The Town Whispers: Season 1

Chapter 10.5: Possessing Jacob T. Mortimer

Upon returning to his cabin, feet kicked through the freshly fallen snow packed tight under its own weight, Jacob Mortimer saw the front door to his cabin swinging wide open, and inviting.

A gust pushed him forward, pushed him home, pushed him to whatever could have opened his front door, and Jacob felt a chill run through the slim sliver of space where muscle met bone, even under his heavy coat. He stepped cautiously up to his cabin and saw what he had been most afraid to find. Wet, half frozen footprints, where snow had melted from the ambient heat, before freezing once again from the cold outside - covered the floor, crisscrossing over themselves as they searched for something, but the feet that had left such prints were not that of a man.

The footprints which dotted the floor of his cabin, were inconsistent, as if what it was moved while in a state of metamorphosis, while it changed, stalking through his private space, as it shifted from shape to shape, neither deciding on one, or being able to discern one shape from another fully.

The footprints lead to his desk, where his papers and pens had sat, where he had left it hours earlier with a half-finished page of his work still sitting in place.

The remainder of his manuscript was strewn about as if a wind had caught it, and sent it flying chaotically about.... except for that one page which sat in the typewriter.

Whatever it was that had ransacked his tiny abode, whatever it was that had come to terrorize him, and shatter the illusion that that day was no different than any other, had left him a note.

With a shaky hand, Mortimer lifted it to his eyes and stared at his name, "Jacob T. Mortimer."

Jacobs's breath caught before it reached out of his mouth. It knew his name.

JACOB: No... you won't stop me now. You CAN'T stop me, I know what you are.

Those pages which had been thrown about were the product of a year of writing, and of decades of research. Even now, Mortimer's cabin was strewn with textbooks stolen from an archive in some long forgotten heretical church, while others were from his own private collection, a series of journals and notes, the collective knowledge of all those before him who sought a name..... The true name of a thing, that had no name and was unknowable.

But those books weren't the end to his findings, no some of the texts were then stuffed with more sheets of notes, that Jacob had meticulously hand copied from the more delicate tomes he had studied.

Better than most, he knew, or thought he knew, how the shadows of things worked. How shadows meant absence, and absence meant privacy. But what if that shadow, that absence of light that meant privacy, was that which listened and watched most intently?

When Jacob was younger, he had sought out some universal constant, a single ultimate truth. And that arrogance hadn't been received well, it had been taken as narcissism, Jacob was the boy who would not play well with others and that as well, drove him deeper into his work, it only became clearer to him that he needed to disconnect from the world.

Both problems were solved when he moved away from the watchful eyes of less helpful, or welcoming neighbors in The Fort, their growing foundling of a town.

When it had been warmer, both in the season of the year, as well as the seasons of his youth, he had built his cabin, and There, Jacob tore himself away from the world of man, that is where he could finally be as far removed as he would need to be to hear the whispers of things buried deep in time.

It had been lonely at first only being kept company by the somber essence of the trees around him. But that's what he had wanted, what he needed. Right? That was a necessary sacrifice.

And for a time it was, because Jacob had found his penultimate truth, the last and final word of what he had searched for for so long. It had many names—aether, chi, lifeblood, source, magic—but he understood it as an aether that enveloped everything. Where the aether was concentrated, life sprouted forth. More energy, the more complicated the creature. So, what had driven Jacob into the woods, was the understanding that everything was connected, and that meant there was no way to run from what Jacob sought to distance himself from.

He knew there were no true boundaries between living things, just inked lines, some as arbitrary as the borders drawn between nations on maps. Jacob had desperately tried to stretch those connections to their breaking points and free himself from the world, but had done nothing more than break himself away from it, with the ichor of mankind stuck to his back. In order to be free, to be truly free he would need a name, his name, his true name, the name by which the aether flowed and festered.

But so far he'd been at a loss, and instead searched for the true names of those things, in that new world where The Fort had been built. He needed those names, so that they might be able to tell him his true name.

Jacob was blinded by his own ambition - blind to the truth, that a true name, hold true power over that which holds that name, and by asking those things which sought to pluck and pull at the strings of his fate, Jacob was stepping ever closer to an edge from which there was no return.