The night was just like any other. The branches outside swayed from side to side because of the breeze outside, poking the windows on this rustic, quaint-looking house. Isak always had a tendency to roll around a lot in his sleep. His snoring filled up his almost-empty room, there wasn't much inside it; just a shelf with a few books on it, a desktop with a lamp and a laptop on top of it. Even though the room is one-colored with similar color scheme as the shelf and the desktop; the choice of books ignited the cave walls of the granite dungeon. The books are done with great detail as seen on the covers, many of them featuring illustrations with a wide range of motives such as: mythological beings, police officers, forests, and bodies of water. Some of them were left ajar with a little part of the page corner folded together as a form of bookmark. The light from the fireplace downstairs in the living room bounces between the walls, growing so effortlessly all the way up to Isak's room. The flickering light illuminated the visible pages in his books from his open door, bringing a sudden life to the letters that jumps around on the page with the amber flicker. The flicker grew aggressive as a number of knocks could be heard at the door.
The knocking grew stronger until Isak's parents slowly approached the door.
"Who could it be at this time?" said the old man as his voice shifted from soft to hard in an instant, "The fella behind the door better have a reason to knocking at four in the morning!".
His wife stays silent as she wraps her arms around his left arm before he shakes her off, chuckling as he does it.
"Stop laughing, Jacob!" the old lady cries as she finds his behavior to be teasing her.
He grabs the door handle and looks back at her, saying "I'm just teasing you, honey–".
The door is roughly kicked open by the intruder, pushing the old couple of balance. The intruder; wearing attire that makes him almost invisible with the night sky behind him, and the slender figure that sends chills down everyone’s spine. The intruder looks around as the old is trying to get up from the fall, grabbing the frame of the fence connected to the stairway up to the second floor.
"Who are you to intrude–"
The intruder pulls out a gun and points it towards the old lady who's shuddering as she lies down on the carpet in the hall.
"Give me the jewelry, Jacob."
The intruder talks to the old man as casually as a friend would, the voice gets stuck in Jacob's head and flinches from the realization he just made.
"Markus, don't do this! I don't know what is this that you're looking for, wait–" he stops when he realizes one more thing, "Don’t do anything rash–"
Markus pulls back the barrel on his gun and places a finger on the trigger.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
"Jewelry or a hole in your ladies' head. You choose, Jacob."
The old man gets hesitant and stands up in front of the old lady, looking at Markus with displease.
"We can talk about this."
The intruder nods and looks at Jacob with a grotesque smile.
"A hole in her head it is.” Markus fires a bullet at her and hits Jacob as he covers her.
Isak suddenly wakes up from the gunshot and nears the stairway and hears another gunshot. He jumps back as he hears the second gunshot and stays close to the wall. Isak peeks around the corner and sees the black figure with a gun in his hand and his parents collapsed in the hall.
"Come down here, Isak~"
Isak scarily walks down the staircase with his hands in the air, his breath fluctuating as he looked down on his parents; he's on the brink of fainting.
"Don't fall now." he laughed as he looked at Isak from the hall.
Isak's voice was weak as he spoke with Markus.
"Markus, we can do this without anyone gettin–"
He stopped as he heard himself; he wept and his legs couldn't handle the situation and he fell down the stairs. Markus pulled him up and pushed his gun against the back of his head.
"Show me the office."
Isak nodded as he walked up the stairs with slow steps; he stops for a moment and looks at the office before Markus pushes him forward.
The door to the office makes a cracking noise as they enter the room; the room was full of boxes, boxes filled with jewelry waiting for delivery. The boxes were everywhere, they were on the floor and on the desktop, there were enough boxes to block off the only window in the room completely shut, and on top on the rest of the furniture in the room. Markus pushed him over, commanding him to help out with the boxes.
As they were moving the boxes a short crumble could be heard from the floor, and then it went silent. What happened after was unfathomable. A hole erupted from the planks that made up the floor, the hole was filled with nothing but a dark void and the crumbling got more forceful, eating the planks and the furniture on top of it. Eerie noises; what could be interpreted as voices of animals, crying in agony left the void and as soon as the noise reached Isak’s ears, he was violently pulled into the void by a mysterious force. A void was seen from the outside of the hole, but what Isak saw was blinking of images surrounding him. The quick blinking made the images impossible to remember at first glance. The flicker went on for a short duration of time before it stopped. When it looked like the impending doom, the void, devoured Isak for eternity and with no way out, he moved again. And there was a sudden burst of light, light that transitioned to the natural sunlight gazing upon his face. It looked like everything was alright again, but what Isak didn’t know was that he got transported to somewhere other-worldly. Other-worldly was the only way to describe this odd location.