Chapter 2: The First Cut

Chapter 2: The First Cut

Alex woke with a crick in his neck and the phantom sensation of a thousand tiny legs skittering across his skin. He snapped upright, his eyes darting immediately to the nightstand. The beetle was there, a lump of greenish-gray stone in the pale morning light, exactly where he had shoved it back to the center. For a dizzying moment, relief washed over him. It hadn't moved again. He must have dreamt it—the unsettling slide across the wood, the rustling in his sleep. Just a stress-dream brought on by the dust and the decay. He was overtired, that was all.

He was a rational person. Stone objects did not move on their own.

But as he swung his legs out of bed, the relief curdled into a nagging doubt. The memory felt too crisp, too real to be a simple nightmare. He left the beetle sitting there, a silent, unmoving accusation, and got ready for another day of gutting the dead man’s house. He needed to focus on the work, on the solid, predictable reality of his uncle’s world where problems could be solved with a pry bar and a dumpster.

“Got a special project for you today,” Uncle Joe announced, clapping a dusty hand on Alex’s shoulder. They stood in the study, now stripped bare of the desk and its secrets. The only thing remaining was a large, tightly rolled carpet in the center of the floor. “Owner’s son called. Wants us to try and salvage this. Sentimental value, apparently.”

Joe nudged the roll with his steel-toed boot. “Looks like a biohazard to me, but he’s paying extra for the attempt. Get the industrial cleaner from the truck.”

Alex grabbed the end of the carpet and unrolled it across the grimy floorboards. The smell hit him like a physical blow. It was a thick, cloying miasma of something metallic and organic. A coppery stench, like a mouthful of old blood, mingled with the damp, earthy odor of rust. It clung to the back of his throat, acrid and invasive.

The carpet itself might have once been beautiful, a Persian or something similar, its intricate patterns now lost under a sprawling, dark stain. The stain was an ugly, map-like shape of blackish-red that had soaked so deep into the fibers it looked like a part of the original design. A shadow of a life ended badly.

“Jesus,” Alex muttered, recoiling from the smell.

“Told you,” Joe said, already turning to leave. “Wear gloves. And try not to think about what made it. Time is money.”

The work was hell. For hours, Alex was on his hands and knees, scrubbing at the foul stain. The chemical cleaner he used was pungent, but it couldn't conquer the deep, metallic odor that rose from the dampening fibers in sickening waves. It was the smell of the house itself, concentrated into one foul patch. He felt it seeping into his pores, clinging to his clothes and hair. A ghost he couldn’t exorcise.

His mind, trapped in the small, stinking room, kept drifting. He thought about the beetle sitting on his nightstand. He pictured its metallic purple veins, its unnerving weight. Had the previous owner carved it? Was he the source of its strange energy?

“Hey, Uncle Joe,” he called out during a water break, desperate for a dose of normalcy. “What was the deal with the guy who lived here anyway?”

Joe was outside, measuring a window frame. He didn't turn around. “Some old recluse. Abernathy, I think the neighbors said. Died right in his armchair, wasn’t found for a week. That’s all I know, and all I care to know.” He grunted, making a mark with a pencil. “Now stop jawing and start scrubbing. From here, that stain still looks like a crime scene.”

The casual remark landed like a stone in Alex’s gut. He went back to the carpet, the image of a body decomposing into the fibers searing itself into his brain. The metallic smell was suddenly richer, more horrifying. The house felt less like a job site and more like a tomb. Each scrape of his brush felt like he was disturbing a grave, and with every passing minute, the stone beetle waiting in his bedroom felt less like a find and more like something he had disinterred.

By the time he got home, every muscle in his body ached. He was caked in grime and reeked of chemicals and death. He stood in the shower for twenty minutes, scrubbing his skin raw, but he couldn't wash away the smell. It was a phantom, lodged deep in his sinuses. A permanent souvenir from the Abernathy house.

He walked into his bedroom, and his eyes went straight to the nightstand. The beetle sat there, impassive. It hadn’t moved. He was being ridiculous, letting a creepy house and a weird carving get to him. He was tired, his imagination was in overdrive.

Still, he couldn't bear the thought of it watching him sleep.

In a decisive move to reclaim his own sanity, Alex snatched the beetle from the nightstand. The stone was cool and inert in his palm. He wrapped it tightly in a thick wool sock, muffling its perfect, unnerving details. Then he opened his desk drawer, shoved the bundled object deep into the back, and buried it under a pile of old notebooks and loose papers. Out of sight, out of mind. He slammed the drawer shut with a satisfying thud.

Exhausted, he collapsed into bed and fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep, the phantom smell of rust and rot his only companion.

He woke up in the dead of night.

The room was pitch black, silent save for the low hum of his own blood in his ears. It wasn't a sound that had woken him. It was a feeling. A dull, rhythmic, pulsing ache in his right hand.

He blinked, trying to clear his head. His hand was at his side, clenched into a fist so tight his knuckles strained against the skin. He tried to uncurl his fingers, but they were locked, rigid as stone. A tremor of unease, cold and sharp, traced its way up his spine.

Then he heard it.

Click.

A tiny, sharp sound, like a grain of sand striking glass. It was impossibly close. It wasn't in the walls. It wasn't on the floor.

Click… click…

With a dawning, sickening horror, Alex realized the sound was coming from inside his own clenched fist.

Panic seized him. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead. Using his left hand, he grabbed his right wrist and began to pry his fingers open. They fought him, unnaturally strong and stiff. He strained, his breath hitching in his throat, forcing them back one by one. The joints groaned in protest.

As his palm finally flattened, the weak moonlight from the window illuminated the object resting there.

It was the beetle.

Somehow, it had gotten out of the drawer, out of the sock, and into his hand while he slept. But that wasn't the most horrifying part. It had changed. Its six legs, once tucked seamlessly against its body, were now unfolded. They weren’t thick, carved appendages. They were impossibly thin, needle-like shards of polished stone, tapering to points as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel.

Two of those bladed legs were embedded deep in the fleshy part of his palm.

He stared, his mind refusing to process what he was seeing. Dark, viscous beads of his own blood welled up around the precise puncture wounds, gleaming black in the moonlight. The stone of the beetle felt warm now, a low, vibrant heat radiating into his flesh. As he watched, paralyzed by terror, one of the other unfolded legs shifted with an audible, sickening click, scraping against the bone inside his hand. The psychological unease he had felt all day had just become brutally, terrifyingly physical. The thing in his hand was not just a carving. It was alive. And it was hungry.