TISZ Chapter 10 Wick
"Krooohhhhh… Krooohhhhhh…"
The sound settled over all of them like a cold hand pressed flat against the chest.
Joe had stopped mid-step the moment he caught it — a strange, low noise threading through the dark, half-swallowed by the trees. The overlapping voices of Nap and Miny had made it impossible to identify. He hadn't been sure, at first, whether he had imagined it.
"Shut up," he said again, sharper this time.
Both of them went quiet.
And there it was. Unmistakable now.
Snoring.
The moment the word formed in Joe's mind, something else followed it — a memory, snapping into place with sudden, horrible clarity. The picture they had all woken to at this hour: a child, sleeping, and a small diagram beside it depicting the unmistakable rise and fall of sleep. The illustration of a sound. Snoring.
And the man in the track pants, before they had scattered. His voice, calm and flat:
"Just do what the paper shows you."
"Do what the paper tells you."
The paper had told them one thing about the sleeping child: don't wake it.
From somewhere at the back of the group, a sharp intake of breath — someone on the verge of screaming. The person standing beside her was faster. A hand shot out and clamped over her mouth before the sound could escape.
Joe, Nap, and Miny all turned at once. The look on their faces said everything. She pressed her lips together and nodded, eyes wide.
No one spoke. No one moved quickly.
One step. Pause. Another step. Each foot placed with the kind of deliberate care that made every muscle in the leg tremble from the effort of it. They retreated slowly, the group moving as a single, silent thing — backward, away from the snoring, away from whatever was making that sound.
Then something shifted at the back.
A sound — small, unintended, but enough.
The snoring stopped.
Boom.
The ground vibrated beneath their feet. Not violently, but perceptibly — like something very large had just begun to move.
Joe felt the rage ignite in his chest before he had even fully registered what happened. His jaw tightened.
'Who made that sound? Who was it?'
He turned his gaze from the front of the group toward the back, eyes burning — and then the rage guttered out completely.
Nap and Miny had already drifted to the front. When they caught Joe's expression — slack, stricken — both of them felt a different kind of cold. Not the cold of the night air. Something that moved through skin and settled deep in the bone.
Slowly, they turned to look behind them.
All three of them saw it at the same moment.
To the right: a pair of legs, jutting up from the earth.
To the left: a pair of arms, fingers spread, pressing against the ground from beneath.
Between them: a small body, rising.
The shape was unmistakably that of a child — small-framed, slight. But what held their eyes, what rooted all three of them in place, was not the body.
It was the face.
Where there should have been skin, there was none. No flesh, no mask, not even the suggestion of a face — only bone. A bare, white skull catching the candlelight, empty sockets turned upward as the figure pulled itself free of the ground. The other ghost children wore masks. This one had nothing to hide behind.
This was Caleb.
The sight of him swallowed their attention so completely that none of them noticed what was happening behind Joe until it was too late.
BOOM.
The sound hit before the shadow did — a massive, concussive slam that shook the air.
Joe had no time to turn. He had no time to think. His mind had still been locked on Caleb when the darkness fell over him from behind, and by the time his instincts screamed at him to move, the lag had already cost him everything.
What he saw, in the last fraction of a second before it happened, was the shape of something enormous swinging down toward him — round, vast, blocking out the sky above his head.
Then the world slowed.
'Damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn—'
The thought fractured. The words kept coming, cycling, faster and faster, until they stopped being words at all and became only sensation.
'It hurts. It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts—'
His mouth barely opened.
"Help—"
BOOM.
The place where Joe had been standing was empty.
Not entirely empty — when Nap and Miny finally wrenched their attention from Caleb and turned toward Joe, the candle's light fell across something beneath the shadow. A shape on the ground. What remained of Joe under the weight of whatever had come down on him.
The object pinning him to the earth was a hammer.
Not a normal hammer. Something on a scale that made no sense — a double-headed thing, both faces blunt, its head wide enough to cover an entire adult body. The weight of it was incomprehensible. No ordinary person could have lifted it, let alone swung it.
Beyond the hammer, a shadow stood.
Nap and Miny raised their candles. It barely illuminated the figure.
The figure was large — broad-shouldered, built like someone far older than the face it wore. But the face was a child's. And the name came back to them from the clues they had found hours ago: the only child among the Weavers described as big for his age.
Benny.
They were pinned. Benny ahead of them, Caleb closing in from behind. The candlelight flickered between two ghosts, and for a long moment no one moved.
Then Benny opened his mouth.
"WUARGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
The scream hit them like a physical force. Nap felt his feet slide back an inch on the earth. Miny's candle guttered violently in the shockwave. The sound reached into their chests and grabbed something vital and squeezed, and both of them felt it in their teeth, in their ribs, in the marrow of their bones.
Benny went still.
Then, from somewhere deep inside his open mouth, a light began to glow.
Faint at first. Then brighter. Growing steadily, pulsing, pressing outward between his teeth like something alive trying to escape.
When it had built to a terrible brightness, it moved — a beam of pale, cold light sweeping directly toward Nap and Miny.
Neither of them had any idea what it would do when it reached them.
They didn't plan to find out.