery. They were burying his grandfather, Abuelo, and with him, a world of cryptic stories and moonlit madness Leo had spent a decade trying to escape.
His architectural career in Phoenix was built on clean lines, logical stress points, and predictable outcomes. Here, in the forgotten town of Agua Seca, logic crumbled like sun-baked adobe. The priest’s words were a meaningless drone, easily drowned out by a memory that coiled, unbidden, in his mind.
He was eight years old, sitting on Abuelo’s knee on the porch, the air thick with the scent of moonflowers and dust. The old man’s hands, gnarled and spotted, cupped Leo’s own.
“Listen, Leo,” Abuelo had whispered, his voice a dry rustle like autumn leaves. “Some men pass down watches. Some pass down land. Our family… we pass down a secret. A passenger.”
Leo, small and credulous, had stared into his grandfather’s faded eyes.
“Inside me,” Abuelo had continued, his thumb pressing into the soft flesh of his own belly, “lives a girl. She is long and pale, with a hundred legs like fine silver threads. She came from the moon, a piece of fallen starlight that took root in our bloodline long ago. She keeps me strong. She whispers secrets of the earth. But she is always hungry.”
The image had been terrifying and beautiful. A pale centipede, a creature of moonlight and marrow, living inside his grandfather. For years, it had been the source of his childhood nightmares. As he grew, it became the symbol of the rural superstitions he was so desperate to shed. It was just a story. A folktale to explain away the strangeness that clung to the Martinez family like the desert dust.
“...dust to dust.” The priest’s final words snapped Leo back to the present. The casket was being lowered. The finality of it should have been a relief. The stories were buried now. The madness was over.
But as he shoveled a clump of dry dirt onto the casket, a peculiar sensation fluttered deep in his gut. A nervous twitch, he told himself. Grief plays tricks on the body.
The house was just as he remembered: a tomb of silence, smelling of dust, old paper, and his grandfather’s cheap tobacco. Every creak of the floorboards was a ghost. Every shadow in the corner held a memory. Leo’s plan was simple: find the will, the deed to the house, and any financial documents. He would call a realtor on Monday, sell the place for whatever he could get, and scrub the last of Agua Seca from his life.
He moved through the living room, past the threadbare armchair where Abuelo would sit for hours, staring out at the unforgiving landscape. Moonlight, thin and silver, streamed through the dirty windows, painting stripes across the dusty floor. The fluttering in his stomach returned, stronger this time. It wasn’t a twitch. It felt like a trapped bird, beating its wings against the cage of his ribs.
He pressed a hand to his abdomen, half-expecting to feel something move beneath his palm. Nothing. It was stress. Lack of sleep. The three-hour drive. He grabbed a glass from the kitchen, the tap water running lukewarm and tasting of metal. He drank it down, trying to quell the rising unease.
His search for the paperwork led him to Abuelo’s bedroom. It was sparse, almost monastic. A simple bed, a wooden crucifix on the wall, and a nightstand. On the nightstand, beside a glass of water, lay a single, milky-white object. It was long and segmented, almost like a piece of shed insect skin, but larger than any he had ever seen. A chill, completely unrelated to the evening’s coolness, snaked up his spine. He backed away from it, a primal revulsion turning his stomach.
Exhaustion finally won the war against his anxiety. He decided the paperwork could wait until morning. He kicked off his city-slick shoes, stripped off his sweat-stained shirt, and collapsed onto the guest bed, the springs groaning in protest. The house was too quiet. The silence was a pressure against his eardrums. And beneath it all, the phantom fluttering in his core continued its frantic, desperate rhythm. He closed his eyes, willing himself to sleep, to dream of concrete and steel, of anything but this place.
But sleep, when it came, offered no escape.
He was in the desert, but the sand was bone-white and the sky was an ink-black void without stars. The only light came from a full moon that hung impossibly large and close, its pitted surface staring down like a single, colossal eye.
Abuelo was there. He wasn’t the stooped, frail man Leo had buried today, but a gaunt, hollowed-out figure, his skin stretched tight over his bones. His eyes were dark pits, and when he opened his mouth, no words came out. Instead, something pale and long began to unspool from between his lips.
It was the centipede from the stories.
Milky-white and obscene, it slithered out, its hundred silver legs moving in a silent, hypnotic wave. It was longer than a man’s arm, its antennae twitching as it tasted the dead air. Leo was paralyzed, a scream trapped in his throat like a stone. He couldn't move, couldn't breathe.
The hollowed-out figure of his grandfather drifted towards him, a puppet moved by the will of the thing emerging from his throat. It reached him, and the creature’s head, a smooth, featureless nub, swiveled to face Leo. Before he could react, Abuelo’s hands, cold as grave dirt, clamped onto his head, forcing his jaw open.
The centipede detached from his grandfather’s mouth and lunged.
Leo felt the horror of it sliding down his throat—a violation of flesh and spirit. The scrape of its countless legs against his teeth, his tongue, the soft tissue of his esophagus. It was a torrent of living ice, a nightmare made flesh, pouring into him, burrowing down, down, down into the deepest part of his being. He gagged, he choked, he convulsed in silent, abject terror as the last segmented inch of its tail vanished past his lips.
His grandfather smiled, a lipless grimace on a skull, and then crumbled into a pile of white sand.
Leo awoke with a violent gasp, launching himself into a sitting position. The sheets were twisted around him, soaked in cold sweat. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat in the oppressive silence of the house.
A dream. It was just a dream. A grotesque, vivid nightmare brought on by a day of grief and a childhood of unsettling stories.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, his whole body trembling. The air in the room was stale and hot. He could still feel the phantom sensation of the creature in his throat, a lingering, slimy disgust.
He stood, his legs unsteady, and walked to the small, cracked mirror above the guest room dresser. His face was gaunt in the moonlight, his eyes wide with a fear he had never known. He looked haunted.
He placed a trembling hand on his stomach, expecting to feel the frantic fluttering that had plagued him all evening.
But it was gone.
The space inside him was no longer anxious and jittery. It was still. A profound, unnatural stillness. In place of the flutter, there was a weight. A cold, dense knot deep in his gut, like a stone he’d swallowed.
It wasn't fluttering anymore. It wasn't frantic.
It had settled.
He stared at his own reflection, at the terror in his eyes, and a horrifying realization began to dawn. The funeral wasn't an ending. It was a transfer. The bequest hadn't been the dusty house or a few dollars in a bank account.
The story wasn’t just a story. The passenger had a new host.
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