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 19th 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.
