Chapter 3: The Butcher's Dream

Chapter 3: The Butcher's Dream

Sleep did not come as a soft blanket, but as a sudden, cold drop. One moment, Leo was lying in his bed, the weight of his parents' misunderstanding pressing down on him, the monstrous grin of the Smiler burning in the corner of his room. The next, he was standing.

The floor beneath his bare feet was not the worn, comforting wood of his bedroom, but the smooth, frigid tile of the kitchen.

He blinked, his mind struggling to catch up. This was his kitchen, yet it wasn't. All the shapes were correct: the familiar white refrigerator, the oak table where he ate his cereal, the counter with the fruit bowl. But all the life had been drained from it. The air was still and sterile, carrying no scent of last night's dinner or his mother's potpourri. The vibrant red of the apples in the bowl was a dull, lifeless maroon.

A strange, sourceless twilight filled the room, casting no shadows and providing no warmth. It was the grey, eternal light of a photograph of a memory. He looked around, a prickle of instinctual fear running up his spine. The Smiler was gone. For the first time in weeks, he was truly alone, yet the oppressive feeling of being watched had been replaced by something far stranger: a sense of profound, hollow purpose.

It started as a gentle nudge in his mind, a thought that wasn't his own. The drawer.

His body moved before his brain could protest. His small legs carried him across the cold floor, his footsteps making no sound. He wasn't walking so much as being moved, a marionette guided by an unseen hand. His own hand, pale and small in the grey light, reached for the handle of the utensil drawer. It slid open with a whisper-quiet shhhhick.

Inside lay the familiar jumble of silverware. But his gaze was drawn past the spoons and forks to the back of the drawer, to the knife block his parents kept on the counter. The image of it filled his mind, clear and sharp.

The compulsion intensified, no longer a nudge but a firm, irresistible pull. It was a current, and he was a leaf caught in its flow. He turned towards the counter, towards the heavy wooden block holding his mother’s knives. He knew each one. There was the big, clumsy one for bread, the little one for peeling potatoes. And there was the one with the slender, wicked-looking blade, the one his mother used for slicing tomatoes so thin you could almost see through them. Her sharpest knife.

That one. The thought echoed in the silent space of his head.

His hand reached out, his fingers closing around the smooth, black handle. The knife felt impossibly heavy, its weight a dense, cold reality in this world of pale imitations. It was real. This part, at least, was real.

He turned, the blade held loosely at his side, and faced the butcher's block cutting board that sat in the middle of the kitchen island. It was old and scarred with the history of a thousand family meals. He could see the faint, dark stains where meat had been carved, the deeper cuts where his father had once gotten careless with a cleaver.

The purpose, once a hollow feeling, now solidified into a clear, horrifying directive. He knew what he had to do with an unnerving certainty that bypassed all logic and fear. This was not a choice. It was a task. A required step in a process he couldn't begin to understand.

His left hand, the one not holding the knife, rose as if of its own accord. He watched, a detached and horrified spectator in his own body, as he placed it palm-down on the scarred surface of the cutting board. His fingers were spread wide, small and vulnerable against the wood grain.

He looked at his index finger. He saw the slightly dirty nail, the little constellation of freckles on his knuckle. It was his finger. A part of him.

With his right hand, he raised the knife. The grey light glinted off the polished steel, a single, cold spark in the lifeless room. He positioned the edge of the blade over the first knuckle of his index finger. There was no hesitation, no trembling. The boy who was afraid of the dark, who cried when he scraped his knee, who huddled under his blankets from a smiling shadow, was gone. In his place was an executioner, and the condemned was himself.

There was an overwhelming sense of correctness to the act, a feeling of clicking a final puzzle piece into place. A silent scream was building in the back of his mind, a frantic, desperate protest from the small part of him that was still him, but it was drowned out by the sheer, crushing force of the compulsion.

He put his weight into it.

There was no pain.

There was only a dull, resonant thud as the tip of the knife bit deep into the wood of the cutting board. He felt a sensation of pressure, then a clean, cold parting. A disconnection.

He lifted the knife. He stared at his hand.

His left hand was still spread on the block, but now it only had three fingers and a thumb. Where his index finger had been, there was nothing. No blood, no wound, no stump. It was just... gone. The skin was smooth and unbroken, as if he had simply been born that way. On the board next to his hand, the severed finger lay still and pale, a strange and terrible offering.

The compulsion vanished. The invisible strings were cut, and he was himself again, left standing in the cold, silent kitchen, the heavy knife in one hand and a piece of his own dream-body lying on the block. The silent scream in his mind finally broke free, but it had no voice. All that came out was a sharp, ragged gasp for air that didn't exist in this breathless place.

The horrifying purpose was fulfilled. He had paid a price, but for what, he did not know. He only knew that in this strange, dead reflection of his home, he had just performed the first act of a dark and terrible ritual.