Chapter 5: The Crawling Hunger

Chapter 5: The Crawling Hunger

Sleep was no longer an escape; it was a pilgrimage. Every night, Liam returned to the same suffocating landscape from his first nightmare, but with terrifying new clarity. He no longer dreamt of walking on the black sand; he dreamt of being buried beneath it. He would lie in a sarcophagus of cold, unyielding stone, his eyes wide open in the crushing dark, while a slow trickle of black sand poured from the lid. It filled his mouth, his nostrils, his lungs. He would struggle, but his limbs were leaden, paralyzed. The horror wasn't in the suffocation, but in the final moments before he woke up gasping in his sweat-soaked sheets—the moment he stopped fighting and began to welcome it, the grinding grit feeling less like an invader and more like a homecoming.

The waking world offered little relief. His senses were warping, twisting the familiar into the alien. The phantom sensation of the scarab in his palm was now the least of his worries. The real stone, the one he kept locked away by its own volition in his pocket, had begun to vibrate. It started as a low, subtle thrum, easily dismissed as his imagination. But it had grown steadily stronger, until it was a constant, rhythmic pulse against his leg, a slow, patient heartbeat that was not his own.

The most disturbing change, however, was the hunger.

It began at the dinner table. His mom, in a well-intentioned effort to put some meat back on his bones, had made his favorite meal: lasagna, rich with cheese and garlic bread on the side. The smell, which should have been a comforting embrace, was sharp and acrid. He sat at the table, a stage actor playing the part of a normal son, and forced a bite into his mouth.

The taste was a catastrophe. The rich tomato sauce was metallic and sour, like licking a battery. The creamy ricotta tasted like chalk dust, and the seasoned meat was a lump of tasteless, repulsive texture. He chewed mechanically, his jaw aching with the effort, his stomach churning in protest.

“Not hungry, honey?” His mom’s voice was laced with a concern that felt like a hot poker against his frayed nerves.

“Just tired,” he mumbled, pushing a piece of garlic bread around his plate. “Long day.”

But he was hungry. He was starving. It was a deep, gnawing emptiness that had hollowed out a space just below his ribs. It was a craving more intense than any he had ever known, but it wasn't for food. As he sat there, pretending to eat, he could smell the damp petrichor of the recently watered petunias through the open kitchen window. The scent of the rich, dark soil was intoxicating, a complex aroma of life and decay that made his mouth water in a way the lasagna never could. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to go outside, scoop up a handful of that black earth, and press it to his tongue.

He excused himself from the table, claiming a headache, and fled to his room. The vibration from the scarab in his pocket seemed to intensify, the slow pulse a mocking counterpoint to his own frantic heartbeat. It was resonating with the gnawing void in his stomach, the stone and the emptiness calling to each other across the barrier of his own flesh.

The days that followed were a private, waking hell. The cravings grew more specific, more grotesque. While helping his dad clear leaves from the gutter, the smell of the damp, decaying pile of foliage was almost orgasmic. It was a sweet, musty perfume that promised a satisfaction he couldn't name. He found himself lingering by the pile, his hands trembling, fighting a primal urge to shove a fistful of the rotting vegetation into his mouth.

It was the rust that finally broke him. He was in the backyard, his mind a fog of exhaustion and dread, when he saw the old swing set his parents never got around to taking down. A thick layer of orange-brown rust coated the chains, flaking away in the sun. He ran his fingers over it, the texture gritty and sharp. An impulse, alien and undeniable, seized him. His mind screamed no, but his body was no longer entirely his to command. He leaned in, his gaze furtive as he checked the windows of the house. He pressed his tongue to the chain.

The taste was electric. A sharp, coppery tang exploded in his mouth, and for a blissful, horrifying instant, the gnawing emptiness in his stomach subsided. It was a feeling of profound relief, of a deep thirst finally quenched. He pulled back, disgusted and terrified, a reddish-brown smear on his lips. What was he becoming?

He stumbled back to his room and collapsed in front of his laptop, his hands shaking. He pulled up Arthur Finch’s blog, Kheper’s Nest. He wasn't looking for answers anymore; he was looking for confirmation. He scrolled past the arrogant pronouncements and the cryptic ritual notes until he found the later entries, the ones written in the grip of the same transformation he was now enduring.

Finch wrote about it with a chilling, detached fascination. “The vessel must be prepared. The internal environment must be made hospitable. My palate has… shifted. I find myself drawn to the telluric, the chthonic. The base elements. It is not my hunger I am satisfying, but the nest’s. Kheper is remodeling its new home from the inside out.”

The words hit Liam with the force of a physical blow. Remodeling its new home. He looked from the screen to his own pale, trembling hands. The weight in his gut wasn't hunger. It was construction. The coughing up of the stone leg wasn't just a byproduct; it was the start of the process. The entity wasn't just living inside him. It was hollowing him out, turning his organs and senses to its own purpose, preparing the ground for something to grow.

He pressed a hand to his stomach, where the gnawing ache was returning. The vibration from the scarab in his pocket pulsed in time with it, a steady, patient rhythm. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. It wasn't just a rock anymore. It was an engine, powering the slow, methodical demolition of Liam Carter. He wasn't just a host, a carrier for a cursed object. He was the soil. He was the incubator. He was the nest. And the horrifying, unspoken question left hanging in the air was: what, exactly, was Finch’s final, terrified word meant for? What was hatching inside of him?