บท 12: The Present
Thankfully, he didn't appear to be sacrificing anything alive.
It was almost a candle-lit vigil.
If you ignored the vast number of demonic symbols drawn haphazardly on the floor.
The only other person in the image was the butler in the background, leaning over and placing a candle down in another part of the room.
What was most disturbing about this image wasn't the blatant delve into the occult.
It also wasn't the fact that the once ordinary mansion was now coated in candles and chaos.
It was the madness so evident on the father's face, the absolute desire and focus.
His eyes were wide, and a slight smile showed itself on his lips as he stared obsessively at his work.
It was impossible to tell if he was inspecting for mistakes or simply admiring the fruit of his lunacy.
Clearly, the father had dived into the occult.
Most likely in a bid to bring back his wife.
Although Jacob didn't see anything implicitly implying this in the image, he remembered the freezer.
The same freezer had been sealed by symbols very similar to the ones in the painting, making the connection obvious.
Looking at the group portrait, he noticed that the backup maids were gone, leaving only the head maid.
Once again, the painting seemed darker and less hopeful. Even the expressions on the people inside it were no longer as joyful.
Thinking back, he looked at the first painting of the lot, noting that it seemed a lot more weathered. Like it was slowly being forgotten as time went on.
This time when he inspected the cabinet he made sure to look closely. Sure enough, the cabinet had aged several years, even further out of sync with the rest of the hallway.
Once again storing this information, he pulled out the next cabinet drawer and inspected the paper inside.
The symbol appeared to be an angular and jagged root system or a tree branch.
The word in question on this occasion was INSANIA.
For this one, he didn't even need to know Latin. It meant insanity or madness.
Pocketing the puzzle piece, he inspected his current items and took stock of his tools.
He currently held in his pockets: A locked book, a guitar pick, a flask, and 4 paper symbols. On his waist, he wore the lantern and had managed to tuck the knife into the same belt the lantern came with.
He had given up on always holding onto it, deciding it was better to risk being nicked by the blade.
He had already found it to be dull, and he wanted to be able to use both hands in an emergency.
He had 4 pockets total, but he still wished he had a backpack or something.
He may have stuffed the flask and the guitar pick in the same pocket, but the book needed its own pocket. If he had more large items to carry, he would quickly run out of space to store them.
Sighing at his misfortune, he once again made his way to the door.
He noted that the symbol had gained another line. This one grew out from the end of the last and moved directly to the right, to the opposite side of the first line.
With that, he stepped through the door again.
"Well, this went from 0 to 100, didn't it" Jacob mumbled bitterly as he noted the extreme changes that had taken over the hallway.
First and foremost were the walls. No longer were they dull and lifeless. Now they were covered in a red sheen he could only assume was blood.
The second was the lighting. It had decreased even further, with the dim overhead bulbs occasionally flickering off for a moment.
Finally, a putrid smell and metallic taste now occupied the air of the hallway. Highlighting the further distortion of reality into the grotesque and bizarre.
Before he had arrived in this mansion, this sight would have terrified Jacob to his core.
His feet would have been filled with lead, and he would have barely been able to bring himself to move.
But now he was beaten, worn, hurt, and exhausted.
Simply put, he didn't have the energy to fear something at this level anymore.
So, he once again studied the painting on the wall, noticing there was only one more painting left after this, the 6th.
This one was once again a depiction of an occult ritual, but on this occasion, it was of the head maid tied up and falling in the middle of the ritual circle.
The father was standing over the maid, having just thrust a knife down in a brutal attempt to complete the ritual, but his face held absolute despair, and the reason for it was clear.
The boy, his son, had knocked over the intended sacrifice in a bid to save her and had been stabbed in her place while his sister looked on in horror.
From what he could tell, the father had intended to sacrifice the maid, but at the last minute, the boy had intervened, attempting to save her and becoming the accidental sacrifice in the process.
In the group portrait, only three remained.
The father, the butler, and the daughter.
He made his way through the demented hall and round its corner. Finding the cabinet and opening the aged drawers to reveal the next in the series of weird papers.
This one held the word CASUS.
The symbol reminded him of a cracked hourglass. Maybe it represented running out of time?
Regardless he didn't recognise the word casus.
He moved to the door and finally realised what the door's symbol was now that it was only one line from completion.
It was a pentagram. Now that the 5th point near the bottom left was made, there was only one more line until it was complete.
His lungs slowly filled with air as he braced for what he suspected was the final time he would have to go through this hallway.
Jacob stepped through the door.
And into a nightmare.
The walls were coated with blood. Black worms appeared to wriggle behind the deep crimson that made up the new demented wallpaper.
The lights that once flickered off occasionally now seemed to reverse their frequency, occasionally flicking on while mainly drenching the room in darkness.
As he limped forward, he noted that the floor appeared to be replaced with a black crunchy substance.
He also made sure to light his now glassless oil lantern, it was likely to blow out at the slightest breeze, but he had no choice but to use the damaged tool. The flickering overhead light was worse than no light due to its flashbang effect on his vision.
Deciding that the floor was better left uninspected, he looked at the final painting.
Unlike the others, this painting didn't showcase an event.
It was a solo portrait of the girl, her white dress now coated crimson courtesy of her slit throat.
Her face was caught between emotions, she wanted to cry but had no tears, wanted to scream but blood filled her throat.
She didn't look angry, insane, or even happy. Her face was a perfect caption of the moment before emotion took place. She was frozen in a split second when her brain was still processing what had happened before deciding what to feel about it.
It was the same girl he had seen in the mirror at the start of his nightmare.
The one who warned him of the darkness.
As he looked, he came to another realisation.
The hallway was… closing.
That was the only way to describe it.
It wasn't like the walls were closing in, but the hallway felt smaller and smaller.
The best way to describe it would be to refer to those movie scenes that try to depict what catastrophe feels like.
He had less and less space, it was getting harder to breathe.
And yet the hallway hadn't changed at all, its appearance remained exactly the same.
It was like everything he was experiencing was just inside his head.
He couldn't help but feel like the hallway was enjoying it.
Like a cat playing with a mouse, it had been toying with him and wanted to finish the job.
Jacob swiftly made for the cabinet, deciding that the risk of loosening his bandage was worth the speed.
When he arrived there, he yanked open the drawer and, without even looking, pocketed the paper.
Limping as quickly as he could move towards the exit, he silently begged his leg to stop hurting so much and let him run faster than a snail.
Stumbling into the door, he grabbed the doorknob and pushed the door open with his shoulder.
Or at least he would have liked to.
If the doorknob hadn't refused to turn.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, what now…" He cursed, looking around desperately before resting his eyes on the pentagram.
The once simple pentagram was now decorated with runic language and a total of 6 circular slots, just big enough for the pieces of paper he had found in the hallway.
Most important was the text in English right next to each space.
They read: Joy, Death, Life, Madness, Despair, Opposite.
From there, he could easily guess the next appropriate course of action. He had to translate Latin to English and place the seals correctly.
In the top slot marked death, he placed the mors paper.
In the top left slot marked life, he placed the vita paper.
In the bottom left slot marked madness, he placed the insania paper.
That was the end of the papers he had already deciphered, but now he had a significant clue to deciphering the last 3.
He knew what they translated to but had no idea which was which.
He first inspected the new paper. The text read vicissim, and the symbol was of 2 long twisting arrows pointed at each other.
He felt it was a safe bet that this was the 'opposite' based on the symbol of opposing arrows.
He slotted into the centre of the pentagram marked as such.
Then the light of the lantern, his only constant in the flickering closing hallway, disappeared.
His attempts to relight it revealed that it wasn't the wind or any supernatural force that caused the lantern to extinguish.
It had simply run out of fuel.
Determined to figure out the symbols anyway, he reinspected the first paper.
He hadn't looked too carefully when he first grabbed the paper as he assumed that the vital information was the text.
The difference was that he now needed any clue the symbol could provide since he had a hunch that the creepy pentagram in the demonic blood-covered hallway wouldn't give him a second try if he got it wrong.
At this point, the walls felt suffocating, like he was trapped in a coffin despite being in a relatively spacious hallway.
The space itself was shrinking down on him to crush him to death.
Shaking his head, he forced himself to focus and re-examined the paper.
The symbol was that of a circle with a total of three lines through it. In fact…
It vaguely reminded him of a peace sign.
Lacking an alternate explanation or idea, he quickly placed the paper into the top left slot marked joy and the final paper with the hourglass into the remaining slot.
And the door opened.
As it did, Jacob fell outside, unconscious.
But something stuck with him.
The sight of the same beautiful woman he recognised as the head maid placing something into his hand as he fell before disappearing into nothingness.
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