#42

She was not there when he got back.

The rice was good, at the very least, and filling. Jacob hadn't eaten in awhile; he had thrown himself too much into his work, and oftentimes ate breakfast really early in the morning. But because he inked so late at night, he would often be sleep-starved, and as such slept in, and was only eating one meal a day. Now that he was nourished, he could go back to Skype. Though frankly, he would've much preferred to work on a new page.

Wilhelmina Berkley was, outside of Lex and Amos, his best friend. She was the only cousin he really got along with, but she was slightly younger than him and tended to bug him sometimes, but he tried to remind himself that he wasn't that busy of a person; unlike Amos, who now after going to college, only emerged from his room to pace, laugh weakly at something, and then go back in. Mina did seem pretty excited, so he figured whatever she had to say was important.

By the time he got back, though, she had already logged off. There was some text up onscreen, though; mostly stuff lambasting him for his sluggishness, mixed with some pretty horrific casual insults. “Insolent pig-dog”; “hideous scum-beast”; “fucker of the wastes”; etcetera. Perhaps not that horrific, but certainly dark things lurked in Wilhelmina's brain. At the end of all of it, however, there was a sizable gap in the insults, followed by...a link, of some sort. Jacob paused to frown, because the link was nonsense. He clicked it anyway, trusting his cousin; and when the site opened, it seemed to just be a black page.

However, after awhile, the page reloaded automatically, and this time had a name—something matching to a standard name on a recorded video clip. A YouTube-style video window opened and started playing what was presumably the clip in question. There was no comments section; no sign of any ratings, or statistics of any kind. Whatever this site was, it was some sort of bootleg site. Jacob made sure the firewalls were up, just in case, and also braced himself for jump scares or porn. Something that Mina would definitely send him. She knew he could take it.

Whatever was playing was incredibly dark; and not content-wise, but genuinely lighting-wise. An occasional pan revealed something that in turn showed the identity of the filming locale: it was in a cave. Therefore, it must have been the cavern that Mina's friend Aurel was exploring. He wasn't very well lit, and didn't say anything, aside from the occasional grunt of distress as he descended. Presumably this was a GoPro feed that he ended up swift-uploading somehow. Remembering that Mina said he found an “underground bay” or something, Jacob figured he would wait until some sort of water appeared, in sound form or visual form.

Nothing like that did.

Instead, the video ended, and three files began downloading. Jacob caught at once that they were probably viruses, but didn't panic; the browser specified that they were PNGs. They could still have stuff on 'em that could wreck the computer, though, so he instantly set them to quarantine, using an anti-virus program of his own making. (His desktop and Game Boy emulator were of his own making, too.) Within the quarantine he could preview them, though he was apprehensive (though never legitimately scared). They could be pictures of nightmare faces or genital mutilations or something. He figured—thinking without fear, of course—that he could just bring them up real quick, close his eyes, and view them through a squint. If they looked shady they could be wiped out before any real damage was done. With this in mind, he opened all three images.

A shark? Fed through a shitty Vegas filter, no less. That was the first one: just called “1”. Pretty much meaningless. Was this supposed to be creepy?

The next one opened.

A vulture, through the same filter. Huh. Okay. Cool.

Wait.

It looked like a human eye had been Photoshopped over its real eye. What was this, a crappy Poe reference or something?

What.

What the fuck.

Is that supposed to be a dog? Jacob wondered. It was some sort of animal, at least, but with...well. What was the object off to the left? A helmet of some kind? Maybe a mining helmet...

Or a helmet with a GoPro mounted on it.

Jacob felt unnerved, for the first time in a long while. He decided to go talk to Amos about it. Amos had a lot of decent information on random, pointless shit, including Internet-born horror images. Maybe this was just some other Jeff the Killer nonsense.

When Amos looked over the images, he frowned. “I haven't seen 'em on the Creepypasta Wiki or TV Tropes or anything,” he said. “Did you put them in Google?”

Jacob did so, but nothing relevant came back.

“Congrats, bro. You may have found a brand new, never-before-heard-of horror ARG. I want a full report as soon as you can pull one up. It'll be just like the time that Dad found that serial killer's tape at that garage sale.”

Jacob knew that that tape was more like a poorly-shot garage band montage gone wrong, but he allowed the Slimechap his fantasies. The idea of this being a really complicated horror story wasn't very satisfying. “What if this is something else, though?”

Amos scrolled through the images again.

“Whoever did this was some sort of DC fan, maybe. The Shark, the Vulture, and the Fox were the guys who made up the Terrible Trio. Three shitty villains who fought Batman in the '50s or something, and Doctor Mid-Nite, too, I think.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah, that's a little odd. Probably some postmodern garbage or whatever.” The statement was ironic, and as such, it pissed Jacob off to no end. “Anyway,” Amos continued. “I have to get back to watching real crud. I'm doing Hip Hop Locos right now, and I think it's going on the list. I'LL FIND THE SECRET TO ETERNAL LIFE YET.”

With that statement, which in this case was not meant ironically, he left.

Jacob pondered the image for some time. The pondering was not that good.

He decided to try calling Mina again, but once again nothing came of it. He tried a couple of more times that day, but he figured eventually that, due to the time dilation, she would probably be in bed anyway. He shunted his worries into his inks, and spent the rest of the day working on his webcomic, but also some cyborg pictures or something.

For a little while, he managed to convince himself to forget all about it. Which may have been a wrong way of thinking, as it simply managed to move into a deeper level. The thoughts became ghosts, but he at least convinced himself that ghosts couldn't hurt him.

When he went to bed later that night, an image entered his mind. It seemed faint and vague, as if it was at the fringes of a portrait frame. It entered his mind like a download, coming out of a vast and chaotic field of sizzling interference, a strange place that was less a literal place and more like a shared swirl of splintered metaphors.

It was an image of a fox.