Chapter 4: The Collector's Legacy

Chapter 4: The Collector's Legacy

The drive to work with Uncle Joe was an exercise in silent, gnawing dread. The stone beetle was a heavy, cold weight in Alex's pocket, a stark contrast to the disturbing warmth it had radiated when he'd woken from his fugue state. He kept his right hand jammed in his pocket, fingers wrapped around the carving, half to keep it secure and half because the thought of not touching it was somehow worse. He felt its smooth, unyielding surface against his skin, a constant reminder of his lost time, of his own hands betraying him.

The story of Abernathy gnawing on his furniture played on a loop in his mind. Wood splinters in his teeth and gums. It was a grotesque, insane image, but a terrifying piece of the puzzle had clicked into place. The blank spot in his memory from the day before, the way he’d found himself standing in the center of the study with no idea how he got there… what had he been doing during that lost time? Had he been staring at the walls? Had his own mouth felt the dry, splintery taste of old wood? He didn't know, and that ignorance was the most terrifying thing of all.

“You’re still a million miles away,” Uncle Joe said, breaking the silence as he pulled the truck up to the curb in front of the house. “If you’re sick, just say so. I can’t have you falling off a ladder because you’re not paying attention.”

The word "sick" was an anchor. “You know what? I think I am,” Alex said, the lie tasting like truth. “Something’s not sitting right. I think I need to just go home and sleep it off.”

Joe gave him a long, appraising look, his brow furrowed with a mixture of concern and professional annoyance. “Fine,” he finally sighed. “Don’t make a habit of it. I’ll drop you off. But I’m docking your pay for the day.”

“Fair enough,” Alex agreed immediately. A day’s pay was nothing compared to the answers he desperately needed.

But he didn’t go home. After his uncle dropped him off, Alex waited until the work truck had rounded the corner before heading downtown. The public library and the adjacent county courthouse annex felt like the only sane places left in the world—buildings of quiet, ordered facts, of recorded history that couldn't move on its own or draw blood. He needed a name, a history, something more than a ghost story from a paramedic.

The county records office was in the courthouse basement, a sterile, beige room that smelled of aging paper and floor wax. Under the humming fluorescent lights, a bored-looking clerk pointed him toward a row of hulking metal cabinets and a microfiche reader that looked like a relic from the Cold War.

He started with property deeds, confirming the name: Alistair Abernathy. Then he moved to the library’s digital archives, typing the name into the search bar. The first hit was a short, dry obituary from two years ago. It listed no surviving family and gave a brief, dismissive summary of his life: “long-time resident,” “private collector,” “passed away peacefully at his home at the age of 87.” It was a sanitized, public-facing lie. There was nothing peaceful about the stain on that carpet.

He kept digging, scrolling back through decades of digitized local news. Most of it was useless—zoning notices, election results, announcements for the annual bake sale. He was about to give up when he found it. It was a small, feature article from 1978, tucked away in the Sunday supplement. The headline read: “Local Professor Probes Nature’s Stone Secrets.”

Alex leaned closer to the screen, his heart starting to thump a heavy, anxious rhythm. The article described Dr. Alistair Abernathy not as a recluse, but as a respected, if eccentric, professor of entomology at the state university. It spoke of his controversial theories, his falling out with the academic community, and his focus on a strange, niche field he called “bio-mimetic petrology”—the study of geological formations that uncannily mimic biological life.

The reporter wrote, with a hint of journalistic skepticism, of Abernathy’s belief that certain organisms, under immense pressure and specific mineral conditions, didn’t just fossilize; they could become a kind of seed, a perfect, dormant stone replica capable of carrying on its biological imperative once unearthed. The university had called it pseudoscience and revoked his tenure. Abernathy had retreated into his home, becoming a private researcher, funding his work by selling off parts of his family’s estate. He had, the article concluded, become a dedicated collector of “unique specimens that defy conventional classification.”

Then Alex saw the photo.

It was a grainy, black-and-white image accompanying the article. A much younger Abernathy, with wild hair and a pair of piercingly intense eyes, stood in his study. The roll-top desk was visible behind him. He was holding up a piece of petrified wood for the camera, but that wasn’t what made Alex’s breath catch in his throat.

Around Abernathy’s neck, hanging from a simple leather thong, was the beetle.

It was unmistakable. The distinct shape of the stag beetle’s mandibles, the curve of its carapace, the way the light caught its polished surface even in the poor-quality photograph. It was the same carving. Abernathy wore it like a talisman, a badge of his singular, obsessive faith. This wasn't some random object Alex had found. He was following a path. He was the next link in a chain. He was the inheritor of a curse.

As the horrifying realization settled over him, the sterile air of the archive began to change.

It started with the smell. Faintly at first, then growing stronger, more insistent. The metallic, coppery stench from the stained carpet in the Abernathy house. The smell of old blood and rust. It filled his nostrils, thick and cloying, completely out of place in the clean, quiet basement. He looked around wildly, but the clerk was still typing, oblivious. No one else seemed to notice. The smell was just for him.

He pushed his chair back, a wave of nausea rolling through his stomach. The stone in his pocket, the one he had been clutching for comfort, suddenly felt like a cancerous growth. He needed to get out. He stood up, his legs unsteady.

That’s when he felt it.

It began as a faint tickle on the back of his hand, the one with the two small puncture wounds. He instinctively went to scratch it, thinking it was a stray hair or a loose thread. But the sensation didn’t stop. It intensified, spreading up his arm. A feeling of movement, of a dozen tiny things crawling just beneath the surface of his skin. It wasn't on his skin; it was in him.

He could feel a phantom skittering, a dry, rustling procession moving through his veins, up his arm, towards his shoulder. He clawed at his forearm, his nails leaving red tracks on his skin, but the crawling was too deep to reach. It was a horrifying, intimate violation. He was no longer just the carrier of the beetle. He was becoming its nest. The legacy Abernathy had left behind wasn't in his house; it was now crawling under Alex's own skin.