He awoke to the sound of something chewing.
The room was dark—black beyond black—but the sound was unmistakable. Wet. Muffled. The deliberate grind of teeth on something soft. Flesh. Maybe tendon.
It was nearby.
Callum didn't move at first. His body refused. It knew something his mind didn't. His breath was shallow, as if his lungs were afraid to inflate too loudly. The sound continued—shck, shck, shck—until it stopped with a sudden snap, like a joint pulled free from its socket.
Then the silence returned.
And with it, a whisper—not out loud, but beneath his skin:
> "You've grown."
He sat bolt upright.
There was nothing in the room.
But the shadows didn't feel empty. They felt full. Pressed in. Watching. Waiting.
---
The fire in the study had long gone out, leaving only smoldering coals and the coppery smell of ash. Callum pulled himself from the floor and stumbled into the hallway. His feet were bare. The wooden floor beneath them felt too soft, like stepping on something that was breathing just beneath the boards.
The air smelled wrong. Like antiseptic and rot.
And somewhere, deep below the house, he could hear it again:
Chewing.
---
He descended the staircase without a coat, without shoes, without thought. He was no longer resisting the pull of the archive. Resistance had become irrelevant.
By the time he reached the trapdoor, the hallway lights had dimmed to a pulsing, amber glow. Like a heartbeat, buried in the walls.
The trapdoor stood open.
And beneath it, the dark breathed.
---
The archive had changed again.
This time, the walls were closer. Not stone anymore, but something smoother. Fleshier. Callum ran his fingers along them as he walked. They were warm.
And they pulsed.
He passed the shelves. Many were now empty, as if the bones had walked off in the night. The ones that remained twitched faintly, their sockets turning toward him without moving.
The door beyond the skull wall was wide open. No light now. Just thick blackness that swallowed everything it touched.
He stepped inside.
---
The chamber was gone.
In its place was a long tunnel, carved from interwoven ribs—like a cathedral grown from human thoraxes. The walls dripped moisture. The ceiling pulsed with thin red veins. And the floor was soft beneath his feet, like cartilage soaked in oil.
He walked anyway.
Each step echoed strangely, as if the air itself were shifting behind him.
Something was following.
Not footsteps.
Imitations.
The sound of his own walk—but just slightly off-rhythm. A beat behind. As if something was mimicking him, badly.
He didn't look back.
---
The tunnel ended in a chamber that defied structure.
It wasn't made of stone. Or bone.
It was made of faces.
Thousands.
Screaming. Grinning. Expressionless. Some real, some carved. Stretched across the walls like leather masks, stitched together in spirals. Their eyes followed him as he entered.
In the center of the chamber stood a table. No, an altar. Made from pelvises fused together in unnatural symmetry.
Upon it lay a skeleton.
His skeleton.
---
Callum froze.
It wasn't similar.
It was his. Same missing molar. Same healed fracture in the right forearm. Same tilt to the clavicle.
But it had two spines.
Just like the one from the glass case.
He stepped forward, hypnotized.
There was a note pinned to its sternum—scrawled in black ink, letters jagged and broken:
> "This is how you will return to us."
"This is how we remember you."
And underneath, in red:
> "Subject 14. Final Form—Unstable."
He reached out, not knowing why.
And the skeleton grabbed his wrist.
---
The bone hand gripped hard—too strong, inhumanly strong. Callum screamed, pulling back, but the hand didn't move. Instead, the skull turned to face him. Its jaw didn't open. It cracked. Like bark splitting on a dying tree.
A voice echoed, not from the skull, but from every wall around him:
> "We gave you shape."
"We are taking it back."
He tore free—falling backward onto the pulsing floor.
The moment he hit it, the room shuddered.
---
The faces on the walls opened their mouths.
And began to scream.
All at once.
Every voice Callum had ever known. His mother. Greaves. Himself. But warped. Distorted. Layered over each other like a chorus of broken record players.
He crawled to his feet, clutching his ears, but the sound was inside him.
The altar split in half behind him with a wet, crunching sound. Bone shards rained down, slicing his shoulder.
And something rose from beneath the altar.
Not a creature.
A form.
It wore a coat like his.
Had his eyes.
His mouth.
His bones.
But stretched. Elongated. As if someone had grabbed the idea of him and pulled.
It was him—
—but inside-out.
> "You are just one of us," it whispered, lips not moving.
"A fractured repetition. A failed print."
> "You are not the original."
"You are the echo."
---
Callum turned and ran.
Back through the rib-tunnel.
Back through the archive, the shelves now empty, the lights now gone.
Up the stairs, two at a time, screaming with a voice that didn't sound like his own anymore.
---
He burst into the bathroom, slammed the door, and flipped on the light.
And stared into the mirror.
There was nothing there.
No reflection.
Just darkness.
And then—slowly—something appeared.
Not a face.
A skull.
His skull.
And behind it, the other him. Watching. Grinning. Holding something in its hand.
His spine.
---
Callum fell to the floor, gasping. His shoulder burned. His neck twitched. He reached up—
—and felt a second vertebrae cluster forming beneath the skin.
Pulsing.
Growing.
---
The fire in the study reignited on its own that night.
No wood.
No spark.
Just flame.
And in it, a voice:
> "When the host forgets the shape,
the Archive reminds him."
---
Callum wrote nothing in his journal that night.
He simply scratched one word into the wooden floor with a scalpel:
> "UNMADE."
---
The next morning, the town nearby reported no calls, no power, no sign of activity from Thorne Hollow.
When police arrived, the house was empty.
No blood.
No signs of struggle.
Just a basement full of bones—
—and one skeleton standing perfectly upright in the center.
It had two spines.
And it was smiling.