Chapter 5 – he who Knew the truth
The next morning came gray and tired. Jack hadn't slept. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw it—the spider's legs scraping across the barn floor, its many eyes blinking in and out of the dark.
He'd seen monsters in comics, but not like that. Not ones that bled real blood.
Calvin showed up before noon, his bike tires crunching over the gravel in Jack's yard. He looked pale, jittery, his usual grin gone.
"Elena says she found someone," he said without preamble.
Jack looked up from the porch steps. "Someone?"
"Yeah. Some old guy. Lives out by the tracks. Used to work for the government, she thinks."
Jack frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Calvin just shrugged. "Means he might know what the hell that thing was."
By mid-afternoon, they were walking their bikes down a cracked road that led out of town. The farther they went, the less Dry Hill looked like a place people lived. The houses thinned out. The telephone poles leaned. The desert crept in, swallowing fences, chewing up the edges of asphalt.
Elena met them near a weather-beaten sign that said PRIVATE ROAD – TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.
"I talked to him this morning," she said, tightening her ponytail. "His name's Mr. Hayes. He was in the Army back in the forties. Said he worked near the test site."
"Did he tell you anything?" Jack asked.
She shook her head. "Said he'd only talk if we came in person."
The house sat by itself on a rise of dead grass. The roof sagged, and a windmill creaked somewhere behind it. The porch was cluttered with rusted tools, old coffee cans, and a shotgun propped against the railing. When they knocked, the door opened before their knuckles touched wood.
The man who stood there looked like a ghost that had forgotten to fade. White hair, thin as wire, eyes that had seen too much and didn't want to see any more.
"You're the kids Elena talked about," he rasped.
"Yes, sir," Jack said. "We—we found something out by the old site."
Mr. Hayes studied them a long moment, then stepped aside. "Come in."
The inside smelled like tobacco and old paper. Dust floated in the shafts of light that came through half-drawn curtains. Every wall was covered in yellowed photographs—rows of soldiers, black-and-white test footage, newspaper clippings about the war.
Hayes moved slowly to a chair near the window and lit a cigarette. His hands trembled slightly, not from age, but from memory.
"You kids don't have any idea what you stumbled on," he said finally. "That place should've been buried a hundred feet deeper."
Jack leaned forward. "Then what was it? What happened to those people in '41?"
Hayes exhaled smoke through his nose. "It wasn't a nuke test. That's what they told the papers, but it was never that simple. Back then, we were losing the war. The scientists—men smarter than anyone had a right to be—thought they could pull something through."
"Through what?" Elena asked.
"Through space," Hayes said. "Through… whatever's on the other side of space. You ever hear of thin places? Spots where the world's weaker—where things leak through? Well, those scientists found one. And they decided to open it wider."
He got up and crossed the room, picking up an old photograph from the mantle. It showed a group of men in lab coats standing beside a concrete bunker. Behind them, the desert stretched wide and endless.
"They called it Project Arachne. They were trying to drag something across. Something not human. Something ancient. Said it would end the war in a day."
Calvin swallowed. "What'd they get instead?"
Hayes looked at him. His eyes had gone glassy. "A spider, boy. But not the kind you squash with your boot. A creature older than the world itself. It didn't crawl out—it spilled out. They ripped a hole open in reality, and it poured through like tar."
Elena's hands shook. "What happened to the scientists?"
"They vanished," Hayes said. "Not all at once. One by one. Some screamed, some just… folded in on themselves. We tried to seal the rift, but you can't fix a hole in something you don't understand. All we could do was trap what came through. The box you found—" he pointed at Jack "—that's what held it. A containment device made from whatever strange metal came with it. We welded it shut, buried it in concrete, and built the fence. Then we swore never to speak of it again."
Jack felt cold. "But we opened it."
Hayes nodded slowly. "Then you've let it breathe again. It's not alive like you or me. It doesn't eat the way we do. It feeds on fear, on the vibrations people make when they're afraid. That's why it's back. It's been sleeping all these years, waiting for someone to remember it."
Calvin's voice cracked. "How do we kill it?"
Hayes gave a dry, humorless chuckle. "You don't kill something like that. You seal it. You send it back through the hole it came from. But you'd have to find its nest first."
"The nest?" Elena asked.
Hayes turned to the window, squinting toward the horizon. "Every world has a heart, and so does every monster. It'll build one—a place that hums with wrongness. You'll know it when you're close. The air'll turn heavy, your skin'll itch, and the sound… you'll hear whispering, like silk tearing. That's the heart. That's where the rift still bleeds."
Jack's stomach tightened. "If we find it, what do we do?"
Hayes looked him dead in the eyes. "You destroy it. Both sides of it—the flesh and the shadow. Light'll hurt it. Fire might slow it. But to finish it, you'll need more than bravery. You'll need to face it without fear. Because that's what it feeds on. If it can't scare you, it can't kill you."
He stubbed out his cigarette and leaned back, the chair creaking under his weight. "You kids should leave town. Forget all this."
Jack didn't answer. He couldn't. The silence hung thick in the room, broken only by the wind whistling through the cracks in the wall.
Then Elena spoke softly. "We can't. It's already here."
Hayes closed his eyes, as if he'd been expecting that.
"Then God help you," he said. "Because once it starts feeding, it doesn't stop."
They left just before dusk. The wind picked up dust across the fields, and in the distance, the wheat swayed like a restless sea. Jack rode slower than the others, the old man's words replaying in his head.
A hole in reality.
A monster from another world.
And the box that was never meant to be opened.
He looked up at the sky—the colors bleeding from gold to gray. Somewhere out there, in the desert's empty miles, something was awake and watching.
And it was hungry.