Lot 126: There’s A Hatch In The Middle Of The Woods

The Antiquarium.myshopify.com is truly the hub of the Antiquarium experience.

“If you've been listening closely, you might already know some of the items don't quite stay contained.”

Well, now, a few of the slightly less haunted ones can come home with you as well. We're about to replenish everything. New shirts, hoodies, and a few more curiosities we probably shouldn't be letting out. Very soon. And while we're on the subject of things waiting to be released, you've got one too. You know, that idea, that project, that thing that keeps sitting there in the back of your mind,

just out of reach, because you're not sure anyone's going to care or engage.

Listen, don't overthink it. Let it out. Whether you want to share your creative voice or build something that lets you leave the nine to five, Shopify removes the friction entirely. No complicated setup, no endless learning curve, just tools to make it easy and fun. Shipping stays simple to Shopify calculates everything.

“Print your labels, keeps that out of the post of a sign cause come on. Who's got time for that?”

It's time to turn your "what ifs" into, with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month

trial today at shopify.com/tash. That's exclusively for you the anti-cram visitor. I believe it's what they call an anagram. I might be using that word totally wrong, but go with me. Shopify.com/tash. That's shopify.com/tash. Enjoy the lot you're about to be taken home today. And remember, no refunds, no exchanges. This week's episode is sponsored by the new Supernatural Horror, The Demon.

Tom returns to the lakeside home where his father died, hoping to come front his past. But instead,

“something beneath the water begins to answer. As his behavior grows distant and disturbing,”

his wife and loved ones are pulled into a nightmare that feels older than memory itself, blending the psychological dread with the creeping inescapable horror. The Demon explores grief, possession, and the horrors we inherit. Some forces don't just haunt you. They consume you. Watch the trailer and learn more now. For an ad free experience visit the Obsidian Covenant.com. Good evening. Some objects are carried

into a place. Others manage to return. If you'll step closer, a rusted Swiss army knife, red casing long since faded brown with age and exposure. The main blade is partially snapped near the tip. Trace remnants of an unidentified fibrous material remain lodged within the hinge assembly. Attempts to remove it have been unsuccessful. The knife emits a fate mineral odor when unfolded. Wet stone. Standing water. And many fat. Something organic. There's a hatch in the middle of

the woods. Before we begin, I want to point out some of the customers whose names have been etched in brass on this beautiful plaque I had made above the front desk. These are some of the members of the inner circle of the Antiquarium. We go by the Obsidian Covenant. Recent initiates include "Oper-Word Cheddar Worst of Decrepe's Cudnison" "Cursteep Jack" "Samantha Warner" "Cristina Polk" Ninja with a Y and get me my coffee. We are ever appreciative of your devotion to the order.

Go to the Obsidian Covenant.com to receive the sacrament. Sounds harmless enough, right? Welcome to the Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings, and our goings on. There's a hatch in the middle of the woods. It was old, older than God, older than the

rise, planted firmly in the forest floor. It wore a tight beard of pine needles over a

“rusted wheel handle, with bolts the size of apples. It took both of us to get the handle to turn,”

metal groaned and protest, screamed as it shaved away the lower of rust that had welded it shut. Together we pulled the lid open, it was heavy, heavier than a house, and it split back on its hinge with a sigh of stale air. Darkness seemed to spill out of the hatchway. Like it had been bottled up for eels, and was now ready to infect the world. It looked as though a great metal mouth had opened up in the forest floor,

a predator's mouth, starving and ready to feed. We peered down, a service ladder of rebar-like rungs descended the dark concrete bore into the great unknown.

“Hazy overcast sunlight fought the darkness and lost, penetrating a meager five feet”

before shadow claimed the hole for its own. Sammy found a rock that looked like a cat's head negotiated it over the hatch and dropped it down. It was sold off into darkness.

We waited two teenage girls in the woods of Washington, listening for a sound that never came.

That rock hitting the bottom. I was spending a month of summer with my cousin Sammy at our grandma's place up in Northern Washington. It was a gray, unsunny July. I'd only been there a day, but a kingdom of storm clouds had rolled in off the ocean and pitched camp over our corner of Washington, issuing unto it low and list drizzle that left the world soggy and awful. Today, however, the clouds had parted, pulling back in a blast of sunlight and leaving Sammy and I

to our daily dose of mischief to perloined cigarettes. With the smokes in hand, we cut out through the trees behind grandma's house and search of someplace suitably grunge to light up. We followed a thin veil of hiking trail, eventually breaking off on our own through the wide, premordial riot of what's not entirely claustrophobic, but dense enough that the massive pines would be warring for root space. We had been off the trail for no more than 10 minutes when Sammy

called out to me, indicating the closed hatch that would eventually swallow us whole. We brushed away a thin skeleton of branches, a great bed of moss, a tangle of brush,

to finally unorth the thing that resembled something city workers and bright orange vests might

descend to access a gas main, which was odd because it wore no markings to denote its origin. Not even warnings with penal codes to dissuade would be vandals. It was anonymous and disconcerting, like its lack of designation meant it didn't belong. Like it was an interloper.

“Sammy had asked me something. I looked up at her. What? What is it? Curious gaze pinned on the hatch?”

I don't know. I don't know what this is. I knew it was old. Older than God. Older than the hundred foot pines that towered above. The hatch was open and Sammy wanted to go down. Come on, Laney. It'll be fun. We'll poke around and take some shots for our vids. I'm not on that shit. Social media is the death of rational thought. True. What are we supposed to do? Hang out with grandma all day and watch rebel without a cause with commercials?

I took a long pence of drag on the stale Winston, not wanting to admit that I was kind of terrified. Not only was I worried about the hatch lid slamming on us, trapping us in, but the thought of climbing down that shadowy ladder of disappearing into the earth's dark quiet belly and you want to vomit. Luckily, I didn't have to make any excuses.

It started to rain. Shit. Sammy hissed as the first spray of drizzle fell in gray sheets.

And I doubted very much if it would flood, but I was more than happy to help her seal off

“that dark orifice. We did, together. Before heading back through the trees leaving the hatch”

behind, we were soaked through by the time we made it back to grandma's. She fixed us plates of hot lasagna and we all watched James Dean's effortless, cool and rebel with the commercials. My grandma's house was not unimpressive. It was a two-story Victorian rising and a collage of faded red and white from a wide lot of crabgrass. The open property hemmed by a rod iron fence,

all of it seemingly weighed down by a hundred years of history. It looked like something out of a

Tim Burton movie. A Gothic manor surrounded by woods, a lone raft stranded in a sea of trees. I was staying in my dad's old digs, a mess of ancient band posters and records, breezy punk stuff,

“like the gun club and the wipers. Despite all the vinyl, I was plugged into Spotify”

and Boeey was wailing moon-age daydream when Sammy slipped in, face bright with mischief. "Come on, let's go. It was late. Dark and late. I thought she had gone to bed. But she claimed to spot on the edge of my bed, charged with nervous energy. I lost my headphones and shifted to look at her. Her eyes wide and excited. What? Go? I screwed my face into a confused nod. The thing, the hole in the ground. The mention of the hatch, the mouth, in my skin crawl.

What? No way. It's like midnight. It's atmospheric. It's pitch dark out. So, we'll vlog it or something. Record it. I don't know it'll be fun.

“No fucking way. Then I'll go without you. Into the hole in the middle of the night.”

Yep. Totally alone. So if I get molested by sub-dwelling mutates, it's on you, because you're the older cousin in all. Don't be a bitch. She smiled. A simple forming beside her mouth. Clearly amused at having manipulated me into a stalemate of mutually assured destruction. I was caught. Either I go with her and keep her in check or I let her go alone and something might happen. She was 15. Only a year younger than me. But impulsive and brash. And it

wouldn't surprise me if she got hurt. I could claim ignorance. But if something happened,

I wouldn't be able to live with myself. Despite being cousins, we'd always been close.

Always been more like sisters than anything else. Sammy could drive me up the wall. But I still loved her. And I could see in her eyes that she wouldn't be swayed. I blew another long sigh, pushed myself off the bed, shrugged on my black windbreaker. Let's get some fucking flashlights. I prayed for rain I knew wouldn't come. The clouds had burned off in the moonlight, leaving the heavens

bright and clear. We had found a set of headlamps and grandmust drawer, and navigated the low woods by the watery beams they provided. I had also taken an old Swiss army knife. It was made of rust and looked like it had survived the great war. But I took it, just in case. I was hoping I wouldn't need it. Hoping we wouldn't find a hatch. Hoping it would be lost in the riot of trees. But something deep down, a high tickle in the deepest wrinkles of my soul, told me we would,

find it. And we did, almost immediately. It resolved out of the darkness, a small, brutalist platform rising out of the still damp soil. Had it been so close, it must have, must have, Sammy was recording us with her phone, posting them on Instagram or something, who knows. My vision had wittle down to a dizzying pin prick, and all I could hear was the hot rush of blood

wanted to do this. Of course I do. She said with a tight smile as she poked at her phone,

“it'll be exciting. Then she mounted the ladder and started off down the hatch.”

That sound only could have been made by the hatch lid slamming shut. We'd been climbing down the narrow bore for five minutes. Each wrong burning with a hot metal freeze that nibbled through flesh and seems to lick at the bone. When there had been allowed, metallic reports. We both froze on the ladder. Sammy just below me, panting like a

tired dog. What was that? Why are you whispering? What was that? But I didn't have to ask.

I already knew. She did too. I heard the growing scuffle of her climbing back up the ladder.

“I started to, one white hot, wrong after the next. My palms burning. My heart beating”

its angry fist against my ribs. The climb up was hard. My body seemed to weigh too much. Like each limb was encased and let, as I pulled myself up up, nearing what I knew I'd find. And I was right. The hatch was closed. I pounded on it, screamed, knowing that the only ones to hear would be us. I chipped away at it with the army knife to know of you. We tried our phones,

first mine, then Sammy's, pressing the devices to the lids rough rust and skin.

No reception. Nothing but the mouth. No one but us. Two teenage girls. Her with red hair, me with brown, trapped in an awful ladder with nowhere to go, but down. I don't like this. She sounded so young. Like a little girl clutching her teddy bear after an especially dreadful nightmare. I didn't like it either. It was wrong. It was so, so wrong. It was it was a pyramid of rocks. The climb down the ladder had been impossible. Time fell away,

shifting into a dull blur that didn't much matter. All that matters was finding your footing as you lowered yourself down, down, wrong, after, wrong, step after step. It might have been an hour or 10, but a while later, a long, long while. We hit a wide concrete room. It was about the size of your average backyard. The ceiling low, unblemished despair, the circular opening through which the ladder ran. Shadow shifted and danced in black relief as you played

our headlights across the dark space. On the wall opposite the ladder stood a wide ruined opening, nothing but darkness beyond it. The massive bank vault-style door that had once filled it in the satin, a twisted broken heap nearby. Torn free of its hinges by something. That was disturbing.

“It sent a sudden flood of hot dread filling my guts like boiling water. What was worse?”

Was the pyramid? It stood in the center of the room like a shitty roadside art sculpture, a pain-staking pyramid fashioned out of countless rocks. I knew where those stones had come from. Sammy did too. They had been dropped from the above by people like us. Hundreds of them, thousands, sacrificed to the darkness of the earth. The mouth. I knew, because topping the pyramid like a Christmas tree star, was the rock Sammy had dropped

earlier. The exact same one. No doubt about it. Tucked carefully atop the mountain of stones. Placed there by someone. Some thing. A high-trumpling sound like an animal and a snare

She was losing it. Unraveling at the seams, sitting on the floor, needs to her chest, rocking, and sobbing, and apologizing for bringing me down here. We had to move. My whole body was one big screaming ache, and if we let exhaustion ease its warm blanket over our

shoulders, we'd never get going. I saw to air through my lungs and boiled it into authority.

We have to go. What? She raised a trembling finger to the crock to entryway across the room. Through there, I nodded. Struck one of the matches I still had from the cigarettes. The flame wavered, guttered as a breeze tugged at it. There's a breeze airflow. Another way out. No. No way. I say we wait here. Wait for someone to open the hatch. No one knows we're down here. No one. But what if she started looking at the pyramid of rocks? She lowered her voice. A horse

“whispered. What if the thing that made that is in there?”

One moment. We try not to leave this item open for extended periods.

People tend to fixate on what it was used to cut through. We'll return shortly. Hi, my name is Trevor. I'm from the Acquisitions Department here at the Antiquarium. The Antiquarium.myshopify.com is truly the hub of the Antiquarium experience. If you've been listening closely, you might already know some of the items don't quite stay contained. Well, now, a few of the slightly less haunted ones can come home with you as well.

We're about to replenish everything. New shirts, hoodies, and a few more curiosities where you

probably shouldn't be letting out. Very soon. And while we're on the subject of things waiting

to be released, you've got one too. You know that idea, that project, that thing that keeps sitting there in the back of your mind just out of reach because you're not sure anyone's going to care or engage. Listen, don't overthink it. Let it out. Whether you want to share your creative voice or build something that lets you leave the nine to five, Shopify removes the friction entirely. No complicated setup, no endless learning curve, just tools to make it easy and fun.

Shipping stay simple to Shopify calculates everything. Prince your labels keeps you out of the post of a scientist. Come on. Who's got time for that? It's time to turn your what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/tsh. That's

“exclusively for you, the anti-cram visitor. I believe it's what they call an anagram.”

I might be using that word totally wrong, but go with me. Shopify.com/tash. That's shopify.com/tsh. Enjoy the lot you're about to be taken home today. And remember, no refunds, no exchanges. This week's episode is sponsored by the new Supernatural Horror, The Demon. Tom returns to the Lakeside home where his father died, hoping to confront his past. But instead, something beneath the water begins to answer. As his behavior grows distant and disturbing, his wife and loved ones

are pulled into a nightmare that feels older than memory itself. Blending the psychological dread with the creeping inescapable horror, the demon explores grief, possession, and the horrors. We inherit. Some forces don't just haunt you, they consume you. Watch the trailer and learn more now. Why hello there, you've reached the antiquarium. If you wish to leave a message, please do so at the tone and have a great day. Hi there, I was just wondering if you also carry that newspaper that

reports to Mars news. I need to check the obituaries. Oh, a lottery too. You know what? I'll just drop them. And as messages. Welcome back. By this point, the scape has already become unlikely.

“Let's join our two adventurers in the midst of their peril. Shall we?”

What if the thing that made that is in there? She was close to Cattitonia and I needed her in motion. We have nowhere else to go.

Her eyes were puffy, red, bright with terror. And she summoned her courage like one would a long

“full of air and nodded. I hauled her to her feet and we started off through the doorway.”

There's someone following us. The entryway had fed us into an underground hospital. It was abandoned. Left to rot beneath the earth. A maze of scarred linoleum hallways, moldering gurneys with thick leather straps, blown out doorways with padded rooms beyond. No. Not a hospital. An asylum. Or a laboratory, a kind of psycho mixture of both.

It's construction spoke of a time before technology and the advancement of human rights.

Yellowed walls and popcorn ceilings were shredded, 200 ribbons, like a feral,

“something had been set loose. Rusty smears of dried blood textured the white darkness here and there.”

It was awful. Each football, each pull of breath, all seemed to echo playing reverberate through the white walls of this underground labyrinth. It was like a nightmareish as sure painting. It was the mouth. Up until then we'd been negotiating slowly. Rounding corners, finding more shadow soaked hallways, passing an overturned reception desk, more padded cells, driven forth by terror and primal survival instinct. Then Sammy had whispered in my ear,

her breath hot, her voice horse with terror. There's someone following us.

“I froze. A cold infection of goosebumps went sprouting up over my body.”

I lungs were tight empty of air. My heart was pounding with icy fear. I turned, slowly, not wanting to make a sound. I afraid that if I did, it might make the someone real. She must have imagined it. There was no one. There was then I saw the eyes. Two dull, milky pinpricks hovering just outside the light of our headlamps. They were head level, higher than head level,

unblinking, hovering and watching. Eyes. Sammy's body was right up against mine. She was wound up like an overtorked screw. Terror radiated from her in hot waves. I could feel fear beating through her veins. The eyes moved so suddenly that both of us screamed. They searched forward without any warning. rushed at us, the thing, the something, the awful sub-dwelling new take that would devour our

hot intestines while we were still shrieking. I saw its crooked emaciated silhouette, lumbering and lurching towards us. A tall, broken thing. It's arms, stick-light, and so impossibly thin. Those glowing blind eyes set into a narrow, now-formed head, as molded and precise as a canine's skull. Then the creature hit our pool of light and the eyeballs popped out of thin air. Like the light had banished that thin, leaving only two marbles which clotters down, hit the floor,

bounced, and rolled to our feet. They stared up at us, pale, seen, and somehow blasted from us. Sammy and I jerked back and bolted like the wind. My cousin screamed and yanked to me back just as solid ground dropped out beneath me. We had been in a blind rush, a blur of hallways scrolling by, casting padded cells with shadows that moved within them. When the floor had suddenly stopped, be. Sammy grabbed my shirt and jerked me back just as I went humbling out after a gut-wrenching

second of uncertainty. I found myself on solid ground, looking down at the vast empty nothings.

running across it. It looked like someone had shoveled out a massive, crude pit in the hallway

“of the underground nightmare. We pierced down, hauling air through broken lungs, hearts pounding,”

not sure what we were seeing. A solid knot of arms and legs interwoven and laced together, filled out the bottom of the abyss. They were grey, broken, decay, torn flesh hung from the bone. Massive boyals filled with hot, pus, textured, rotting skin. But this wasn't a shallow grave, and they weren't the departed. As soon as our light hit them, they slithered apart,

breaking away like a hive of snakes under the burning heat of a magnifying glass.

Dreadful heads, pained and drawn in agony, recoiled from the light.

“Ploken, human-like things, forcing themselves into shadow to reclaim what little salvation they had.”

They hissed and mowed and chuckled within sane humor. Like condemned souls cast from heaven, forever banished to this pit of darkness for an existence of raw pain. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. But there was no god in this place. It was a great blast for me, born from the sin of the unrighteous. It was awesome and awful. It was. A low sound came from behind us, tucked into the cacophony of torment.

Samied in here to take in with a pit of the damned. I slowly turned, turned. I hurt

“fluttering with icy dread. My stomach nodding in on itself. But the whole way behind us was empty.”

I blew a relief sigh. The giant meets Peter exploded out of the darkness with Brody Scroach. A blur of limbs carrying it across the scoffed ceiling. But they weren't limbs. They were human arms and legs. I gasped as it rattled down the wall, hissing and pulsing with hideous life as it joined the floor and surged forward. It bubbled into the light. A nightmare set of enjoined twins, two separate androgynous entities melded together. A pentages beginning

where others ended, scraps of face and all the wrong places. eyeballs and noses and mouths all scattered about its lumpy fleshy form. It was a nightmare of terrible industry. And its head, much like a spiders, was bulbous and truly heinous. Patches of hair textured its lumpy scalp above rows of eyeballs and a wide mouth of thick razor teeth. Samied, turned, screamed and stepped back. It was instinctive, a single misplaced move that sent

her out over empty space. She reached out for me who fingertips skimming my arm. As she issued a surprise, oh, and she was gone. While knitting into the sea of souls, swallowed by the mass of forgotten bonds, I heard her shrimp, heard her wail and bright agony as those things tore her limbs from limb, picking her apart like a mean kid with a stunned fly. And I looked up, and a fleshy mass of teeth and eyes and hatred was a top me. The meat spider

tore me down into darkness. I awoke in a biblical spiderweb to the wreak of death. It was a dark, sticky place, hot with the stench of dead things. The smell flooded my lungs burned my nose and eyes. I looked around, my eyes adjusting to the gloomy haze. I'd lost my headlamp. Fibrous white nets resolved out of the darkness, stretching to in fro like an entropic masterpiece, all of it seemingly random,

and oddly beautiful in its precision. An incredible tapestry of psycho nature.

They were prey. And so was I. I couldn't move. I was melted to a wall of weeping by a spray of fiber,

“not entirely cocooned, but imprisoned in a straight jacket of dreadful string.”

I tried to scream, but my mouth was gagged with a shred of weeping. I issued a low muffle streak. The sound of despair. Then the entire formation began to tremble with a low vibration. I heard a tight hiss. So a dark shape skitterbar. The meat spider mounted the nearest cocooned and tore into it with its terrible human-like arms, craning its lumpy head to suck meat from ball. I heard congested slurping, things tearing, flesh and bones snapping apart. It was feeding.

And it would come for me next. I slowly began to struggle, trying to work some slack into my binds,

“but they held firm, held firm. I felt something firm in my back pocket. I padded it desperately.”

The Swiss Army knife. I worked it out, popped the blade as the noise of feeding slow, as the awful meat spider shredded it's fell from one of its victims. I eased the rusty blade through the webbing and began to saw. It was like cutting through canvas. The web behind the instantly began to slack in, splitting apart, losing its tension as, oh god. Oh no. The meat spider launched. Drenched and still hot blood. Moving with that deliberate

speed afforded only to creepy crawlies. It was coming for me. Arms and legs pumping. It's

“misshaping form for hopping with terrible heat. I worked the Swiss Army knife faster, harder,”

hacking away blindly, hatcheting apart the web holding me captive. And I could smell it. God, too weak, of ancient brought. The things dead and decayed and ate. And it was here. Oh god, it was here. The meat spider launched. For a terrifying instant, all I saw were eyes and teeth. There was a horrible intelligence in those eyes. An awful cunning that reminded me so much of the dead

eyed stare of serial killers in court. And the web split beneath me and I felt a second later,

and I would have been groomed. Instead, I was tumbling down, down, plummeting like a stone. The ground black and solid and rushing toward. It slammed into me like a freight train. My crumples like a bird. It wasn't solid ground. It was an angry rush of water. A river tumbled and heaved through a rocky cante. The rapids frothed, like a rabbit dog, whipping me around like a ragdoll in the hands of a breath. I snapped this way in that,

working my arms and legs and brain off lips of rock that seemed to bite out at me. Water that wreaks of rotten gasoline and the thousands of dead things that had washed away flooded in my mouth, filled my lungs. I choked and fought and doubled out strained until blackness expanded.

I awoke in a drain pipe to the first light of dawn. It painted strange shapes on the curved

concrete bore in which I was delivered. I folded over and voluminate a warm spray of water, a thin trickle ran from the darkness of the pipe, issuing through my hands, hair, flushing me with sobriety. That darkness, he pulsed me, made my skin ached and crawled with nausea. I staggered toward the light, fought my way out into a rocky shore. Seagulls were honking angrily, fighting over a scrap of meat on the beach.

Other seabirds twisted through the foggy air above grey waters. The ocean heaved at my feet. I looked up at the sky and cried. A trucker found me limping along the highway like an abused dog.

myself be taken. He rushed me to the nearest hospital. I found out I was 80 miles from grandma's.

“I'm in a sterile white place now. A hospital that reminds me so much of that underground nightmare”

of things that should never see the light of day. I started this account hoping it would bring

me peace, hoping it would help me come to terms with the trauma I'd faced. It hasn't helped at all. The police are still looking for the hatch and for Sammy's body. It's been two days and they found near. I was hoping normality would return, would burn away the nightmares that have haunted me since

“I've been back. But it hasn't. When I shut my eyes I see things, things I'd seen out of the corner”

of my eyes and those padded rooms. Unspeakable horrors that belong not in this world, but in a place far

beyond. God save them. It's an empty platitude, but it's all I can offer. God save them. APGX CPWTGCD now. Thank you for your patronage. Hope you enjoyed your new relic as much as I've enjoyed passing along its sorted history. It does come with our usual warning,

“however, absolutely no refunds, no exchanges, and we won't be held liable for anything that may,”

or may not occur while the object is in your possession. If you've got an artifact with mysterious

properties, perhaps it's a company by a history of bizarre and disturbing circumstances. Maybe you'd be interested in dropping it and it's story by the shop to share with other customers. Please reach out to [email protected]. A member of our team will be in touch. Till next time, we'll be waiting for you whenever you close your eyes in the space between sleep and dream. During regular business hours, of course, or by appointment, only for you,

our best customer. You have a good night now. The antiquarium of sinister happenings, lot 1, 2, 6. There's a hatch in the middle of the woods, consigned by the crooked boy, starring Gwyneth Glover and April Consulow, featuring Steven Noll's as the antique dealer. Production and sound design by Kevin Seaman, theme music by the new brothers. Additional music by Coag, Vivek Abashek, Clement Panchau, Nicholas Redding, and Conan Freeman.

The antiquarium of sinister happenings is created and curated by Trevor Moore and Shand. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter @antiquariumpod, call the antiquarium@646-41-7197. [Music]