I Dare You. (A WKM Story.)

I Dare You. (A WKM Story.)

(A/N: LONG ASS ONESHOT I’M SORRY I’M STILL OBSESSED.)

Every town has their ghost stories, and their haunted places. Some have huge hotels full of sordid affairs and midnight rondesvous gone wrong, some have old farm houses in the backcountry, steeped in the folklore of the hills and the mists of the early mornings. Los Angeles is no exception. There's no shortage of ghosts and spectres haunting the City of Angels, no want for dark pasts and dangerous deeds in this hotbed of Hollywood fame and infamy. Such a case of infamy is that of Markiplier Manor, the huge, sprawling estate of actor Mark Fischbach in the hills that used to house the most influential people in town, back in the early '10s. No one really knows what went down on October 11th, 2017, and the few days that followed. All we had to go on was a pseudo-reporter's rambling blog on tumblr and a few short articles with fantastically gruesome headlines.

"3 Found Butchered in Markiplier Manor." "Public Despair at the Discovery of Mayor Damien Noir's Mutilated Corpse." "Unstable Colonel Ford Prime Suspect in the Murders of Markiplier Manor."

Everyone had a guess. Everyone had a theory. But no one knew the truth. No one knew exactly why, on the 14th of October in 2017, the butler from the manor had come running into the LAPD Headquarters, screaming about demons and murder. What everyone did know, however, was that when the police, with sirens blaring, went to investigate the butler's claims, they'd been sickened to find three rotting corpses scattered around the manor, in various states of dismemberment and decay. They said that the mayor's body was the worst, looking like it'd been torn limb from limb by animals, almost without a single bone that wasn't broken, his tortured form found on the balcony outside the foyer. Then there was the body of a woman later identified as Fischbach's former wife, Celine, found in a small room upstairs, surrounded by occult items. It was practically perfect in appearance, but when they tried to do an autopsy, they found her insides had been practically liquified. The last body was the most tame, a detective by the ironic name of Abraham Lincoln, shot through the right side and left to die slowly at the top of one of the staircases. It was the worst murder case they'd seen in years. They couldn't get anything sensible out of the butler, who, according to his friends and family, had been a perfectly sensible man before the tragedy. But now he was spouting nonesense about "dens of evil" and "forces far beyond our understanding". They did manage to get the names of the other people present at the poker party out of him, and found everyone but the colonel and another party member whose name was never given to the public, and a statement as to the death of Mark Fischbach on the 11th. Mark's body was never found. Of course, the media had opinions as to what had actually happened.

I mulled over the headlines and the stories again in my head as I pulled onto the long gravel driveway, overgrown with weeds and bramble in the years of disuse. A stupid thing had led me to my dismal destination today: a dare. A simple, ridiculous dare among friends, and the fatal phrase, "You're not chicken, are you?" I was never one to turn down a good dare, and honestly, I'd never been particularly superstitious. The worst thing I feared was the cold of this year's record-breaking October nights, and the animals that had likely taken up residence in the absence of human habitation. Stepping out of my borrowed vehicle and shouldering my duffle bag of provisions, I surveyed the area, and my first thoughts were, I won't be lacking in places to camp out for the night, that's for sure. I trekked up to the rusting gate and chucked my belongings over it, climbing (with much difficulty) after them and landing about as gracefully as they had. Excellent, I thought as I rubbed a bruise on my knee, only another thousand yards to walk before I'm actually inside this place. The front garden was beautiful, even in its wild state. There was something to be said for the mossy stonework and the dry fountains, a kind of dystopian beauty that a city-slicker like me seldom gets to see, that made the walk bearable, and before I knew it, I was at the wide front doors, testing the handle to see if it was locked. Fortune was on my side, or so I believed, and I found it open, so stepped into the once-lavish front hall. The ceilings were high and covered in cobwebs, and nearly every surface was caked with a layer of dust thick enough to be snow, including a shattered mirror whose shards glittered on the table below it. The sight of my own exercise-reddened face in it gave me an unexpected chill, which I chalked up to the weather hastily, and I decided to move on. As I walked, I glanced up the stairs, wondering if these were the ones that'd once seen a detective's final breaths, and the panicked screams of a man running for his life. What had these walls seen, I wondered? If they could talk, what tale of terror would they recount? My eyes wandered into the foyer as I passed, and I was forced to stop and double take. Lines of weather-worn yellow caution tape lay strewn around a body's outline in front of the fireplace. This time, I accepted the chill as my own reaction. There'd been no mention of a fourth body. Was this where Fischbach had met his end? Was this the place where the detective had sussed out the murderer, and decided to confront him, thereby sealing his own fate? I didn't think I wanted to know the answer, and I decided to try to look for a bedroom, as it was getting late. I climbed the stairs by phone-flashlight, careful not to touch the railings as I went. A dark stain on one wall had me frozen on the top step. That was the unmistakable stain of blood, and the discolored wall around it looked almost like an outline of its own. I had a moment of silence for the fallen man, then moved quickly past his old resting place to the hall beyond, and into an open bedroom out of the line of sight of the stairs. Perhaps I'd sleep better if I couldn't see it; I'd underestimated my own detachedness. The room I'd entered looked as if it'd been through hell. There were books and papers all over the floor, the musty bed was in total disarray, and a table in a nook on my left had been overturned, scattering a few broken picture frames to the ground. I dared to look at one of the pictures, and found smiling back at me the same faces that'd smiled out of the articles proclaiming their deaths and disappearances. The mayor, the colonel, the actor, and the ex. Looking away quickly, I decided to set up camp and drown my fears in a few hours of portable game system distraction. My bag thudded dully down beside the bed, and I thudded dully down beside it, rummaging and humming an old happy tune to break the silence. I couldn't help but feel that something was inherantly wrong with this place, but I brushed that aside. I had no use for silly superstition and fanciful interpretations of old stains and pictures. After all, this place had been empty for going on fifty years. The killer was either long gone or long dead; I had nothing to worry about.

It was 2:15am when I squinted at my dying phone's screen, startled out of my uneasy sleep by a loud thud downstairs. "It's an animal," my brain told me lazily. My heart, however, wasn't listening, and was instead trying to leap out of the frosted glass doors to freedom and safety. Sighing, I stood and stretched. It looked like tonight was going to be an exploring night rather than a resting one. I pulled the real flashlight out of my bag, grabbed the extra batteries and stuck them in my pocket, put my phone in there with them, on power-saving mode, and went for a walk, carefully avoiding the small room to my right, and the stairs down the hall. This place was definitely living up to the status of the word "manor": it seemed like an endless maze of halls and bedrooms and bathrooms and studies and media rooms and dining halls. Even the kitchen was enormous, and from its window I could see the vast balcony and the backyard that seemed more like a safari jungle, the green-watered swamp of a pool its oasis and the dilapidated golf-holes its plains of the Sarangheti. I wandered without thinking for the most part, trying to distract myself from the ever-lasting night with searching games. Where were the drinks stored (I didn't go down into the wine cellar), where were the games played (I didn't touch the royal flush still sitting on the poker table)? This worked until I found myself pushing open a door and the beam of my light fell across what I can only describe as a crime show "murder board". Red yarn connected various fading, fragile Polaroids of a bygone age's people, some of whom I recognized from the news, some of whom were strangers to me. Yellowing articles and criminal profiles were thumb tacked to the cork boards that lined the walls. Looking a little closer, I could see that they were not the sensationalizations that I carried in my phone's picture gallery, but various stories of the lives of the victims. An old campaign poster that bore Mayor Noir's reserved, smiling face was connected to an article about one of Mark's movies and its failure in the box office. A front page bearing the title "Safari Hunt Gone Wrong!" sat in front of a copy of the marriage certificate for the Fischbachs. Even the faces of the chef and the butler glared judgmentally back at me, their records sitting beside them as if to ask what my credentials were to enter this dangerous estate. What investigation had led the detective here, then? I frowned at some of the hand-written notes peppering the boards, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. The most I could get was that Fischbach had been in financial trouble, and the mayor had apparently been working with him on...something. The colonel, it seemed, had always been a bit of a wild card, and perhaps had been a very dangerous man; several of the notes seemed to accuse him of the murder of Mark Fischbach. Oddly, none of the other murders were mentioned. Celine Fischbach was notoriously absent. Another thud, close to my room this time, shocked me out of my investigation, and I hid as I recognized the sounds of footsteps. I was technically trespassing, though who owned the land now I didn't know. Perhaps my friends had thought it funny to call the police and send them to pick me up. I decided that they'd pay for that later, but my main concern was staying out of sight. I ducked under the desk and held my breath as the footsteps came into the room. I didn't think about it until much, much later, when I was recounting the tale to my awestruck friends over mediocre school lunches, but from the moment I heard the first steps, a high pitched whine had droned in the background, as if some feedback from a cellphone on a cheap radio were being played constantly.  At the time, I was more focused on not making a noise as what I assumed was a cop wandered around the room, stopping every once and a while, and occasionally pacing on one end of the room, as if he were studying something on that wall. There was one point when the man had stood so near to the desk that I'd been able to see him in profile, but not being able to use my flashlight without giving myself away, I hadn't seen much other than the outline of a man in a suit, with disheveled hair falling in a sweep over the left side of his face, the only side I could see. Oddly, it was as if he were giving off a little light of his own, a red and blue hue defining some of his smaller features, like his stubbley jaw and the creases in the elbow of the otherwise immaculate suit. Perhaps he'd brought something with him to light his way, some weird lamp or flashlight. Maybe it was his phonescreen. Either way, this was a detective, I guessed then, fervently ignoring the sense of wrongness that radiated from him like waves, though why they'd sent him and not a normal beat cop, I didn't know. My heart almost stopped when I was almost certain I heard him speak, a low, gruff voice that seemed to have too many layers, but it was so quietly that I couldn't tell whether it'd been "You've stayed" or "Betrayed." I was certain that I heard, "Never again," though. By this point, keeping myself from shivering was a constant, conscious effort.

"It's quite amusing to me that you think you can hide by simply being out of my sight and 'keeping quiet.'" This time, there was no guesswork. This time, my heart did stop, and I couldn't tell whether I was going to shit myself or scream. But the man didn't seem to care that I was there. He simply seemed to want to acknowledge my presence, as if out of a want not to be rude in ignoring me. "Stay, if you like. Read all of these old lies. Make guesses, everyone else seems to have done so already. Let's see if you can get any closer to the truth of the famous 'Murders at Markiplier Manor'." I could practically hear the cold smile leaving his voice, and it was as if part of it had dropped half an octave, if that makes any sense. "Or you can go now, and forget you ever saw this place. Pretend it's just another mystery tale to tell each other while you waste your time with meaningless relationships." It went back to the pitch it'd been before, and the cold smile was back in it, if backed by a bit of bite this time. "It is, of course, your choice."

He never said another word that I heard, and it seemed to take forever for him to leave, but when he had gone, I stayed hidden for another long minute, until I was sure he had left the house (though I ignored that fact that I never once heard a door open). I stood shakily, flicking  my flashlight on again, and froze. There was only a single set of footprints in the room, and that was the diamond-patterned prints of my own Chucks in the dust on the old wood floor. I don't think I'd ever run faster in my life, or broken more rules of the road, than I did as I got the hell out of that place.

Everyone always asks me what I think I saw. Was it a ghost? Or a demon? Maybe a shade of the mayor, or of the actor? All I can respond is...I don't know. I don't know what I saw, or what spoke to me, or what those words meant, in the long run. And I'm certainly no closer to a positive ID of the murderer than anyone else. But there're certain things I never say, like how I don't think the butler was mad anymore, and how it was almost as if I could hear voices calling as I left, the strange red-and-blue light never completely dissipating until I had scrambled back over the front gate and shakily started my car, not daring to even turn on the headlights until I had made it back off of the estate, just praying and following the gravel path back to the main road by memory and feel. If you want a solid opinion, then here's what I think: I think I never want to know what I encountered, and that I never want to encounter it again. I think I'm going to follow his advice, and let the mystery stay unsolved. 

After all, it makes for a damn good story, doesn't it?