Listen to what I say
Moanin' and groanin'
Won't drive those blues away
Lift up your voices in song
You know you've all done wrong

You sinners, drop everything
And let that harmony ring
Up to Heaven
And sing, you sinners

Just wave your arms all about
And let the Lord hear you shout
Pour that music right out
And sing, you sinners

Whenever there's music
That ol' Devil kicks
He don't allow music
By the river Styx

Oh, You're wicked and you're depraved
And you've all misbehaved
Say, If you wanna be saved
Well, sing, you sinners

– Sing, You Sinners

Author's Note:

Hey folks! The story isn't dead! Honestly I've been working on this chapter for about four, five months? A ridiculously long time. I've finally decided its time to just throw it out there. I'd been hoping to get several more chapters done before posting this, but I'm sad to report that I've only gotten the next half a chapter started. C'est la vie. I'll keep working at it. Hopefully things will move a little faster, though my life is a little more hectic than usual, leaving me more tired than usual at night when I do my writing. Some motivation wouldn't be bad though! ;)

Special Music Note:

Thinking of the Alex Pangman version of "Sing, You Sinners" for this one. Up until literally just now I had no idea which version of the song I've been listening to since middle school. I found the song on a CD included with MP3s I got with a CD/MP3 player I was given so many years ago I don't even want to think about it. Her version isn't easy to find, and she's since done a less "funky" version of it – a more clean studio version I don't like as much, but samples of the one I like can be found here:

us/album/sing-you-sinners/id306261838?i=306261841

track/83686009/sing-you-sinners

Not sure if anyone will get why I'm tying this song to this chapter yet – it might become more apparent in hindsight, several chapters from now (hopefully). I'd love to hear everyone's theories though!

Cheers everyone!

He's stupid.

Really stupid.

He always sleeps on the bed nearest the door. He does this not because he likes the draft that comes from it – though he will say in the heat of the summer that it's a perk. No, he sleeps there because it allows him to monitor the comings and goings through it, not so that he can sleep through the comings and goings through it.

Tim awakens not to a redhead in the other bed, but to a note:

Went to Church. Try to be good Timothy, and don't get into any trouble while I'm gone? x

She could be in Portugal by now for all he knows.

He's never slept that deeply with someone else in the room before. Even after he had acclimated himself to Jay's constant presence he slept lightly, always aware on some level of his surroundings.

Allison just walked right out the door.

As he slept in the bed right next to it, oblivious.

Great.

He supposes it's the principal of the thing that has him pissed off the most – on both of their accounts. She left a note, supposedly telling him where she went and implying that she'd be back shecouldhaveleftittothrowyouoffherscentsothatshecouldleaveandnothaveyoufollowimmediately so she probably will be, but she could just as easily not have left a note and left him in the dust to grapple with the events of the last week by himself, so that was nice of her at least. Still, she could damn well have waited until he woke up to leave or at least could have woken him up before she left to let him know what she was doing and allow him to ask important questions like, "Where will you be in case of an emergency?" or "How long do you think you'll be?" and "When should I send in the cavalry to save you?" – things like that.

He gets up, showers. Finds some food in a vending machine. Takes his pills.

He sits.

He smokes a cigarette.

9am.

He checks his phone. No missed messages or calls.

He grabs one of those awful plastic-wrapped paper cups, fills it with water, drinks.

He picks up one of the musty books Allie unpacked last night, rifles through it.

Puts it aside.

Smokes another cigarette.

9:30am.

Shit.

He's already restless, unsure of what to do with himself. They have no plan of action; last night's conversation didn't exactly lend itself to one. He has no choice but to sit tight and impatiently await his companion's return.

Except…

Jay's laptop sits on the floor waiting for him. Its weight is familiar as he lifts it from the ground to his lap, flips up the screen, and wakes it from sleep mode. He opens up Adobe Premiere, and waits for it to struggle through Jay's outdated software.

He goes through the recording he made last night and decides he doesn't feel like editing it much. He adds text at the beginning that explains what he's been doing since he last assured viewers that "everything is fine," how he ended up in Louisiana, what happened while he was in Allie's hometown and how the newest hack tied in, and why they had to flee. He bookends the end of the recording with the information that he's fine for now, and that he's going to be doing a lot of research since he's found some new leads thanks to his new ally. Its text heavy, and the footage consists merely of their voices and a wall that occasionally shows their shadows, but he can't bring himself to care. Its not like he has any footage to pad it with. He'd stopped filming himself long ago.

As it renders, he considers the implications of uploading it. Not only is it returning to a paranoid habit that he'd picked up from Jay, it also adds a further complication. If he uploads this video and Allie – who said she'd been subscribed from nearly the beginning – gets a notification, she'll know that he filmed the entirety of their conversation. He doesn't know her well and doesn't know how she'll take that. Thinking back on it, did he really need to be so secretive? Its not like she's a stranger to the concept that he and Jay filmed every little thing that happened in their lives, just in case something became noteworthy. Why would last night have been any different?

Becauseyoupridedyourselfonnotbeingcompelledtodoitbynotbeingsowhollyconsumedlikealexlikejaylikebrian

The other problem that comes to mind is that fact that just by editing and uploading this, he's officially reopening this chapter of his life – this won't be some weird little blip on the radar. He'll be back to constantly filming every little thing, back to constantly trying to wrap his mind around things he's starting to think he doesn't even want to understand, and back to being on the run.

The thought alone is draining. He can't imagine living it again.

There were times where it felt like a dream, didn't it? Something far away and distant, that you could almost pretend happened to someone else…

He tries to remember why they did it – why Jay did it. Tim never had the urge to document everything the way Jay did, to keep it all for posterity, to have a record just in case someone needed to know what happened. He knows its bullshit; the idea that someone cares about what happens to him, that someone wants to know his story. What he does care about, however, is keeping a record for himself, so that he knows where he's going and what he's doing. He never liked having lost time – even as a boy it frightened him more so than it might have other children, who's ideas of object permanence were still delicate and fragile. Tim knew even as a child, that unaccounted time meant something dangerous and scary.

Perhaps that piece of mind alone was worth restarting the habit.

Jay's laptop gives a cheery ping, alerting Tim to the fact that the rendering process has finished.

Time to dive back in…

Taking a deep breath, he pulls up Firefox, where the YouTube logo waited for him. As he logs-in he has to bite back a curse – there's a new video glaring up at him from the top of the screen, uploaded fourteen hours ago. The binary in the title is easy enough to translate back into text; "maps" delivers that plus creepy footage of himself and Allison as well as old footage Tim had hoped to never see again.

Wonderful.

Luckily for her, Allie didn't return until after Tim had finished seething about it. After he changed all of his/Jay's passwords and uploaded the new entry (edited to reflect that he has no idea what was going on in the latest hack) he'd had nothing but time to chain smoke and get over it.

At least a little bit.

Enough so that by the time she comes in through the door with a small "hey" he is able to grunt a little less grumpily at her as she drops her purse on the floor and collapses into a chair.

'There's a new video," he announces without preamble, not even looking at her from his position on the bed.

"What?" she asks, craning to see his lips move. He repeats himself, voice monotone, though looking at her this time.

"Wonderful," she replies just as dryly when she catches the message.

"Do you want to see it?" He starts to rotate the computer towards her. She shakes her head, however.

"It can wait."

Tim supposes he needs to stop comparing her to Jay, but he finds this lack of urgency odd. Jay would have been on it in seconds, breaking down every nook and cranny of every frame. He supposes once she becomes the star of the peepshow's sequel she'll start singing to Jay's tune sooner rather than later. Searching for something to fill the silence he finally ventures back to the other irritating topic of the day.

"So….church?"

She hums at him, kicking off her shoes. "Yep."

"You needed to go to church, the day after…well." He stops short. He shouldn't need to explain to her the amount of danger they're in, the amount of time they don't have to get on top of this. Luckily, she picks up on the skepticism in his voice.

"Yes, I did. Did you forget already? My friend died. Church is usually part of the grieving process."

Tim winces. Right, nice job Timmy ol' boy.

"Besides," she continues. "I like going to church. I like old church buildings. Make me feel safe. They're comforting." She hesitates. "I've never been attacked by that thing, at a church."

He raises his eyebrows. "So, why don't you just stay at the church then?" His question is met with a sad smile.

"Can't live your whole life in a church, Timothy," she says simply in her drawl. "There's a whole wide world out there, and you gotta see it. You gotta face it. You can't hide in there forever. Sometimes you just gotta go out and face your problems, even if you don't want to." She touches the bruises on her neck gently, unconsciously. "They always end up catchin' up to you in the end anyway."

He knows, but he says nothing.

They sit for a moment as the sound of midmorning traffic starts to lull, before she sighs and looks up at him from beneath her hair. "Guess I should follow my own motto, huh? Let's have a look at that video." She crosses over to sit by him, and as they watch her frown deepens. While he's already ruining her mood, he decides to go ahead and tell her about his own entry. He expects her temper to flare, but he only receives her affirmation: "That was probably a good idea."

He can tell she's not exactly thrilled about it, but it seems she had expected him to do something like this. He continues cautiously. "We should probably – I mean, maybe we should –"

"Yeah."

"What I'm saying is, I think it might be a good idea if we started –"

"Filming everything again, I know. I'm with you."

"Oh, right… I don't – I don't have the camera anymore. I just used the laptop last night."

"Okay, so we need to get new cameras. We should do that by tonight, then."

"Right."

"Okay."

He huffs. While she's agreeing with his ideas, this is still painful, nearly so much so as talking to Jay about literally anything was. Since when did he become the paragon of communication?

Nothing ventured nothing gained…

He clears his throat; he still has one more unpleasant topic to broach, especially while his companion is still amiable. "I was also thinking, it might be a good idea for you to start taking these." He rattles his pill bottle. Its only just occurred to him, but the idea feels like a sensible one. Things between Jay and himself fell apart quickly when Jay stopped acting like himself. If he can prevent the same outcome this time around, maybe there'll be less bloodshed and regrets.

"No."

Tim imagines throttling her, shaking some sense into her, and regrets it immediately as he looks back at the shadows on her skin. Still, after agreeing to everything else, this feels downright stupid to differ on. This is after all about her health and general wellbeing.

Really was hoping to be stuck with someone more agreeable and less…reckless this time around.

"No?" he asks, hoping he misunderstood her, that she really wasn't this dense.

She takes her index and middle finger and decisively brings them to her thumb, shaking her head. "Not happening," she clarifies, not that he really needed her words. Her body language said it all, annoyingly enough.

"And why not? You saw what happened to Jay –"

"And I saw what happens to you, when you go without them! I won't be taking any of yours, and it'll be a pain in the ass to get my own – really, did you think Jay was going to be able to get them that easily, even if he'd actually gone to that appointment?"

"Jessica did," Tim points out before being cut off again.

"It's not happening, I'm not taking the pills."

"You're a fool," he warns her. "For all we know that's what seems to keep that thing away, at least temporarily."

"Maybe I don't want to keep it away."

He scoffs at her. "What, are you some kind of glutton for punishment? You might not be so lucky the next time it shows up."

"We might need to keep it close at some point, is all I'm saying. If you're able to keep a level head while on the pills while I draw it near without them, we might be able to make some progress."

"That sounds stupidly dangerous."

"It probably is, Timothy."

There's no arguing with her; he shelves the discussion. Instead he takes her "order," having been "allowed" to get their much cheaper lunch from the gas station this time around. She frowns at her wilted sandwich as she unwraps it, but otherwise stays silent on the issue. When they finish eating, they decide there's no time like the present to go and get their new camera equipment. They plan to move motels afterwards, so they pack first. Allie consolidates the research again while Tim takes their overnight bags to the car. Not wanting to leave things in the backseat where they scream "steal me!" he decides to rearrange the disaster he's let brew in the trunk. Old papers are scrapped, bottles of water long melted with plastic from the heat tossed. Its as he reaches further back however, that he discovers something much heavier than the rest, wrapped in one of his flannel shirts.

He'll be damned.

He finishes his task quickly, before taking his find to Allison. She's surprised, but not nearly as surprised as he feels she should be.

"You found it in the trunk?" she confirms, eyebrows high. "That's lucky."

"I threw it out," he frowns, pressing the power button on Jay's camera to no avail. "Or at least, I thought I did. I didn't need it anymore…"

"Is there a chance you changed your mind? Or that someone changed your mind for you?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I'm just saying…that mask had a way of, well, finding its way back to you. Sometimes it might have been you and other times it might have been…Brian."

He doesn't like how she hesitates on the name.

"Brian's dead," he tells her with as much dispassion as he can muster, which thankfully after years of practice is quite a bit.

"Yes," she says slowly. "But it seems others are taking up his mantle."

She's not wrong, he thinks, as they climb into his car. Allie gives him the directions to somewhere she thinks they'll get a good deal without getting shoddy tech, and he steers the vehicle back towards the heart of the city.

"What do you think it means?" she finally asks, looking at him intently.

"What does what mean?" He throws her a quick glance, as much of one as he can afford. He knows it must not be easy to understand him when they're in the car like this. She's leaning forward so slightly he's not sure she notices it, trying to see as much of his face as she can, but he can't exactly turn towards her in order to make lip reading easier.

"The new hack. I mean, the first one that was easy, right? I was being attacked, and whoever it was wanted you to know about it and I guess help me. But this last one…there wasn't really a command there. Just… 'hey here's a thing.'"

"Well, think about it…"

"I'm not exactly great at that stuff."

"What, thinking?"

She snorts at him, rolling her eyes. "Decoding, or whatever. I'm not one to go too cryptic."

"You and me both," he admits. "Jay was always better at it than I was. I never had the patience. Alex was easy – I understood him, as much as I didn't want to. And while I don't think A was exactly going to Z in the end, I could see what he was trying to do. Predict what he was going to do. But the totheark videos? That was Jay's area."

She takes a breath, puffs it out into her bangs which fly up into the air. "Maps, obviously go with travel. Driving, going to different places. The first map was centered on Alabama – where you're from. The line coming out from it connects to where I live in Louisiana. So we're connected, obviously, since we met at the diner and have both had encounters with Tall and Faceless. And know about Marble Hornets."

"How did you even find the MarbleHornets channel, anyway?" Tim asks. "It wasn't exactly a high publicity production, and while there were hits on the channel it wasn't enough to garner a lot of attention… Jay didn't exactly advertise it much, surprisingly enough. Were you looking for stuff like that? For other people, like you?"

She wrinkles her nose. "No, I stumbled across it actually. It was kind of a slap to the face, really. I'd gone through my phase of wanting to know more, of wanting to do something other than ignore the problem, by that point. By the time I found the channel I'd given up."

"You just stumbled across it?"

"Don't sound so skeptical, Timothy."

He shoots her a mildly annoyed look. "It just hard to believe, especially since now you're kind of a part of it."

"Only kind of?" She was teasing, but she had a point.

"I'm sure it was on my recommended feed at one point. I made it a habit for a while to troll around YouTube looking for supernatural shit – I mean a girl living in Louisiana who knew that any of that stuff she'd grown up hearing about had the possibility of being real? Alices and curiosity go together my friend. I went down the rabbit hole and the white rabbit said 'partake,' so I did."

The electronics store they're patronizing is small – mom and pop through and through. Since Jay's camera seems undamaged other than an empty battery, they replenish their stores of tapes, batteries, and charging cables before debating on the model of the second camera they need. Allie suggests that they go digital for sure on that one, just to contrast with the Mini-DV tapes Jay's outdated camera still uses. They hope that if there are indeed differences between what's recorded on each format, that information may lead them to some kind of conclusion. It's a long shot, but there's no point in not taking it.

They also conclude that the idea of going "hands free" is an attractive one. While one person controls the hand-held recorder, framing things with finesse and preciseness, the other will simply allow the camera to do the work, using a wide angle lens to capture things that might not attract their attention until afterwards. Also, if they end up in trouble, as the most likely case will be, having someone unencumbered by a camera in their hands is probably the smart way to go.

The GoPro then, is the most obvious conclusion, complete with a chest harness. Tim is volunteered to man that camera, after Allie somewhat loudly and embarrassingly proclaims that she's "damn well not wearing that on my chest."

Its late afternoon and the golden sun is beginning to lower in the sky by the time they choose their next temporary residence. It's in the middle of the city in a multi-story building that's a little too high for Tim's liking. He doesn't like their options for escape here, but Allie seems unconcerned.

It's slightly infuriating.

They eat their Chinese take-out dinner with the window open, overlooking a city just beginning to hustle with pre-night life. They're trying to take stock of where they are and what needs to happen next. Jay's camera sits atop a newly purchased tripod, the red recording light taunting Tim from across the room. They're good in the camera department, and Jay's laptop, while outdated, seems like it will last for sometime yet. Even if that fails, Allie has a laptop of her own, and while it doesn't have all of the editing software Jay's does, they can cross that bridge only if they have to later.

Allie has enough money socked away for food and motels for a time – she jokes that she's so boring that all she ever spends money on is dog food and gasoline for her fuel-burning eco-terrorist truck from the 70s and she never does anything exciting so she has nothing to do with her time but work. Tim feels some shame at not being able to contribute more, before he remembers that he only made his last paycheck thanks to the redhead sitting next to him, so she's fully aware of his limitations.

Thankfully, they don't need much living this lifestyle – food, gas, motel, phone bills paid, free-wifi wherever they can find it. They can skrimp and save where they can, if Allie doesn't always insist on fancy food. When they have the time, she says she can do odd jobs over the internet, push comes to shove. She tells him that it's amazing, the things people will pay for, most of which don't even take much skill, just a willingness to participate in the odd, no questions asked. They don't really have a destination, but they're in a big city so there are still some options around that lets them stay on the move before they make up their minds. They can spend the next few days researching and going through old documents, which should be enough to find a direction to go in.

He hopes they find one quickly. He wants this done, whatever "this" is. Live or die, it has to be done because he simply just can't do this for the rest of his life.

He's nudged out of his thoughts by a sneaker against his knee. Allie has finished her dinner and is looking at him thoughtfully as she toys with the fork and carton in her lap. "I keep thinking about what you said earlier," she informs him, squinting in the dying light. It gives the green of her eyes an alien look that unsettles him.

"About the MarbleHornets channel?" she continues. "You asked me how I found it, before saying that it was funny I was now apart of it. Do you think there might be others?"

"Others?" he repeats, unclear as to where she's heading with this.

"Yeah, others who've seen the channel and are now involved somehow?"

Tim doesn't think his sudden wave of nausea has anything to do with the view out of the window and his realization of how high it is. "I don't –" he starts.

"What if it was only chance that you came across me and not somebody else who'd also seen the channel? What if there are other people out there who've seen That Thing, and maybe have even seen the channel as well? Couldn't you have just as easily run into someone other than me?" She's leaning forward, eager.

Tim just feels sick. "You're saying that I've infected everyone who's seen the channel?"

"No! No, Tim, that's not what I'm saying at all!"

"Kind of seems like it is."

"Hey, I was infected long before YouTube even existed, alright, so –"

"So, you're the exception then, but everyone else –"

"Has anyone else messaged you saying that they've been seeing it too?"

"Not anyone I actually believe, mostly it's a bunch of kids pretending to be in on the 'story' too…"

"But, what if? What if one of them actually is? Do you realize what that means?

"That this is all my fault?"

"No, that there are other people out there trying to cope, who might know more ways of dealing with it, who might have new information on it!"

He pinches the bridge of his nose to quell the building migraine as she continues on.

"We should follow up, go back through the messages, contact them, see if we can weed them out. See how long they've been infected, see if other people in their families have seen it, too!"

"How exactly do you propose to do that?"

"Cross referencing. Take a look at their digital footprint, see if it matches up to what they've said. Maybe there are others that recorded things, too."

"And then what? Do we just invite them to join us? Get a band together and sit around the campfire and hash this all out?"

Allison glares at him, as if he's purposefully trying to rain on her parade.

"We communicate, Timothy. We talk to them, learn what they know, share what we know. Keep an open line. See if we can track movements, find patterns, something!" She hoists herself off of the sill, before crossing to Jay's laptop. Its not password protected, though now he thinks it should be since she's just using it whenever the hell she wants to.

"You talk as if that's the key to all this – do a shit-ton of research and we'll find the magic key to defeat this thing."

"Do you have any better ideas?" she asks archly, pausing her rapid typing. "No? Nothing? Then maybe this isn't so bad, then."

"What are you doing?" he snaps at her, throwing his empty carton at the bin. It misses, only furthering his foul mood.

"Did you ever even think to Google it?" she asks him, voice haughty.

"Google it. Are you kidding?"

She looks at him in that funny way she has that clearly demands he answer the question, asinine though it may be.

"It occurred to me that this is the sort of thing that probably can't be solved by using Google."

"You'd be surprised at what's on the deep web my friend. Not that you need to go to that corner of the internet to find something useful." She beckons him over, to where she's performed a search that's returned a couple of thousand hits.

"What if there's people like us out there, and they're talking? What if this isn't just something that happened to you and your friends, or me and my family? There are so many people out there who don't have a clue what's happening to them, what if we could help? Their best hope would be for us to find a way to stop this, to keep that thing trapped or weak or whatever the case is. Our best hope is to have as much knowledge as we possibly can so that we can do what we need to do and not die in the process."

She gives him a shrewd glance.

"Look, if you don't want to help, fine. I'll do it on my own. I'm back in this, for better or for worse. I know your way of doing things usually includes charging head first into enemy territory and tackling things, but my way of moving forward includes careful planning. If you don't like that, feel free to take off and do your own thing. Go stick your head in the sand or go back to Alabama and wander around Rosswood Park some more."

Tim says nothing, but turns his back to her and goes to the window, cupping his hand around the lighter and flicking it to life. He's in this alright, but for all of her bluster he can't tell if she's on the right track or not. Something about it all doesn't sit right, but he's hard pressed to say what.