#43

Jacob woke up the next day unrefreshed. It was around sixish. Amos, the lazy fucker, would still be asleep until around ten, and it was a weekday, so no parents, either. At least four hours of nothing awaited him. His limbs were too weak to get to inking anything yet, and so he decided to maybe limber up by taking a walk.

He figured he didn't need to leave a note; he wouldn't be gone for long, and if Amos did wake up he'd just assume that he'd been kidnapped by cultists, and would go on a lengthy journey to rescue him. Which was of no consequence, overall.

He walked out as quietly as he could, onto the cul-de-sac, under a weirdly colored sky. It was a darkish red, something Jacob had never seen before; it was too complete, too fully across the whole sky to just be caused by a sunrise. He noticed then that the grass was wet, indicating it had stormed last night. Being a calm person, he considered this wetness enough reason to just ignore this sky as a side effect of the storm, and kept walking. It was pretty to look at, that sky, though. Ideas like water-based light diffraction and photon scattering didn't make the universe any less beautiful.

There were no clouds out to block it either. But storm clouds did their own thing, of course.

The walk was long and silent. The neighborhood was always pretty quiet when there was no one out on the main road, which wasn't far from there. People stayed inside. Dogs only barked when their kin were out and about. So this was all normal and logical. Sequential. Mathematical.

But then Jacob, in his own way of noticing things, felt something was wrong.

Amos was the horror chap of the family. He would be the one to get eerie sensations and inclinations—dérives, he called them—which would lead him into nightmarish forests and whatnot. But now, Jacob was having a strange desire to head down to one of the side-streets—one he barely walked on or drove down. He had really only been there once or twice. At the edge of it, there was a forest, one that Amos would have liked if he hadn't kept it a secret, but he had never entered it—it was on private property. It couldn't have gone back a ways because he knew what was on the other side of it, and that was a road. Still, maybe the owners of the property were still asleep. Maybe in the quietness they wouldn't notice him entering.

Within minutes, the treeline loomed before him. Yeah, Amos would love this. It looked just like one of his shitty movies. It even seemed to have a little bit of a film crackle around it; and under the red sky it looked washed out, like an old tape.

He started to walk into it, moving as silently as possible. It was a slow walk. The leaves underneath him rustled.

Under the tree line, the light vanished; not all at once, but quickly, with a dance, like someone leaving the stage in a musical. Jacob noticed this, of course, but figured he was just playing his own mental dance with it; just like his brother often did. It wasn't real apprehension or fear, just stupidity. Theatrics. The word “clownery” entered his mind and he stifled a chuckle at this. That was when he briefly hallucinated that there was an evil clown in the woods.

Jacob didn't fear clowns, but he hated them. And so he tried to ignore this. It legitimately and objectively was just a hallucination, though. So he kept going.

About three minutes in, he started finding the toys. At least, they gave off the impressions of toys. They were mostly just objects, broken pieces of things, but out of the corner of his eye they looked like toys. Which was odd. Maybe the people who had the property had a problem with the garbage service. Or, in the instance of the things that did in fact turn out to be toys (there were a few of them, at least for a little while), they just happened to have kids. Lazy kids who left their toys out in the woods. Though sometimes, Jacob noticed the toys were not toys.

The red sky stayed blazing overhead for those three minutes, but beyond Jacob's notice, it began to slow turn to a darkened night, with twinkling stars.

About seven minutes in, he began to realize that the forest was impossible.

One, Jacob thought, it can't go back this far. Two, it can't go back this far. Three, it can't go back this far...

He reached point twenty-seven before he realized what he was doing, and that he was Lost.

He fell to his knees and closed his eyes. When he reopened them, he was standing before a hill. And on top of the hill was a House.

The starry night over The House looked completely peaceful, and despite the now-genuine terror he felt, Jacob didn't feel too badly looking at such a place. In fact, he felt inclined to go check it out. If anything, to perhaps somehow find a way back out of this forest.

He walked up and saw that it was a Victorian-era East Coast house; something like out of a picture or a game or something unreal. To be fair, it was. It was the relic of a dead world, and it, like Jacob, was Lost. Jacob was only getting closer to the world that it came from as he approached the front door.

Right from the script, the front door l̶u̶r̶c̶h̶e̶s̶ lurched open, and a man came out, stalking eerily from the shadows. He has a black trench-coat and a similarly-colored slouch hat. On his hip, Jacob could see a gun; it's a glinting silver Magnum. The man looked familiar to Jacob, and he was; in other lives, when Jacob was Jack, when he was Walter G., he knew this man. He just had different names back then.

“Welcome to McGee Manor,” he s̶a̶y̶s̶ said. “My name is Doctor Kay.” But he says it as though he has an accent; as though it were “Kai”.

Then he began to smile. But his smile went too far, and soon his entire face began to be consumed by the blackness between his lips.