Chapter 10: A Heartbeat in Stone

Chapter 10: A Heartbeat in Stone

The darkness came without the overture of a storm this time. There was no thunder, no lashing rain. Just a single, decisive THUMP from the guts of the museum, and the world vanished. One moment, Leo was standing in the sterile, bone-white expanse of the Hall of Replicas, studying the unnerving progress on his own statue; the next, he was entombed in a silence and blackness more absolute than any grave.

His breath hitched. He wasn't near the security office. He was in the heart of the beast's studio, a place not meant for the living. The sixty-second rule was a fantasy from here. There was no escape.

He clicked on his flashlight, the beam a nervous, trembling thing that seemed to bend and warp in the oppressive dark. He swept it across the hall, the light catching on the dozens of empty pedestals, a silent audience waiting for a performance to begin. He was the only performer.

Then he heard it. The sound he’d come to dread. A soft, dry scrape. Stone on polished marble.

He swung the beam towards the grand archway leading into the hall. Standing there, side-by-side, their small forms almost perfectly identical in the gloom, were The Twins from the Gallery of Innocence. They were no longer holding hands. They stood with a rigid, unnatural stillness, their heads tilted in perfect synchronicity, their dark, hollowed eyes fixed on him.

They took a step forward, their movements unnervingly smooth, a gliding, silent advance that was far more terrifying than a frantic rush.

Leo’s mind raced, shoving aside the primal urge to scream and run. Elias Thorne’s frantic charcoal scrawls burned in his memory: It’s all one set of eyes. Find the blind spots. He had proven the theory, created a small sanctuary with a camera loop. But there were no cameras here. It was just him, the Artist’s Gaze, and its chosen instruments.

He backed away slowly, his flashlight beam fixed squarely on the face of the Twin on the left. As long as he was looking, it remained frozen, a perfect statue. But in his peripheral vision, a flicker of movement. The other Twin, the one on the right, was sliding forward, closing the distance.

Panic flared, hot and acidic. The Artist was splitting its focus. He couldn't watch them both.

He remembered the locket, the way the Gorgon had been pinned by its own reflection. The floor. The floor here was a pale, almost mirrored marble.

He lowered his flashlight beam, angling it to catch the polished surface. It worked. In the harsh glare, he could see the reflection of the right-side Twin, a distorted, ghostly image sliding across the floor towards him. He kept his eyes locked on the left Twin, holding it in place with the force of his stare, while tracking its sibling in the gleaming marble below. It was a dizzying, nauseating act of mental gymnastics, forcing his artist's brain to process two separate points of view at once.

He continued to backpedal, a slow, terrifying retreat. Stare at the statue, watch the reflection. Don’t blink. Don’t look away. The scraping sound stopped. He had them both pinned. Two points of light in the vast darkness, held in place by his fragile, desperate attention.

But he couldn't retreat forever. The back of his legs bumped into something hard and unyielding. He didn't have to look to know what it was. The pedestal. His pedestal.

He was cornered.

The Twins reacted instantly to his hesitation. They broke their straight-line advance, separating and beginning to circle, forcing him to choose. He could watch one, or the other, but not both. They were herding him, their blank faces betraying no emotion, their movements a cold, calculated geometry of death.

He was trapped. His theory had bought him moments, but it couldn't save him. His escape was cut off, his back pressed against the instrument of his own erasure. He could feel the cold presence of his clay doppelgänger behind him, a silent testament to his fate.

And in that moment of absolute despair, a new, insane thought sparked in the darkness of his mind. A thought born of Finch’s words: The original is slowly… rendered. Its life… is transferred. A transfer. A connection. If this thing was becoming him, then it was a part of him. And if it was a part of him, maybe he could use it. Maybe he could disrupt the process, create a feedback loop so loud and painful the Artist would be forced to recoil.

It was a suicidal, nonsensical gamble. But it was the only move he had left.

He made his choice.

He took a deep, shuddering breath and turned his back on the advancing Twins.

He plunged himself into the blind spot, deliberately surrendering them to the periphery. The scraping sound grew louder, faster, converging on him. He ignored it, focusing every ounce of his will, his fear, and his rage on the object before him.

He raised his flashlight, illuminating the unfinished statue. His face, perfectly rendered in pale, damp clay, stared back at him with empty, placid eyes. In the few days since he’d first seen it, the details had become sharper. He could now see the faint, web-like impressions of veins beginning to form on the temples and neck. The texture of the skin was less like clay and more like cool, lifeless flesh.

The scraping was just feet away now. He could feel the cold aura of their presence at his back.

He reached out a trembling hand and pressed his palm against the statue's chest.

A jolt, violent and absolute, shot up his arm. It wasn't electricity; it was a shock of pure information, of alien consciousness. For a split second, he felt the vast, cold awareness of the Atheneum itself—a mind of stone and shadow, of geometry and agonizing grief. He saw, in a flash of incomprehensible insight, the other statues in the darkness, all frozen, their collective attention now focused here, on him, on this blasphemous act of contact.

The coldness of the clay-like substance was a lie. Beneath the clammy surface, deep within the chest of the replica, he felt it. A faint, rhythmic, thrumming pulse. It wasn't a heartbeat of muscle and blood. It was a vibration of stolen life. A slow, deep thump-thump that was utterly, horribly familiar. It was the echo of his own heart.

And at the exact same moment, a searing, blinding pain erupted in his own chest.

It was a sharp, piercing agony, as if a white-hot needle had been plunged directly into his heart. He gasped, his vision swimming with black spots. It was a feeling of profound, intimate violation, of being hollowed out from the inside. A filament of his own life force, his very essence, was being siphoned through his hand, feeding the nascent pulse in the clay.

He ripped his hand away with a strangled cry, stumbling back. The pain in his chest subsided to a dull, throbbing ache, but the feeling of being drained lingered, a ghostly vacancy where something vital had just been.

Flicker.

The emergency lights in the corridor blinked on. The power was returning. The scraping sound behind him ceased instantly.

Leo dared to look over his shoulder. The Twins were gone. They had retreated with the return of the light, their game interrupted.

He was alone again, clutching his chest, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. He stared at his own hand, then back at the statue. It looked exactly the same, yet he knew it was different. It was more complete. It held a piece of him now, a piece he had felt being torn away.

The horrifying truth settled upon him, cold and heavy as a tombstone. This wasn't just a slow, psychological process. It was a direct, physical transference of life. The statue’s completion was a zero-sum game, its every new detail paid for with a pound of his own flesh, a measure of his own soul. The countdown to his own erasure wasn't just metaphorical. It was real, and he could feel every single, agonizing tick.