Chapter 2: The Unbreakable Bond

Chapter 2: The Unbreakable Bond

The morning light did nothing to dispel the night’s lingering horror. Liam sat on the edge of his bed, the stone scarab resting in his palm, its cold weight a stark, undeniable reality. Sleep had been a series of fragmented nightmares—the taste of sand, the crushing pressure, the feeling of something crawling just beneath his skin. Each time he’d jolted awake, his hand was already clamped around the artifact, a cage of flesh and bone.

This had to be a mistake. A hallucination brought on by exhaustion and the creepy atmosphere of that house. He was a rational person, a history student who dealt in facts and verifiable sources. There had to be a logical explanation.

His first attempt was simple, almost laughably so. He walked to his desk, the scarab feeling slick with his own nervous sweat, and pulled open the top drawer. It was a chaotic mess of pens, old receipts, and charging cables. He dropped the stone beetle inside, its clatter against the cheap wood sounding unnaturally loud in the quiet room. He locked the drawer with a small, flimsy key and put the key on top of his bookshelf, across the room.

There. Contained. He could see the key. He knew the drawer was locked.

He tried to focus on something else, anything else. He pulled up his college email, staring blankly at a notification about course registration. But his entire consciousness was focused on the desk. A low hum of anxiety vibrated through him. His right palm began to itch, the phantom sensation of those sharp, carved legs returning with a vengeance. He rubbed his hand against his jeans, but the feeling persisted, an insistent ghost.

He lasted five minutes.

With a groan of frustration, he stood up. He didn't check the drawer. He didn't need to. He slid his hand into the pocket of his jeans and felt his blood run cold. There it was. The smooth carapace, the unyielding weight. He pulled it out, the stone now feeling warm, as if from body heat. He fumbled for the key, unlocked the drawer, and peered inside. The space where he’d dropped it was empty. No sound, no sign of tampering. It had simply vanished from one place and appeared in another.

Panic began to fray the edges of his reason.

“Okay,” he whispered to the empty room, his voice thin and reedy. “Okay. Let’s try something else.”

He stormed into the kitchen, his mind racing. He needed a more robust prison, something that couldn't be escaped by… whatever impossible means this thing used. He yanked open the freezer, the blast of frigid air a welcome shock. He grabbed a plastic takeout container, filled it with water from the tap, and dropped the scarab in. It sank instantly, settling at the bottom like a black, malevolent seed. He shoved the container into the back of the freezer, behind a forgotten bag of freezer-burnt peas and a box of ice pops.

He would not leave the room. He would not take his eyes off the freezer door.

He sat at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee he couldn't bring himself to drink. He watched the clock on the microwave, the red numbers marching toward an unknown conclusion. Ten minutes. Twenty. An hour. A fragile sense of victory began to build. Maybe it just needed to be contained by something other than wood and cheap metal. Maybe the cold would nullify whatever weird energy it possessed.

He got up to pour the cold coffee down the sink. He turned his back on the freezer for no more than three seconds. It was a single, fluid motion—dump the coffee, rinse the mug, place it in the rack. But when he turned back, the familiar, dreadful weight had returned to his pocket.

His breath caught in his throat. With a trembling hand, he reached into his pocket. The scarab was there. It was not wet. It was not even cold. It was perfectly dry and held the neutral temperature of the room.

He tore open the freezer door, his hands clumsy with dread. He pulled out the container. A solid block of ice had formed, cloudy in the center. But suspended within that icy tomb, there was nothing. Just an empty space where the scarab should have been. The laws of physics had been casually, contemptuously broken in his own kitchen.

This wasn't a trick. He wasn't going crazy. This was real.

A raw, primal fear took hold, and with it came a surge of desperate anger. Liam sprinted to the garage, rummaging through his uncle’s old toolbox until he found what he was looking for: a thick, silver roll of industrial-strength duct tape. This was his last, desperate stand against the irrational.

Back in his room, he placed the scarab on his desk. He started wrapping, pulling the tape taut, his movements jerky and frantic. He wound it around and around, layer upon layer, until the artifact was the core of a thick, lumpy silver cocoon. It was ugly and dense, a tomb of adhesive and fiber. He wasn't finished. He took his thickest history textbook—a massive tome on the fall of the Roman Empire—and used a box cutter to carve a hole in its center, desecrating a thousand pages of history to create a tiny, paper-lined crypt. He shoved the duct-taped ball inside and slammed the book shut.

He didn't hide it. He placed it in the middle of his floor and sat on his bed, cross-legged, staring at it. His eyes burned from lack of sleep. His heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He would not blink. He would not look away. He would watch it until sunrise if he had to.

He stared at the book, a singular point of focus in a world that was rapidly dissolving into madness. He didn't feel a transition. There was no flicker of movement, no sound, no shift in the air. One moment, his hand was empty, resting on his knee. The next, the scarab was in it.

He didn’t even need to look down to confirm it. He could feel it, a fundamental part of him now, like a phantom limb in reverse. He slowly opened his hand. The stone beetle lay there, dark and clean, its oily sheen mocking him. He looked at the textbook on the floor. It was still closed, completely undisturbed. He knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that if he were to open it, the silver ball of duct tape would still be inside, its core mysteriously empty.

He had lost.

Liam slumped forward, the fight draining out of him, replaced by a cold, hollow dread. He wasn't being haunted by an object. A haunting implied separation, an external force tormenting him. This was different. This was a connection, a tether that transcended space and physics. He couldn't get rid of the scarab because, he finally understood, it was already a part of him. The bond was absolute. It was unbreakable.