Chapter 5: The Shedding of Skin

Chapter 5: The Shedding of Skin

The dead silence from within the shop was more menacing than any scream. It was a vacuum, pulling at their courage. Reg’s warning shouts had dissolved into the alley’s oppressive quiet, leaving only the frantic hammering of his own heart.

“There’s no way in,” Toeless whispered, his hand drifting unconsciously to the tender, sticky patch on the side of his head. “Let’s just go, Reg. This is bad.”

“We can’t,” Reg said, the words tasting like ash. The image of Maggie’s face, carved in a mask of ultimate despair on the statuette, was burned into his mind. They had been marked. Now she was marked. Leaving was not an option; it was complicity.

His eyes fell on the small, grimy window to the side of the back door, covered by a rusty security grille. It was a long shot. He grabbed the grille with both hands, planting his feet in the filth of the alley. He pulled. His muscles screamed, sinews straining against decades of rust and neglect. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with a tortured groan of metal, one of the bolts tore free from the brickwork.

“Help me,” he grunted.

Toeless, his fear momentarily eclipsed by the urgency in Reg’s voice, grabbed the bars and pulled alongside him. Together, with a final, desperate heave, they ripped the grille away from the window. It crashed to the ground with a clang that seemed deafening in the stillness.

Reg didn’t hesitate. He wrapped the bottom of his jacket around his fist and smashed the glass. The pane shattered inwards with a sharp, crystalline explosion. After clearing the jagged shards from the frame, he hoisted himself up and through the narrow opening, dropping into the suffocating darkness of the shop. He landed with a soft thud on a pile of what felt like old coats, the musty smell of mothballs and decay filling his nostrils. A moment later, Toeless tumbled in after him.

The air inside was thick, cold, and utterly still. The only light was the weak, silvery moonlight filtering through the front window, barely illuminating the chaotic silhouettes of the shop’s clutter. Piles of forgotten treasures became ominous, lurking shapes in the gloom. It felt less like a pawnshop and more like a crypt.

“Maggie?” Reg called out, his voice a low whisper that the dust seemed to swallow whole.

No answer.

They moved cautiously through the narrow aisles, their feet shuffling on the dusty floorboards. Reg’s hand was in his pocket, his fingers wrapped tight around the cold, malevolent weight of the effigy. It felt like it was vibrating with a low, predatory hum, a silent thrum of anticipation.

And then they saw her.

She was sitting in her worn armchair behind the counter, right where they had left her. She was perfectly still, her hands resting in her lap, her head tilted slightly to one side. The dim light cast her face in deep shadow, but even from a distance, the expression was unmistakable. It was the face from the statuette. A mask of hollow, absolute despair, her eyes wide open but seeing nothing, her mouth a slack line of utter defeat. She looked like a statue herself, a monument to sorrow.

“Maggie?” Toeless whispered, his voice trembling. “Is she… dead?”

Reg crept closer, his boots silent on the old wood. He reached out a hesitant hand to touch her shoulder. She was cold. Not the cold of death, but the same deep, unnatural cold as the effigy. As his fingers made contact, her body twitched.

It was a small, spastic jerk of her right hand. Then another. A low, gurgling sound bubbled up from her throat.

Reg snatched his hand back as if he’d been burned.

Her body began to convulse, a violent, puppet-like dance of jerking limbs. Her head snapped back, and a sound tore from her throat—not a scream, but a wet, tearing noise, like old fabric ripping. Her skin, stretched taut over her cheekbones, began to split. A dark, viscous fluid seeped from the tear.

Toeless let out a choked cry of horror, stumbling backwards into a shelf of porcelain dolls. They rained down around him, their glass eyes glinting in the moonlight as they shattered on the floor.

The sound seemed to accelerate the process. Maggie’s—or the thing that wore her skin—convulsed harder. The tearing sound grew louder, accompanied by a sickening chorus of pops and cracks as the bones beneath shifted and reformed. Her skin began to slough off in wet, ragged sheets, falling away to reveal the horror beneath.

It was not flesh and bone. It was something skeletal, yes, but nightmarishly wrong. Its frame was a pale, chitinous white, like polished bone or insect shell. Its limbs were too long, jointed at impossible angles. It unfolded itself from the collapsing sack of Maggie’s flesh, rising from the chair with a jerky, unnatural grace. Its head, elongated and skull-like, swiveled towards them, and from a mouth full of needle-thin teeth came a high-pitched, chittering sound, the noise of a thousand cockroaches skittering in the dark.

For a frozen second, they could only stare, their minds refusing to process the abomination that stood where a woman had been only moments before. The phantom images they had seen in the alley’s reflections were a pale, merciful shadow of this reality. This was what the statuette did. This was the fate it had in store for them.

The creature’s head clicked to the side, its empty sockets fixing on them. It took a step, its long, bony claws scraping against the wooden floor.

That broke the spell.

“RUN!” Reg screamed, the word tearing itself from his throat.

He grabbed Toeless, yanking him away from the crashing shelves and shoving him towards the front of the shop. Panic gave them speed. They scrambled through the cluttered aisles, a desperate, clumsy flight for their lives. The shop had transformed from a cluttered maze into a claustrophobic death trap.

Reg vaulted over a glass display case, shattering the lid as he landed. Behind them, the chittering grew louder, closer, punctuated by the screech of its claws on the floor. It was impossibly fast. He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw it scuttling over the counter, its movements a fluid nightmare of spider and skeleton.

“The door! Get the door!” Reg yelled, shoving Toeless forward.

They reached the front of the shop. The door was secured by a heavy deadbolt and a crossbar. Toeless fumbled with the bolt, his hands shaking too violently to work the mechanism. The creature was coming, knocking over a coat rack laden with old army jackets, its chittering filling the small space.

“Move!” Reg roared, pushing Toeless aside. His own fingers, steadied by years of training and terror, found the deadbolt and threw it open. He heaved the crossbar up and out of its brackets. He wrenched the door open and shoved Toeless out onto the cold, empty street.

He was about to follow when he saw the heavy iron crank set into the wall beside the door, the mechanism for the steel shutters. An idea, born of pure, animal desperation, flashed in his mind. Trap it.

He slammed the door shut just as the creature lunged, its bony claws leaving deep gouges in the wood. He didn’t wait. He grabbed the crank and began to turn, pouring every ounce of his adrenaline-fueled strength into the motion. The gears groaned in protest, and with a deafening rattle, the steel shutter began its slow descent.

Through the door’s small, barred window, he could see the thing. It threw itself against the door, which shuddered on its hinges. Then it turned its attention to the window, its skeletal face appearing in the opening, the empty sockets seeming to stare directly into his soul. A three-fingered, skeletal hand smashed through the reinforced glass, clawing at the air inches from his face.

Reg kept cranking, his muscles burning, his breath sobbing in his chest. The shutter descended, foot by agonizing foot. The creature screeched, a sound of fury and frustration, its claws scraping uselessly against the descending wall of steel.

With a final, deafening clang, the shutter hit the pavement.

Reg stumbled back, his legs giving out from under him. He collapsed onto the sidewalk, his back against the cold, vibrating metal. From inside the shop, the sound of the monster’s rage was a muffled, terrifying symphony of destruction—splintering wood, shattering glass, and the constant, high-pitched chittering of a nightmare locked in a cage.

He and Toeless were safe, for now. But as Reg looked at the shaking boy huddled on the curb, then down at his own trembling hands, the terrifying truth settled over him. They hadn’t just witnessed a monster being born. They had just seen a preview of their own demise.