Chapter 4 – The Thing in the Barn
That night, Dry Hill felt wrong.
The kind of wrong you can't point to — like a smell you can't find or a noise just under hearing.
Jack couldn't sleep. The box sat on his desk, the faint moonlight pooling around it like spilled milk. Every few minutes, he swore it made a noise — not a hum, not a buzz, more like breathing.
Outside, the crickets had stopped.
That silence was worse than any sound.
Then came the tap.
Once. Twice. On his window.
Jack's heart punched against his ribs. He slid out of bed, slow, every step creaking on old wood. He peeked between the curtains.
The backyard looked the same — dry grass, his father's rusted toolshed, the crooked fence. But something moved out there. Low. Smooth. Too fast.
It slipped behind the barn.
Jack's hand trembled as he backed away. He didn't open the window. Didn't breathe for a whole minute. When he finally did, the box was still sitting there.
And it was open again.
⸻
By noon the next day, Jack had dragged Calvin and Elena to the barn.
"I'm telling you," Jack said. "Something's in there. I saw it."
Calvin snorted, gripping a metal bat he'd borrowed from school. "You saw your own reflection, genius."
Elena didn't laugh. She held a flashlight so tight her knuckles had gone white. "If it is from the box…" She trailed off. None of them wanted to finish that sentence.
The barn was a hollow, sagging thing at the edge of their property — half-eaten by rot, half-buried in silence. The moment they stepped in, the temperature dropped. The air smelled like wet dirt and old pennies.
"Jesus, it's freezing," Calvin muttered.
They crept deeper. The hay crackled beneath their shoes. Dust hung thick in the light shafts cutting through the cracks.
Then came a sound.
Not scuttling. Not footsteps. Something worse.
Like dry branches rubbing together — a skrrkkk-skrrkkk that came from everywhere at once.
"Over there," Jack whispered, pointing to a hay pile that looked like it was breathing.
Calvin raised his bat. "On three—"
He didn't make it to two.
The hay exploded outward in a whirl of motion — legs, eyes, dripping fangs. The thing slammed into Calvin and sent him sprawling, the bat clattering away.
Elena screamed.
Jack froze — not because he was scared, but because his mind refused to name what he was seeing.
It looked like a spider but wrong. Its legs bent in directions no bone should bend. Its body pulsed under a thin layer of glassy skin, green veins writhing like worms beneath it. And its eyes — not eight, but dozens — shimmered like black beads, rolling independently in the dark.
The spider reared up, letting out a wet, gargled hiss.
Jack snapped out of it. He lunged for the bat and swung. The metal connected with a sickening crack. The spider shrieked — a sound that rattled the rafters — and slammed a leg into Jack's chest, sending him flying into the wall.
Elena's flashlight beam swept over it — and where the light touched, the spider's skin bubbled and smoked.
"Light!" she shouted. "It burns it!"
She swung the beam at its head. The thing screeched and scuttled backward, knocking over a shelf of tools. Nails and dust rained down as it tried to escape into shadow.
But Calvin wasn't done. He snatched the bat back up and ran at it, screaming, swinging again and again. The hits didn't kill it — just made it angrier.
The spider lunged. Calvin went down hard. It pinned him — one long leg pressing into his shoulder, another curling around his throat.
Elena aimed her light again. "MOVE!"
The beam hit square in its cluster of eyes. The flesh sizzled and burst like boiling tar. The spider let out a howl that didn't sound animal at all.
Then it bolted — straight up the wall and through a rotten windowpane, vanishing into the daylight.
Silence fell again, except for their breathing.
Calvin sat up, blood streaking his neck. "Tell me that was a dream."
Jack didn't answer. He stared at the hole the creature had escaped through, at the green ichor dripping from the splintered frame.
It was still moving. The blood — crawling back toward the barn door like it had a mind of its own.
Elena whispered, "It's not over, is it?"
Jack looked at her, his eyes wide, his voice shaking.
"No. That wasn't it. That was just a piece."
And outside, faint but clear, the wind carried something across the fields.