September 29th. The rain doesn't stop. It beats against the Nexus window like a fist demanding entry. A foolish notion. Nothing gets in here unless it's allowed. Except the rot. The rot is already inside.
It's in my journal.
The book lies splayed on my desk, a dissected corpse under the harsh glare of my lamp. Pages are stiff with ink, sketches of web-patterns, hastily scrawled observations. Red ink stains bleed across the entries, looking disturbingly like veins branching from the spine. My own handwriting is a stranger to me. It trembles between entries, the familiar, rigid block letters giving way to a frantic scrawl, as if my hand were merely a vessel for another's thoughts.
Under the ultraviolet light, the page is a nightmare. Tiny patterns, invisible in normal light, form between the words—a filigree of spiderwebs connecting my thoughts, looping around nouns and ensnaring verbs. They shimmer with a faint, sickly luminescence.
"Ink doesn't move on its own," I mutter, the sound swallowed by the small, sterile room. The smell of stale coffee and damp wool clings to everything. "Not yet."
The thought is a splinter in my mind, an insidious whisper that this is more than ink, more than paper. I force it away, a mental discipline honed over a lifetime of staring into the abyss. Label it. Contain it.
In the margin, I grip my pen and write, my knuckles white: Delusion. Underneath, a necessary reminder: Tools don't talk back. Masks don't dream.
The pen feels cold. Alien. I continue my report on the recent string of psychic attacks across the Web. Victims report a feeling of being… unraveled. Memories pulled apart like threads from a tapestry. The signature is consistent with the entity designated 'Weaver's Child.' Modus operandi remains consumption of…
My pen hesitates mid-sentence. Stops dead.
Beneath the nib, the words on the page seem to thin, to shift like heat haze on asphalt. The paper is no longer paper. For a sickening, vertiginous second, it is a window.
Flashes. Not thoughts. Intrusions.
A man in a red and blue costume, a stylized condor on his chest, swinging through a city I don't recognize. La Paz. The name surfaces unbidden. Spider-Man Bolivia. The skyline behind him doesn't crumble; it melts, dripping into liquid silk that hardens into vast, predatory webs.
Then, the Child. Crawling from the mirrored surface of a skyscraper, its form indistinct, a smudge of wrongness against the glass. Its eyes are blank voids, reflecting nothing.
The perspective wrenches, and suddenly I am the one falling. Looking down at my own hands, my own memories unraveling, turning into shimmering threads pulled loose and drawn toward that hungry, empty shape. The feeling isn't pain. It's erasure.
I slam the book shut. The sound cracks like a gunshot in the silence. My breath hitches, a ragged, ugly thing in my chest. The images linger, burned into my retinas like static on a dead channel. A psychic shockwave will ripple through the Nexus in a few minutes, an alarm triggered by a Totem's death. But I saw it first. I saw it before it was reported.
The door hisses open, and Cindy Moon steps inside, her suit a stark slash of black and white against the gray room. Silk. She doesn't waste time with greetings.
"Another shockwave. Just went off. Bolivia." Her eyes are sharp, missing nothing. They land on the journal clutched in my hand, my knuckles bone-white. "You're pale. You knew." It's not a question. It's an accusation.
"Didn't know," I rasp, my voice sounding like gravel. "Just wrote. Then it happened."
The statement hangs in the air between us, absurd and terrifying. She takes a step closer, her expression unnerved. She's seen too much to dismiss anything outright, but this… this skirts the edge of madness.
"What exactly did you write, Rorschach?"
I don't answer. I can't. How do you explain that your own words are a death sentence, read by a god you're trying to hunt?
It gets worse. The whispers start two days later. Across the Nexus, other Spider-Totems begin hearing things. Echoes. Fragmented observations broadcast directly into their minds, through the very strands of the Great Web. My observations.
Jessica Drew's voice crackles over my comm, patched in from her sector. Her tone is clinically precise, but I can hear the underlying dread. "It's your voice, Rorschach. Someone's broadcasting your words through the strands. 'Memories pulled apart like threads.' 'Consumption as erasure.' It's like the Web itself is reading your journal aloud."
I'm brought before a small council. Parker, Drew, Moon. They stand around me, their faces a mixture of suspicion and fear. I deny it, of course. How could I be responsible? It's a trick. A tactic by the Child to sow discord.
But they don't look at me anymore. They look at the simple, leather-bound journal on the table between us. They look at it like it's a bomb.
Back in the solitude of my room, I try to piece it together. Solitude is where the patterns emerge. I lay out my journal entries, cross-referencing dates and times with the attacks. The correlation is absolute. Terrifyingly, perfectly absolute.
Every time I write about the Weaver's Child, using its designation, describing its methods, the Web reacts. Every pattern I record, every theory of its movement I sketch, becomes replicated somewhere in the strands. My thoughts are reflected in the architecture of reality itself.
I grip my pen, the cold metal a poor anchor in this storm. My hand is steady now, driven by a grim, burgeoning horror. I write:
Observation creates shape. Thought becomes thread. Am I mapping it… or feeding it?
As the last word forms, a chill unlike any I've ever known spiders up my spine. For a moment, my consciousness is ripped away, thrown across the infinite expanse of the Web. I am not in my room. I am somewhere deep, somewhere dark, in a nest woven from stolen light and dying universes.
And I am not me. I am small. My fingers are tiny, stained with something dark and sticky. Before me is a wall of gossamer silk, and with one bloody finger, I am tracing letters. They are my letters. My handwriting.
I trace the question I just wrote into the silk.
…or feeding it?
As the Child's finger lifts from the silk, the ink on my page dries. Instantly. We finished the sentence together.
I am back in my room, gasping, a cold sweat slicking my skin. A test. I need a controlled experiment. One variable.
My hand trembles violently as I open the journal to a fresh page. I force my muscles to obey, to form a single, simple word.
"Bait."
I write it. Nothing more. Just the four letters, stark and black against the cream-colored paper.
I wait. One second. Two. Ten.
A klaxon blares through the Nexus. An urgent, piercing shriek. An alarm. I stumble to my monitor, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"Dimensional anomaly detected in Sector Epsilon-7! Minor Web sector, uninhabited."
I pull up the coordinates, my fingers flying across the console. A topological map of the sector appears onscreen. There, glowing with unstable energy, is the anomaly. It's not a random tear. It's a shape. A form.
The shape of the word I wrote.
A choked sound escapes my throat. It isn't a word, not really. Just a raw, broken noise.
"Not ink," I whisper to the empty room. "Not journal. Interface."
Silk finds me like that, staring at the screen. She doesn't wait for an invitation this time. "That anomaly. It's your work, isn't it? Let me see the book, Rorschach. Now."
"No." I turn, putting myself between her and the desk. "It's a tool. Of surveillance. Must be studied."
"Studied? It's a weapon! In your hands, it's a menace!" she snaps, her patience gone. "Your damn paranoia is going to get us all killed."
"Paranoia's just pattern recognition ahead of schedule," I reply, the old mantra feeling hollow even to me.
Her eyes narrow, but then her gaze drifts past me, to the journal on the desk. Her expression changes. The anger dissolves into a quiet, creeping horror.
"What… what is it doing?" she whispers.
I follow her gaze. On the edges of the pages, the red ink stains I had mistaken for simple smears are glistening faintly. Pulsing. A slow, rhythmic beat, like blood moving through veins.
That night, the final piece of the puzzle clicks into place with the sickening finality of a closing coffin lid. I'm cleaning a small knife I use for sharpening pencils when it slips. A minor cut on my index finger. A single drop of blood wells up and falls, landing on an open page filled with diagrams of the Web.
It doesn't just stain the paper.
The ink around the droplet drinks it. The black lines absorb the blood, and then they begin to move. They spread across the page, not as a meaningless blotch, but with chilling purpose. New lines etch themselves into the paper, branching from my diagrams, forming new, intricate patterns.
I watch, paralyzed, as the shapes align into a map. A hunting map. The routes the Weaver's Child has taken. The routes it will take. My blood has shown me its hunger.
My hand, slick with sweat, picks up the pen. The shaking is uncontrollable now, but I must document it. I must write the final truth.
Journal is conduit. Writing feeds it. Web bleeds through me. I am documenting infection. Or I am the infection.
I try to close the book, to seal the horror away, but I no longer have control. A force, cold and immense, holds it open. The pages begin to flip on their own, a dry, rustling wind in the dead-still room. They stop on a fresh, blank page.
I watch, helpless, as words appear. Ink bleeds from the paper itself, forming letters in my own, precise handwriting. A message.
You understand me now.
Keep writing.
The lines hold for a moment, a perfect, mocking imitation of my own meticulous script. Then, they begin to dissolve, the ink running and reforming. The last line fades, replaced by a new image. A childish, wavering scrawl. A spider symbol, dripping in visceral, glistening red.
My breath catches in my throat. I can't look away. I am the investigator, and I must observe. I stare into the symbol, into the deepest red of the ink.
Slowly, it shifts. The lines curve, a dark spot coalescing in the center.
It is taking the shape of an eye.
And it is watching me back.