Chapter 6: The Monster in the Stone

Chapter 6: The Monster in the Stone

They ran. They didn't have a destination, only a direction: away. Away from the rattling steel shutter, away from the muffled, furious chittering that seemed to follow them for blocks, a phantom sound clinging to the edges of their hearing. They plunged into the city’s labyrinthine network of backstreets and darkened alleys, fueled by a terror so profound it burned away every other sensation—the ache in their lungs, the sting of the cold night air, the gnawing hunger that had defined their lives just hours before.

Finally, their adrenaline-fueled sprint gave way to a stumbling, exhausted shamble. Reg spotted the gaping mouth of a pedestrian underpass, a concrete wound beneath the roaring highway above. He grabbed Toeless’s arm and dragged him down the slick, tiled ramp into the echoing darkness.

The air in the underpass was cold and damp, thick with the smell of wet concrete and diesel fumes. Water dripped from unseen cracks in the ceiling, each drop landing with a hollow plink that echoed in the long tunnel, counting out the seconds of their stolen time. The roar of traffic overhead was a constant, oppressive rumble, the sound of a world that was utterly oblivious to the nightmare that had just unfolded. It was a grimy, forgotten place, but for now, it was a sanctuary.

Toeless slid down the curved wall, his body finally giving out. He hugged his knees to his chest, his breathing a series of ragged, hitching sobs. He looked impossibly young, a lost child swallowed by the urban dark.

Reg stood watch at the entrance for a long moment, his eyes scanning the empty street, his ears straining for any sound other than the traffic and the dripping water. There was nothing. They were alone. He turned and walked back to Toeless, the echoes of his own footsteps sounding like those of a second man following him.

“You okay?” The question was absurd, a pathetic string of syllables in the face of such monumental horror.

Toeless just shook his head, not looking up. “We saw it, Reg. We saw it happen. It… it came out of her.” He gagged, a dry, retching sound. “Those things we saw in the alley… in the reflections… they were real.”

“I know,” Reg said, his voice a low gravelly thing. He sat down heavily beside the kid, the cold of the concrete seeping through his thin trousers. He knew. The visions hadn't been hallucinations. They had been previews. Glimpses of the chrysalis stage, the monstrous truth lurking just beneath the skin.

His own rage, that blinding, alien fury that had made him strike his only friend, felt different now. It wasn’t just an emotion anymore. It was a symptom. A stage of the disease. The statuette hadn't just amplified his anger; it had been cultivating it. It was tilling the soil of his soul, preparing it for whatever monstrous seed it intended to plant.

He had to look. The need for answers, for some kind of terrible understanding, was stronger than his fear of what he might find. His hand, slick with a cold sweat, trembled as he reached into his jacket. The effigy felt colder than ever, a solid lump of absolute zero that seemed to leech the warmth from his very marrow. He pulled it out.

In the gloom of the underpass, punctuated by the sickly orange glow of a single, flickering fluorescent light at the tunnel’s midpoint, the statuette seemed to absorb the darkness itself.

“Don’t,” Toeless whispered, finally looking up, his eyes wide with pleading. “Don’t look at it. Put it away.”

“We have to,” Reg said, his voice grim. “We have to know.”

He held it in the palm of his hand, a heavy, cursed weight. He forced himself to turn it, to perform the grim inspection. There was his own face, twisted in a snarl of impossible rage. A perfect copy. He rotated it again. There was Toeless, his mouth a silent O of pure terror, a mirror of the moment before he’d hit the wall.

Reg’s breath hitched. He turned it one more time, to the third face. The face that had been Maggie’s.

His blood turned to ice.

The face of despair was gone. The hard lines, the weary eyes, the scornful mouth of the old pawnbroker had vanished completely. In its place, carved with the same exquisite, horrifying detail, was the monster.

It was an exact replica of the creature they had just fled. The elongated, skull-like head. The empty, soulless eye sockets. The mouth stretched wide in a chittering shriek, filled with a forest of needle-thin teeth. Even the texture of the chitinous, bone-white skin was there, rendered in the milky crystal. It wasn't a face anymore. It was a death mask. It was a trophy.

“It’s not her,” Toeless breathed, crawling closer, his terror battling with a morbid need to see. “Reg, it’s not Maggie’s face anymore.”

“No,” Reg said, his voice hollow. “It’s what she became.”

The terrible, final piece of the puzzle clicked into place, and the sheer scale of their doom crashed down upon him. The statuette wasn't a cursed camera, taking snapshots of its victims' worst moments. It was a blueprint. It was a manual of transformation. It showed the before, and then it showed the after.

His gaze snapped from the monstrous carving back to his own face, etched in rage. Then to Toeless’s, frozen in fear. The connection was undeniable, a screaming, silent truth. They were the "before" pictures. Their faces, captured in stone, were not a record of a past emotion. They were a brand, a mark of ownership. They were a promise.

“It’s going to happen to us,” Toeless whispered, the realization dawning on his pale face. “That thing… that’s what we’re going to turn into.”

Reg could only nod, his throat too tight for words. He felt a profound, physical dread, as if his own skin were starting to itch, to feel loose and ill-fitting. The parasite was already inside him, he could feel it. He had felt it in the pawnshop, a black tide of rage that wasn't his. He was already being changed from the inside out.

He slowly, mechanically, rotated the statuette one last time. Past his face. Past Toeless’s. Past the monster that was once Maggie. He stopped at the final, fourth face.

The smooth, featureless, horrifyingly blank face.

It stared up at them from his palm, a placid void in the midst of all that sculpted agony. It wasn't empty. It was waiting. It was a vacancy. A job opening for the next victim. A slate waiting for the next portrait of despair, or terror, or rage to be carved upon it before the final, monstrous transformation.

The statuette didn't just predict their fate. It dictated it. It wasn’t a relic they had found; it was a predator that had found them. They weren’t just haunted or cursed. They were incubating. They were marked for a monstrous transformation, their faces already etched in stone, their place in the gruesome lineup secured. They were next.