Gone Home✔️

Chapter 03: The Search Begins

So where to begin?

All at once I felt positively alive, electro-charged even! So many possibilities! Directly across the room from me was another door, this one closed. Well, why not? It seemed like as good a place to start this adventure as any. What else did I have going on? Besides figuring out what the hell happened to Sam and my parents, of course, but it made sense to look for clues, which was just what I was doing anyway.

I crossed the room and opened the door. It led to a closet. I reached up and yanked on the pull-string I saw hanging in front of my face. There were some boxes, but they didn't really look interesting, some jackets...I saw what must be Sam's new school jacket. Goodfellow High School. The mascot was an owl...cool! It was adorable. I'd always loved owls. I also saw mom's jacket with her job badge clipped to it.

Janice Greenbriar – Senior Conservationist.

Go mom! I'd always loved that she loved what she did and was successful at it.

Unfortunately, the closet seemed to be a bust, not a really good starting place. All I found was a board game up high. Over the Alps: a novel traveling game. Me and Sam used to love it and had always begged mom and dad to play with us, but there had been a good year-long stretch, maybe even longer, where mom banned it because me and Sam got into a really bad fight one game where Sam threw a half-empty can of soda at me.

It had given me a bloody nose.

Oh man, she had been in so much trouble, grounded for two weeks! And I was the one who ended up feeling bad. Sure, it had hurt, but not that much. Although I guess it was good for her, it let her know she could not do something like that again, that it wasn't acceptable behavior. She even felt terrible after doing it, I could tell that it was just an in-the-moment bit of fury. Even I'd had some of those and only my self control had kept me from slapping a couple of idiots when I got my first job at a grocery store when I was sixteen.

I had forgiven her, of course. Nothing had ever really come between us. Sure, we had sibling rivalry, but we usually didn't stay mad at each other for longer than a day or two. Putting the game back up in its spot, I considered my next move. As I looked along the wall to my left, which continued for a couple feet before dipping in, out of sight, into an open area, I was suddenly reminded of probably the only video game I'd ever seriously played.

Doom.

Everybody was talking about it all last year and I'd ended up trying it at a friend's house. I normally didn't play anything beyond solitaire or Minesweeper, but oh man...Doom was addictive. I'd played it a ton...until my mom figured out what I was doing and forbid me from playing it. It sucked but I got over it, eventually.

But a big part of that game had been searching the environment. When you were looking for something, you scanned the room, then moved along the walls. I wasn't looking for hidden panels or secret chambers now, but it was a sound theory. I moved along the wall and into the open area where it was very dark, but there was just enough light to see a floor lamp across the room. I crossed it and quickly turned it on, uncomfortable in the darkness.

Flipping it on revealed another door, a bookshelf, and a fancy table with doors on it. I poked through the fancy table and almost skipped over a handwritten letter. It was packed with writing and I started reading, curious since I didn't recognize the handwriting.

Dear Jan,

It's so good to hear from you again! All
this new house business sounds like quite the
adventure! Remember the little dorm room we
shared, freshman year? When we were miserable,
fantasizing about our dream homes? I always said
I wanted a mansion, you said you just wanted a
house in the woods...look who got both! Somebody
up there likes you! I could use some of that
magic. Send me some lotto numbers, I'll play them!
Seriously!