Chapter 7: The Archivist

Chapter 7: The Archivist

The half-eaten steak sat on the counter, a rotting monument to Aaron’s moral decay. A fine sheen of grey mold was beginning to bloom on its surface, yet the kitchen was filled with a phantom, ghostly aroma of grilled perfection. It was a constant, sickening reminder of the meal that had fractured his identity. He kept tasting things that weren’t there: the faint, metallic tang of Mark Rendell’s dental fillings, the cloying sweetness of his cheap cologne. He’d catch himself whistling a tune he’d never heard, a jingle from a commercial Mark must have liked. He was becoming a haunted house, and Mark Rendell was the ghost.

His injured arm was a landscape of mottled purple and angry red, the wound weeping a clear fluid that dried into a crystalline, glittering crust. The confetti was no longer just clinging to him; it felt like it was growing from him. He’d wake up with a fresh, shimmering hexagon on his pillow, as if he’d shed it in his sleep. He was an unwilling host to a beautiful, terrifying parasite.

He had barricaded himself inside, ignoring the buzzing of his phone and the emails piling up from work. The outside world had ceased to matter. There was only the craving, the pain, the static, and the ghost of Mark Rendell living behind his eyes.

A sharp, insistent knock on his door shattered the suffocating silence. It wasn’t the hesitant rap of a delivery person; it was deliberate, commanding.

Aaron froze, his heart seizing in his chest. He didn't move, didn't breathe, praying whoever it was would go away.

The knock came again, louder this time. “Aaron? I know you’re in there. We need to talk.”

It was her. The girl from 2C. Maya.

“Go away,” he croaked, his voice raw from disuse.

“No,” her voice came, muffled but firm, through the cheap wood of the door. “I’ve spent the last three days in the university’s special collections, cross-referencing folklore about demonic bargains and liminal spaces. I found something. I know what’s happening to you.”

A cold dread, colder than anything he had felt in the pantry, washed over him. He crept to the door, peering through the peephole. Maya stood there, her face set with grim determination. She held up her phone to the lens. On the screen was a scanned page from an old, leather-bound book. The text was archaic, but the illustration was horrifyingly familiar: a tall, slender female figure with an impossibly wide smile, standing before a curtain. In the margins, someone had scribbled notes, and one word, circled repeatedly in red ink, stood out: Lacuna.

His blood turned to ice. He fumbled with the locks, his hand shaking so badly it took him two tries to turn the deadbolt. He opened the door a crack.

Maya’s sharp eyes took in his disheveled state, the fear etched on his face, and the fresh bandage on his arm. “You’re shedding,” she said, her gaze flicking to a piece of emerald confetti on the collar of his shirt. “It’s a symptom. We need to go. There’s someone I think we need to see.”

Reluctance warred with a desperate, drowning hope. He was terrified of exposing himself further, but the thought of an answer, any answer, was a lifeline. He gave a single, jerky nod.

Twenty minutes later, he was in the passenger seat of her beat-up hatchback, cradling his injured arm as she drove them away from the sterile anonymity of their complex and into the older, more neglected parts of Tucson. The houses grew smaller, the yards more overgrown, until she finally pulled up to a small, dilapidated bungalow at the end of a dead-end street. The house looked abandoned. The paint was peeling in long, leprous strips, the lawn was a jungle of weeds, and several windows were boarded over with weathered plywood.

“Are you sure about this?” Aaron asked, his voice barely a whisper.

“His name is Arthur Penwright,” Maya said, shutting off the engine. “He was a professor of semiotics at the university until he had a breakdown and vanished from public life thirty years ago. I found his dissertation. It was a study of ‘parasitic narratives’ and what he called ‘ontological entities.’ It was mostly dismissed as academic lunacy, but he described a creature just like your host. He mentioned the game.”

They walked up a crumbling concrete path. A single, bizarre detail stood out amidst the decay: a small, meticulously polished brass peephole cover set into the center of the rotting front door. Maya knocked.

For a long moment, there was silence. Then, the brass cover slid aside, and a single, bloodshot eye peered out.

“Go away,” a voice rasped from within, thin and dry as autumn leaves.

“Mr. Penwright,” Maya said, speaking clearly to the door. “My name is Maya. I’m a folklore student. I’ve read your dissertation. I need to talk to you about Lacuna.”

The eye widened, a flicker of raw terror in its depths. “I have nothing to say. Leave me alone.” The cover began to slide shut.

“Wait!” Aaron blurted out, a surge of desperation cutting through his fear. He shoved his good hand into his pocket and pulled out a small cluster of confetti he’d picked off his floor that morning. He held it up to the peephole. “I’m a contestant,” he said.

The peephole cover snapped back open. The eye stared at the glittering flakes, then at Aaron’s face. “Show me your arm,” the voice commanded.

Confused, Aaron rolled up the sleeve of his uninjured arm.

“No,” the voice hissed. “The other one. The one you’ve been protecting. Show me your winnings.”

Heart pounding, Aaron slowly, painfully, rolled up the sleeve over his bandaged wound. He peeled back a corner of the gauze, revealing the raw, inflamed gash beneath, the flesh still embedded with the glittering remnants of his ‘RISK’.

A series of metallic clicks echoed from behind the door as multiple locks were undone. The door creaked open, and a man who looked like a ghost stepped out of the shadows. He was ancient and impossibly frail, with a wild mane of white hair and a beard that reached his chest. He was wrapped in a threadbare bathrobe, and his eyes, set deep in a-wrinkled face, burned with a terrifying, paranoid intensity.

“Get inside,” Arthur Penwright whispered, ushering them in and quickly re-locking the door behind them.

The inside of the house was a shocking contrast of squalor and obsessive order. Dust lay thick on every surface, and the air was stale with the smell of old paper and decay. But lining every wall, from floor to ceiling, were meticulously organized shelves. On the shelves were not books, but hundreds of glass jars. Inside each jar was a single, perfect object: a gleaming silver dollar, a child’s lost tooth, a perfectly ripe peach that showed no signs of age, a vintage watch frozen at a quarter past three, a single, intricately carved jade chess piece. Each jar bore a small, typewritten label. Aaron squinted at one: MEMORY OF FIRST KISS – SARAH JENSEN, 1978. Another read: SECRET OF FATHER’S INFIDELITY, 1982.

These were his rewards. An entire life traded away, item by item, memory by memory.

“She feeds on potential,” Arthur rasped, following Aaron’s gaze. “On the stories we use to build ourselves. The rewards… they seem perfect, don’t they? But they’re hollow. Bait. Just enough to keep you coming back for more.” He gestured to stacks of leather-bound journals that filled a corner of the room, their pages crammed with frantic, spidery handwriting and disturbing anatomical sketches. “I’ve spent thirty years studying her. Trying to understand the cycle.”

“The cycle?” Maya asked, her voice hushed with awe and dread.

Arthur hobbled over to one of the journals, flipping it open to a marked page. On it was a detailed, nightmarishly accurate drawing of one of the mantis-creatures Aaron had encountered behind the crimson curtain.

“She doesn’t just feed,” Arthur whispered, his finger tracing the outline of the monster. “That’s too simple. It’s a process. A cultivation. She has a name for her chosen contestants. The ones who keep coming back, the ones who get marked by her world.”

He looked up, his wild eyes locking onto Aaron’s. The paranoid fear was gone, replaced by a terrible, chilling pity.

“She calls us Caterpillars,” he said, his voice dropping to a near-inaudible whisper. “She fattens us up with rewards, fills us with her essence, her glitter. She’s not just preparing a meal, boy. She’s preparing a nest.”

He let the silence hang in the air for a moment before delivering the final, devastating blow.

“All of this—the trades, the risks, the rewards—it’s just the prelude. It’s all to get us ready for the change. For the pupation.” He pointed a trembling, skeletal finger at the glittering, infected wound on Aaron’s arm. “And by the looks of you, the silk is already inside.”