Just like every story before it, "The Man in the Closet" was a fairytale with a moral. It was born from a child's primal fear of the closet in their room, aiming to teach the reader that the only way to conquer fear is to face it head-on.
The the was quite intriguing. Of all the furniture in a ho, the closet and the space under the bed were two of the few places that could conceivably hide a humanoid creature, a fact sufficient to spark the imaginations of timid, fantasy-prone children.
Finding himself once again in the distant, unfamiliar Black Town, Jenkins stood under the eaves of a clothing store temporarily closed for renovations. He glanced up at the overcast sky, then noticed sothing unusual about the street.
He saw tal lampposts spaced at regular intervals, intricate networks of tal pipes running along the walls like dense circuitry, and buildings in the distance towering at least five stories high—a scene unlike anything even in Nolan.
"So this is what the town looked like before the last epoch ended?" he mused. "It's magnificent. If the Eighteenth Epoch manages to conclude peacefully, and the torch of steam-industrial civilization is passed on, then the cities of the Nineteenth Epoch might very well look like this."
Despite the high degree of steam industrialization, this was still the sa remote town. It seed that in every era, Black Town existed on the fringes of civilization.
The weather was grim, threatening rain, and Jenkins wanted to resolve matters quickly. The last thing he wanted was to get soaked.
"The Man in the Closet" was a tale told from a child's perspective. Although it never clarified whether there was actually soone in the closet—and if so, who—that ambiguity didn't stop it from being the most bizarre story Jenkins had read so far.
The story was set in "an ordinary ho in town," but since Jenkins knew the protagonist Jason's surna, finding the house wouldn't be difficult.
The family's house wasn't in town but nestled in the forest just beyond it. Though it wasn't a great distance, Jenkins couldn't fathom their reason for living in the woods.
The house was a solid structure of brick and stone, standing in a clearing embraced by trees and enclosed by a simple wooden fence. Jenkins hesitated at the gate, gazing up at the imposing building. It looked almost like a small castle.
It wasn't long before soone noticed his arrival. A small boy with blond hair opened the front door and peeked his head out, looking at the stranger standing outside.
"Hello, sir," he called out. "Are you the new teacher my mother hired?"
The boy asked politely. The ti gap was so vast that the language spoken in this era was foreign to Jenkins. He could only decipher the aning through a combination of empathy and guesswork.
Jenkins had no intention of lying—he saw no need for it—but he quickly noticed the faint aura clinging to the boy. In response, he simply nodded in silence.
If he wasn't mistaken, the boy before him was Jason, the protagonist of "The Man in the Closet." With a complete lack of caution, the boy invited Jenkins inside and, as he led him to the second floor, ntioned that his parents weren't ho.
But the boy didn't lead Jenkins to a study or a dining room with a spacious table. Instead, he took him to his own bedroom.
"Please wait here, teacher," the boy said. "I'll go make so hot tea."
With that, Jason left Jenkins standing at the bedroom door and darted downstairs. Soon, the sound of his footsteps faded completely.
"Nothing about this feels right..." Jenkins thought.
Standing in the doorway, Jenkins didn't enter imdiately. Instead, he took a mont to observe the house from his vantage point.
He'd already confird on the way up that such a large house had no servants. More critically, there were no light fixtures of any kind. He hadn't seen a single gas lamp, not even a candle. The rooms were illuminated solely by the gloomy light filtering through the windows. Once night fell, the place would be utterly pitch-black.
Considering the strange aura he had seen on the boy, Jenkins tried reinterpreting the story he'd read, looking at it from the opposite perspective. When he did, most of the inconsistencies began to make sense.
"A dark fairytale, then," he murmured to himself.
Pushing the door open, he stepped inside. Jason's room was unremarkable, exactly what one would expect of a boy around ten years old. A thin booklet lay on the desk across from the bed. Jenkins walked over and opened it, discovering it was a sketchbook. Its pages were filled with twisted, terrifying scenes drawn in crayon.
The images had one thing in common: in the corner of every drawing was a boy with a wide, unsettling grin. He was either hiding behind crooked bushes or peeking out from behind a vividly colored house, only his head visible.
After studying the drawings for a mont, Jenkins placed the sketchbook back where he'd found it and turned his attention to the room's only closet.
According to the story in the *Black Town Secret Records*, this closet was the source of Jason's terror. The boy had experienced a host of terrifying and inexplicable events centered around it and this very room. Throughout the entire tale, the closet was never opened. The ending, however, hinted that his experiences were no illusion—there was truly sothing inside.
"No aura..." he noted.
With that thought, Jenkins walked to the closet, placed his hand on the handle, took a deep breath, and yanked the door open.
Inside hung a few articles of a boy's clothing, and a musty sll wafted out. He pushed the clothes aside but found nothing hidden behind them.
He paused for a mont, then rapped his knuckles against the back panel of the closet. There was no unusual sound.
"Now this is interesting," he muttered.
He was about to put everything back as it was when the corner of his eye caught a glint of light at the bottom of the closet. Reaching down, he picked it up. It was a single scale, but he couldn't identify the creature it ca from.
The boy returned shortly, carrying a tea tray that looked almost too large for his small fra. He carefully stood on his tiptoes to set it on the desk, then invited Jenkins to sit down and have so tea before the lesson began.
"Teacher," Jason said, his eyes flicking to the closet, "did you open that just now?"
Jason noticed right away.
"Yes," Jenkins admitted. "When I ca in, I felt as if soone was watching from inside, so I took a look. My apologies. I shouldn't have touched your things."
He didn't know the language of this ti, and he was certain the boy wouldn't understand the common tongue of the Eighteenth Epoch. Therefore, he spoke in Elvish.
The boy showed no surprise. He replied in fluent Elvish, his tone perfectly natural:
"For a while, I always felt like soone was watching from the closet, too. I was terrified. At night, I'd hide under the covers, because peeking my head out ant facing it directly. But there's nothing to worry about now. It's empty, isn't it?"
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