Chapter Text
They were ready to leave. The crevice that Hastur tore through Moonlit River Park was there, waiting.
But then Emma paused. Emily, who was holding her hand, looked back at her questioningly.
“What’s wrong?” Emily asked.
“My throat itches….” Emma murmured, a hand at her neck.
Then she spewed out a violent cough and fell to her knees. She retched, tears springing from her eyes. The other Survivors approached to see what was wrong.
“Emma?”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Is she okay?”
Emily was horrified to discover golden, bloodstained straw on the ground. It had come out of Emma’s mouth.
Emma heaved like crazy. Straw was jutting out of her throat, and no matter how wide her mouth was, she couldn’t breathe. Her hair started falling out because of the dark straw that pushed out of her scalp. Blood dripped down her cheeks.
“Emma!” Emily cried. She held onto Emma as she convulsed from the lack of air.
Hay was pushing out of Emma’s nose and ears. Emma tried to claw the hay out, but it was useless—there were more pushing out from her pores and underneath her fingernails. When they crept out of her eye sockets, they brought with them crimson tears.
“Oh my God!” Tracy clamped her hands over her mouth.
Emily didn’t know what to do. She was trembling, but not just from fear and despair. There was something happening to her spine. Like her bones were wriggling.
Then something exploded out of the flesh of her back, spraying blood everywhere.
“Emily?!” Martha exclaimed.
Emily’s back pulsated with pain. There was a burning feeling from the bones that tore themselves out. Bones?
“What the hell are those on your back?!” Servais demanded.
“W-wings?!” Margaretha exclaimed.
"W-what....?" Emily's voice was no more than a ragged whisper. She tried to look.
She wished she didn't.
Bloody, feathery wings, sprawled across the ground behind Emily. They were like dead Frankenstein limbs that remained attached to her body. Staring at it was unreal. Emily could feel the weight of these limbs, and the burning on her back, but—how?
How did this happen?
Emma was still suffocating in her arms but she wasn’t dead. She could not die, Emily realized. There was no end to her pain.
Someone else shrieked, guttural, painful. Naib had fallen to the ground. Everyone could see his arm deform until his flesh stretched taut around his muscles, until the bones of his hand broke themselves to resemble claws.
It shook everyone to the core because no one had ever heard Naib scream like that.
“Naib!” Helena, who was the nearest to him, was about to help him. But then her cane clattered to the ground as she cried out and gripped her face. Her eyelids, lips, and nose began to disappear into her flesh, as if they were being painted over, the peach color of her skin hardening and paling into white ceramic. A mask.
Helena’s glasses fell to the ground. A single, bloodshot eye opened on her mask, wrenched wide open in fear. Her muffled screams sounded behind the ceramic, but she had no mouth, even as her fingernails scraped at her new face.
More terrified yells arose from the Survivors, but it was not just from the horror of what they saw. Margaretha’s toes started binding into her feet while her legs hardened into unmoving metal. The left side of Norton’s face caved into his scar like dripping wax. Extreme hypertrophy choked William’s body with the swell of his veins. Eli writhed as shadows ripped at his bones, creating demonic afterimages of himself that screeched and thrashed like they’d been doused in hellfire.
And in the other side of the manor, Joseph was lying unconscious on the steps of the garden. The beautiful, humanlike flush of his skin had returned. If his eyes were open then perhaps they would've been blue and white, just like they were when he was alive.
Hastur leaned over Joseph. He idly stroked Joseph’s cheek with the back of his hand.
“I would have deemed it unacceptable,” he crooned, “that my exit from this cursed manor would be interrupted so rudely by you humans. However….this is an interesting development that I must observe.”
Up ahead, the flames from the burning scarecrow screamed. It soared high from all the diaries that were fed into the fire. Aesop screamed with the fire—black veins crawling all over his skin, his mask sticking to the flesh of his mouth. When he unhinged his jaw, there were rows of sharp black teeth and a devil’s tongue.
“Remember, Embalmer,” Hastur said, “you brought this upon yourself.”
Black tears flooded down Aesop’s cheeks as the birth of the Embalmer ripped through his entire being.