The Darkness I Carry

Chapter 11: Hunger Wakes

The rain wouldn't stop.

It clung to the town like a second skin, soaking the streets, the rooftops, the secrets buried beneath old soil. It filled the gutters with the ghosts of autumn leaves, turned sidewalks to rivers, and painted the windows with slow, weeping trails. It felt endless, like the sky itself had opened and didn't know how to close again.

Leah walked through it, hood down, arms bare. The cold bit into her skin, but she welcomed it. Pain, after all, was proof that she still had nerves. That she was still something human.

Clara hadn't come to school that day.

No calls. No messages. Not even a ghost of a presence in the hallway or a distant echo of laughter. Just silence.

Leah felt it like a weight on her chest, thick and pressing. Clara had never gone more than a day without contact. Even at their worst—when the truths were too sharp and the silence too wide—Clara always found a way to return. A scribbled note in a locker. A brush of fingers in passing. A single, lingering glance that said I see you still.

This time, she didn't.

Leah checked the greenhouse after school, her boots sliding in the mud that had crept in through the broken panes. The air inside was wrong. Damp. Heavy. The vines drooped, petals half-shredded by the storm. Their garden of secrets looked sick. Even the wildflowers Clara had loved—delicate blue stars that only bloomed in the cold—seemed to bend away from the light.

The bench where they had sat was empty.

The Beast inside her stirred again.

Not with hunger.

With unease.

Something was wrong.

She could feel it. Not in her gut, but deeper—in the marrow of her bones, in the soft tissue of memory and fear. It was a sensation she didn't have a name for. Something primal. Prehistoric. Something that whispered run but made her legs move forward.

By nightfall, Leah made her way through the neighborhood streets, soaked and silent. She stood outside Clara's house for a long time, watching the curtains that didn't move, the windows that stared back at her blankly like dead eyes.

Then she broke in.

The door was unlocked.

It shouldn't have been.

Inside, everything was quiet.

Not the quiet of sleep or solitude, but of something long abandoned. The kind of silence that settles after a scream. The kind that makes the hairs on your arms rise even when the air is still. The air had gone stale. The sharp tang of turpentine was gone. No paint. No oils. No canvas. Just dust and rot.

Leah walked slowly, her boots creaking on the hardwood. Her fingers brushed across the walls where paintings had once been stacked, where faces had watched her in silence. Now, there was nothing. Not a single canvas. Not a single image.

Gone.

Erased.

It was like Clara had never existed. Like someone had reached into the house and scooped her out of it. All that was left was the shell.

Except one thing.

In the living room—on the wall where the blank canvas had once stood—something had been drawn.

A symbol.

Drawn in something dark. Viscous. Still tacky to the touch.

It pulsed when Leah looked at it. Spiral lines and jagged corners, curling into an open mouth that looked ready to swallow the world. The longer she stared, the harder it became to look away. The lines seemed to twist, reshape themselves, almost alive beneath the surface.

She didn't recognize it.

But her body did.

Her bones did.

The Beast inside her did.

It remembered.

Leah backed away slowly, her fingers curling into fists. A note was taped below the symbol, scrawled in Clara's unmistakable hand. Familiar. Slanted. Hurried.

She tore it down.

I had to go deeper. The Beast isn't what we thought.

It's not just inside us.

It's waiting.

Leah stared at the note for a long time, her breath slowing until it felt like she wasn't breathing at all. Her eyes drifted back to the symbol, then to the empty corners where memories had once lived.

The Beast whispered.

Not in words.

But in feelings.

It was afraid.

And it had never been afraid before.

That night, Leah left town behind. The rain followed her, cold and needling. She didn't bring anything with her—no backpack, no flashlight, no food. She didn't think she'd need any of it.

She returned to the place where it had all started. The woods.

Jason.

The trail where he had bled.

The spot where she had thought herself transformed. The place where she'd first looked down at blood on her hands and felt power.

The first time she thought she had taken a life.

The ground was soft beneath her boots, churned with fresh footprints. The scent in the air turned sour—earth and iron and something rotting beneath the surface.

Someone had been there recently.

Not just one.

Many.

She followed the trail, heart a hammer in her chest.

Through the undergrowth, thick and clawing.

Past broken branches and claw marks on tree trunks.

And then—she found the pit.

Shallow. Muddy.

Filled with bones.

Not just Jason's.

Others. Dozens.

Some old, yellowed. Others fresh, the marrow still slick in the sockets. Skulls grinned up at her from the earth like they'd been waiting. Fingers curled around nothing. Ribs tangled like cages.

Leah stared. Not blinking. Not breathing. Just watching.

Until she saw it again.

Carved into the bark of a tree above the grave.

The symbol.

It glowed, faintly, as if it were on fire beneath the rain.

Her stomach twisted.

The Beast inside her made a sound she'd never heard before.

A laugh.

Not cruel.

Not triumphant.

But old. Tired.

Like something that had waited for this moment a long time.

Because this wasn't just about Leah anymore.

And Clara hadn't vanished.

She had opened something.

A door. A gate. A mouth.

And Leah—

She was the key.

The rain thickened. The sky above rumbled like a beast turning in its sleep.

She didn't resist. She didn't turn away.

She stepped into the pit.

Let the mud rise around her ankles. Her calves. Her knees.

The bones shifted beneath her weight, as if waking.

She closed her eyes.

And listened.

To the voices beneath the soil.

To the hunger waking.

To the thing that had always watched her from behind the mirror, from the surface of the still pond, from the shadows of her dreams.

The Beast wasn't just inside her.

It was her.

And it was not alone.