Chapter Text
He’d been walking for what felt like an hour now, and god, he wanted to kill Jay.
(No, he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. Somebody else got there first.)
He could feel the sun prickling the back of his neck, just above the collar. He could feel sweat starting to accumulate under the straps of his chest-mounted camera (a new one he bought a few months ago, just in case, he remembers thinking). He could hear the buzz of insects in the grass, the wet heat of the humid summer air pressing down on him, and everything itched.
He didn’t want to do this. He could just turn around, get back in the car, drive home–or at least a hotel. This was stupid–this was Jay-tier stupid, but here he was again. Alone. The camera was rolling. The mask was long gone, probably growing algae at the bottom of the lake or rotting in a landfill. Like Jay told him, gripping his hand painfully, white-knuckled, in an unlit hotel room: even if his mind couldn’t be trusted, the camera could. That thing could warp the image, distort the audio, but that was nothing compared to what it had done to their heads.
Then again, for all he knew, the video could be missing all sorts of things. For all he knew, that thing could make the camera show whatever it wanted.
Tim chuckled, and it made his throat ache.
—
Two nights ago, a new video had appeared on the Marble Hornets channel. He’d nearly forgotten he’d attached it to his phone (liar, liar, liar) until the notifications started rolling in. Heart beating and throat constricted, gripping the half-empty pill bottle in his pocket like it would make a difference, he’d watched it in the car.
It looked like one of those idiotic “totheark” videos.
(He hadn’t noticed them the first time he’d searched “Marble Hornets”, but after a few weeks on the road with Jay, occasionally roped into assisting with editing duty, he’d finally started to pay attention. Not that they really said anything worthwhile; mostly cryptic threats and puzzles that repeated what they knew already. Jay paid attention to them, but again, Jay was an idiot.)
The edits were choppy and distorted, and the actual content of the video ranged from the mundane to the so-surreal-it-was-definitely-staged. Tim swore through the lump in his throat; that killed his theory that totheark was Brian (oh god, Brian). That killed his theory that everyone he knew who was directly involved was either dead or had their memory so thoroughly fucked that they barely knew their own name.
“FIND ME,” it flashed, for a split second becoming “HELP ME.”
“Yeah, sure,” he’d spat, bile raising in his throat. “I’ll get right on that.”
That night after work, he’d gone back to his barren little studio apartment, booted up his laptop, and despite his self-preservation instincts screaming themselves hoarse, he ripped the video off Youtube and started to look at it more closely.
Flashes of Rosswood (of course) and Benedict Hall (made sense). A blank-faced doll moving in that jerky, unnatural, bad-stop-motion way he’d seen in countless student films. Clean, white, sans-serif text spelling out ominous nonsense like, “THAT IS NOT DEAD WHICH CAN ETERNAL LIE”, “DID YOU THINK THIS WAS OVER?”, “LIAR”, “WATCHING YOU”, and the aforementioned “FIND ME”/“HELP ME” switch he’d seen earlier.
He sunk his head down to the desk slowly, kneading at his temples. When that wasn’t satisfying, he pulled his hands away from his head and pounded them against the desk. Again. Again. His fists stung. Again.
He took a breath in and snorted it out, his nostrils burning.
Slowly, he turned back to the video, this time slowing it down, examining each frame in the distorted places, squinting to see what he could make out. Most of it was indecipherable, at least to him, but he was able to distinctly make out a shot of Jay’s face with rough “X"es scrawled over the eyes. (Sick, sick, sick.)
He’d taken to Twitter then, logging into the old account. (And he was ashamed to find that he still knew the password, even after all this time.) Bracing himself for a swarm of mentions, it was a strange relief to find the number of commenters had thinned out since he had posted his last entry. He scrolled through with an underlying revulsion, feeling like he had when he was a child, when his mother forced him to eat cooked spinach. (“Yes, Timmy, I know it tastes bad, but you need your vegetables!” “Yes, Timmy, I know the pills are hard to swallow, but they’ll make you feel better!”) It was mostly just repeats of what he’d already seen in the video, mixed in with frantic messages asking about his safety that made his stomach turn at the prospect of replying. However, he started to notice a new pattern, one he hadn’t spotted in the video.
“Has tta changed fonts?”
“MH, did you get hacked? This doesn’t look like a real totheark vid.”
“tim, getting lazy. forgot to switch the font.”
“That’s jay’s font. Accident?”
“Tim, did you make this?”
He hadn’t lost any time, and the camera (just in case, just in case) hadn’t shown him getting up in the night. This wasn’t him, and the more he looked, the more he had to agree that it didn’t quite look like totheark, either.
He watched the video again, normal speed, no modifications. There was something recognizable about the audio, something he remembered from setting his childhood cassette tape player to reverse. He stripped out the audio, played it backwards. It was sludgy, indecipherable. He sped it up.
“Oh god, please stop. Please. Please. Leave me alone. I’m so tired. Not again, please–please, not again. Not again. Not again. Not agai–”
That was Jay’s voice. That was Jay’s voice, sobbing through words Tim had never heard him say, not in any video. This was new (or very old, taken from footage only Jay could access).
His phone buzzed. A notification on Twitter.
Hands shaking, he minimized Premiere and looked at the Twitter tab still open in the background, still sitting on the Marble Hornets page.
“View 1 new Tweet.”
He clicked.
“FIND ME”
“View 1 new Tweet.”
He clicked.
“HELP ME”
More notifications from the followers, more frantic questions. Feeling like he was watching his hands more than controlling them, he managed to draft a new message.
“Past two tweets aren’t me -tim”
“View 3 new Tweets.”
He clicked.
“IN THE TREES”
“FIND ME”
“HELP ME”
The last message had a photo attached. Tim squinted at it, enlarged it. After a few moments, the knowledge slid back into place. The annex, the small building set off from the hospital. That must be where he is.
(He’s dead, he’s dead and not coming back.)
That must be where he is.
—
Tim slapped at a mosquito buzzing at his ear. He couldn’t be more than fifteen minutes away from the hospital, assuming that Rosswood didn’t rearrange itself again like some goddamn Rubik’s cube.
He hadn’t told the internet where he was going. If there was anything he’d learned from his ‘investigations’ with Jay, it was that if you’re going to do something stupid, don’t broadcast it where everyone and their mom can see.
Though, now that he thought about it, Jay–or whoever or whatever had hacked his Twitter–had posted the annex photo publicly, so for all he knew, some well-meaning follower had already gone out there. And possibly gotten themselves killed.
He felt for the knife in his pocket, folded safely in its case. It was small and clumsy–a far cry from the gun a part of him wished he was carrying–but guns made him think of Alex. (Made him think of Jay.) He’d wavered close enough to Alex’s mindset already, and he didn’t like the thought of making the similarities any stronger.
Granted, he was also a lousy shot.
Through the trees, he could just make out the shape of the hospital. His knees locked up.
A part of his mind chanted, “It’s burned down, it’s gone, it’s over,” while another part of him screamed, “By what fucking metric would anyone call this ‘over’?”
He took a step forward. Another. The bottle of pills rattled in his other pocket.
His head wasn’t buzzing the way it did when that thing was around, so he hoped that was a good sign.
Finally he made his way around the hospital to the annex, fists clenching and unclenching as he tried to override his instinctual need to run, to hide, to do literally anything but the deeply stupid thing he was about to do.
With a creak, he opened the door.
“Jay?” he called out, feeling self-conscious despite himself. “Jay, this had better be you.”
He heard a distant shuffling and felt a familiar itch in his throat that he passionately hoped was nothing. (Or asbestos. Either would be preferable over the alternative.)
He tried to call out again, but it was lost in a cough. No, no, no, not today. He pulled out the pill bottle, ready to dry-swallow if anything got worse. He slowly inched toward the noise he’d heard, feet dragging through the debris and kicking up dust. He painfully strangled another cough, jaw straining.
“Jay?” he rasped.
More shuffling. There was definitely someone in there with him. Or a raccoon, or a squirrel, or the wind, he reminded himself, letting out a chuckle that descended into a coughing fit. Forcing the top of the bottle open with shaking hands, he shook out two pills and swallowed them dry.
He listened again, hoping his outburst hadn’t scared them off. Silence, followed by more shuffling, louder this time, closer.
He picked up speed. “Jay?”
The sound of shoes on concrete, not more than two rooms away. More shuffling.
Tim ran, his feet scrabbling against the dusty floor as he changed direction, passing through the empty doorframe of a room he found unsettlingly familiar.
There was a shape on the ground, huddled, its face to the wall. Its shoulders were narrow, heaving with labored breaths, and very, very familiar.
Tim approached slowly. “Jay, it’s me.” He couldn’t keep the impatience out of his voice. “Jay, turn around.”
The shape–and it was definitely Jay, nobody else had that unsettlingly familar silhouette, that tattered brown hoodie–moved, half-turning. He had the hood pulled up over his head so Tim couldn’t see his face, but when he turned, Tim could barely make out the shape of the brim of his hat. He held up one hand, and Tim nearly laughed to see he was still carrying a hand-held camera.
He trained the camera on Tim, adjusting the angle to follow him as he shifted back and forth uncomfortably. Jay still hadn’t turned far enough for Tim to see his face.
Tim started forward, “Come on.” Another cough ripped from his throat, and he saw Jay tense, leaning into the wall. “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here–I don’t know what the hell you’re doing alive–but we have to go now.”
Jay turned slowly, camera still trained on Tim, and finally Tim could see his face.
It was covered by what looked like a balaclava without the eye holes, a blank black mask with a design painted across the front in white: a simple eye, wide open, with a narrow pupil.
“Goddammit,” Tim muttered.
“Hey, you?” He finally said, louder this time. “I don’t know what you’re calling yourself now, Jay–mask–thing, but we are leaving, even if I have to pick you up and carry you out of Rosswood myself.”
(Jay was taller than him, but slighter by far. He didn’t doubt that he could pick him up, though he wasn’t sure if he could manage to get all the way back to the car in this heat.)
His phone buzzed, and with his focus still on Jay, he slowly pulled out his phone. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a message from what he just knew was Jay’s number, even though he deleted the contact months ago.
“FIND ME
HELP ME”
Tim turned to the shape huddled on the floor, voice exploding from his strained throat. “What do you think I’m trying to do?”
Another buzz.
“HELP ME”
Another buzz.
“HELP ME”
Several more.
“HELP ME”
“HELP ME”
“HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP”
It took all Tim’s willpower not to throw the phone against the wall. He gripped it tightly, the edges digging into his skin. He felt the fizzing feeling start, bubbling quietly at the back of his skull. Though he tried to stop them, he couldn’t; great, heaving coughs ripped from his throat. Jay kept the camera trained on him as he lost his balance, hitting the concrete hard.
“Get up!” Tim yelled, even as he struggled to his feet. “Run!”
Jay just stayed frozen in place, the camera following Tim as he pulled himself up unsteadily, swaying on his feet.
“You want help?” Tim asked, eyes wild. “We’re leaving, now.”
He lunged forward, wrapping his arms around Jay’s midsection and lifting him even as he struggled. He clumsily dragged his target to the door, wincing as his shoulder hit the doorframe. Like hell I’m leaving without you again.
Jay struggled at first but then hung limp, finally seeming to grasp the gravity of the situation. Trying to maneuver the lanky man into a sort of bridal carry, Tim admitted that at least dead weight was better than a fight.
He kicked the door open, and the brief burst of heroic satisfaction quickly gave way to mind-numbing panic. The buzzing in his head was getting louder, more insistent, though he could feel the pills start to kick in, staving off what he knew would have been a full seizure without them.
He started to run, slow and clumsy with a hundred-and-something pound weight in his arms, the need to get out of there now overriding his desire to convince Jay to stand up and run. God knew if he even understood English at this point; what he’d seen of his own masked alter ego had seemed animalistic, feral. At least Jay didn’t seem violent.
Nothing else mattered but running, and as soon as he caught sight of the hiking trail, he sprinted as fast as he could possibly manage. His lungs were screaming, his throat was burning, and his heart was pounding faster than it probably had in years. (A distant part of him remembered an old book he’d been forced to read at school, a story about a sled dog whose heart had burst just as it won the race.)
He saw the car. He saw the car. Everything hurt, but the car was right there.
A burst of static ripped through Tim’s skull, sending him tripping sideways. Jay fell from his hands and hit the gravel without making a sound. He curled around the camera, protecting it. Tim yanked him up by one arm. “Run.”
Dragging Jay behind him, Tim half-ran, half-hobbled across the parking lot, slower now that Jay had both feet on the ground. Finally, Jay seemed to get his bearings, picking up speed just as they reached the car. Tim pulled the keys from his pocket, the jingling ringing painfully in his ears, and unlocked the driver’s side door. Once inside, he flipped the switch that would unlock the passenger’s side. “Get in!”
Jay just stood, frozen, camera in hand.
With an anguished groan, Tim left the driver’s seat and yanked the passenger door open. He nearly threw Jay inside, slamming the door behind him. With a click, he locked the car. Making a final glance over at Jay (whose expression was maddeningly unreadable under the mask), he turned the key in the ignition and peeled out of the parking lot, squinting to see the road over the lights flashing in his eyes.