Chapter Text
Though his mind screamed at him to turn and run, Jon’s feet twitched and dragged him over the ruins towards the house from his childhood nightmares. Rocks and rubble rattled underfoot, and as he glanced down, Jon noticed multiple torn pages sticking up between the destruction like fallen leaves, fluttering slightly as the breeze caught them.
He recalled the last he’d seen of the Archives Monster, as Martin had taken to calling it. As they’d hurried to Michael’s door to escape, Jon had seen it wither and dissipate, peeling into thousands and thousands of yellowing pages.
Now was his chance to find out what statements had made up that breathing shadow that haunted him so.
Still, though Jon wanted to stop and pick one up, his legs refused to obey him. Still, he managed to duck and scoop one up mid-step, bringing the tattered piece up to read.
The text seared from the ripped page, the ink bright and bold despite the dirty and sun-bleached page it was upon.
KNOCK, KNOCK. WHO IS IT—
Jon’s breath caught in his throat.
No.
He dropped the paper and looked around, grabbing handfuls more as he walked.
KNOCK, KNOCK.
—BROUGHT YOU HIS SON.
MR SPIDER DOESN’T LIKE IT.
—, KNOCK. WHO IS IT, MR SPIDER?
ANOTHER GUEST FOR DINNER.
KNOCK, KNOCK.
—WANTS MORE.
“No…no, no, no, no…no!” Jon mumbled, the papers fluttering out of his hands. He tried to twist away, to stop his feet, but something thin and sharp cut into his ankles.
“Martin, run. Run!” he yelled back, though he knew it was hopeless even before he felt Martin’s hand clamp around his wrist.
“Not without you! What are you doing?! Stop walking towards it! We can just go!” Martin begged him, pulling hard on Jon’s hand. But the sharp cutting flared up around Jon’s wrist, making him cry out.
“I can’t! I…Christ, not again…! Martin, it’s caught me, the…the spider, i-i-it’s in the house, its webs, they’re…!”
Before Jon could explain further, something pierced through the corner of his lip and pulled, yanking his head and twisting him away from Martin.
The house lurched back into view, jerking closer with each forced step Jon took.
He’d faced flesh-twisted giants and seeping darkness. He’d watched smiling creatures wear familiar faces like masks. He’d experienced endless falls and ungodly isolation, felt his lungs burn as predators pursued him without mercy. He’d been eaten by parasites, stumbled at the knife-edge of madness, and choked on the rising bile of unfocused rage.
He’d drowned in the void that awaited all, screamed as his skin and muscle boiled on his bones, and clawed his way through the cold, crushing earth.
Yet not one of them summoned such dread in Jon’s soul as that plain little house with its blood-coated front door.
Martin’s hand slipped from his, to the relief and terror of Jon. At least Martin could get away now. At least he could run. But what would happen once Jon, 23 years late, finally arrived at Mr Spider’s door?
He closed his eyes and tried to swallow against a dry throat.
I’m so sorry, he pleaded to a world that could not hear him. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean for any of this! I didn’t mean to bring them here, I didn’t want to open the door, I didn’t want to die and have them escape all over again, I tried, I tried, I swear I—
His panic shattered as he walked into something tall, soft, and decidedly not a front door.
Jon, perplexed, stumbled and opened his eyes, taking an awkward second to rebalance himself while the silvery wisps of webs at his wrists, ankles, and face tangled and snapped taut.
There, standing with his back to the door and his arms folded across his chest, was Martin.
“There. You’re not going in,” he declared. “What’s the Web going to do now? It can puppet you all it wants, but those spindly arms aren’t going to shove me out of the way. Checkmate!”
Jon’s jaw dropped, and he blinked up at Martin, still half-unbalanced. In fact, were it not for the silk strings holding him, Jon would have been flat on his face.
“Martin, get out of the way!” he yelped, eyes darting left and right to try to catch sight of any webs fluttering out of the cracked windows. “It’ll just move you otherwise! Or worse!”
“Then I’ll take us both back to the Lonely!”
“Martin, you can’t treat the Forsaken as a safehouse! It’s just as insidious as the Web – every time you disappear back there, I risk losing you!”
“And every time you go to collect another Fear, I risk losing you!”
“You promised that—”
Wait.
Another Fear.
Jon stopped straining against the sharp silk wrapped around his joints. A steadiness returned to him, dampening the shivers of terror that had wracked his frame until now, and he had no intention of wasting it.
“Martin. Please. I know I have no right to ask this of you, but trust me when I say I promise I’ll come back to you. I can only say that I won’t betray you again, but you have to show me you believe me. It’s up to you. Trust me, or we both die here.”
He had expected Martin to refuse.
He deserved Martin to refuse.
Still, the flash of conflict that stole Martin’s gaze from him for a second made Jon’s stomach twist with pain. Martin wasn’t sure if he could trust Jon in this way, and Jon couldn’t blame him for it.
Then, without a word, Martin stepped to the side, unblocking Jon’s web-spun route to the front door.
Almost immediately, Jon’s feet jerked into unnatural steps once more. The silks pulled him to the front door, even though he fought to try to look at Martin, to thank him, to assure him.
His hand lifted towards the blood-splattered door.
Then, front over his left shoulder, a tiny utterance reached his ear.
“I love you.”
Jon swallowed down the sobs brewing in his throat. He knew that phrase, the farewell cadence behind it.
He thinks I’m lying. That I won’t come back.
“I…” Jon’s voice caught in his throat. He took a deep breath. “I’m coming back, Martin. I’m so sure of it that I’ll make this wager – I’m not going to reply to that yet. I’ll give you my answer when I get back.”
Jesus fucking Christ, I’d better come back from this now.
With his heart on the line, his moment of sheer confidence passed, and – to the delight of the Fears nestled in his body – the shivers of terror took root in his bones once again.
He knocked on the door.
The damp wood printed dark red against Jon’s knuckles. Then, silently, the door swung open. Perfect darkness awaited beyond.
Jon, with his breath trapped in his chest, scanned the shadows with frantic eyes. Where was it? Where was it? Just get it over and done with, where was that damned spider?
Just as his panic reached its peak, four spindly grey legs burst from the dark, caging Jon within its grip and yanking him into the house.
The door slammed shut behind him, trapping Jon in the house with Mr Spider.
As the door snapped back into place, however, it cut the webs holding Jon upright. He fell to his hands and knees, a cloud of dust kicking up from the rotten wood floor. Coughing, he pushed himself to his feet and whirled, seeking any sign of the horrible legs of the spider.
From somewhere behind Jon, a chirping clicking echoed in the small house.
Cold sweat trickled down Jon’s spine as burning nausea rose from the pit of his stomach.
“Wh-who is it…Mr Spider…?” Jon whispered to himself, his voice cracking.
The clicking increased, excited and amused and oh-so-eager to play along.
Something large shifted in the dark. Furniture tumbled and struck the floor with a dull thud, and a scratching voice replied to Jon’s whispered question.
“Why, it’s the Archive…All grown up and overflowing with fear…”
With more effort than he knew he was capable of, Jon turned to face the direction of the noise. Only darkness greeted him, along with the truth – he could See through this if he wanted to. He was choosing to stay blind to it.
“What are you?” Jon asked, rooted to the spot.
The clicking made an impressive imitation of a laugh.
“Will you not compel me for the answers, Archive? What is this, respect? I am flattered…”
“No. Well. Maybe,” Jon admitted. “You’re…a shapeshifter, is that it? First a-a-a monstrous spider, and then you were the creature that lay in these ruins. You spoke to me. You told me that you were what I should have been. What was waiting for me at the end of every choice I make.”
“Correct. And thanks to that – thanks to you – I have fed. And I have fed well.”
A great mass shifted again, brushing against the walls Jon could not make out. Two skinny, angled legs tapped forwards, landing so close to Jon that he yelped and jumped back. Almost immediately, the clicking increased, and then the wet suck of slurping followed, turning Jon’s stomach.
“Y-you…you have…the Web,” Jon managed to say. Not a question this time. “You have the Web now…b-b-but you were a part of all this even before that. My first mark. Y-you…you picked me, not Jonah. You marked me. Why? Why me?”
The two legs gripped the wood, claws hooking into the wet mush and tensing, dragging the mass behind it forwards along the floor.
“You’d like that answer, wouldn’t you, Archive? Something to make it all make sense. Something to make it special. Something to make you sadness and your misery mean something. To give your nightmare a purpose. It would lessen the sting, wouldn’t it? Then allow me to dispel you of such notions. You ask me why you? I answer…”
A huge, hair-speckled grey face pushed out of the dark, chelicerae twitching bloodied fangs forwards and backwards. Many eyes swivelled in its head, every single one a milky white. It loomed over Jon, thick rivulets of saliva working between its fangs like a grotesque web of its own.
“Because I wanted more.”
It struck then, a maw of blood and viscera slamming down and missing Jon by inches. He screamed and fell backwards, his limbs slipping on a floor damp not with rot or rain but the remains of Mr Spider’s previous guests.
He slid in his haste to get up, almost falling as he bolted for the stairs and Mr Spider’s leg crashed after him.
Nothing. It was all nothing! Chance and his own rotten luck! No, no. No, there had to be something, there had to be a purpose for all this, not just the machinations of wicked creatures and terrible men aligning through chance! His misery, the suffering of his loved ones, the world’s torment, surely it all meant something.
Jon made it to the landing just as the floor beneath him exploded, clicking fangs and wild blind eyes unblinking against a shower of splinters.
“Wait, wait!” Jon yelled, backing up as far as he could. “Y-you don’t want to kill me!”
Mr Spider paused. It watched Jon from the great hole in the floor, four legs holding the edges, ready to hoist himself up.
“Aaaah? Do you hope so?” it hissed.
Jon nodded, though he regretted it for how dizzy it made him among his nausea. “Mmm! Mmm-hmm! Y-you…you’ve haunted me my entire life. Your mistress even decided to make use of that! P-pushing me down the path to become the Archivist for Jonah Magnus. She…she wanted to flee. To feed on this world and then leave its hollow corpse behind and…and find more.”
“You are…right in this…but I am not she. And I have waited so long for you to knock upon my door.”
Jon shoved down the impulse to heave and continued, though he kept one hand groping out behind him to find a new escape route as he stepped backwards again. “B-b-b-but you said it yourself. Y-you want more. Not…not flesh, no, because, b-because if it were just that, you’d have eaten me when I showed up at the ruins. Y-you fed well, you said. You don’t feed on flesh. You…you feed on fear. And I have given you that in spades.”
“That you have, that you have,” the creature rumbled, and to Jon’s horror, it began to duck down into the shadows of the hole in the floor once more. “You were terrified that I was right. That you would become like me. It was…delicious.”
“I have known fear. I have heard tens of thousands of nightmares and experienced them as though they were my own. But you…” Jon laughed, the sound splintering on the edge of madness. He kept pawing his way backwards to put as much distance as he could between himself and Mr Spider, at odds with what scared him more – to see where it was or to be close to it. “You? You’re…you’re my nightmare, aren’t you? Mine and mine alone.”
“Yesss…” Mr Spider hissed, satisfaction and pride pouring through. “You have been stuck in my web all this time, Archive. I am the root of your terror. Do you think you can change that? Conquer your fears? You and I know the truth of that, now, don’t we? There is no such thing…”
“I-I agree. I…I am scared. I am terrified of you in ways I have never known. The monster that lurks in the shadows of all my worst moments. The lingering reminder of what I…I’ll likely become one day. Were you human once?” – a hiss of anger, but Jon ploughed on – “Will I delight in tormenting people as you do one day? When all my humanity finally burns out of me? When nothing is left but my bitter defeat and agonising need to feed on fear?”
His back hit a wardrobe, the handles pushing into his spine. End of the line. No more escape. Even if he could not conquer it, he must face his fear now.
Jon steeled himself as spindly legs – click, click, click, click – hooked around the doorframe to the room he’d backed himself into. Like pearls in a black sea, eight eyes glowed beyond that, sightless yet fixed upon the Archive.
“It matters not,” Mr Spider whispered through the dark. “Human or not, man or monster, I will feed on you forever. I am the root of all your misery…”
“I know. I will…always be terrified of you,” Jon admitted, defeat pushing him to slide down until he sat upon the floor. “All my nightmares end with you. You are…the root of my misery.”
He set his hands down either side of himself, palms splayed flat against the damp floor beneath.
The soaked wood sizzled under his palm.
Jon managed a small sad smile. “Still. A terrible, terrible friend taught me how to deal with that, should I ever face it. Actually, I’m flattering myself. We weren’t friends. Not by the end.”
By now, Mr Spider had hauled itself into the room as best it could. Its huge swollen abdomen cracked the doorframe as it forced itself in, its legs crashing down around Jon like bars of a cage.
Beneath Jon’s palms, the wooden floor began to smoke and crackled, threads of brilliant orange snaking through its core.
Jon leant his head back and closed his eyes, concentrating on everything he knew of the agony of flames. Not the joy of light nor the comfort of warmth, but the skin-cracking torment of unrelenting heat. The stench of fat boiling and muscles scorching. The sound of bones squeaking under immeasurable temperatures, shattering at its crescendo.
Tim, if you can hear this…fuck you too. But thank you for teaching me this.
The Desolation seared through the Archive, scorching out of his body and searing off his skin. The room erupted into dark-emitting flames, filling the house with thick smoke and the screeching fury of Mr Spider.
The gargantuan arachnid tried to back out of the room, its huge legs scampering across the burning wood in its panic to flee. But the black fire danced along its hairy limbs and spread with ease across its huge torso, engulfing it and cooking the flesh down to smouldering embers.
It screamed and flailed, smashing through its house and causing almost as much carnage as the Desolation itself.
From within the madness, Jon gritted his teeth and endured the now-familiar nightmare of being burned alive. He searched through the white-hot pain, seeking not the Desolation but another Fear.
The snarling jaws of the Hunt let its irritation at the Archive be known, but begrudgingly came to heel when asked. Survival, it seemed, set all of them in alignment. It helped, of course, that Jon gave the Hunt a target.
Find the Web. Don’t let it escape.
Grunting, Jon pushed himself to his feet, fuelled by the Hunt’s crazed need for pursuit. Even as his skin boiled and bubbled, even as his flesh dripped off his bones, Jon ran through the house after the burning spider.
His eyes alight with the Watcher’s glee, the entire building revealed itself to Jon. Framed pictures of sorrowful flies curled in the heat, and bookshelves filled with watches, glasses, necklaces, and rings broke apart as the lightless flame devoured what Mr Spider had not. The floor, once stained with the remains of Mr Spider’s unfortunate meals, now coughed up plumes of black smoke that lifted sheer heat from the ground to the ceiling.
In the middle of it all, the mountainous form of Mr Spider writhed upon its back. With one last screech, the eight-legged nightmare curled into a twitching ball, one leg spasming as death throes claimed it.
There! A fractal of silk, like the air itself had shattered, fluttered from Mr Spider’s open maw. Lithe as a ghost and almost unseen, it stuck itself to the wall and began to crawl upwards.
“No you don’t…” Jon growled. He leapt forwards and clawed his way up the wall, snatching up the Web in burn-riddled hands.
The moment the wispy silks touched his hand, it turned upon him. Threads of silk wove around his wrist and up his arm, covering his entire body in mere seconds. Ghost-white strands knitted over all of his eyes, blinding him and leaving him floundering in the burning house.
He tried to tear the silk from his face, but even as he worked on freeing his eyes, the Web smothered his nose and mouth with the same feather-light steel.
Why…can’t I…?
He crashed into a table and fell to the ground, still rolling and thrashing to try to get the Web off him. The threat of suffocation drew ever closer, sending Jon’s heart thudding a mile a minute. He’d promised Martin! He’d promised him! He couldn’t let him down, not again, not again, why couldn’t he contain the Web? Why—?
Ah.
The answer, of course, made perfect sense.
Jon stopped convulsing. He stopped trying to pull the silk from his eyes and mouth.
With a huge amount of effort, he lay still, setting his hands at his sides, and let the Web smother him.
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