Chapter 4: The Ghost of Arthur Finch

Chapter 4: The Ghost of Arthur Finch

The house fell silent around Liam, the mundane rhythm of his family’s evening life—the distant drone of the television, the clatter of dishes in the kitchen sink—feeling like a broadcast from another planet. He was sealed in his room, the door locked, the blinds drawn. On his desk, next to the flickering monitor of his laptop, sat the tiny, jagged stone leg. It was a grotesque trophy, a physical proof of the nightmare that had taken root inside his body.

His first frantic searches for “Arthur Finch” had yielded little more than Uncle Joe had told him. A single, ten-year-old article from the local paper’s digital archive popped up. The headline read: Local Academic Vanishes, Leaves Puzzling Legacy. Below it was a grainy, black-and-white photograph. The man in the picture, Arthur Finch, stared out with an intensity that transcended the poor resolution. His eyes were wild, burrowed into a thin, gaunt face. He stood before a wall of books, the same shelves Liam had helped empty, a manic intelligence warring with a deep, palpable fear in his expression. The article painted him as an eccentric recluse, a disgraced Egyptologist whose radical ideas had seen him ostracized from the academic community. Then, one day, he was simply gone.

It was a dead end. A decade-old cold case offered no answers, only more questions.

Liam leaned back, the springs of his desk chair groaning in protest. The scarab in his pocket felt heavy, a leaden weight pulling him down. He had to think like a history student. Primary sources were gone, so he needed to hunt for the unconventional, the ephemeral. What does a reclusive academic, obsessed with fringe theories, do in the internet age? He doesn’t publish papers. He argues in the dark corners of the web.

He changed his search terms, abandoning Finch’s real name. He tried combinations of terms from the book titles he’d seen in the house: “sentient mineralogy,” “Edfu ritual texts,” “pre-dynastic artifacts.” For an hour, he waded through a swamp of pseudo-science websites and crackpot conspiracy theories. Nothing. His right palm began to itch, the phantom limbs of the scarab crawling over his skin. He squeezed his hand into a fist, his knuckles white.

Then, a breakthrough. Buried deep in the search results was a cached link to a defunct forum from the early 2000s: The Antiquarian’s Ledger. The page design was a relic, all harsh fonts and clunky GIFs. A user by the name of “Hierophant_77” had started a thread titled “On the Animus of Inert Matter.” Liam’s heart hammered. The user’s location was listed as their small, insignificant town.

He clicked. The first few posts from Hierophant_77 were academic, if eccentric. He wrote about artifacts that seemed to possess a will of their own, objects that resisted analysis and seemed to exude a palpable aura. Other forum members were dismissive, accusing him of romanticizing history. But Hierophant_77 was persistent, his posts growing more specific, more fervent. He mentioned his “recent acquisition”—an artifact of unknown stone that defied classification, one that seemed to “whisper” to him.

“It is not a tool,” one post read. “It is a vessel. A dormant consciousness waiting for a compatible host.”

Liam felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead. Following a link in the user’s signature, he found what he was truly looking for: an archived blog. The title was simple: Kheper’s Nest. The page was stark white, the text a simple, damning black. It was Arthur Finch’s private journal, his digital ghost.

For the next two hours, Liam devoured a decade of a dead man’s descent into madness. Finch wrote obsessively about his scarab. He identified the entity within it as “Kheper,” a name he’d taken from an obscure, apocryphal text. He described it not as a god or a demon, but as a devourer, an ancient consciousness whose sole purpose was to consume and gestate within a living host before moving on.

Finch’s early entries were filled with an arrogant excitement. He believed he was on the cusp of a revolutionary discovery. He wasn't trying to destroy the entity. He was trying to control it.

“The ancients misunderstood,” Finch wrote in an entry dated eleven years prior. “They sought to banish such entities. The true path is not exorcism, but symbiosis. I will perform the Ritual of Symbiotic Containment. I will offer myself as a stable, willing host, a nest. In return for this vessel, Kheper will grant me access to its knowledge, to the memories of its countless cycles of consumption. I will see the birth of stars and the death of worlds.”

Liam’s stomach churned. This was the arrogance that had gotten Finch killed, or worse. The man hadn’t been a victim fighting a curse; he had invited the monster in, laid out a welcome mat, and offered it the keys to his own body. The blog entries grew more sporadic and unhinged as the years went on. Finch described the same phantom sensations Liam was now experiencing. He wrote about unnatural cravings, a hunger for things that were not food. He mentioned a constant, low vibration, a thrumming from the artifact that he could feel in his own bones.

He was documenting Liam’s future.

The entries stopped abruptly ten years ago. Liam scrolled through months of digital silence, his dread mounting with every flick of the mouse wheel. He reached the final page of the archive. There was only one entry. It was from the day before the local paper reported Arthur Finch had officially disappeared. It wasn't a paragraph or even a full thought.

It was a single, chilling sentence.

It’s hatching.

The words hung on the screen, a digital epitaph. Liam stared at them, his breath caught in his chest. Hatching. The word echoed with the visceral memory of the violent, body-wracking cough, the feeling of something being torn from the lining of his lungs. He slowly looked from the screen to the small, black, jagged object on his desk.

It wasn't just a piece of the scarab. It was shrapnel. It was a sign. The thing inside him, the thing Finch had called Kheper, was no longer dormant. The decade of silence was over. The gestation had begun again, in a new nest.

In him.