#49

McGee Manor was haunted. Snaps McGee, its owner on Earth-20181, had used a certain part of The House to store the bodies of the people his party had killed, for further use. After a particular event in 1922, the corpses vacated the chamber and The House altogether, and were Lost. However, while their remains were Lost, their spirits remained, giving the place an unnatural aura for many years. When the house was re-purposed as The House, its hauntological energies became distorted after a passage through The Unscene, and the once-human spirits became...something else. Once it was placed at Archetype Central in the Lost Stream, it traveled back to the dawn of existence, to the days of the Primeval Superhero, and transmitted its warped beacon throughout the cosmos, creating every haunted house that ever existed, including the Vecchio estate.

Jacob and Lex never learned this, of course. Most of the above was a rough translation of the thoughts passing through the mind of Doctor Kay. Jacob and Lex were too busy trying to get their own minds to adjust to the sight of the Manor.

“We've renovated recently,” the Doctor said, which didn't help matters; didn't help brace the two young men against the flickering blackness of the walls, outlined faintly with thin but radiant lines of white light. The walls would occasionally...cease to be, as it were, revealing wood paneling and the sort of late 19^th Century elegance that they were expecting upon entering. These were regressions to The House's original appearance. The regressions, though, were only very brief, and so the intense darkness of these photo-negative walls was overwhelming. It didn't help that it was openly multidimensional, meant for higher eyes.

In front of them, outlined in jagged-seeming but perfectly straight patterns of shifting and flickering white lines, was the Grand Staircase. It led, obviously, to the upper levels, where a grandfather clock and a system of railings were also defined by the same maddening lines. Scribbles. Jacob tried to focus on the Staircase itself instead, examining how it seemed to be made out of levitating platforms, one for each stair, that appeared to be solid-state holograms of some kind. At least, the popular conception of such. They weren't so easy on the eyes either, swirling within their ill-defined outlines with all the colors of the rainbow.

The whole place just felt...wrong, and Jacob was doing his best to stay upright.

“I'm technically not supposed to be doing this,” Doctor Kai said. “So please don't use any of the phones or computers. I can give you one of my guns in case you have difficulty ignoring the entities, but please don't go in the basement.”

Jacob and Lex said nothing, instead preferring to try to amble towards the Staircase.

The stair they sat on depressed slightly, as if it was sinking into a void. Jacob reached behind him, and found that indeed, the space between the stairs was little more than emptiness. What did it lead to...? He decided he didn't want to know.

Kay walked past them, going up the stairs and entering a room through a similarly ridiculous door. When he emerged, he had two USP Matches, which he threw rather haphazardly to the two. They jumped as they thudded next to them, almost falling into the void beyond the steps. When they turned to look back at him, he was gone. Probably vanished into one of the rooms up there.

“I don't like this,” Lex said then.

“Neither do I,” Jacob replied. “This just doesn't look good. I don't trust this Doctor, either. Even if he did give us guns.”

“Are the guns loaded?”

He checked. They seemed to be, unless they were blanks. Jacob didn't know really what blanks looked like. As mentioned above, he did know about archery and thus trusted his shot with the gun—while knowing it wasn't at all the same thing, of course—and he also had fenced a while back, so if he had a sword he could handle himself. He considered ascending the stairs to question the Doctor, but he didn't trust his dexterity enough, at least for now, to climb this ridiculous Staircase.

He tried walking around on the ground floor and found that as long as he didn't exert himself, it was pretty easy. The floor itself was a normal floor—it was just hard to look at it. He sort of just looked at his feet, and even then, blinked whenever the true texture of the floor returned.

“I'm going to look around this place,” he said to Lex. “If I find anything odd, or anything showing me we need to get out of here, I'll let you know.”

Lex said nothing, not quite in the mood for walking—or talking—yet.

Jacob entered one of the odd passages that was off to the side of the Grand Staircase. It was unnerving to move through; the support arch jiggled and flickered above him, like an animated child's drawing. It didn't make it look like there was any sort of dimensional substance to the passage, as if it were just a drawing, but it was sort of contrariwise. The walls somehow protruded in a semi-subliminal way, so that Jacob could sense them, even though they were all black. The passage broke off into three sections, with one to the right leading downwards. It must have been the basement. Kai had warned them not to go down there, but maybe he was hiding something important about himself that he didn't want them to see. Something that would rat him out.

He began to descend, and as he did he almost turned back.

The staircase, which was made of the same rainbow steps as the Grand Stair, was somehow was flanked with a huge cybernetic valley; black, with a dark grey sky. Cubes and towers made out of platinum rose across this infinite planet, and in the distance a silver sun could be seen. The sun let off the same sort of light as the outlines above, and Jacob wondered if maybe its light was being filtered throughout the rest of the house. Maybe the towers, which were now melting and rebuilding, were collecting the light somehow. But someone must have built all this...

There were fluttering white...squares, falling from the “sky” now. They were only box-shaped white outlines, full of shadows, which plummeted impossibly at forty-five degrees angles to the ground. Here, they shattered, and broke apart into much smaller squares. These squares fell again and again, cracking apart each time, until they were invisible. Were they parts of much larger falling squares...?

He had to get out of here. He began descending rather quickly, towards a door. It was an ordinary wooden door this time, but it was attached to a...a severed wall-chunk, which had the look being literally torn from another part of the house. The old house, that is. Before Doctor Kay “renovated” things.

It didn't matter. It was a way out, and Jacob had to take the chance.

He opened the door and stepped inside.

Despite there being no chamber on the other side of the torn-out wall, there was now a room. A meat locker, to be precise. Though there was no meat in it. Only cold.

At least, that was how it was for a little while.

Jacob turned around, deciding quickly that this was not particularly beneficial to digging up any dirt on Doctor Kai. The door was now a metal seal, as one might expect in a place like this—but the tumblers on it looked heavy, and the whole affair was neatly sealed shut. Jacob realized that he may have been locked in, but this wasn't the worst of it.

He turned around. There was a spectral little girl in the room.

“Oh no.”

He cocked the USP Match. “Get away.”

“Can you help me find my mommy?”

“I SAID GET THE FUCK AWAY.”

What happened next was predictable, almost. The girl began to hover in the air, her greyscale form, which was lined with TV static, slowly gaining color. It was the color of blood.

“Don't say bad words to me, Jacob.”

Jacob didn't really scream in so much as he just made a roaring sound while he opened fire. The bullets, of course, went right her, but they did form little pinholes where more blood started pouring out. Her legs then dropped off, making a meaty splattering sound on the floor, as she began convulsing and screaming. Her eyes grew huge but her pupils remained the same size, and they extended past her head, somehow forming a frame beyond the shape of her face as if she were a messed up sketch—the edges around it, at the bottom, began bleeding profusely, and her arms began stretching towards him, even as her mouth cracked open at the sides and became twisted, jagged, and oversized. He started screaming, and she started screaming, and the screams fused together into a weird sort of chant.

“WRONG ROOM WRONG ROOM WRONG ROOM—”

“JOIN US JOIN US JOIN US JOIN—”

Suddenly, Jacob felt inclined to stop shooting. Doctor Kai was there, with a brief flash of shadow. He was holding a brown-gloved hand up to the apparition's face.

“Shhh! Sh, sh, sh...”

His face appeared just as panicked as Jacob's, but he was trying to legitimately get things under control. The ghost seemed to back away from him, even as he took Jacob's hand and started leading him backwards.

“Don't turn away from it,” he whispered. This wasn't an issue; Jacob couldn't take his eyes away. By now all of its hair had fallen out and its skull was protruding, tumor-like, from the flesh of its head. Its eyes had began to merge with the skin around them in a way resembling a spiral, and this caused the flesh to start ripping and bleeding. The smile kept getting wider.

A few seconds later they were outside and back on the staircase. Except it was now a dusty wood staircase, leading up a brick shaft—not unlike something Jacob had seen in his grandfather's house. A short walk later and they were back up in the main chamber.

“What happened?” Lex said, surveying Jacob's face.

“I told you not to go in the basement,” Doctor Kai replied.

And with that, he set Jacob down on the steps and went back upstairs.