Written for the Marble Hornets fic week 2013. I messed around with a random prompt generator and combined a couple of them into one four page one-shot. No, I won't tell what the prompts were because spoilers.
Warnings :
1)This takes place after the events of Entry 76, so don't read if you haven't seen it of course.
2)English isn't my first language and I don't have a proof-reader, so please tell me if you spot any mistakes I didn't see.
Jessica woke up in a room she didn't know. The walls, floor and ceiling were evenly grey and nothing was in it but the mattress she was laying on and a laptop beside her on the floor. There was no visible door or window ; how did she end up here?
Her memory was as blank as the walls of this room.
The young woman sat up, opened the laptop and turned it on in the hope it could give her some answers. She didn't find any interesting files, but, surprisingly, there was wi-fi. She opened google chrome to find out two tabs were left open on youtube channels by the previous users ; one channel was called MarbleHornets and the other totheark. What was that supposed to mean?
She opened a new tab and tried to go on other websites, but none of the URLs she tried would load. The videos of the two channels, however, worked just fine.
Having nothing else to do and hoping to find a clue, Jessica started to watch them.
It just kept getting weirder and weirder. Who was that faceless man? Why did he look so familiar to her? That Alex guy also seemed familiar. She had seen them before, she was sure of it ; she just couldn't remember. Both youtube channels raised more questions than answers, and the battery of the laptop wouldn't last forever.
The MarbleHornets channel was owned by some guy named Jay. She knew this name. If only she could recall anything… All she saw before the battery died was weirdness and mystery surrounding names and faces (or, in two cases, mask and non-face) that seemed familiar but were forgotten.
Her head started to ache badly, and a sudden and violent coughing fit took over her whole body.
She woke up again in the same room with no memory of going to sleep or fainting. The laptop was still there, just next to a water bottle and a metal basin Jessica hadn't seen before. The computer's battery was full again. Whoever brought her there wanted her to keep watching those creepy videos.
There wasn't any outlet to charge the battery in this room ; there wasn't any door to allow someone to enter and bring her water either. This didn't make any sense.
However, as creepy as her situation and those videos were, she wanted to know what happened next, wanted to know if Jay would ever get the answers he wanted. Plus, she was still hoping he (or totheark if they stopped being so cryptic) could provide her those she needed. So she kept watching.
Wait a minute, who was this girl in the hotel? Could it be…? Oh god, it was her! There really was a connection between her and Jay's videos!
But what happened to her after that?
Jessica woke up a third time feeling like she was starving ; she gladly hate the snacks that were put at the end of her mattress while she was sleeping and then turned on the laptop to see if Jay or tothark had updated.
According to the date given by the laptop's clock, she had been sleeping for over six months. How was it possible? Yes, it wasn't the strangest thing she had seen since she first woke up in that grey, door-less room, but it was weird nonetheless. Did whoever charged the battery also change the date? Why?
A few more videos had appeared, and since each of them had their release date at the bottom (as it is always the case with youtube), it quickly became clear that the young woman actually had been unconscious this long.
The only thing she could do was to keep watching. And she did. She would sleep for weeks or months at a time, waking up only when a new video had been posted. How? Why? Maybe the videos will give an answer some day…
Why did Alex try to kill her and Jay? What were the motivations of the hooded person? And that faceless thing, always there, distorting the videos, making those who approached it sick and paranoid, stalking everyone… what was it? What did it want?
Jessica was more and more convinced it was the key to everything.
One day, she saw herself on video one last time. The entry number was 76. She couldn't help feeling proud when her past self managed to disarm Alex and point his own gun at him. But then…
"What?" she shouted. "No! I'm – I am not dead! That thing is fake, it must be! I breathe, I eat, I drink, I…"
She violently threw the laptop to the wall, breaking the device in half.
"Oh no, what have I done? It was the only thing I had…"
Even though she didn't spend that much awake time in that room, she knew she had stayed there much too long. She looked at the dent she had made in the wall. It wasn't very solid… Using the battery of the broken laptop, her feet, her bare hands, she banged on the wall until her hands were covered bleeding, her lungs were on fire and her whole body ached, but Jessica had finally managed to make a hole in the unknown grey matter that was surrounding her. The Faceless One brought the young woman here ; now it was time to escape and help Jay. He badly needed it.
Jay didn't have enough money even for cheap hotels anymore, so he slept in his car, travelling from parking lot to parking lot every night. He didn't sleep much though. What did it feel like to have a complete night of sleep? He didn't remember. How could he sleep for eight hours straight when he knew that thing was always there, and Alex might find him too?
Jessica was dead, and Tim knew the whole time.
He couldn't trust anyone. Once again, he was on his own. However, Jay was still determined to get to the bottom of the whole thing. He would find the answers to all of his questions if it killed him.
He parked his car in a well-lit parking lot and set up his camera to film whatever could happen outside during the night, then moved to the backseat and lay down. Unsurprisingly, sleep didn't want to come despite how tired he felt. He kept sitting up and looking through the window, thinking it could be there.
Who was he kidding : it was always there, in the corner of his eyes, in the background of his videos… The times it showed itself in plain sight only were the tip of the iceberg.
Wait, what was that sound?
Jay stepped out of his car, taking the camera with him more out of habit than anything else. He looked at the little screen on the side and dropped the camera out of surprise.
Jessica barely fitted through the hole she made, but after some struggle, she managed to get out of the grey room at last. As soon as she got out, she found herself in a parking lot at night. She looked behind her : the room wasn't there anymore. Parked cars and street lamps were there instead. She washed the blood off her hands with the underside of her shirt.
Near her, someone parked his own vehicle. Jessica recognised him : it was Jay. She called him, but he didn't seem to hear her. When he laid down on the backseat, she started banging on his window ; even though he kept sitting up and checking his surroundings, he didn't seem to fully acknowledge her for some reason.
Getting desperate, Jessica yelled at the top of her lungs :
"Jay! It's me! I'm not dead!"
This time, he took his camera and went out of his car, looking everywhere around him through the little screen. When the camera was finally on Jessica, the young man dropped it on ground. He quickly picked it up and looked again. His eyes kept going from her to the screen and back.
"Jessica?"
"See?" she responded, "I'm alive! I escaped from… wherever it was."
He took a step back.
"The camera sees you… but I don't…" Jay finally whispered.
"What? Are you kidding me? We don't have time for that! I mean, I don't remember much, but I know we must find out what is actually happening! Let's find Tim, maybe he -"
"I… I can't hear you. I only see you through my camera… Wait, I'll rewind that thing, maybe it recorded your voice too…"
The footage Jay had just shot was heavily distorted, but he more or less managed to make out what Jessica said.
"You want to find Tim?" he asked, pointing his camera back at her.
She nodded.
"Tim can't be trusted", the young man argued.
"If he doesn't turn into the masked guy again he could help us…" Jessica replied. "I've just escaped from… wherever it took me, and now that I'm here, we have to the bottom of this together. We'll work better as a team!"
It wasn't easy, and Jay having to rewind the video to hear her (and with heavy audio distortion!) didn't help, but she finally convinced him to go find Tim again.
Why couldn't see or hear her without the camera? Had she become a ghost?
No, she was pretty sure ghosts didn't bleed. However, her stay in the grey room had an effect on her... She thought about what happened when she left it a few minutes ago. Had it just disappear as she initially thought or… had it always been non-existent? Or was it some kind of other dimension the Faceless One liked to bring its victims in? Was her invisibility a consequence of travelling through dimensions?
Jessica volunteered to keep watch from the driver's seat while Jay tried to get some rest in the backseat. She had slept more than enough in her grey, possibly otherworldly prison.
As the first rays of sunlight appeared in the sky, Jessica suddenly felt sick. It wasn't the same sickness that affected Jay and all those who approached the Faceless One though : she didn't cough, just felt a strong urge to throw up. She rushed out of the car to do just that.
Jay soon joined her to ask if she was ok ; she covered the lense of his camera with her hand, not wanting to be filmed in such a state.
After a while, feeling better, she returned to the car, followed by the young man.
"I… I'm ok, just feeling a little sick…" she replied when he asked again what was wrong.
They waited until the sun was up above the clouds to finally move on. They drove until the sun started to set and parked the car for the night.
The young woman threw up again the next morning, and the morning after. Jay would frequently have violent coughing fits and sometime spit blood because of them, but unlike Jessica he didn't vomit most of what he ate every day.
They kept looking for Tim regardless, but couldn't find him. Where could he be? Was it too late?
A week after Jessica's return, Jay woke up alone in his car once again. He looked for Jessica outside, looking through the eye of his camera. He found her standing behind a dumpster, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her shirt.
"Morning sickness again?" he asked her, not knowing what he should say or do.
Through the tiny screen on the side of the camera, he saw her freeze as though she just realised something important. She then slowly shook her head no. Her lips were moving but he still couldn't hear what she said.
"Jessica? Did I say something wrong? What's happening?"
She clutched her stomach, her eyes widened.
She then stared at Jay, froze again, and finally her mouth opened wide as she pointed at something behind him. He turned around.
It was there. The tall being that had been haunting both his awake time and his nightmares for the past years was standing in the middle of the parking lot. He suddenly coughed so hard he ended up on the ground. Wouldn't be the first time.
He heard something, a voice so quiet he could barely perceive it. Was it only in his head?
As soon as he could stop coughing, he stood up and, tightly clutching the camera, ran as fast as he could, hoping Jessica would follow.
As her friend was coughing up his lung, Jessica shouted at the Faceless One, demanding it to leave them alone. As Jay stood up and ran, she followed him. However, all this time spent laying unconscious on a mattress didn't help her get in shape ; therefore he reached the road long before she could.
She stopped when she heard the horn and saw the car on the road ; Jay didn't. The driver braked, but it was too late. The person immediately drove away rather than checking if the young man was alive or not.
"Jay?" Jessica called. "You – you can't die now!"
It appeared between her and Jay's body, ready to take each of them to their own grey room. There wouldn't be any escape this time.