Chapter 17: The Sound of Tearing Skin
Chapter 17: The Sound of Tearing Skin
The first to die was Mr. Aldridge, the janitor.
It happened quietly, without ceremony or spectacle. He'd been sweeping near the science wing, muttering to himself like always, the bristles of the broom brushing up dust and old pencil shavings, bits of paper damp with something unidentifiable. The night had crept in strange and fast, swallowing lightbulbs and flickering exits. He didn't seem to notice.
The floor opened beneath him.
Not violently.
Not like a trap.
But like an invitation.
Like the ground had decided to remember him—the shape of his boots, the weight of his years, the songs he hummed under his breath while mopping blood from hallway tiles after fights no one reported.
No one saw it happen.
Not with their eyes.
But when the morning came, and the broom was found standing upright in the middle of the hallway—its wooden handle slick with something thick and dark, not quite blood, everyone knew.
Mr. Aldridge was gone.
And the school no longer belonged to them.
It belonged to the old things now.
To the Ones Below.
To the roots that had stopped hiding.
To the girls who no longer pretended to be human.
Leah sat cross-legged in the center of the auditorium stage, her palms resting on her knees, her fingers stained with ash that smelled faintly of burned flowers and old teeth. She didn't speak. She barely blinked. The world around her felt thinner by the hour, like paper soaked too long in water—ready to tear.
Behind her, Clara paced slowly.
Her bare feet left no prints on the worn stage wood.
She whispered names.
Not ones you'd find in a yearbook. Not Emily or Jackson or Maria. These names tasted like rust and smoke and bark peeled from a dying tree. They hung in the air, syllables broken by time, half-lost to the rot of centuries. Some were older than bones. Some hadn't been spoken aloud since the world first flinched into being.
Each name was a door.
And every door opened something deeper.
The students still sat in the auditorium seats.
Dozens of them.
Eyes glassy. Breathing in rhythm. One heartbeat shared across fifty chests. They were becoming vessels. Their pasts draining away slowly, quietly like ink bleeding from the pages of a book left in the rain.
Leah watched them.
But her eyes weren't glassy.
They burned.
The Beast wasn't whispering anymore. It didn't crouch in a corner of her mind, snarling and pacing, waiting to be fed.
It was her.
It thought with her.
Hungered with her.
Loved with her.
It had fused into her marrow, into her blood. There were no more lines dividing girl and monster.
Only truth.
"I heard the soil last night," Clara said, voice soft as prayer. "It spoke your name. Over and over."
Leah turned her head slightly. "It knows what I am now."
Outside, the sky shifted again.
Colours bled across the clouds—not reds or blues, but things unnamed. Sickly, radiant things. Shades that didn't belong in the visible world. The clouds didn't drift anymore—they twitched. Trembled like nerves exposed to open air.
From above, strands fell.
Not rain.
Not snow.
Threads.
Long, pale filaments—silken and wet—drifting downward like shed skin from something massive. They clung to rooftops. Tangled in the trees. Melted slowly into the pavement, hissing as they disappeared.
Birds no longer came near.
The town changed without headlines.
People stayed indoors. Closed their curtains. Unplugged televisions that kept flickering to static. Some gathered at churches that felt colder now, smaller. The air around the altars tasted wrong.
And in the dark corners of their homes, they remembered things they weren't supposed to. Old stories. Fragments of dreams. Faces of people who never lived, but whose names they suddenly knew.
They clutched crosses.
Prayed to gods they weren't sure had ever answered.
It didn't matter.
The forgetting had already been undone
And memory once loosed is an infection.
And infections spread.
At midnight, Leah and Clara returned to the pit.
They walked barefoot, through the dew and dust and ash. The town didn't try to stop them. The air parted around them. The wind moved with them, not against. Even the stars seemed to lean back, making room.
The pit had grown again.
Wider. Deeper. Its rim lined with bones and blackened vines. The heart still beat at the center Slow, immense. But something else had formed now. Ribs, maybe. Or a jaw. Flesh woven from roots. A second shape emerging from the first, like a cocoon learning to split open.
It pulsed with hunger.
Leah stepped forward.
Clara knelt, reverent.
Leah placed her hand on the surface—wet and warm, like meat left in the sun. It shuddered at her touch, not in fear.
In recognition.
She whispered something.
Not English.
Not anything human.
A sound that scraped the back of her throat like thorns and smoke.
The mouth opened.
Slowly. Not wide. Just enough.
And something crawled out.
It had no face. Not yet. Just skin and limbs and slow, shivering breath. It wore a hoodie—one of the students', Leah thought. Blue, frayed at the cuffs. There was a name tag pinned to it.
But the name was blank.
The thing stumbled forward on shaking legs. It didn't cry. It didn't speak.
It simply was.
A child of the pit.
A child of her.
Clara knelt beside it, brushing mud from its arm with a gentleness that made Leah's throat tighten.
"Do you remember?" she whispered.
The creature twitched.
Then nodded.
It remembered enough.
More would come.
Leah knew that now. Each night, the pit would open. Each night, it would birth new things—half-formed, perfect in their brokenness. Children made from memory and rage and sorrow. Creatures shaped by what the world had tried to forget.
They would grow.
And build.
Not cities. Not empires.
But truths.
Living truths, clawing their way back into the waking world.
Leah stood at the edge of the pit and stared down into its heat.
She did not cry.
She did not smile.
But she felt something inside her shift. Something like peace.
This was not destruction.
This was birth.
This was what they were meant to do.
Not as monsters.
Not as girls.
But as mothers of a new world.
And somewhere deep in the bones of the earth, a bell tolled.
Not out loud.
Not with sound.
But in soul and soil.
A final chime.
And with it, something behind Leah uncoiled its limbs. Something vast. Something old.
The remembering was done.
The awakening had begun.
And tomorrow, tomorrow they would walk.