The Barn Spider

On a summer day in the mid-nineties of both time and temperature, there came a young man from the woods to inspect an old barn in a dry field. The man found the large front doors locked with a chain covered in rust but holding strong. He circled around and found a smaller door on the side whose sliding latch was guarded only by a large coil of knotted wire. This took him a short while to untangle.

The man felt relief to be out of the sun, but that's not to say the barn was comfortable. Spirited up by the heat, the trampled dirt cake of dusty animal shit was haunting the barn air.

The man held his breath and circled the empty stalls. He opened the splintering cabinets by the back wall and found stones of mouse droppings. He pressed against the big doors to verify their chain had no slack, then he tried kicking loose the boards of the walls that seemed weakest. He climbed to the loft and checked for large holes in the roof or gaps near the edge of the rafters. He stepped through all the small piles of forgotten hay to search for lost hand tools and felt nothing.

Satisfied, the man returned to the woods and lead his animal back by her rope. He brought her through the barn’s side door and hitched her up in the stable furthest from the sunshine. After settling her in, the man locked up the barn and went exploring through the surrounding land.

The man was a few hills out of sight when a boy on a bike came sweating down the field. He swung his legs to one side of the bike the way his brother had taught him, standing balanced on the downward pedal as it coasted to a stop by the barn canopy. He dumped the bike and pulled a chainless key out of his little pocket to open the barn doors. He secured his little bike to the canopy post, not because he thought there was any real danger of it getting stolen, but because his mother instilled safe habits into his character, and the chain needed to be somewhere.

The boy swung the doors wide to let out the stink. He climbed the loft and swept aside the pile of hay in the corner where a comic book hid. The boy laid back against a rafter and wiped the sweat off his forehead. He looked out through the barn door, saw no one, then started reading his most prized comic book for the hundred-and-fourth time.

The issue of 'Grey Cross' that hid in the loft hay was not a recent distribution. There was nothing specifically terrific about the story that made it worth hiding so far from his home. The boy's brother had labelled it a 'dead dog plot,' because it made no noise, moved nowhere, and did no tricks.

Grey Cross, our hero, starts and ends his monthly adventure in the exact same place, bound captive in the cave lair of Cavaticus, one of his less threatening villains. Most of our story takes place in the city above, as officials scratch their heads over the mysterious disappearance of Doctor Templeton. More strange than the sudden vanishing of the city's upstanding local physician is the seeming reluctance of Grey Cross to arrive and pick up the case.

As we bounce back and forth through the surface of the ground, we see Grey Cross's many failed attempts at escape. His thought bubbles are filled with worries about when the police chief inevitably must realize why Grey Cross cannot possibly help investigate Doctor Templeton's kidnapping.

The boy scanned the colored panels without absorbing any word or image. As he pretended to read, he did so leisurely, as if this were his first time. This was the way of building anticipation, to pretend he hadn't known what waits at the end of the magazine. This was ritual, and ritual dulled the sin of the act that would follow. He planned to come across the last image in the book as if by chance. Whatever he might choose to do with himself then, he couldn't call an orchestrated act or a premeditated decision, because he told himself he came out alone to the far away barn just to read his comic book in peace.

As the boy neared the end, and the edge of the full page ad on the last sheet began to poke out behind the turmoils of Grey Cross, and the painted fingers of the glossy woman wearing nothing but shoes and a bikini could be seen reaching from the page, the excitement took control of him. He wiped off more sweat and shifted his seat on the creaky boards, crossing and uncrossing his legs.

The boy heard a second moan beneath that given from the tired boards, this more vocalized and weary, like someone waking from a nightmare. He held still, listened close, and became certain that the heat must be mixing thoughts in his head with the sounds surrounding him.

He checked the open barn doors and saw nothing. As he peered down the cracks in the loft, he froze again, then carefully set down the comic book. An animal was lying in the stable directly below him. “Some pig,” he thought, from the look of the pale and pimpled skin caked in old mud. But there were some confusing patches of radiant color down there too.

The boy climbed down the ladder and saw the poor beast for who she was.

She wore nearly as much as the model in the comic book ad, but, instead of shiny new name-brand sneakers, her feet were covered in rope. The colors seen from the loft were the tattered remains of her trainer and briefs. She was laying on her side, hog-tied, and facing the wall. The boy could see that the rope led away from her hands, through a metal ring fixed to the wall, and ended at a knot around a support beam past her reach.

The boy said nothing, even after she lifted her head and called out in a soft cry, “Henry?”

Her eyes were nearly swollen shut, but she seemed to register the boy’s presence.

Stirred by the lack of response, the girl rolled herself over and screamed, "Ain't that you, Henry?!"

If someone had warned the boy before this situation presented, if they had told him what could happen to the mind of someone that must grow up after making a rushed decision, or if they'd at least had the chance to remind him that an act of bravery may take time to rationalize itself, the boy might have done the right thing.

Instead, overwhelmed by the frightening resemblance between what he came here to see and what he had found, the boy rejected the sight before him and took off running in the opposite direction.

He left the comic book up in the loft, lying open to the third-to-last page. He left in such a panic that he didn't pause to unchain his bike. He pulled it from the post and threw a leg over the side, but the chain tripped him and threw his body over the handlebars. And still he never stopped moving forward, all the way across the field and over the hill.

Both man and boy at separate times returned to their girls in the hot barn that day.

While he was still far off in the field, the man saw the swinging barn doors and considered with great doubt if he was wiser to turn around and flee or to figure out what happened. He returned cautiously, hiding along the skirt of the dry field and the woods, and made certain no one was waiting in ambush around the barn corners.

The man went inside, untied the hitching rope, closed and rebound the wire on the side-door bolt, then dragged his animal back to the same patch of wilderness they had woken up in.

Soon after, humbled by faith in the power of his own imagination, the boy returned too. He found things exactly as he'd left them, aside from the empty stable. With as much caution as the man had displayed, the boy inched his way up the loft ladder and retrieved his comic book.

After locking up the barn doors, he tried the strength of the rusty chain and found no give. He then circled around the barn and found the side-door still locked.

He biked home with the rolled-up comic book weighing him down heavier than it's earthly material. As taught by his mother and brother, the boy believed in a God powerful enough to invoke visions of angels for his children when lost in sin. He promised to God and himself that he would throw out his temptation before setting foot in his home.

But the path home was long, and the boy's faith had time to wax towards the powers of a heat-stroked mind, when spurred on by lusting anxiety, and wain away from such a God that would deliberately show him something so horrible.

The rest of his youth passed within reach of both the dead-dog comic and the dilapidated barn.

He never found the courage to crack open either one.