MAG 146: Threshold

Audio
Transcript
Warnings

Statement of Marcus MacKenzie, regarding a series of unexplored entryways.

## Statement

Marcus begins his statement by apologising for the statement his father made the previous week, believing him to be lying for attention and to manipulate his son into moving back home. He goes on to explain.

Marcus spent much of his adult life moving in and out of his parents' house. While his mother was pleasant, if eager for him to move on, his father was overly protective due to his history of hallucinations involving doors. Marcus was smothered by his father while living at home, as he would desperately try to keep Marcus from moving away due to a belief that his son's hallucinations were a warning of great danger.

At present, Marcus believes his father secretly thinks he has an undiagnosed psychiatric disorder, despite extensive testing only ever indicating depression. Marcus's father has been lonely since his wife's passing, and Marcus believes his father is pretending to have the same hallucinations of doors as a ploy to make him worry and move back in. He says he visits his father often but needs to move on with his life, and does not appreciate his father's manipulation.

Marcus first saw a door from beyond reality when he was six. He woke one night to the sound of his skipping rope being dragged out of his bedroom. Unafraid, but upset that something was touching his toys, he chased after it. He followed it down the dimly-lit hallway until he reached an open door standing where a blank wall had once been. Marcus's skipping rope was partway through the door and he began to shake with terror as more and more of it was pulled into the darkness. He picked up the handle and pulled, but the cord went taut as something pulled back and Marcus could feel himself slipping. He let go of the rope and watched it disappear into the door before running back to bed. He told his parents, who believed he was lying to cover for losing his toy. The door was gone and the blank wall had returned.

Marcus saw his second door when he was eleven. On his way to and from school, he would pass by an alleyway with a blank space that unnerved him. One day, despite being unable to see it, he knew that the door his rope disappeared through was beneath the concrete in the blank space.There were new marks in the wall which reminded him of a handprint. Marcus felt that the door was playfully challenging him to put his fingers in the hollow of the wall in order to open it. His arm tensed as he prepared to accept the challenge until a friend, Luke, called after him. Marcus tore himself away from the alleyway and told his parents about the encounter. He received vigorous psychological examination through his adolescence but, other than seeing the doors, there was no indication he was mentally ill.

When he was thirteen, Marcus saw the door underneath a railway bridge. It was made of thick metal and bore a chalk message that read, "WARNING: Danger of Death." There was a pounding on the door, and Marcus could not tell if what was on the other side was trying to get out, or if it was knocking to be let in.

When he was fifteen, Marcus went to his sweetheart Sandra's house to pick her up for their first date. When he rang the doorbell it sounded wrong, like it was echoing through hundreds of empty corridors. He looked at the door to see it did not lead to their house, and heard fast and steady footsteps approaching. Marcus turned and ran just as he heard it open behind him.

When Marcus was sixteen, he saw the door laying open on the ground as he stumbled home drunk, leading into an angular labyrinth. In his efforts to walk like he was sober he almost did not see it until it was too late. Through vodka-blurred eyes, he saw a shape calmly walking along the vertical hallway.

When he was eighteen, Marcus drove his friends to a concert, stopping at a service station along the way for lunch. There was a scream from the stone structure near the parking lot and drag marks leading to the door, none of which his friends noticed.

Marcus last saw the door almost fifteen years afterwards and he almost wept at the sight of it. There was an empty lot a few blocks away from his apartment in Oxford. A week before Marcus was to move back into his parents' home, he passed the lot to see a pale yellow door standing freely without a wall or frame to support it. Unlike previous times, Marcus sensed no playfulness or malicious joy from it, only hunger and cold anger. It seemed to scream at him to open it and he couldn't resist the call and walk away, insinuating that he went into the halls and was let out.

At present, Marcus apologises for getting so deep into his own issues. He says that the depth of meaning behind the door is why his father is using it as a focal point in his own story, and again insists he is only pretending to see it.

## Post-Statement

John expresses frustration over how much he worked to find Marcus's statement when he first recorded his father's statement. Instead, he found the statement when he was drawn to rearrange an old filing cabinet and found the statement lost behind it. He says he misses the old days where he could attribute the statements to drug abuse or mental illness. He now knows that almost all of the statements were true, and John laments Paul McKenzie's suffering while also commenting on his own knowledge of doors. The recorder clicks off.

The recorder clicks back on to John pounding on a door. Helen opens the door and John asks her why she never told him about Marcus McKenzie or his father. Helen says she was pursuing the pair long before she was even Michael, and laments missing the chance to eat Paul before his natural death. John wants to know what happened to Marcus as he can no longer be reached, and Helen alludes to eating him some months prior. John is appalled and asks why, but Helen doesn't have an answer for him other than that her style of terror has shifted. Helen compares her own method of feeding to John's and advises him to embrace his needs.

John wants to know why Helen was trying to lure Marcus into Hill Top Road. She says there is something wrong with Hill Top Road, calling it a "strange scar on reality" integral to whatever the Web is doing. Helen wanted to see what would happen if she lured Marcus inside, but did not have the same skill for manipulation as the Web and was unsuccessful. John asks if she was compelled by the Web to do that, to which Helen says she doesn't think so, but due to the subtlety with which the Web acts is not completely sure. John becomes increasingly agitated and asks if the Web can control an Avatar of a different power and compel them to feed against their will, but Helen laughs. She mockingly asks if he's really sure didn't want to feed, and continues to laugh as her door closes. The recorder clicks off.

When it clicks back on again, John is in a room with Daisy, Melanie, and Basira. Martin sent them the tape with John's coffee shop victim and they demand an explanation. Basira wants to know how many times John has fed. John counts 4 then corrects to 5 after including Floyd Matharu, his victim on the boat to Ny-Ålesund. He says that the woman who didn't give her name in the statement to Martin, Jess Terrell, was his fourth victim.

The first was a supermarket cleaner who was lost for a week in an endless warehouse. John claims to have only gone in for shopping before forcing the worker to tell his story. The second was a woman who woke up in a fresh grave every year on her birthday. After being stabbed by Melanie, John went out to walk in the streets. He thought he was trying to clear his head but Daisy accuses him of hunting, to which John agrees. The third was a lonesome man who sought love from increasingly dark places that wept maggots while John compelled him to speak.

Basira stops John before he can say any more. Melanie asks why John did not record the statements, to which Basira suggests he was ashamed, but John says he lets the tape recorder start on its own rather tape each individual statement and assumes they will record whatever is important. Basira says John is a monster hurting innocent people. John compares his actions to Daisy's, but Basira insists her situation was different and points out that Daisy has been vigilant in resisting her hunger since realising her need. John says he does not know if he can control his hunger and suggests the Web might be controlling him. Basira says that to find out if he is being controlled they need to find Annabelle Cane, and John mentions her connection to Hill Top Road.

Basira decides they will go to Hill Top Road immediately, which is met by resistance from Melanie, Daisy, and John. Basira resolves to go alone if the others will not go with her and leaves. Defeated, John concludes that they're going with her as Daisy and Melanie leave the room. The recorder clicks off.

## Continuity

* **Related Entity:** The Spiral
* Marcus's father's statement can be found in MAG 27.
* The tape Martin sends to Basira, Melanie, and Daisy is from MAG 142. John identifies his victim as Jess Terrell, while Martin was not able to get her name when he took her statement.
* John's first feeding appears to have been accidental and he does not say when it happened. His second feeding happened when John was weak from being stabbed by Melanie in MAG 125. His third happened after John returned from rescuing Daisy from the Buried coffin in MAG 132. His fourth was the woman who made a statement in MAG 142. In that statement, John was described as looking like "he hadn't slept in a week". His fifth and final victim was Floyd from MAG 141, when John was preparing for what he thought would be a confrontation with The People's Church of the Divine Host.

* After The Change, the "scar on reality" at Hilltop Road is fundamental to Annabelle Cane's plan to remove The Entities from the world. This plan is outlined in MAG 197 and completed in MAG 200.