Chapter 2: Hunting Grounds
The clicking wasn’t mechanical. It was the sound of shears, opening and closing. Snick-snick. Snick-snick.
Wei froze, his back still pressed to the glass door. The sound came from just around the corner of the blood-red hedge. The foliage was unnaturally dense, the leaves a dark, wet crimson that looked black in the low light. They rustled, though there was no wind. The rustle formed words, or the shadow of words—a susurrating chorus of sighs and choked whispers.
He had two choices: go back inside to the party-turned-abattoir, or move forward into the maze.
He pushed off the door and ran left, away from the clicking, his dress shoes slipping on the dewy gravel. The path forked almost immediately. He took the right branch without thinking, his breath already coming in ragged pants. The hedge walls rose eight feet tall, their surfaces twisted into gnarled knots that, from the corner of his eye, resolved into agonized faces—mouths stretched open, eyes hollow.
The smell was overpowering here. Damp mulch and the coppery, thick scent of blood. It was in the air, in the leaves. He could taste it.
He took another turn, then another, trying to keep a sense of direction. The mansion was to his left. He just had to go left. Every intersection looked the same. The soft chamber music from the house was gone, swallowed by the dense foliage, replaced by that endless, whispering rustle.
He skidded to a halt at a dead end. A small, circular clearing held a single statue. It was a young man kneeling, his stone hands clawing at his own throat, his face a masterpiece of silent suffocation. The detail was unbearable—the veins on the temples, the frantic bulge of the eyes.
Wei spun around to retrace his steps.
Mr. Huang stood at the entrance to the clearing, blocking the path. He held a pair of long, polished topiary shears casually at his side. He wasn’t breathing hard. He looked like a man on a casual evening stroll.
“You left the party, Wei. It’s considered poor form.”
Wei stumbled back, his heels scraping against the gravel near the kneeling statue’s base. “What did you do to Jian?”
“Preserved him,” Mr. Huang said, taking a slow step forward. His shoes made no sound. “Perfected him. He was always so… kinetic. All that energy. So volatile. Now it’s fixed. Eternal. My finest piece in years.”
“He’s not a piece, he’s a person!”
“Was,” Mr. Huang corrected softly. “He was. And he was beautiful in his final moment. The transition is the most fascinating part. The mind remains aware, you see. For a full minute or more, as the transformation solidifies the outer shell and works inwards. The eyes are the last to go. He was screaming, of course. Silently. A truly profound silence.”
Wei’s stomach lurched. He saw it again—Jian’s eyes, the terror locked in stone. The logic of it was a physical blow. He’d been conscious. He’d felt it.
“You’re insane.”
“An artist,” Mr. Huang said, another step. The shears glinted. “I curate potential. I find beautiful, promising young men—athletes, scholars, poets—and I give them a purpose far greater than any degree or medal. I end their becoming and grant them a perfect, permanent being. No decay. No disappointment. Just form.”
Wei’s mind raced, scanning the ground for a rock, a stick, anything. There was only gravel. “The other guests… they just watched.”
“Shock is a powerful paralytic. And the ones who do run? They come here. To my garden. My workshop.” He gestured with the shears towards the maze. “It helps me refine the poses. The chase introduces a… natural desperation. A raw authenticity that can’t be choreographed.”
Wei darted to the side, trying to squeeze between the hedge and the kneeling statue. The branches were like barbed wire, snagging his jacket, tearing at his hands. He forced himself through, ignoring the scratches, and stumbled onto another path.
He ran. The whispering got louder. The faces in the hedge seemed to turn, their leaf-and-twig eyes tracking his progress.
Left. Just go left.
He took a sharp turn and found another clearing. This one was larger. In the center stood a figure under the dim glow of a shrouded lantern.
It was Jian.
But it wasn’t the finished statue from the fountain. This one was wrong. Incomplete. The left side of his body was the familiar, polished marble, caught in that same graceful, awful pose. The right side was still partly flesh—the clothing half-fabric, half-stone, the skin of his right cheek and arm a mottled, greyish texture like concrete setting. His right eye was human, wide and blinking with wet, living terror. The other eye was stone.
The half-stone, half-flesh mouth was open. A low, continuous rasp came from it, the only sound his petrifying lungs could manage. It was the sound of air being forced through a narrowing stone pipe. A soundless scream given voice.
Wei gagged, clapping a hand over his mouth.
Behind the horrific duplicate, a stone plinth stood empty, waiting.
“He’s not as good as the original,” Mr. Huang’s voice said from directly behind him. Wei hadn’t even heard him approach. “A practice run, from an earlier batch. The process was… interrupted. Flawed. But I keep him as a reminder. A lesson in focus.”
Wei couldn’t move. He was pinned between the monster at his back and the abomination before him. Jian’s living eye pleaded with him.
Mr. Huang’s voice was a confidential whisper near his ear. “The original is inside, of course. Perfect. This is just the raw material. Every artist has sketches. This is mine.”
The shears came up, not to stab, but to gently part the hair at the nape of Wei’s neck. The cold metal touched his skin. “Your fear has a lovely texture. It’s not panic. It’s deeper. It’s comprehension. That will translate beautifully.”
Wei’s body moved before his mind caught up. He dropped straight down, a sudden crouch, as the shears snipped closed where his neck had been. He kicked backward, his shoe connecting hard with Mr. Huang’s shin.
There was a gratifying grunt. Wei didn’t look. He launched himself forward, past the rasping, half-formed thing that used to be a person, and sprinted down the next corridor of hedge.
This path didn’t twist. It ran straight, and at the end, he could see a sliver of dark sky—a break in the maze. An iron gate.
He heard no footsteps behind him. Just the relentless, calm snick-snick of the shears, opening and closing, somewhere in the maze, moving without hurry.
Wei didn’t slow down. The gate was old, rusted, set into a high stone wall. It was chained and padlocked. He hit it at a full run, his hands grasping the cold iron bars, shaking it. The chain rattled but held.
He looked back. The path was empty, shrouded in shadow.
Then he looked up. The wall was maybe ten feet high. Topped with broken glass embedded in mortar.
From the maze, he heard Mr. Huang’s voice, calm and conversational, as if continuing a discussion. “The gate is ornamental. The wall, however, is quite functional. Do try the climb. I’m curious to see what pose you adopt when you fall.”
Wei’s fingers found a gap in the stone. He started to climb.