Hi, good evening. My name's Denise, I'm calling from Edinburgh. I've spent about twelve years now going through old expedition records, colonial-era journals, letters from surveyors and missionaries and traders. Mostly it's dry material. Land measurements. Disease reports. Nothing you'd call remarkable. But every so often you find something tucked in where it has no business being, and it just stops you completely. I found this one while looking for something else entirely. I was tracking down correspondence from a botanist who'd done work in the Congo basin in the late thirties, trying to confirm a date for an unrelated paper I was writing. And in with his letters was a handwritten account from a woman named Molly Lyle. She was writing about her parents. What they'd seen in the summer of 1938. I almost set it aside. Almost. Her parents, I'll call them Roland and Maren Lyle, were traveling through what was then the Belgian Congo. Roland was a mineral surveyor, I believe, and Maren went everywhere he went, apparently. They were driving a Ford truck through the deep jungle interior when they encountered something on the trail in front of them that neither of them ever fully recovered from. I don't mean that dramatically. I mean Molly said they didn't talk about it easily, and when they did, they were careful with their words. And these were people who'd spent years in rough country.
From what Molly described, her parents had been driving for several hours on a track that barely qualified as a road. Two ruts in the earth, really, left by previous vehicles, with undergrowth pressing in close on both sides. The canopy above them was so dense that even in mid-afternoon the light came down in long slanted bars, and it felt more like dusk down at ground level. Hot. Humid in the way only equatorial jungle is humid, where the air itself feels like something pressing against you. Roland was going slowly because of the ruts. Fifteen miles an hour at most. Maren had a map on her lap. Birds overhead, insects, that constant low hum that those forests apparently produce even in the day. Just a normal afternoon, as far as they were concerned. They'd been in the region for weeks at that point. Nothing had alarmed them. Then Roland hit the brakes. Maren looked up from the map. There was something in the trail ahead of them, maybe thirty feet out, crossing from left to right. Something large.
Roland's first thought was that it was a monkey. That's what Molly said he told her. The coloring, the bulk of it, the way it moved at that distance in that filtered light. It just read as an animal on all fours, something familiar. Maren thought maybe a large cat. You know, a forest cat of some kind. But it wasn't moving like a mammal.The legs were wrong. Too many of them, and too long, and they moved in that slow deliberate way that spiders move when they're not in a hurry. Roland said the thing was crossing the entire width of the trail and the legs were still reaching into the undergrowth on both sides. Brown. Coarse and bristled, like a tarantula, but scaled up to something that had no right to exist. He couldn't see the full body clearly from the truck. He didn't want to. He reached for his camera. It was on the back seat, and the whole thing, the looking away, the grabbing, the turning back, couldn't have taken more than five seconds. When he looked at the trail again, it was gone. Vanished into the trees on the right side. Not a sound. No rustling. Just gone. Roland sat there with his foot on the brake for a long time before he drove on. They reached a village that evening. When Roland described what they'd seen, he said the locals listened without any particular surprise. They had a name for it. J'ba Fofi. In the Baka language, it means the great spider.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]