Chapter 11: The Altar of Leo

Chapter 11: The Altar of Leo

The silence that followed the woman's violent, self-inflicted death was a physical weight. It pressed in on Alex from all sides, a thick, suffocating blanket woven from horror and dread. He stood at the threshold of the dilapidated den, the woman's broken body a gruesome welcome mat. Her last, hateful glare was seared into his vision, a final testament to her rabid devotion. The path was clear, but every instinct in his body screamed at him to turn back.

He couldn't. Not after everything. Not after the racecar bed, not after Sarah’s vacant smile, not after this final, bloody sacrifice. The answers, whatever they were, lay inside that suffocating darkness.

Holding his breath, Alex stepped carefully over the disciple's body, his sneakers avoiding a spreading pool of dark blood. He didn't look down. He couldn't. He pushed aside a moldy piece of burlap that served as a door and plunged into the shadows.

The stench hit him first. It was a complex, layered foulness. The base note was the damp, musty smell of rot and earth that had permeated the entire woods. But underneath it was the coppery tang of old blood and something else, something cloyingly sweet and sickly, the smell of infected meat left too long in the sun.

His eyes took a moment to adjust to the gloom. The only light filtered through cracks in the rotting plywood walls, cutting the interior into stripes of grey and black. The space was tiny, cramped, no bigger than a walk-in closet. And it was not empty.

In the center of the small space, propped up against the far wall in a sitting position, was a large, slumped figure. Alex’s heart seized. His first thought was that it was a scarecrow, a grotesque effigy left by the madwoman outside. But as his vision cleared, he saw the familiar, matted brown fur, the faded red bow tie, and the round, plastic button eyes.

It was Barnaby. The teddy bear from his childhood. The one that had been impossibly delivered to his dorm room. The one that had spoken in a mockery of his brother's voice.

But it wasn't just a stuffed animal. It was a costume. And there was someone inside it.

“Chris?” Alex whispered, the name a fragile puff of air in the dead space. His voice sounded alien, thin and reedy.

He took a hesitant step forward, his phone now in his hand, its flashlight beam cutting a nervous, trembling path through the darkness. The beam swept across the figure, and Alex’s whisper died in his throat, choked off by a wave of pure, undiluted horror.

The figure’s head was tilted at an unnatural angle, resting against the bear’s fuzzy shoulder. Peeking out from beneath the worn sneakers was a familiar brand of sock. Poking from the cuff of one of the furry paws was the edge of a graphic t-shirt, a pixelated video game character Alex recognized. It was Chris. His best friend.

A strangled sob escaped Alex’s lips. He stumbled forward, his flashlight beam dancing wildly over the scene. He needed to help him, to get him out of the ridiculous costume. He reached out to pull at the zipper on the front of the bear suit, but his fingers found only a coarse, thick seam of black thread.

There was no zipper.

He traced the seam with the beam of light, his stomach churning violently. The matted fur of the bear costume was not zipped or buttoned. It was sewn shut. More than that, the thick, wax-coated thread was stitched not just through the fabric, but through the skin beneath. Crude, heavy sutures, like the ones on a baseball, puckered Chris’s pale, waxy flesh, binding him inextricably to the childhood effigy. The fabric and his body had been made one. The line between person and object had been grotesquely, permanently blurred. Alex could see where the fabric had fused with the skin underneath, inflamed and infected