The Five Cocoons are five transparent globes, each holding a person, in an underground chamber beneath Gary, Indiana, where the missing companions were held and tested; four held the missing, the fifth someone unknown.
| Type | Objects (cocoons) |
| Place | Chamber of the Crystal Tower complex, beneath Gary |
| Chronicle | GARY_TNW |
| Spanish entry | Los cinco capullos (TNW) |
Ray’s vision
Woken by clairvoyance, Ray asked only where his missing friends were. He saw a square room with a running clock, an obsidian obelisk on platforms, the city riddled underneath like an industrial Swiss cheese; and a palace of iron candelabra and shattered doors, the floor padded with feather cushions. At its center hung a woman’s body split open “as if she’d been fished”; the ceiling was a spider’s web. Around the perimeter ran a three-meter walkway with five transparent globes — cocoons like amber boots — each with a person inside, standing on metal plates carved with the green-and-black Virgin of the abandoned church. Only Ray saw the fifth.
Inside
Those who woke inside described cables or strands of uncertain material, little spider-shaped colored lights, pulsing walls — a bizarre underground disco. Hung head-down over a deep pit among webs, they were being “nursed”, regenerating, their sexes co-opted by tubes, drifting in and out of consciousness, questioned (“who are you? why are you here?”) under strobe flashes. A Black woman with pointed ears (Rachel Betta) sharpened a sword before them, a jade face lighting up behind her, and told the ones in futuristic armor: “They’re no good.” A blond stranger was taken from one egg, laid on the altar, his chest marked, and then sent upward untouched.
They lost two days in the globes and came out fully healed. The cocoons were a workshop: they were tested one by one for something none of them had, and those who did not serve were returned intact. Ray called the place the Deep Rite.
See also
- Arachnids — the web ceiling and nursing strands
- Aunt Nancy — owner of the webs beneath the city
- Emily Larson — whom they feared to recognize in the split woman
- Genesis Foundation — from which others were also missing