Chapter 2: The Seventh Statue

Chapter 2: The Seventh Statue

Dawn broke not with light, but with a thick, pearly haze that did little to cut the oppressive humidity. Anya hadn't slept. She’d spent the night sitting by the window, pistol in her lap, listening to the silence that had followed the clanking and the scent of rust. The smell had dissipated, but the memory of it clung to the back of her throat like a foul residue.

The crunch of tires on the gravel track announced Marco’s arrival. He found her on the porch, staring intently at the wall of cogon grass that seemed to have crept closer in the night. She looked pale under her tan, her eyes holding a feverish glint he didn’t like.

“Anything?” he asked, holding out a styrofoam cup of aggressively sweet instant coffee.

“Sounds,” she said, taking the cup. Her fingers were cold. “Last night. Metal scraping. And a smell.”

Marco’s brow furrowed. “What kind of smell?”

“Rust.” The word came out flat, stripped of all emotion.

He let out a slow breath, his skepticism a gentle but firm presence between them. “Reyes, this place… it’s getting to you. Old farm equipment, a tricycle with a bad chain. Could be anything.”

“It wasn't just anything, Marco.” Her gaze didn't waver from the field. “The boy’s mother said he and the other kids played out here. They made statues.”

“Right. Stick figures. The other kids confirmed it.” He gestured towards the field with his chin. “You want to check it out? Maybe the kid dropped something, a clue.” He was humoring her, trying to steer her obsessive focus into a productive, procedural channel.

“That’s exactly what I want to do,” she said, pushing herself to her feet. The desire to cross that threshold, to step into the place that haunted her dreams, was a nauseating mix of terror and compulsion. She had to see it, to confirm that the nightmare of her past was truly bleeding into her present.

Marco sighed but followed her lead. “Alright. Let’s go scare some snakes.”

The entrance to the field was a barely-there path, a slight parting in the sea of grass. The moment they stepped inside, the world changed. The air grew still and thick, the noise of the village muffled by the dense stalks. The cogon grass towered over their heads, its sharp-edged leaves whispering against their clothes, a constant, sibilant chorus. It was like walking into a labyrinth with no visible walls, the sky reduced to a small patch of hazy blue above.

“Creepy,” Marco muttered, swatting a blade of grass from his face. “You can see why a kid would get lost in here.”

“They don’t get lost,” Anya said softly, her eyes scanning the claustrophobic corridor of green. “They get taken.”

They found the children's play area a few dozen meters in, a small, trampled clearing. Six stick-and-cloth figures stood in a rough circle. They were crude but innocent, made from scavenged twigs, adorned with colorful plastic wrappers and faded scraps of fabric for clothes. A child's game. An attempt to impose order on a wild place.

Anya counted them. One, two, three, four, five, six.

“The kids said there were six of them,” Marco said, nudging one with the toe of his boot. “Leo was the sixth. So they made one for each of them. Standard kid stuff.”

But Anya’s attention had been caught by something behind the circle of stick figures, half-hidden by a thicker clump of grass. Something that didn't belong.

“Marco,” she said, her voice tight. “There’s another one.”

She pushed through the stalks, her heart hammering against her ribs. There, standing apart from the others, was a seventh statue.

It was taller than the rest, nearly four feet high, and it wasn't made of sticks. Its spine was a length of rusted rebar, pitted and stained a deep, angry orange. Its body was a chaotic jumble of baling wire, twisted sheet metal, and filthy, oil-stained rags. A shard of a broken mirror was embedded in what might have been its chest, reflecting a distorted, sickly green piece of the world.

And the arms. It had too many arms.

Lengths of corroded pipe, a broken car antenna, the gear-and-chain assembly from a bicycle, and a gnarled piece of driftwood all jutted out from its torso at unnatural angles. They were less like limbs and more like weapons, a chaotic explosion of sharp, decaying metal.

Marco came up behind her, his easy-going demeanor evaporating. “What the hell is that?” he breathed. The sight of it was viscerally wrong. It wasn't a child's creation. The malice that radiated from it was palpable, a deliberate and grotesque parody of the other statues.

He stepped closer, his detective's curiosity overriding his unease. “This is… this is junk art. Maybe some local eccentric? Or a sick prank?” He reached out and touched one of the metal appendages. “It’s cold,” he said, pulling his hand back as if burned. “And heavy. This took effort.”

His rational mind was scrambling, trying to fit this monstrosity into a logical box, but the box was cracking at the seams. For the first time, he looked truly unnerved, the city cop completely out of his depth.

Anya, however, wasn't looking at the whole. Her investigator's eye, sharpened by fifteen years of unresolved trauma, was drawn to a single, sickening detail. Tied around one of the rusted pipe-arms, almost hidden amongst the grimy rags, was a small strip of bright blue fabric. It was faded and dirty, but the pattern was unmistakable.

A tiny, repeating cartoon rocket ship.

She felt the blood drain from her face. She remembered it vividly from the photograph in the case file. The smiling, gap-toothed boy, Leo Santos, proudly wearing his favorite t-shirt.

“Marco,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Look.”

He followed her gaze. His eyes widened, and the last of his professional detachment shattered. The color drained from his face as the implication hit him with the force of a physical blow.

This wasn't just a prank. It wasn't junk art. It was a trophy. A gruesome, handcrafted monument to a missing child, built from the very rust she had smelled in the night. The kidnapper hadn't just taken the boy. They had returned to his playground, to the heart of his innocent world, and built an effigy in his absence. Or worse. Far worse.

Something else had built it.