Chapter 10: The Rabid Disciple

The fabricated memory of the sleepover clung to Alex like a shroud. He stumbled away from the decaying racecar bed, his mind a battlefield where his own authentic past was fighting a losing war against an invading force. The ghost of childish terror—the sound of a man being bludgeoned to death in the woods—felt as real and as formative as his first day of college or his brother’s funeral. He was no longer just Alex Vance, a computer science major. He was also Alex Vance, a child who had heard a murder with his best friend, Chris. The two timelines scraped against each other in his skull, threatening to tear his sanity apart.

He didn't know why he kept walking. Part of him, the logical part that was now a tiny, screaming voice in a hurricane of madness, told him to run. To get back in his car, drive until the gas tank was empty, and never look back. But the entity had him on a leash. It had rewritten his history, stolen his friends and family, and now it was reeling him in, pulling him toward the heart of its web. To run would be to die in the wilderness, lost and insane. The only path, however suicidal, was forward.

He pushed deeper into the suffocating woods, leaving the impossible clearing behind. The forest grew darker, the air thicker. A low, rhythmic crunching sound began to echo through the trees, drawing him onward. It was an ugly, industrial noise that had no place in the natural world. It sounded like teeth on gravel, like a dog chewing on a bone made of glass and metal.

The path ended abruptly at a small, sunken hollow. At its center stood the ruin of a childhood fort, what the locals used to call a “den.” It was a pathetic structure, cobbled together from rotting sheets of plywood, a rusted piece of corrugated tin for a roof, and walls made of stacked stones and decaying logs. It was the kind of place he and Leo would have claimed as their own secret castle. But this was no castle. It was a tomb.

And kneeling before it, like a supplicant at a profane altar, was the woman.

She had her back to him, hunched over something on the ground. Her stringy hair hung in greasy curtains, obscuring her face, but her shoulders worked with a frantic, animalistic energy. The source of the crunching sound was immediately clear. In her hands was the mangled, shattered wreckage of his Raspberry Pi.

The transparent case was spiderwebbed with cracks, shards of it littering the damp earth around her. She held the small, green circuit board—the very brain of The Watcher—and was systematically destroying it. Not with a rock or a tool, but with her teeth.

Alex watched, paralyzed with a mixture of horror and a strange, detached grief for his machine. She bit down on the board, and he heard the sharp crack of fiberglass and silicon. She gnawed on the delicate pins of the GPIO header, tearing them loose with a wet, grinding sound. A thin trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth, mixing with the grime on her chin, but she didn't seem to notice or care. She was devouring his code, his logic, his last tether to the rational world, consuming it in the most primal way imaginable. The wires he had so carefully soldered were tangled in her hands like black spaghetti, and she chewed on the plastic insulation, spitting out small, colored flecks.

She paused in her destruction, holding a piece of the broken board up to her face, examining it with a terrifying intensity. A low, guttural phrase escaped her lips, a series of harsh, clicking sounds that were nothing like the Hebrew he’d heard before. It was older, fouler.

“Akash-gûl… nith-korath…”

The words hung in the dead air, feeling less like language and more like the scraping of stones in a crypt. It was a prayer. A chant. An offering to whatever resided within the dilapidated den.

Alex took an involuntary step back, his foot snapping a dry twig. The sound was a cannon shot in the oppressive silence.

The woman froze. Her rhythmic chewing stopped. For a heartbeat, there was nothing. Then, her head swiveled around with an unnatural, ratcheting speed. Her face was a mask of filth and blood, but it was her eyes that made Alex’s soul recoil. The vacant, haunted look was gone. In its place was a bottomless well of pure, sentient hatred. It was the look of a rabid guard dog seeing an intruder, of a zealot seeing a heretic defiling a holy site. Her gaze fixed on him, pinning him in place. She saw him not as a person, but as an infestation. An impurity.

Her blood-stained lips peeled back from her pale, empty gums. The horrifying smile was gone, replaced by a snarl of utter loathing. The silence stretched, vibrating with her focused malice. Alex couldn't breathe. He couldn't move. He was a bug under a magnifying glass, and the sun was beginning to burn.

When she finally spoke, her voice was not a whisper or a hiss. It was a raw, guttural roar that tore from her throat, a sound of pure territorial fury that ripped through the woods. It was in perfect, unaccented English.

“GET OUT!”

The force of the scream was a physical blow, staggering Alex backward. It wasn't a warning; it was a curse, an attempt to unmake him with sound alone.

But she wasn't finished. Her duty, it seemed, was not just to warn him, but to perform one final, terrible act. Before Alex could react, before he could even process the command, her frenzy turned inward.

With a shriek that curdled the blood, she fixed him with her hateful stare and raised the mangled wreckage of The Watcher high above her head. The sharp, broken edge of the main circuit board glinted in the sickly light. And then she brought it down, not on him, but on her own head.

The impact was a sickening, wet crunch. She struck herself again. And again. And again. Each blow was delivered with the full, manic force of her emaciated body. She was a machine of self-destruction, her movements brutally efficient. Blood sprayed from her scalp, matting her stringy hair. She didn't cry out in pain. Her only sound was a series of low, wet grunts, each one punctuated by the horrible thud of silicon and fiberglass against her skull.

Alex stood frozen in abject horror, unable to look away from the gruesome spectacle. She was destroying herself. Erasing herself. A final, violent act of devotion. This, he realized with a nauseating certainty, was the ultimate fate of a follower. This was the horrifying endpoint for those who served 'The Saint'.

She staggered to her feet, her face a bloody ruin, her eyes still locked on his. She raised the shattered remnants of his creation one last time. Her body convulsed, a final, shuddering spasm, and then she collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, falling limp onto the damp, mulchy ground at the entrance to the den.

Silence rushed back in to fill the void, profound and absolute. The only sound was the frantic, panicked rasp of Alex’s own breathing. The woman lay motionless, a broken sacrifice at the threshold. The path was clear. She hadn't been trying to keep him out. She had been preparing the way.

He stood there for what felt like an eternity, the brutal, final moments of her life replaying in his mind. He was no longer just a victim of this entity. He was a participant. Her blood was on his hands, her final, hateful gaze was a brand on his soul. Shaking, covered in a cold sweat, he took a tentative step forward, his eyes fixed on the dark, gaping entrance to the den. The final threshold.