Jay woke to the sharply distinct smells of copper and oak. His world was sideways, vision blurred into dark browns. Moving a little, he felt his face scratch against splintered floorboards. For a moment Jay tensed, muscles pulled taut, blinking rapidly in search of a masked figure. His eyes registered nothing in the shade of the night.
Hissing as he rolled onto his side and slowly pushed himself up, Jay's fingers brushed against a spot of warm and wet. A gash on his arm oozed steadily. His thin shirt was doing nothing to staunch the bleeding. He gathered himself up into a tighter form, wrapping his arms around his knees - a frail bubble against the cool air. The shack he was curled up in lacked window panes, and the door frame was empty and gaping. Jay could barely see the darker tips of trees against the night sky when he craned his neck.
Jay let out a shuddering breath and heaved himself up. Staggering out the doorway into the inky darkness of too familiar woods, he racked his brain for clues as to how he had ended up here. The masked man, with awful pits for eyes, was the only thing he could remember. That, a knife, and a shock of pain. Somewhere in the back of his mind Jay yearned quietly for his camera. The security it offered him was missing. He wondered if the masked man might have taken it. Then again, what purpose would there have been in doing so?
After ceaseless wandering through the blackness of the forest, Jay finally broke through the tree-line into a softly illuminated clearing. Jay found his car sitting alone in the parking lot. Opening the door, he slowly slid in.
There was a little black rectangle sitting in his passenger seat. Jay eyed it contemplatively, grabbed it, and stuck it into his pocket.
OOO
Jay sat on the edge of his bed, arm hastily bandaged with strips of white cloth. He had shoved the tape into his hotel room's TV and now watched the small screen anxiously. The first few seconds were distorted blurs and static noise. Then, Jay saw his own feet, moving quickly through the woods.
He heard his own breathing, heavy and uneven. The crunch of the brown leaves and the wave of the camera was an all-too-familiar sight. He ran for a long time (from what he was running from Jay could not remember), but suddenly the footage took a strange turn. The camera took a nose dive and hit the ground, camera man falling somewhere out of sight with a thud. Jay heard himself grunt, then the desperate scrabbling of a struggle, while the camera remained still on the ground.
"No!" Jay heard himself shout. "Get off! Get away from me you monst-"
Then there was silence. Abrupt, horrifying silence as the camera strained to refocus itself. And suddenly the camera was floating through the air, picked up by an unfamiliar hand, and aimed at Jay's newly unconscious body. Face down in the dirt, there was a fresh cut on Jay's arm, and it was just beginning to bleed. The camera rotated, and was met by the unfeeling black sockets of a pale white mask. Jay clenched his teeth and curled his fingers into the bed sheets.
White noise cut away from the mask. The next few minutes of the tape were unclear. The tape kept cutting back and forth between the masked visage and Jay lying still in the shack. A hand appeared from the shadows and began to pull at his hair. Petting it. Running gloved fingers through it over and over... The mask flashed again and again, the distortion closing in, and Jay could feel his heart pounding in his chest. A final message snapped across the screen before the footage blacked out.
ϚΘӎΞ
ЪДϾЌ
Jay sat in silence, in the dark, and ran his fingers through his hair. Chest heaving, Jay slumped against his pillows and dreamed about darkness.
