Enjoy Your Stay (Darkiplier One-Shot)

I

NOTE:  This work contains no romance/smut. If you are here looking for that, you have come to the wrong place. This is a work of horror. Enjoy your stay.

  Mark is playing Raspy Hill again. He’s not sure why he decided to, because it still scares him half to death, but the fans asked for it, so of course he chose to deliver. He begins his usual intro: “Hello everybody, my name is - “ he cuts himself off. He’s smiling where he usually does, but his camera isn’t where it usually is. As a matter of fact, the camera is nowhere in his immediate sight, which is strange because it almost never leaves his studio. Suddenly Mark’s hands are shaking, but he doesn’t want to admit that he’s scared himself. Living alone often means getting so caught up in your daily routine that sometimes you do things subconsciously out of habit, right? He probably just forgot to set up the camera but started talking without noticing, he tells himself.

    Maybe it’s rightful that he’s not recording.

    Notwithstanding that he hadn’t recorded anything today, Mark decides to play the game by himself a little. He’s embarrassingly flustered and unsettled upon not seeing his camera where he thought it would be. He’d look for it after doing some more exploring in Raspy Hill. Maybe it won’t be as frightening if he isn’t putting it in a video; that way he’ll be a bit closer to reality, right?

    When he turns to look back at the monitor, he notices that the graphics have improved greatly since the last time he played. He didn’t remember hearing about an update at all, much less one this extensive. The sounds are incredibly realistic, and it’s almost as though he’s using his Oculus to see, but better even.

    Then he feels a frigid breeze throw wisps of hair into his eyes. He flinches, jerking his head toward the fan that he can vividly remember turning off. When he turns, however, his studio isn’t there. There’s only more dark night sky and rolling hills… and those fucking mannequins.

    Seriously, what the hell is going on?

    Mark’s house quickly fades away completely, and he’s here, in the game, but it’s more real than what he recalls as his real life seems at this point.

    It’s too much to ask of him to move at this point; if you were in that situation, you’d be paralyzed too, now wouldn’t you?

    He only begins to run when the mannequins get entirely too close to him.

    And then he’s sprinting, and what he can hear is his rough, strained breathing, and the high-pitched laughter of the dolls that are following him seemingly a hell of a lot faster than he can move. All he’s paying attention to is keeping his legs moving as fast as they possibly can, but soon his calves are burning like acid’s eating through his bones, and the mannequins are getting so loud that his heartbeat is drowned out, and he can see them in every direction. He panics. They’re moving more slowly now, but at any rate they’re closing in on him, and the giggling is exploding in his ears with an excruciating pain that resonates completely through his skull. And momentarily, it’s too late.

    All at once, Mark is back exactly where he was before, in his studio. The title screen for Raspy Hill is on his monitor, looping unassumingly. It’s as grainy and pixelated as it should be. The camera sits on its tripod, staring at its owner, its lens resembling the eye of someone who has no knowledge of what just happened.

    Surely that was just a dream. He must have fallen asleep at his desk and had a nightmare, right?

    Stop it, Mark.

    A soft voice that sounds a lot like Mark echoes through the room, bouncing off even the soundproof walls. When he opens his eyes after snapping them shut upon the scare, everything’s the same, but all the lights are off. Cheap jumpscare, he tries to tell himself, repeating in his head a million times that his dogs probably just pulled a cord or something.

You know what’s real when it happens.

Ain’t nothing coincidental about that voice.

You’re a smart man. You need to stop trying to remove me from your life - or from you, more accurately. Your fears are always here, and they’re always observing you. Don’t try to run from them. Don’t try to run from me. Let me in. Welcome me, and you will enjoy my stay in your mind.

Just as he’s about to scream, Mark wakes up, skin crawling, hair soaked in cold sweat. His phone is what woke him up; well, at least that’s normal. He really needs to stop playing horror games before he sleeps.

As he presses Answer, he hears the voice of his stepmom, cheerily greeting him and letting him know that she just wanted to check up on him. All he can manage is a strained “Hello.”

“What’s the matter?” his stepmom asks, sounding genuinely concerned.

“I don’t quite feel like myself.”

It’s not his voice though, and he didn’t say that.