NOVEL NEXT I'm Sorry?
When it was finally safe to open them again, he had to blink the spots out of his eyes before he could take stock of his surroundings.
He wasn't standing in the mysterious old room anymore. Instead, he was standing in front of a door that belonged to an old timey looking block house.
It was built out of rough looking tree trunks and definitely had a pioneer type of feel to it. He had often seen these kinds of buildings on the Internet where men tried to show how tough they were by single handedly walking into the forest and cobbling together the same type of building.
He also remembered thinking that these guys were lunatics for trying something like that. In his mind there was no way to comfortably live in what was essentially a draughty shack in the middle of nowhere. He acknowledged that it was kind of impressive but if you couldn't feasibility live normally in the house you built, there wasn't really a point to building it.
He shook his head to clear his thoughts. His usual inner ‘does that make sense’ rents wouldn't help him in the slightest here. It was a bad habit of his too evaluate the actions of other people and not finding any practical reason behind them.
He started looking around. First, he inspected the door in front of him. It was strange to look at. From about 7 metres away he saw the wood grains clearly but there was also something else that he couldn't make out from the distance. He stepped closer and focused on a single small spot on the door.
He almost had to press his face against the wood to see it but eventually he could make out incredibly fine and detailed carvings across the entire door. The whole thing was practically completely covered with images. From depictions of a plethora of legendary beasts and fairy tale figures like gryphons, Dragons, giant flaming birds, manticores and giant deep-sea creatures. Not only that but also scenes of great battles with mountains of corpses and celebrations of victory, of people sitting together in animated discussion, a scene of what he presumed to be a wedding with two of the happiest people he had ever seen and right below it a pair of gravestones dead seemed to be leaning on each other.
There were so many different scenes that he doubted he could count them all in the span of a single day. Not only that but when he started to look closer he spotted even more tiny images inside the bigger images.
He was practically stunned by the sheer artistry and more importantly the fine control someone would have to possessed to carve something this miniscule. He doubted that even high-tech precision machinery would have an easy time producing something similar, if it was even possible.
He managed to tear his eyes from the marble that was the door and instead looked to his surroundings. Just trying to open the door and potentially get shot by some hillbilly that liked to scream about his property being off limits didn't seem to be a good idea.
Apparently the house was located inside a forest in the middle of a large clearing that reached a diameter of about 100 meters. there was a small road of cobblestone leading from the entrance of the house in the direction of the forest, but it ended exactly where the line of trees began.
He tried to reach the nearest tree but about 75 meters away from the house he bumped his head on something he couldn’t see before. he fell on his butt and rubbed his head while cursing internally.
A second after his fall a transparent, white Dome appeared that engulf the entire house and him. He started to touch the wall and try to find … Actually, he wasn't really sure what he was trying to find.
He just tried to comprehend what the thing in front of him was. after a while he gave up and while slightly panicking, he returned to the house. He tried to make sense of the situation and thought about what had happened up until now.
His composure crumbled as soon as he realized that he was basically trapped. He didn't see any opening in the Dome and as far as he was concerned, there was no way of going through it.
The only viable option he could see was trying to get inside the house. Which was made more difficult by the fact that he noticed that it lacked any kind of handle to pull.
First he tried just knocking and after a few minutes of nothing happening he tried to push the door inward which gave no result either.
The confusion and frustration was mounting until Lucas was banging both his fists and his head against the door.
He was about to start crying when he suddenly heard a sigh and a,” uh hum” from behind him which almost made his heart jump up his throat.
He whirled around while hoping with every single brain cell not to look down the barrel of a shotgun.
When he saw what was behind him he dearly wished to be looking down a double barrel since that would have been less unsettling. Instead of a tank top wearing hillbilly there was something he had to take a few seconds to make sense of.
There was a human silhouette in front of him. At first he thought that a shadow had decided to stand up of the ground and walk around on its own. Whatever was standing in front of him had 3 dimensions instead of two though. It was more accurate to describe it as negative space instead of just the absence of light.
It looked him up and down and from somewhere that was definitely not in front of him he heard a voice that had a quality to it which he couldn't quite grasp. If he had to describe it he would say that the creature sounded as it looked. “I have still the clearance to throw you out so I would like a bit more respect.
“I know I'm a glorified housekeeper for the most part but I'm still a person and would like to be treated as such.”
Lucas was bewildered by what the silhouette had said. He was still trying to cope with the fact that he was talking with what was apparently the absence of anything that had gained a silhouette, a voice and an attitude.
“Uh”, no matter how hard he tried there wasn't much coming out of his mouth. After a few seconds of silence, he heard a low humming getting louder and louder from all around him that set his teeth on edge. A profound feeling of dread and the cold sweat trickling down his back managed to reset his brain.
“I'm sorry?”