A/N: Sorry for the long time in between updates when I promised they'd be quick. There's no internet in the middle of the woods. Happy Mardi Gras though - laissez les bon temps rouler!
Warm shadow,
Won't you cast yourself on me?
What you got in store for me?
Keep those, eyes closed, next to me.
And I don't want another day to break,
Take our, steal our night away.
- Warm Shadow (Dactyl Remix), Fink
Tim stays to work two more days, making it a week that he's been in the same town. It's a record.
He spends his mornings at the diner, his days at the dock, and on the day that marks off the week he has shrimp etouffee with Jack and Ray. Mercifully their children are with friends that night. Sitting in their normal house, with home-cooked food from their normal kitchen, upsets him and it's all he can do to not let it show. He appreciates the sentiment; their openness and willingness to share their home and their food with him are extraordinary, and Ray turns out to be just as warm as her husband, but his brain screams at him the entire time about how wrong this is, how dangerous it is, and he spends the whole time over-analyzing every little movement, every little word, every little breath he takes while there. When he finally returns to his hotel room he is exhausted and more than looking forward to his morning cup of coffee in an empty diner.
Allie's smoking outside the door as he arrives just after dawn. She looks irritable and tense. Her eyes dart from side to side, glaring at the empty street. Tim raises his eyebrows at her, but she says nothing as she turns to stub out her cigarette so that she can head back inside.
Tim waves her off, indicating that she should finish her smoke. "It's a bit chilly out here," he remarks idly. She shrugs at him, avoiding his eyes. Tim chances a glance inside, wondering if the men who'd hassled her his second morning here had returned. He sees no one.
Not that that ever means anything.
"One of those mornings?"
"Something like that." They sit for a moment more, before she rises. "Come on, I'll get you some coffee."
She's restless. After she pours his coffee she sets about cleaning while waiting for his breakfast to be done. All of the tables are wiped down and spotless, the countertop of the bar likewise. She even goes so far as to wipe down all of the chairs and seats, though they'd probably been cleaned the night before. After Tim's breakfast is served, she begins washing the windows, digging into the crevices of the sills.
When he'd first started eating at the diner, she'd spend most of her time not waiting on Tim in the back room with the cook. In the following days, she'd occasionally sit up front near him, making small talk until another customer would wander in. This current flurry of movement is unusual to his experience. Even the cook is perturbed – before now Tim has never seen him, but he's popped his head out of the door to the back room three times this morning. The fourth time he finally demands her attention, and speaks up.
"Girl, what the hell has gotten into you?"
"Go back to your kitchen, Lafayette," she snaps irritably.
"Excuse me." Allie sighs as he saunters away.
"I'll have to apologize later," she says to herself, frowning.
Tim grimaces in sympathy before digging his pack out of his pocket and offering it to her.
Jay's tired voice is echoing in his ears. "Is smoking your answer to everything?"
He catches her eyes as he tells her something Brian always used to tell him with that wry, knowing, grin he had once had. "It's a wonder you have any friends at all with an attitude like that." She fixes him a look that makes him wonder if he had made it clear that he was joking.
"Sorry," he amends. "I don't have many friends either, if it helps."
"Makes sense, what with your situation and all."
He has a momentary spike of panic before his logical side breaks through – there is no possible way that she knows anything.
areyousure?
"What?" he asks before he can stop himself, cigarette dangling from his lips.
She looks stunned, like she can't believe she said anything. She stumbles over her words more than usual. "I-I just mean that – you know – what with all the traveling you do –"
"How do you know that I travel a lot?"
"I don't – I – I mean I guessed."
"That doesn't mean that I don't have friends."
"I – just – I mean –"
"You just mean what?"
"I just – get a feeling about people sometimes…"
"You get a feeling about people?" He can't help the sneer that comes across his face. He wants to give her the benefit of the doubt, but her feeble attempts aren't good enough to appease his paranoid side, and feelings like that usually turn out to be bullshit.
She's about to respond when Tim hears a commotion in the kitchen. Lafayette is swearing, pans are clattering, and a loud "WHAT THE FUCK?" further accents the strange morning. Allie doesn't so much as blink.
Clenching his jaw, Tim fills her in. "There's something going on in the kitchen," he tells her tersely. Shooting him a worried look, she stands and scurries through the door to the back. She doesn't return for nearly fifteen minutes, and when she does her face is nearly ashen. This does nothing to ease Tim's blood pressure.
He tries to play it off coolly. "What happened?"
She frowns, looking back at the door. "He thought he saw something. It scared him."
"Does that – is that something that happens often?" He dreads the answer.
"He comes in high sometimes, so he can be kind of out of it, but it's never anything too bad. He's probably just coming off of something."
Tim's gut tells him that she's unconvinced.
Worry settles into him throughout the rest of the day. The weather has been spotty the last few days, but today it's a veritable shit-storm. He and Jack struggle to accomplish even the smallest of tasks and eventually Jack writes it off as a bad habit. He gives Tim his paycheck (including what he could have earned had the weather not thwarted them) and tells him to go bunker down in his hotel room where it's dry.
He attempts scrolling the internet for an hour and finds nothing worth his interest. It's the same story with the television. There's no library in this town and while he's always been an avid reader he avoided bringing any books with him just to save packing space.
He ends up going to bed early.
He's in the throws of an uncomfortable dream when a sharp buzzing reaches his consciousness. He spends a moment in confusion before reaching over to the nightstand and clumsily swiping for his phone, answering it.
Jessica's voice is panicked and slightly shrill. "Tim, what's going on?" He rubs the sleep from his eyes, trying to force his brain into action.
"What?"
"Who is she? What's happening? Why haven't you said anything? Is this why you've stayed so long?"
"What are you talking about, Jessica?"
She hesitates. "You haven't seen it?"
His blood runs cold. "Seen what?"
Her voice is shaking. "There's a new Marble Hornets video."
The news slams into him like a diesel-engined truck. "I'll call you back, Jessica." He hesitates before adding, "Be safe." He presses the "off" button on his phone, cutting off her whispered reply of "You too."
He grapples in the dark in search of Jay's laptop. The boot-up time nearly kills him. He's not looked at the channel in weeks. Why now?
youstayedtoolongyoucausedthis
His fingers shake as he inputs Jay's password and email address into the website. Sure enough, there it is. The "secrets" thumbnail is dark and ominous. It is distorted, pixilated, and in black and white. Tim wonders if the shape is supposed to be a face.
He holds his breath and presses play.
Its similar to a totheark video, though even he can tell the difference in the editing. brian'sdead. This is much more simple – a rushed job. It's sloppy and inelegant. Tim can make out the swamp, with its plethora of Spanish Moss solarized. A lone alligator eye blinks up at him, and a rocking chair moves on its own, back and forth, back and forth, slowly. It's hypnotizing.
He sees the outside of the diner.
He sees his own outline, sitting at the window of the diner. A blurry and distorted shape, scratched out with long thin lines approaches him, lingers. As it slides into the booth with him, it becomes apparent that the figure is human and female, though the face is still hidden.
Allie.
It hits him then, that this video is silent. There's no undertone of noise – no whirring, no beeping, no eerie music, no distorted speech. There is nothing.
Do you trust so easily? the video asks, the words forming above an empty coffee mug.
The swamp is full of secrets.
What would it tell you, if you could hear?
Tim shivers – he can make out a large body of water now, alongside himself, Tank, and Jack. Again, attention is drawn to Allie. She is distorted.
The outside of a small shack. There's an old truck parked in the driveway and a large fence around the yard. He sees It, for a split second. At first he thinks it is a tree because of its location, but that symbol appears on screen and he realizes how close It is to the window of the shack and how its orientation must mean its looking inside.
You're running out of time. She's running out of time.
He doesn't like the implication of those words.
The inside of the shack blends with the background due to whatever filter it's been edited with. Jay's voice echoes in his mind, telling him that it's a halftone pattern, not that it really matters. What does matter is the figure of Allie, which is on the ground, dangerously near a coffee table, an anxious Tank hovering closely. She's seizing. Violently. Tim prays she didn't hit her head.
Appalled, he can only stare at the rigidity of her spasming limbs as the sounds of her whimpers mix with the soft whining of the dog, the return of sound stark with its previous absence. She begins sobbing in earnest as It looks in through her window. Her body's trembling intensifies as Tank lays himself on top of her, growling now at the abomination assaulting them, now from the inside. It begins to lift its limbs towards them as the video fades to black, leaving only a single word: Hurry.
Tim doesn't need to be told twice.