Chapter 6: Metamorphosis

Chapter 6: Metamorphosis

The silence in the house was a hollow thing, filled only by the space a small, twitching life used to occupy. Alex had buried Nibbles in the backyard under the old oak tree, the tiny cardboard box feeling impossibly light in his hands. He scrubbed the wire cage with boiling water until his hands were red and raw, but he couldn't erase the image of those tiny, precise puncture marks. Each time he blinked, he saw them.

He sat on the edge of his bed, the stone beetle resting on his nightstand. He had tried to get rid of it again after finding Nibbles, had even walked to the town incinerator, but the same paralysis had gripped him. His hand became a prison of his own flesh and bone, refusing to release its captive. The faint, violet glow in its veins had subsided, but he knew the energy it had consumed was still there, a stored power waiting to be used. The entity wasn't just influencing him anymore; it was protecting itself, using his body as a shield.

He was a walking cage, and the bars were his own bones.

The greatest terror was no longer the creature itself, but the gaps in his own mind. The lost time in the study, the impossible journey the beetle had made from his drawer to his sleeping hand. What was happening in those moments of blankness? The story of Abernathy gnawing on his armchair was a splinter lodged deep in his brain. Was he doing things he couldn't remember? Was his body moving, acting, working while his mind was dark?

The fear of not knowing was worse than any truth he could imagine. He needed to see. He had to.

With a grim sense of finality, Alex picked up his phone. He opened the camera app, switched it to video, and found a precarious but effective perch for it on top of his bookshelf, angled down at his bed. He plugged in the charger, ensuring it wouldn't die in the night. The lens stared back at him like a single, unblinking eye, a silent witness to whatever horrors the night held. He felt a sliver of control, the desperate act of a man trying to document his own haunting.

He lay down in bed, the beetle on the nightstand beside him, a silent, watchful warden. He stared at the small, red recording light on his phone's screen until his eyelids grew heavy. Sleep felt less like a rest and more like a surrender, a daily defeat in which he relinquished control of his own body to the parasite it hosted. As he drifted off, the phantom skittering under his skin seemed to intensify, a million tiny legs marching him down into the suffocating dark.

He wasn't in his bed anymore. He was standing in a place of profound and ancient silence, a cavern so vast the darkness seemed to have weight. The air was dry and cold, thick with the familiar metallic scent of old blood and a chittering, clicking sound that echoed from all around him. It was the sound from his first dream, magnified a thousand times, a dry, rustling chorus that vibrated in his teeth.

The walls of the cavern weren't stone; they were a dark, chitinous material, iridescent and segmented like the shell of an insect. The floor was littered with a thick carpet of what looked like dry leaves, but as he looked closer, he saw they were the husks of countless beetles, empty stone shells cracked and discarded. And nestled in alcoves, embedded in the walls, were thousands more. Dormant. Waiting. Each was a perfect carving of greenish-gray stone, and from deep within them, a faint, rhythmic pulse of violet light beat like a slow, collective heart.

He was not alone. A figure stood before a larger alcove, its back to Alex. The figure was thin, unnaturally so, like a scarecrow stuffed with dried twigs. It wore the tattered remains of a tweed jacket and trousers. As it turned, Alex’s blood ran cold.

It was Alistair Abernathy.

But this wasn't the man from the photograph. This was a desiccated husk, a mummified thing whose skin was stretched like old parchment over a fragile skeleton. His eyes were milky, sightless voids, but they were fixed on Alex. When he spoke, his voice was not human. It was the dry, rustling scrape of the husks on the cavern floor.

“The Collector is the vessel,” the Abernathy-thing rasped, its jaw clicking with the effort. It raised a skeletal hand and pointed a long, brittle finger at Alex. “The seed requires a vessel to gather, to build.”

The figure turned and gestured toward the grand alcove behind it. “The Nest must be prepared. The wood must be gathered. The glyph must be charged.”

The words meant nothing and everything. They were a litany, an ancient instruction manual recited by a long-dead puppet. Abernathy wasn't a ghost; he was a recording, a previous host whose purpose had been fulfilled.

“All for the Queen,” the husk whispered, its voice dissolving into the cavern’s chittering symphony. “She stirs. She will need to feed when she arrives.”

Alex woke with a violent gasp, his body drenched in cold sweat. The dream clung to him like a shroud, the chittering still echoing in his ears. His jaw ached with a deep, grinding pain, and his mouth was horribly dry. He ran his tongue over his teeth and felt it: the gritty, fibrous texture of sawdust and the sharp, piercing sting of a fresh splinter in his gum.

He scrambled out of bed, his heart hammering against his ribs. His eyes flew to the phone on the bookshelf. The small red light was still on. It had seen everything.

For a long minute, he just stood there, staring at it, terrified of what it held. This was the point of no return. He could smash the phone, live in ignorance, and wait for the end. Or he could watch. He could know.

His hand trembled as he took the phone and stopped the recording. He sat on the edge of his bed, the video file a dark rectangle on his screen. He pressed play.

The first three hours were a time-lapsed view of him tossing and turning. He fast-forwarded, the image of his sleeping self a blur. Then, around 3 a.m., it happened.

His body went still. Utterly, unnaturally still. Then, with a slow, mechanical stiffness that was nothing like a human movement, he sat bolt upright. His eyes were open but glassy and unfocused, staring into the darkness. He wasn't awake; he was activated. A puppet whose strings had just been pulled taut.

The Alex on the screen swung his legs out of bed and stood. He didn’t stretch or stumble. He moved with a horrifying, deliberate purpose, his joints seeming to lock and unlock like the appendages of an insect. He walked, stiff and jerky, not to the door, but to the old wooden desk in the corner of his room.

He knelt before it.

Alex watched, his breath caught in his throat, as his own on-screen image leaned forward. His head tilted, and he opened his mouth. And then he began to chew.

The sound was sickeningly clear through the phone’s microphone. A wet, splintering, grinding noise. The sound of human teeth, designed for tearing flesh, scraping and gnawing on the hard, varnished corner of the oak desk. He chewed with a methodical, bovine patience, his jaw working rhythmically, his expression utterly blank. He was not a man; he was a tool, performing a task. He was gathering the wood.

But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was the sound beneath the sound.

A low, resonant hum. A deep, guttural vibration that wasn't coming from the beetle on the nightstand. Alex leaned closer to the phone, turning the volume all the way up. The hum was organic. It rose and fell with a slow, steady rhythm, seeming to emanate from the chest of the figure on the screen.

It was coming from his own throat.

The phone slipped from his numb fingers and clattered to the floor. The horror was no longer an object he carried. It wasn't a dream or a memory. It was inside him. It had a voice. And it was using his own vocal cords to hum its alien, industrious song as it slowly, methodically, devoured his world.