Chapter 6: Not Enough

Chapter 6: Not Enough

Forced to his knees on the precipice of the abyss, David could only watch. The men holding him were like granite statues, their grip an unbreakable vise on his arms. Every muscle in his body screamed, strained, and tore in a futile rebellion against his own helplessness. His world had narrowed to this single, horrifying tableau: the sickly orange glow from the pit, the ring of silent, expectant faces, and Abby.

She was fighting. Two men, their faces as impassive as carved wood, had her pinned to the spongy, grey earth just a few feet away. She kicked and writhed, her voice a raw, ragged shriek that clawed at the inside of David’s skull. “David! Please! David, do something!”

His name, ripped from her throat in pure terror, was a physical blow. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed, the words useless, pathetic. “Abby, I’m so sorry!”

Silas, the innkeeper, stepped forward into the hellish light of the pit. He held no ceremonial dagger, no ancient artifact of sacrifice. In his hands was a long, rust-pocked frame saw, the kind used for felling trees or cutting bone, its teeth jagged and dark with age. He moved with the same unnerving, economic grace as always, the calm demeanor of a butcher approaching a simple, necessary task.

He stopped beside Abby, his unblinking eyes looking not at her, but down into the glowing maw at his feet. He spoke, his voice still a placid monotone, yet it carried across the clearing with chilling clarity.

“O Sleeper, who dreams the world,” he intoned, his voice the only sound besides Abby’s desperate sobs. “We, your humble keepers, have failed you. A wrongness has touched your skin. A turning that has disturbed your slumber.”

He gestured with the saw towards the memory of their car, a ghost in the trees. “For the trespass of the wheels that turn, we offer a price. For the legs that walk, we offer payment. We give you this, so that you may be soothed. So that you may sleep.”

The logic was monstrous, insane, yet terrifyingly simple. They weren't just killing her. They were performing an equation of cosmic horror. A turning for a turning. Legs for wheels.

One of the men holding Abby down produced a length of thick, grimy rope and cinched it brutally around her thigh, creating a makeshift tourniquet. The other pinned her leg to the ground. Abby’s sobs turned into a single, continuous, high-pitched scream of pure, unadulterated terror as she understood.

“No… no, please, God, no, NO!”

“Abby!” David roared, thrashing with a strength he didn’t know he possessed. For a moment, he almost broke the grip of the man on his right, but a third came and slammed a forearm across his throat, choking him, forcing his head up, making him watch.

Silas placed the teeth of the saw against Abby’s leg, just above the knee. And he began to cut.

The sound was the most obscene thing David had ever heard. A wet, grinding rasp. The grating of rusty metal on living bone. It was a slow, deliberate sound, punctuated by the sickening crack of the femur giving way. It drowned out Abby’s screams, which had become hoarse, animalistic wails of agony that David felt in his own teeth, his own bones. The cloying, metallic scent from the pit was overwhelmed by the hot, coppery smell of fresh blood, which steamed in the cold air and soaked into the grey earth in a spreading stain of impossible darkness.

David’s mind broke. He was no longer a person; he was a vessel for a single, silent scream that had no beginning and no end. Tears and bile streamed down his face. The world dissolved into a smear of orange light, the impassive faces of the cultists, and that single, unceasing, grinding sound. Sck-raaaape. Sck-raaaape. CRACK.

It was over in an eternity that lasted less than a minute.

Silas lifted the severed limb, holding it aloft like a trophy. Then, with a simple, underhanded toss, he threw it into the pit. It vanished into the glowing vapor without a sound, without a splash, as if consumed by the very air. He repeated the process with her other leg, the terrible, rhythmic sawing a sound that was now permanently etched into David’s soul. Abby had stopped screaming. Her body still twitched, but her eyes were wide and vacant, staring up at a sky she could no longer see.

The two pieces were offered to the pit. Silas wiped the saw on the grass with a tidy, pragmatic motion and stepped back.

An absolute, profound silence fell over the clearing. The townspeople, who had watched the entire mutilation with the detached interest of farmers watching a slaughter, now held their collective breath. They stared at the pit, their faces tense with anticipation, waiting for the sign. Waiting for the low, thrumming purr from the depths to subside. Waiting for their god to be satisfied and return to its slumber.

But the thrumming did not subside.

Instead, it deepened. It grew louder, the vibrations intensifying until the very ground trembled beneath David’s knees. The sickly orange glow from the abyss pulsed faster, brighter, a furious, hungry heartbeat. A low, resonant rumble echoed up from the chasm, a sound of profound and ancient displeasure.

A wave of fear, the first genuine emotion David had seen on any of them, washed over the faces of the townspeople. Even Silas’s placid mask cracked, his unblinking eyes widening in disbelief and dawning terror.

And then, the entity spoke.

It did not speak from the pit. It spoke from everywhere at once. The voice, a thousand-layered chorus of grinding stone and shifting continents, erupted from the mouth of every man, woman, and child in the clearing. Silas’s lips moved, the men holding David moved, the little girl Maeve’s mouth opened, and from all of them came a single, booming, resonant word that was not their own. It was the voice of the Sleeper, and it was furious.

“NOT ENOUGH.”

The sound slammed into David like a physical blow, a shockwave of pure, cosmic negation. It was a pronouncement of failure. A rejection of their desperate, brutal offering.

The townspeople recoiled as if they had all been struck, their borrowed voice leaving them gasping. Their ritual had failed. Their god was not appeased. It was hungrier than ever.

The symmetrical smile was gone from Silas’s face now, replaced by a mask of stark, primal fear. His gaze, and the gaze of every other person in that cursed clearing, snapped away from the pit. They turned away from the mutilated, dying body of Abby. Their two hundred pairs of eyes, all wide with a new and terrible understanding, fixed on the only thing left to give.

They all stared at David.

The first payment had been rejected. The entity didn't want a piece. It didn't want a bargain. It wanted everything.