Chapter 7: The House at the edge of Town (7)
The tall man inhaled.
It was not a normal breath.
His chest expanded too far, ribs lifting and spreading with a faint, wet creak, as if the bones were negotiating with each other about how much space they were allowed to occupy. The air in the room shifted toward him, curtains stirring though no windows were open, the overhead light dimming a fraction as if power were being siphoned away to fuel whatever he was about to do.
Lena felt it immediately.
“Oh, don’t-” she started.
He shouted.
Not yelled. Not raised his voice.
He shouted, to the full, obscene capacity of lungs that were clearly not built with human limits in mind.
“I KNOW YOU’RE HERE!”
The sound slammed into the walls and came back wrong. It didn’t echo so much as fold, the words bending, stretching, lingering too long in the air before sinking into the floorboards. Dust fell from somewhere overhead. A picture frame on the wall rattled, then slid crooked.
“You know why we’re here,” he continued, voice booming, layered with a faint distortion like two frequencies speaking at once. “So don’t waste our time with the sneaky nonsense. No creeping. No pacing. No whispering at three in the morning.”
The house groaned.
Deep. Low. From beneath them.
“Let’s settle this,” he finished, spreading his arms slightly, posture open and almost welcoming, “the way it was always meant to be settled.”
Silence crashed down afterward, thick and immediate.
The pressure in the room spiked, then steadied, like something had straightened up and begun paying attention.
Lena stared at him.
She blinked once.
Then again.
“…What,” she said flatly, “the hell was that?”
He exhaled, shoulders relaxing, joints popping contentedly as his body deflated back to its usual wrong proportions. “My way of doing things.”
She rubbed her temples. “Your way of doing things is yelling at extradimensional problems like they’re neighbors playing loud music.”
“And yet,” he said pleasantly, “they heard me.”
“That’s not the same as helping.”
“It’s a start.”
She turned in a slow circle, scanning the room. The air felt tighter now, charged, like static before a storm. “You do realize we’re supposed to agitate the presence methodically, right? Ritual escalation. Controlled provocation.”
He tilted his head. “I just provoked it.”
“No,” she snapped, pointing at him, “you insulted it.”
“Also effective.”
She groaned. “We were told explicitly, explicitly, to begin the sequence. Salt circle, containment, symbolic resonance. Not… whatever that was.”
He smiled down at her, unbothered. “I find introductions are important.”
“Introductions are important when you’re meeting someone,” she shot back. “Not when you’re dealing with a metaphysical squatters’ rights situation.”
The house creaked again, closer this time. A soft thump echoed from upstairs, directly above them.
Lena froze.
The tall man did not.
“Oh,” he said lightly. “There you are.”
She shot him a look. “You’re enjoying this far too much.”
“Occupational perk.”
She sighed, long and put-upon. “Fine. Since subtlety is apparently dead.”
She reached into her bag again, fingers brushing past tools she hadn’t expected to need so soon. “We should do this properly. The rituals weren’t suggestions. They were designed to force engagement.”
He leaned casually against the wall, which bowed inward slightly under his weight before deciding to tolerate him. “By all means.”
She shot him a glare.
“That was not permission to relax.”
“I’m always relaxed.”
“That’s part of the problem.”
She started toward the hallway, then stopped, glancing back at him. “You’re not going to shout again.”
He held up a hand. “Scout’s honor.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You were never a scout.”
“True.”
She took two steps away.
Then he inhaled again.
Lena spun.
“Do not-”
He screamed.
“COME OUT, BITCH.”
The words detonated through the house.
The lights flickered violently this time, plunging the living room into darkness for a split second before surging back on, brighter than before. The windows rattled in their frames. Somewhere upstairs, a door slammed open with a crack like a gunshot.
Something moved.
Fast.
Not walking. Not pacing.
Running.
Lena stared at him, mouth opening and closing once before sound came out. “I swear to whatever cosmic bureaucracy is listening,” she said slowly, dangerously calm, “if this turns into a full manifestation because you couldn’t wait five minutes-”
He straightened, eyes gleaming with interest. “It’s responding.”
“That was not the goal!”
The floor beneath them shuddered. Not enough to knock them off balance, but enough to make the furniture creak and shift, legs scraping softly as if repositioning themselves.
From upstairs came a sound like breath dragged through water.
Lena swallowed. “Okay. Fine. Congratulations. You got its attention.”
“Thank you.”
“But if this goes sideways-”
“-you’ll blame me,” he finished for her. “I’m used to it.”
The sound moved again, closer now, no longer confined to one room. It seemed to bleed through the walls, the ceiling, the very bones of the house.
Lena exhaled sharply, rolling her shoulders. “Next time,” she muttered, “we’re doing this my way first.”
He grinned, teeth just a little too even. “Next time, I’ll shout louder.”
The house answered with a low, rising moan, the kind that didn’t belong to wood or wind.
And somewhere upstairs, something that had been waiting very patiently finally decided it was done hiding.
***
The pressure that had been building in the living room collapsed inward for a fraction of a second, an implosion so absolute that the air itself seemed to forget it was supposed to occupy space, then rebounded outward with violent intent.
Lena didn’t even have time to swear.
She was lifted clean off her feet and hurled backward through the front of the house as if gravity had briefly filed a complaint and been ignored.
The doorframe disintegrated around her, wood splintering into shrapnel as the shockwave followed her out into the clearing.
She hit the tall man’s car hard.
Metal screamed.
Glass detonated.
The windshield shattered into a spiderweb of fractures that collapsed inward as her body slammed onto the hood, denting it deeply enough to buckle the frame. She rolled once, came to rest half-sprawled against the roof, breath knocked clean out of her lungs.
For a moment, the world was noise and stars.
Then she sucked in a sharp breath and groaned.
“Unbelievable,” she muttered.
She slid down onto the hood, boots scraping against broken glass, and pushed herself upright with a hiss of pain.
Blood ran freely down her left arm from a long gash where a shard had caught her, dripping onto the crumpled metal below. Her ribs ached. Her head rang.
By all rights, she should have been broken.
She wasn’t.
She flexed her fingers.
Wiggled her toes.
Gritted her teeth as pain flared, and then steadied, settling into something manageable.
She wiped blood from her brow with the back of her hand and scowled at the house.
“Well,” she said aloud, voice tight with irritation rather than fear, “that escalated.”
Behind her, something hit the ground with a thud that made the earth tremble.
The tall man landed in a crouch several yards away, one hand braced against the dirt, the other dangling at his side.
The impact cratered the ground slightly beneath him, cracks radiating outward like a spiderweb in dry soil.
He straightened slowly.
His neck snapped left, then right.
Shoulders rolled with a cascade of loud, unhappy cracks. He glanced down at himself, brushing dirt from his coat.
“Hm,” he said.
“That was rude.”
Lena snorted despite herself. “You invited it.”
“Yes,” he agreed mildly.
The house behind them did not settle.
It failed.
The living room wall bulged outward grotesquely, as if something enormous had pressed its full weight against it from below. The foundation groaned, stones grinding against each other in protest. Then the ground beneath the house split open with a wet, tearing sound, like fabric being ripped apart underwater.
The living room collapsed inward.
Floorboards shattered. Walls folded. The front half of the house sank as something else rose.
Lena went still.
Not afraid.
Alert.
From beneath the ruined structure, a mass of black silk pushed upward, tearing through wood and stone alike. It moved slowly at first, dragging itself into the open with ponderous inevitability, strands of its surface stretching and snapping like tar pulled too thin.
It was not a body.
It was a cocoon.
A vast, swollen mass of layered black silk, glossy in places and matte in others, its surface rippling subtly as though something inside it were shifting, rearranging itself according to rules no longer applicable.
The silk clung to itself unnaturally, folding and refolding without seams, without pattern, like a thought looping endlessly.
Burnt and rotting human limbs jutted out from the cocoon at impossible angles.
An arm here, charred to the bone, fingers fused together, reaching blindly.
A leg there, twisted backward, foot bent the wrong way, toes twitching weakly as if remembering what movement used to be.
Some limbs were partially absorbed back into the silk, as though the cocoon couldn’t quite decide whether to keep them or discard them.
Others protruded fully, dangling uselessly, leaking dark fluid that soaked into the ground and evaporated into nothing before it could pool.
It had no eyes.
No mouth.
And yet Lena could feel it looking at her.
The sensation was immediate and invasive, like a pressure behind her sternum, like something had reached into her chest and gently but firmly turned her heart to face it.
She clicked her tongue. “Yeah. That tracks.”
The cocoon shifted, tearing more of itself free from the wreckage of the house. The silk peeled back in places, revealing glimpses of what lay beneath, layer upon layer of fused organic matter, half-formed shapes pressed together as if in the middle of becoming something else and failing repeatedly.
Two arms emerged from the mass.
They were human in shape.
They were not human in scale.
Each arm was massive, longer than a car, the musculature grotesquely overdeveloped beneath stretched, blackened skin. Veins pulsed visibly, thick as ropes, glowing faintly with a sickly internal light. The hands at the ends were wrong, too many fingers, joints bending in ways that made no anatomical sense.
One arm slammed into the ground and dragged the cocoon forward, carving deep furrows into the earth.
The other arm lashed out.
It wrapped around the tall man’s torso with startling speed, fingers sinking into his coat, gripping him tight enough that the fabric screamed in protest.
The tall man blinked.
“Oh,” he said, looking down at the massive limb coiled around him. “So you are upset.”
The arm tightened.
Bones snapped.
Not his.
The sound came from the arm itself as it strained, joints popping violently, struggling to apply force to something that did not respond correctly to pressure.
The tall man sighed. “You’re doing that wrong.”
The cocoon felt his resistance and reacted, not intelligently, but instinctively. The silk rippled violently, the protruding limbs twitching as if trying to reorient toward this unexpected variable.
Lena slid off the hood of the car with a grunt, boots crunching on glass as she landed. She staggered slightly, caught herself, then looked between the cocoon and the tall man.
“Don’t let it pull you under,” she called out lazily. “I just finished the prep.”
He looked over at her, head tilted. “You didn’t want it alone.”
“I wanted it contained,” she shot back.
The cocoon lurched again, dragging itself closer, the massive arm clawing through the dirt toward Lena now, fingers gouging trenches as it reached for her with unmistakable intent.
The air around it distorted, bending light subtly, as though its presence bent not just matter but context. The night felt thinner near it, stretched taut like skin over bone.
Lena felt the pull, not physical, but conceptual. A tug at her edges, like something was trying to remember her as part of itself.
She bared her teeth in a grin that had no humor in it.
The cocoon recoiled slightly, silk rippling violently, and then surged forward again, angrier now, its massive arms working in tandem, one still gripping the tall man, the other reaching for her with furious determination.
Behind it, the remains of the house continued to collapse, walls folding inward as if gladly surrendering their structure to the thing that had grown beneath them.
The tall man looked down at the arm around him, then back at Lena.
“Well,” he said calmly, as the cocoon dragged him a foot closer to itself, “on the bright side-”
“What?” Lena snapped, bracing herself.
“At least it came out.”
The cocoon pulsed.
And began to crawl.
