Finding out more about the tape proved to be harder than they'd thought. Among those few who would talk to them in the first place were those who knew nothing about the rumor, those who refused to relate to them the rumor, and a handful of young girls who more likely would just rather oggle Dean, much to Sam's displeasure, as he was the one, now, with the task of making sure his brother restrained himself.
"Well that got us a whole lot of nothing." the elder complained as they drove toward another school where they could camp out around dismissal time, and pull aside people with the lie that they were reporters or something, the usual, and most successful excuse.
"Patience, Dean..." Sam muttered, rifling through some more things in the stack of newspapers.
"And you're littering my car with crap." he glanced in the mirror, looking into the backseat where there was a shuffled mess of newspapers. "Couldn't you at least take clippings or something?"
Sam sighed frustratedly, "Allright, look, I'll take them into our room when we get back to the hotel today." he agreed.
Dean nodded with approval. "That's more like it."
"But I like to have them with me... when we travel around, so I can check up on things on the way..." he tried one last time to justify the stacks.
"No. Look, if you want it to be portable, take clippings..." he emphasized, "And put it in a journal, like Dad's. Only you would call it a scrapbook, Sammy."
"Haha." he glared over at his brother.
"Or a diary."
"Very funny."
"Yeah, whatever." Dean rolled his eyes. Pssh, just 'cause he had no sense of humor... "Point is, I want them out by tonight."
Sam nodded, "I got that."
-
He was dropped off at the hotel to research while Dean went out 'gathering information'... more like carousing. Sam sighed, and shook the bangs out of his eyes, popping open a can of soda and taking a drink.
He sat down on his bed, and stretched out, first thing was first, cut out all the relevant newspapers... with a sigh, he set to work with a pair of scissors.
-
Dean came bursting in the door at about 1:30 AM, half drunk and grinning.
"Did you actually find out anything about the tape?" Sam asked, not even bothering to look up from the computer screen. He was surrounded by little scraps of papers, a gluestick, some half-buried scissors, and a notepad already full front to back with little glued in newspaper clippings.
"Hm, I don't know, how about you, Sammy?" he grinned lopsidedly, and walked over to the other bed, dumping his bag down.
"You're really wearing that nickname out." he replied angrily, typing something up.
Dean sighed, and sat, leaning his elbows on his knees and trying to get a glimpse of what
Sam was working on, "No really. We both know that six hours of you in front of a computer screen is way more productive than six hours of me out clubbing."
Sam smirked. There was no arguing with that. "Well," he began, leaning back and stretching his arms and neck, as he'd been hunched over the laptop for quite a time. "Spent almost all the time searching around on various messageboards, trying to find all I can about this tape myth. Didn't get too much. Rumors and kids being how they are, alot of it's just made up, but with how much certain things seemed to be popping up, I think there's a few constants we can count on." he leaned back over the machine and pulled up another window.
Dean nodded, "All right, shoot."
"Well, it looks like there's a couple of images in this thing that really stand out. Uh, there's a... white ring against a black circle, a woman brushing her hair in the mirror, the same woman diving off a cliff..."
"Wait, wait, wait..." Dean interrupted, "If they've all supposedly seen this video, why are they able to write about it before they die?"
"Well, apparently the video doesn't kill you immediately. These all also say that after you watch it, you get a phone call, and someone tells you that you have seven days to live."
He raised an eyebrow. "A phone call." he repeated skeptically, "Y'know, the more I hear about this thing, the more it seems like total crap."
"Just hear me out!" Sam pleaded, "There's more. They say there's a way to stop the curse from killing you."
Dean chuckled. "Useful to know. Allright, what is it?"
"Ah..." he scrolled around a page for a little bit, trying to find it, "They say to lift the curse off yourself, you have to show the tape to another person."
Dean smirked, "Likely story. No wonder so many people have been dying, with a cure like that."
"Supposedly some have lived, though." Sam looked up, "There's some legitimate accounts of people who've seen, showed others, and lived. But there's even more people who've shown others the tape, and died. It's inconsistent."
He nodded again, "That all you got?"
"Pretty much, yeah." he straightened yet again, saved a few things, then closed the laptop and set about trying to organize the little scraps all over his bed, "Dare I ask what happened to you?"
Dean grinned, "I was hoping you would." he reached into the bag he'd thrown down, and pulled out a plain, unmarked black videocassette, holding it up triumphantly.
Sam's eyes went wide, "Dean, you didn't..." he breathed.
"Naw, don't worry, I didn't watch it..." he smiled, "But some chick offered to give hers to me, probably to lift the curse off herself..." this thought seemed to bring him back down out of the clouds slightly. He sighed.
"I'm sorry, Dean." Sam muttered... though knowing his brother would get over it. After all, he'd probably only just met her and chatted a bit in whatever bar, before she shoved the thing at him, and they went their separate ways.
"Yeah, don't worry about it." he muttered, "I just figured we could do with one less of these things floating around in the world." he held it out to Sam.
He took it, and nodded, still cleaning up some newspaper clippings.
"All right, well if you don't mind, then I'm going to sleep. As it is right now, tomorrow I'll probably be up late."
"You're always up late." said Sam, stacking the papers together, and setting them aside.
"Late-er." Dean rolled his eyes and corrected. "Don't you be up researching too much
either. I know you always pull that laptop of yours out after you think I'm asleep."
The younger looked over him with an expression of mild surprise, which was matched with a sly grin.
"Night, Sammy." he flopped over, and pulled up the covers, turning out the lights.
"Night..." Sam quietly responded, looking down at the tape. He didn't need this getting back out of their hands again... carefully sliding it under his pillow, right next to the gun that was always beneath there, he lay down, as usual waiting for Dean to go to sleep.
-
Everything was black. Something was whistling, a faraway, echoing sound that didn't seem completely natural... it grew in strength, as if coming nearer, and a searing white glow burned a circle in his vision. It disappeared.
Blood red water flowed away... waves carrying it to some unknown destination.
A deep, wet breathing, labored, loud. Everything was white, and in the center of the emptiness sat an unoccupied chair, simple, made of wood. White.
A thousand points of light tore through a textured blackness, like slow-moving meteors.
A blank wall, an oval window in the right corner... or was it a window? A reflection? A woman stared blankly out at him, pulling a brush calmly through long dark hair.
The image flipped, the mirror or window was on the left. Someone was retreating away backwards from inside it. He thought he heard a song...
"Here we go, the world is spinning,
when it stops, it's just beginning,"
The breathing continued. The image flipped again. The woman was looking over to where the mirror had been just before.
Something flashed, sharp, gone.
The top corner of a house with a slanted roof, the foreground to a cloudy grey sky, but everything was grey. Someone was standing in a closed window, looking down.
A windswept tree stood on a cliff, its thin, ragged form desperately clinging to the grass and earth above the sheer rock that lay beyond, and the fading grey horizon. Then a speck, like an insect wandered across the scene, as if it were only a painting or a picture, spiraling in toward the middle. It's wings fluttered like it would fly away.
A disgusting squishing noise sounded before a human mouth came into view, stretched wider than a mouth should go, stark, bone-white teeth stood out amidst the dark inside of the mouth and the dirty grey skin around it.
He felt his body twitch reflexively with the sudden, disturbing sight, but beyond that couldn't move, couldn't open his eyes.
A noise like a twittering bird sped up and twice as loud, something was writhing back and forth, something dark.
A crescent moon, then a burning bush... a dark, bent treelike form, branches stretching toward the sun, and reeling from the wind with a gold flame consuming it from the top down.
Then a scream rang out, mechanized, sounding more like the beep of a machine than a human's voice, a finger descended on a rusted screw, blood flooding out of the puncture wound.
A gasp, his hands closed around some kind of fabric, but he could feel his own fingernails digging painfully into his palms even through this.
That disgusting squishing noise again, an endless shot of wriggling maggots... it flashed, were they humans now?
That same chair was now at the corner of a table, upon which rested a glass of clear water. The chair was being pushed out by an unseen force. A centipede, out of proportion, it must have been, it was at least as big as the chair itself crawled out from beneath, taking a curving path away across the white.
Some kind of animal limped across a doorway, dark earth crumbling beneath its three paws, the fourth a mere bloody stub raised into the air. A shot of its eye.
The crescent moon.
Eight human fingers twitching in a box, newly severed, the nerves within them still firing, trying to move, to escape the confinement. The burning tree came again, amidst the endless scream, but it hadn't been burned at all. The fires still danced along the branches, like golden leaves in the fall. The picture lingered much longer than before. Whitenoise broke into the scream.
The same writhing figure appeared, the noises all distorted into one another now.
He was aware of himself flailing uselessly, something holding his limbs down, tangling them up, keeping them in place. He moved faster and faster and faster, his strokes becoming more desperate against the invisible captor, but to no avail.
The scream faded away, and the woman in the mirror appeared herself, turning toward him from where she'd been examining her reflection. Her hair was now neatly up in a bun. She gave him a knowing look, though her expression didn't change. There was something in those dark, blank eyes...
The corner of the house appeared again, the window was empty.
The chair, upside down and spinning.
A ladder stood against a glass wall, reflected against itself. The hall sloped upwards and to the right.
Dark waves washed up on a darker shore, wet, sandy beach with rocks jutting out in the background. Dark bodies, inhuman, were touched by the water's tide, moving ever-so-slightly along with it. They were dead. Off in the distance something flashed pure white against the dim, a tower silhouetted on the sky.
The song quietly started up again, a haunting tune.
"Sun comes out, and we all laugh,
sun goes down, and we all die..."
The same grassy cliff came up, zooming in on the scene with the scraggly tree as if running forward. The woman who had been brushing her hair stood front and center of the image, staring out at the ocean beyond. She fell forward, her limp arms forced out to the sides as she took a swan dive over the dropoff.
The ladder teetered, falling away.
The crescent moon was waning, the new moon came, an eclipse, a white circle scorching his eyes...
The ladder clattered soundlessly onto the ground. Breathing. Guttural breathing.
There was a clearing, surrounded by tall, spindly trees. Mist and cloud covered the ground and sky like underbrush, and leaves on the barren branches. In the middle of the grassy area was a small round structure made of stone.
In a flash, everything was black.
-
Sam felt his eyelids over his eyes again, aware that he'd been asleep, now barely aware that he was once again awake. There was a moment of calm, before visions came rushing back to him.
With a strangled gasp, he sat bolt upright, eyes wide in the darkness. His laptop slid off his chest as he sat up and hit the floor with a slam. His gaze darted wildly around the room. where was he, who was he? What had just happened? What were those... those things he'd just seen, the images, and how had he seen them? His mind felt like it was splitting... that was... the worst nightmare he'd ever had! He raised a hand to his forehead and touched it tenderly.
Something stirred beneath a blanket not too far away. He gasped again. What was here? Something was in there with him. His hand shot beneath the pillow, groping around for his gun. It clasped around something smooth and cold, and pulled it out.
He looked at the strange shape in the darkness, a rectangle... not a gun. What on earth...
Then it hit him, The tape... he thought, Beneath my pillow... my dream... the images, the woman in the mirror, diving off the cliff... had he... dreamed what was on the tape?
The familiar jingling ringtone sounded out in the night, making him jump nervously, his entire body immediately tensed. He stared blankly as it continued to ring… twice… three times…
"Ahhh..." came a frustrated moan from the next bed, "Damnit, Sam, that's yours, now pick it up."
Sam looked wide-eyed at his brother, who didn't pay him any attention, facing the other direction anyway. He made a muffled noise in his throat... at least Dean couldn't sense his total and absolute fear...
A shaking, cold sweaty hand reached out for the small device on the nightstand. It was barely illuminated by the green glow of the numbers on the clock, reading 3:12. He opened up the cellphone and answered in a broken voice, "H-hello?"
A childlike response came to him, "Seven Days..."
"Oh god..."
---
Author's Ending Note Thingy: So when I wrote this, the ring tape was not nearly as creepy or well written as I wanted it to be. I might go back and change this as well. I need this chapter to be as absolutely terrifying as the real images were.
