Chapter 12: A Pound of Flesh

Chapter 12: A Pound of Flesh

The attic was a tomb, and the journal in the dust was its gravestone. Leo knelt there, the single beam of light from the dormer window illuminating a swirling galaxy of dust motes around him. The air was thin and dead, but he couldn’t seem to get enough of it into his burning lungs.

I raised it.

The thought was a physical blow, knocking the wind out of him, leaving him dizzy with self-loathing. His entire childhood act of defiance, the bloody, oneiric ritual that he had believed was his salvation, had been nothing more than an elaborate feeding schedule. He hadn't been a fighter. He had been a farmer, diligently tending to his own parasite, nurturing it with pieces of his own soul until it was strong enough to harvest him. The weeping wound, the pity he had felt—it was all a monstrously clever lie.

The cold thing inside him, his inherited Echo, was unnaturally still. It was listening. Waiting. It knew what he had found. He could feel its sudden, sharp attention, a predator sensing the turning of a key in the lock of its cage.

His hands shook as he reached down and picked the journal up again. The brittle pages felt like dead skin beneath his fingertips. He couldn't stop now. He had the diagnosis; he needed the cure, no matter how toxic. He flipped past the horrifying revelation, his eyes scanning Elara’s increasingly erratic script, searching for a way out, an escape clause in this demonic contract.

The final pages of the journal were a mess of blots, cross-outs, and frantic marginalia. It was the work of a mind coming apart at the seams. He found the entry he was looking for, a section circled so many times the paper had nearly torn through.

January 18th, 1959.

It let me feel its "pain." I see that now. It was a performance for an audience of one. It knew its own limits. The link we forged through the dream ritual was still… nascent. It had woven itself into me, but it had not yet consumed enough of my essence to attempt a full merger. If I had continued the ritual, I would have ceded everything. It would have hollowed me out completely, and there would have been nothing left of me for it to claim. My pity was not an act of mercy. My pity was its final, most brilliant trick. It needed me to stop before the vessel was empty. It needed to pause the feeding, to let me live, to let me grow, so that it could lie dormant and digest what I had already given it. So it wept. And I, the fool, sheathed my blade.

Leo’s own memory of the weeping shadow, a moment that had haunted him with a strange mix of triumph and guilt for a decade, curdled into something obscene. It was the calculated whimper of a predator playing possum, luring its prey into a false sense of security. The ten years of quiet had been the Echo’s slumber, a long, patient digestion of his childhood soul. And now, it had woken up, stronger than ever, ready for the final merger. The attack in his room hadn't been an assault; it had been an act of possession.

He felt a surge of cold fury from the parasite within, an indignant rage at having its methods exposed. The emotion was not his own, but he felt it ripple through his nerves, a confirmation of the journal’s terrifying truth.

He turned to the very last page. Elara's handwriting was barely a scrawl, a desperate message scratched into the paper.

There is a way. A terrible way. The old laws are always about balance. A bargain of symbol and shadow can be broken by a sacrifice of substance and flesh. The dream ritual forged the link. It was a promise, made in the currency of the soul. To break a promise made to such a thing, a new price must be paid. A pound of flesh.

The link is tied to the sacrifice. It feeds on the symbolic wounds. To sever it, the wound cannot be symbolic. It must be real. The same wound. The same price. Paid in the waking world. A bargain made in dream must be voided in blood. It is the only way to sever the tether. To make the anchor point of the curse real, tangible, and then cut it away forever.

Leo stared at the words until they swam before his eyes. The same wound. The same price.

The meaning crashed into him with the force of the falling bookshelf. The phantom ache in his left wrist flared into a sudden, sharp agony. He looked down at his own hand, at the pale skin and the blue veins beneath. The hand he had methodically, night after night, "destroyed" in his dreams to hurt the shadow. All of it. From the tip of the index finger to the final, ragged severing at the wrist.

The book slipped from his numb fingers and landed silently in the dust.

The price to expel the Echo, to save Sarah, to save himself, was to perform the ritual for real. Not with a dream knife on a dream hand, but with a real blade on his own living flesh. He had to offer the creature a true pound of flesh, an anchor point in the physical world, and then cast it away.

A wave of vertigo washed over him. His stomach churned. It was impossible. It was insane. Mutilation. Self-destruction.

Then he thought of Sarah, her eyes wide with terror as the bookshelf tipped. He felt the echo of the parasite’s glee as it watched her, a monstrous joy that had coursed through his own veins. He thought of the tiny, sizzling pockmarks on his bedroom floor, of the blood on Sarah’s arm.

This wouldn't end with close calls. The Echo was a part of him now. It saw through his eyes, it felt through his skin, and it could manipulate the world around him in subtle, deadly ways. Sooner or later, its "bad luck" would find its mark. He was a walking time bomb, and Sarah was standing right next to him.

He could run. He could abandon everyone he knew, live as a hermit, and wait for the thing inside to eventually consume what was left of him. Or he could pay the price.

The Echo inside him recoiled, a frantic surge of what felt like genuine fear. It did not want him to do this. The thought of a real, physical severing terrified it. And in its terror, Leo found his resolve.

He stood up, his movements stiff, robotic. The dust of the attic, the forgotten memories, the ghost of his great-aunt Elara and her terrible warning—he left it all behind. He descended the rickety stairs, closing the attic door behind him with a soft, final click.

He walked not to the living room, not to his bedroom, but through the kitchen and into the small, attached garage. The air was cool and smelled of gasoline and old sawdust. His father’s workbench was against the far wall, tools hanging in neat, orderly rows on a pegboard. Saws. Hammers. Wrenches.

Leo’s eyes scanned the board, his gaze passing over everything until it landed on the one tool meant not for building, but for cleaving.

It was an old meat cleaver, heavy and stained, a relic from his grandfather's time as a butcher. It hung from two thick hooks. His father kept it for splitting kindling for their fireplace.

He reached out and took it from the wall. The handle was smooth, worn wood, the blade a thick, heavy wedge of carbon steel. It felt impossibly heavy in his hand. Solid. Real.

He held it up, and for a moment, he saw his own reflection in the dull, tarnished steel. His face was a pale, grim mask, his blue eyes wide and dark with a terrible, unwavering purpose.

He took the cleaver and walked back into the kitchen. The old wooden butcher’s block, the very same one that had starred in his childhood nightmares, sat in the center of the room, scarred with the knife marks of a thousand family dinners.

He laid his left hand flat on its surface, palm down, fingers spread. The wood was cool and solid beneath his skin. In his other hand, he raised the cleaver.

The price was a pound of flesh. And he was here to pay it.