The Lore of the Other Side

***The Lore of the Other Side*** is an exclusive reward that can come with the *Atmosfear 30th Anniversary Edition*. It is a graphic novel that tells the origins of the Gatekeeper, and those of Khufu and Elizabeth Bathory.

## Plot

The story begins in Memphis, Egypt circa 2,400 BC with Egyptian slaves building the Great Pyramid of Giza at the site where Pharaoh Khufu will be entombed in when he dies. Next to the in-construction pyramid is a large black tent, in which Khufu himself is speaking to two of his followers. He boasts to them of his authority and power, of the great pyramid he designed, of his plans to build a wall to keep "The Sea People" and to kill Horus so that he may avoid being guided to Osiris and "arise again" after his death.

In order to decide which of his two selected followers will be entombed with him in the Great Pyramid, Khufu has one of them fill his timekeeper before challenging them both to a game of "Senet Net Hab", or "Beat You To The Afterlife" as dubbed by one of the two slaves who are watching the game unfold from outside the tent. Khufu says that if one of his two followers makes a single "wrong move", they will be killed. In order to win, one of them must make seven "right moves" (Khufu gets to decide on a whim what the "right" and "wrong" moves are) before the timekeeper runs dry. The two followers are partway through playing the game when Khufu yells out, "STOP!" to which his followers answer in unison, "Yes, oh great and mighty Khufu!" At this, Khufu produces "an Asp from (his) ass" which bites and poisons one of the two followers in the chest. After his body is dragged away, the lone follower is declared the winner before being entrusted with safeguarding "a rare flask of magnificent perfume", later revealed to be "the smell of fear".

Forty years after Khufu is mummified and buried under the now completed Pyramid of Giza, that same follower, now a "Lost Soul" returns to Khufu's tomb on the Other Side with the flask in hand along with an entire army of "Lost Souls" behind him. Khufu rises out of his sarcophagus, smells the perfume with great gusto and christens them all as his "Soul Rangers", making clear his intent to defy the established order to "inhabit and conquer the afterlife". Suddenly, a mysterious spirit in the shape of two scrawled wings interjects, clearly incensed at this display of arrogance on Khufu's part. These "wings" turn away from each other to form a vague face with two piercing white "eyes" before the spirit banishes Khufu to "the Netherland between the living and the dead", sweeping away his Soul Ranger army in the process. The Winged Spirit then keeps watch over Khufu's sarcophagus with a single beam of light upon being dubbed the first "Harbinger".

The story then jumps forward in time to 1610 AD in Hungary's Cachtice Castle in which the Countess Elizabeth Bathory is inducting Katalin, her unknowing 666th virgin sacrifice into "a game of blood, sweat and tears" under the promise of work. After Elizabeth cuts Katalin's hand and gleefully samples her blood, the girl faints and Bathory orders a bloodbath to be drawn. One of Bathory's servants tells the Countess of a mob of townsfolk that is quickly encroaching upon the castle with torches in hand and the intent to behead her following multiple reports of missing women and witnessing blood run from the gutters outside the castle. Elizabeth dismisses her servant's warnings, saying that her sacrifices are a "smallish price" to pay in return for their protection, but after the servant insists they use this time to escape via the secret tunnels, Bathory asks "are you a servant or a serpent?" and splits his tongue down the middle to "match (his) beard" so he now speaks in a permanent lisp. The unconscious Katalin is loaded into an iron maiden with a pipe installed underneath that leads directly into an empty square basin lined with porcelain. She is awakened so that Elizabeth can experience "the smell of fear" as the doors of the iron maiden are forced shut over Katalin's chest, promptly killing her. Her dying scream is heard immediately outside the castle where the angry mob of townsfolk have arrived, now banging at the doors to try and force their way inside. A rock smashes the window next to Elizabeth, whereupon she orders her servant to barricade the doors while she takes her bloodbath to achieve immortality and "everlasting beauty".

Bathory sleeps for an hour in her slowly draining bloodbath before she is awoken by the same Winged Spirit with piercing eyes that imprisoned Khufu millennia beforehand, now hovering against the walls of the bath like graffiti. The spirit says she will be "the perfect companion" for the "deluded" pharaoh and Elizabeth challenges its authority just as the angry mob from outside bursts into Elizabeth's bathing room. Before the townsfolk can enact their revenge however, Bathory is pulled down the drain of her porcelain bath by the Winged Spirit into the sewers, blood and all, much to the shock and confusion of the mob. Elizabeth then finds herself in a dark and vacuous “private realm” that is “somewhere between now and forever”. The Winged Spirit says it will feed her and Khufu “fear for sustenance” and remarks that it has something “very special planned” for them both, just as soon as it has gathered more Harbingers of their “kind”, along with someone “cruel and stupid enough” to watch over them all.

Another time jump occurs, this time to 1666 AD in Transylvania in which an unnamed ten-year-old street thief is seen pushing other kids around, stealing apples and attempting to extort a young girl for her expensive ring. Eight years later circa 1674 AD, that boy, now a young adult dressed in a top hat and a ragged coat, is being lectured by his father on his eighteenth birthday. The father recommends to him a lucrative job by his side as a fellow gravedigger which the Thief turns down, dismissing it as a “dead-end job”. Later that day, the Thief breaks a shop window by throwing a stone at it, feigning ignorance and offering to “protect” the frustrated Shopkeeper for a small fee. The Shopkeeper says that this is the fifth time someone broke his window and that he already paid someone else to “protect” his shop. At this, the Thief in the top hat is apprehended by that same hired guard for “taking on (his) turf” and is beaten to the ground, his eye blackened, his lips chapped and his nose bleeding profusely. After the Guard leaves, the Thief finds a strange coin lying on the ground with no value and both sides marked with words: “This Side” and “The Other Side”. He tries to convince other townsfolk that it's a “magic” coin, but they laugh him off, leaving the thief to impotently shout out at them with weak insults.

That night, the Thief decides to take his father up on the gravedigger job, whereupon the Gravedigger tells the Thief about an anonymous client who is paying them both extra to pad out empty graves with other people's corpses to fill out an ever-expanding quota. The Thief's gravedigging father strings him along with the hollow promise of a one percent share of the wages, but one month later, at which point they are forced to dump bodies into a gorge due to the client providing an overabundance of corpses, the Gravedigger goes against his word, sneering that the Thief will have to pay him back for all eighteen years that were spent raising him from birth. Bitter and resentful, the Thief goes home to sulk about how nobody knows the value of his “true skills”: to threaten and intimidate others so powerfully that they keel over in subservience out of fear and belittlement. At this moment, the thief's “magic” coin starts to glow, projecting his own thoughts back to him: the imagined fantasy of him squaring off against the Guard who beat him up before hitting him with an insult so damning, that he suffers an heart attack and dies on the spot: “Your heart is a pathetic whisper of a muscle. Look! It's collapsing in your own chest!”

Suddenly, the coin starts to “speak”, and the Thief turns it over from "The Other Side" to "This Side", on which he sees the Winged Spirit staring back at him. The spirit reveals itself to be the high-paying “client” that the Gravedigger spoke of and that he has just fallen off the ridge and into the deep gorge, now implied to have died after landing in the pile of corpses they had recently dumped over the edge. The spirit offers the Thief a chance to prove himself to be as strong, brave and smart as he claims with the promise of eternal life, which the Thief confidently agrees to. The Winged Spirit, now hovering against the floor like a shadow then produces a “contract” comprised of ancient unintelligible glyphs etched onto a stone slab along with a knife. When the Thief asks “Where do I sign?” the Winged Spirit replies, “No need to sign – it just needs your blood!” The knife then hovers in the air of its own accord and lunges at the Thief before scratching runic symbols onto his forehead and letting the blood drip down onto the contract below. This being done, the Thief's house abruptly explodes, catapulting him over the graveyard and towards a familiar-looking rounded sewer grate. Falling through a deep well underneath and hitting the walls violently on the way down, he eventually finds himself in a large misty chamber with two doors on either side, landing into a thin glowing pool with six short forks that lead to dead ends.

The wing spirit announces they have arrived on The Other Side and the Thief, now robed in burlap and adorned with markings along with a bony necklace is the “Gatekeeper” of the Harbingers that have been captured so far, claiming they will need “sustenance” soon. The Gatekeeper resents this new life of his, claiming this is not what he signed on for while growing bored and impatient after only a few minutes on the job. To provide a greater “challenge”, the Winged Spirit arranges for a battle to take place between Elizabeth Bathory and Pharaoh Khufu, now given enough energy to transform into twisted nightmare incarnations of their former selves, a vampire and an undead mummy respectively. With the Gatekeeper tasked to oversee the fight and act as the referee and coordinator, the two doors in the chamber are unlocked and the Gatekeeper signals the fight to begin. The vampire and the mummy burst out of their respective doors and lash out in a flurry of strikes and insults, bats and snakes attacking each other in the periphery. The Gatekeeper, clearly out of his depth and unable to manage the fight properly, desperately calls on the two combatants to stop with panic and horror in his eyes. The mummy and vampire respond by pushing the Gatekeeper to the ground and contemplating which of the two gets to finish him off. Before either of them are able to however, they are both “banished” by the Winged Spirit.

The story finally ends with the Winged Spirit shaming the Gatekeeper's weakness, lamenting “perhaps your cheating father was right...” with a caption below the last frame that reads, “ON BALANCE, IT WAS NOT THE BEST START FOR THE GATEKEEPER...” implying that the Gatekeeper had a long and tumultuous road of hard lessons ahead of him before becoming the domineering host as seen in the video board games.

## Trivia

* Khufu’s slaves responding in unison to his commands with the phrase “Yes, oh great and mighty Khufu” may have been how the players were originally intended to respond to Khufu in the cancelled *Nightmare V*.
* The “The Other Side” inscription on the Gatekeeper’s magic coin is identical to the one on the tails side of the metal coin from the Deluxe edition.