entrancelogs | i've got demons running 'round in my head [open]

"No. No!" He doesn't know who he's addressing. All of it, just all of it. "You don't know that!"

With those words, Jay's grip on the shadow's neck finally falls slack, and his double scrambles back across the floor, broken camera still clutched in one hand. A frantic smile tugs at his lips, like it's unsure whether to laugh or worse.

"You're fucking monsters, both of you," it wheezes, still inching backwards. "And you're n͞ȩvér g̶òin͜g t́o ad̴̖̺͕͖̘m͕̟̻̦it̸̜̯ ̴̬̳̭̥t͇̪̙͖̙̮̀h̺̠͍ạ͓̬͈̹̖t͏͉̜̫̠͔͚͎ ̼̥̰̟͈ͅt̟̳̳̥͉͈͞o y̮̲̳o̜̥̟̩͖̮̮u̹͔̟̲̺r̠͚̫͎͚͜ͅs͎̠e̦l͕̠͜v͏è͇̤̥̞̙s̺͕̞̦̙͓̪!̺̗̟̣"

There was something wrong with its voice before, but now the sound has started degrading rapidly, like someone dragged a magnet across the tape.

Shit.

No, no, this isn't -

It's starting to distort. It's starting to flux into something else, and Tim twists at the implacable grip with one final tremendous wrench, ripping himself free from the shadow's grasp. He slams a foot into the thing's knee, but its shrill, flurrying laughter is like knives against his eardrums.

"Jay, we gotta go!" It's like shouting through a raging gale. "Whatever it is, it's - I don't think this is supposed to happen!"

"This wasn't supposed to happen," Tim's shadow hisses, a mocking echo.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

The shadow heaves itself onto all fours, twitching like something out of Jacob's Ladder. When it moves, it pulls the area around it with it. The picture drags and distorts, limbs multiply and reset, and for a moment, a wide patch of flesh glitches out of view, exposing a muscular system of tangled black tape stretched over a wireframe.

When it looks up, it's wearing the mask.

Of course it is.

Jay scrambles to his feet and bolts.

Nope. Definitely not supposed to happen.

Whatever this is, it sure as hell doesn't befit the standard lookto this shit. Tim's shadow starts to laugh, a hissing symphony of hideously amused sibilance.

It's time to go.

"The hell is that?" he manages, breathless, over his shoulder.

"That's not me," he wheezes in return, like that's the part that needs clarifying.

He can hear that thing gaining on them, and from the way Tim's breathing (just Tim; Jay's fine, he's just fine), he doubts they can keep this up for much longer.

He spots a door leading off from the hallway and grabs Tim by the arm, tugging him toward it. The steam looks significantly thicker in there, which could either help them lose their pursuer or make the chase much harder. Or trap them at a dead end.

Jay allows himself a little scrap of hope.

“Now is really not the time for denial, Jay!” Tim snarls. He’ll deal with his own shdow’s bullshit later, assuming he gets the chance. Jay’s leading with a grip around Tim’s arm, and for now he lets it happen, lets him weave through the clouds of thick, gaseous white.

Whatever Jay’s shadow just ruined into, it’s probably looking for a fight.

“What do you have on you besides a camera?”

Jay presses his back up against a wall and frantically feels through his pockets, rambling as he does so. "No, I mean I'm not...I can't, I know that's obvious, but I'm not, like, a twenty-foot tall...I guess, metaphorically or whatever, but--pocketknife."

He retrieves the knife, tilting it so Tim can see (not that that's particularly easy, with this fog).

"That's it. Didn't even give me a spare card for this thing." Annoyed, he lifts the camera to indicate the 'thing' in question before shoving the folded knife back in his pocket.

There's an echoing squeal from the hallway, laced with static, like a radio being tuned. Jay hisses through his teeth, flattening himself back against the wall.

"Great. So we can put ourselves down for two pocket knives and a lighter." And a camera, not that he's anticipating that will be especially helpful. It sounds like there's a dial tone screeching after them, which might be amusing if it weren't such an obvious indicator that they haven't shaken their pursuer just yet.

He shoots Jay a frustrated glower.

"Don't put the knife back!" he hisses. "You've got to...accept this thing or something, I dunno, but if we have to beat it down first, we're gonna have to do what we can."

"Alright," he snaps, also trying to keep his voice low. "If you actually think it'll help."

With some reluctance, he shifts the camera from his right hand to his left and awkwardly unfolds the pocketknife. This footage is gonna be shaky as hell, if it even comes out at all. At least he's finally out of the wrist brace.

Tim says he has to 'accept' his shadow, which he guesses lines up with what they've been saying. "What does 'accept' even mean here? It's not like I'm gonna run up and give it a hug, or--"

With a piercing hiss of static, the shadow's claws (claws? did it always have claws?) curl around the doorframe, and its white-masked face peers into the room, obscured by thick clouds of steam.

Jay's voice catches in his throat, and he tries to still his breathing.

There's a low, mechanical click, and two narrow cones of light reach from the eyes of the mask like headlights--like searchlights. They sweep across the room slowly, carefully.

It hasn't spotted them yet.

Edited 2017-11-22 16:31 (UTC)

“It’s better than nothing, right?” Any further suggestions are abruptly cut short when long, clawlike appendages work through the dense cloud of perfumed steam and curve around the door with a menacing click. The yellow of its eyes aren’t just for show anymore - the twin beams sweep across the space with slow, searching morons, and Tim unconsciously tries to worm back.

It won’t have to look long. Just until it sees the only two living things in the room.

Two knives and a lighter...and a building made of wood. He glances down at the lump in his pocket and draws it out, displaying the lighter to Jay with a meaningful lift of eyebrows.

If they can lure it somewhere dry enough...

What's Tim--oh.

If the shadow wasn't right there, Jay would have some harsh words for that plan. Sure, they're in a building made of wood, but so's everyone else. If there was even remotely a chance of fire working, they'd have to keep it from eating up the whole bathhouse. Granted, water's in good supply, but still. Still. Jay glares back at him.

(Still. It might work if they're fast enough.)

Jay bends down, feeling around for something to throw, something to catch the creature's attention for a second. It works in movies; no reason why it wouldn't work here.

Jay slips against the wet tile, catches himself against the wall.

The noise is enough.

The creature's gaze locks onto Jay instantly, and his own eyes widen in response.

"Go, go go go go--!" he blurts out as he stumbles back to his feet, bolting off at an odd angle. Distract it. Draw its attention. Maybe Tim can, can do something, can run, whatever.

Shit.

The floors are too slick and slippery. The thing that used to be that mirror image of Jay swings its too-bright gaze around, throwing Jay into sharp and skeletal relief for a blazing second. It's enough for that to make Jay the new target - as always.

(It's every chair he tripped over, every light he turned on, every time he knocked on the house he meant to break into, every beam of flashlight cutting through the uniform dark and telegraphing his position.)

"On me, asshole!" He tears out from his crouch at a dead sprint. The lighter presses into his palm with hard edges. He just needs to find someplace dry, somewhere dry enough where he can set it all alight, weaken the floor around it or bring down the walls and ceiling -

The sound catches its attention, sending the lights swinging around to face Tim. Straining against the doorframe, it reaches for him with one crooked limb, and for a dizzying moment it looks like it might succeed. Instead it swings wide, claws burying into a chest of drawers.

The shadow lets out a low huff of frustration, a vast machine releasing steam, before straining to look at the splintered remains of the furniture. The air around it shifts impossibly, and it clips forward, now close enough to pick the pieces up, manipulate them.

The door is clear.

Jay sprints toward it, pocketknife unfolded (and praying he doesn't slip a second time). He rounds the vast bulk of the shadow closely enough to have a terrible idea.

He abandons his first idea, because this isn't Shadow of the Colossus, and even he's not stupid enough to try to make that work. He's exactly stupid enough to try his second idea, though, and he reaches out to nick the thing's ankle with his knife on the way to the door.

The hit lands, somehow, slicing a ten-inch gash in the creature's skin. The wound drips black tar, and the way the shadow screams is nearly human. Jay's stomach lurches.

~~Not so easy this time, is it?~~

The shadow twists to look at him, and there's a moment of blinding eye contact before Jay bolts out the door, spots dancing across his vision. Need to find somewhere flammable, but not too flammable. Somewhere they can contain the blaze before it spreads too far. Tim probably knows better about this stuff, if he's honest.

The vast, mechanical spiderlike sprawl of the thing should be unnerving, but it makes sense, doesn't it? It makes sense with everything it claims to be and the way Jay inserted himself into a narrative and now is really not the time to be thinking about the symbolic meaning, particularly as one massive, clawed hand slams into a chest of drawers with a splintering of wood and barely misses him.

A spurt of something black and oily erupts from the scar Jay's knife leaves across the thing's ankle. Its shrilling prickles at Tim's neck and raises gooseflesh on his arms despite the adrenaline storming his system, despite the pressing, thick-scented humidity clouding everything else.

"If we can get it moving up," he hisses to Jay as the other man closes the space between them, "we can take out the floor from under it."

Jay nods furiously. "Long as there's nobody below us." Tim's got a point. Use the height of this place to their advantage. If only they could've done this back in Tartarus.

He runs down the hallway, measuring his steps to make sure he doesn't lose Tim. He slides to a stop at an intersection, looks down each hall, and--

"Stairs, c'mon!" He motions for Tim to follow.

There's a sound of splintering wood behind them as the creature claws at the door, trying to force itself through.

"That's it! Stay right on our asses!" he belts back at the malformed shadow as it tries to work its way through a doorway far too small for its swollen frame. Pretty soon, he's certain the pieces of wall are gonna start crumbling and breaking to accommodate it. That's fine. That works fine in their favor, because this place might have a nice and pretty little aesthetic, but everything's downright fragile when it comes to combat.

He snatches up a splintered chunk of wood, some remnant of the shattered dresser, and hurls it at the creature before tearing up for the stairs.

"High as we can get," he pants to Jay. "If anyone's underneath - they're just gonna have to run."

The creature is bending low, still trying to fit through the doorway, when Tim heaves the piece of broken furniture at it.

Due to either lucky or unlucky timing, depending on whose perspective you take, the chunk of wood nails it across the face. A crack splits the mask from the jawline to the left eye, and the shadow screeches, lunging forward. The air buzzes for a moment, and if either Jay or Tim look back, they will see the space around the shadow split and smear as it clips forward, freeing it from the doorframe. It bounds toward the staircase.

Jay sprints up the stairs two at a time, glancing back at every landing to make sure Tim's still following. Lungs aching and throat stinging, he stops for a second at the entrance to a floor Jay neglected to count, wheezing, "Get downstairs! We're--the ceiling's coming down!"

He continues his ascent, attempting to repeat the warning every few floors, but he knows he's losing track. He knows he's not being as careful as he could be.

He can hear the scrape of the shadow's claws behind them.

The shadow. The true self.

This is Jay's true self. This. This thing with the inhuman screams and the buzz of static and the skull-like mask fused to the oil-slick black of its face and the discomfiting scuttle to its movement, like something spidery and wrong and put through a tape being wound backwards.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon," he mutters. They reach the end of the stairs as the shadow skitters after them, forcing its disproportionately large body through doorways and up the narrow staircases with the wooden supports that suddenly seem fragile as matchsticks.

If there's anyplace higher than this, they're not likely to reach it here. He can only hope to god it's enough.

"High enough?"

Jay nods anxiously, breathing hard as he leans against a rack of folded towels. The heat is indescribable. He feels like he's being cooked alive.

(He'll never complain about Tuscaloosa summers again.)

The room is spacious, with a bank of sinks down the center and shower faucets lining the tiled walls. Near the back is a pool--not a full on swimming pool, but bigger than his aunt's jacuzzi. (Why the hell is that something he still remembers?)

There's an awful clatter echoing up the stairwell. It's getting closer.

"Hey, Tim," he says, and it sounds thin. "Remember what I said about old tape?"

Of course he remembers. He can't remember pieces of himself, gaps of his memory that have fallen to pieces and been torn away. He can't remember entire weeks, months, years from certain periods of his life. He can't even remember the exact points in time in which he lost track of Alex, lost track of Jay, lost track of Brian.

But he remembers this.

Old tape. It's made of the same stuff they use to make flash paper and guncotton. You can dump burning film in water, and it'll just keep burning.

And that's the thing with tape. It holds things together, but it also burns.

His fingertips chase the wood of the surrounding edges until he picks out a particular spot that seems driest. The lighter hiss-spits to life after a few sharp jerks of his thumb.

"Damn right," says Tim.

He puts flame to wood.

Smoke curls out from the wet grain, but eventually it catches light. He blows on it, gentle, to stoke the flames.

Jay watches, transfixed, as he backs away. It's done. They're burning this place down. He checks the viewfinder screen. Blown out to hell, but at least he's getting the shot.

He should have been prepared for this, he really should, but he still jumps when the clattering below gets louder, closer. There's a scrape and a drag of claws on wood, and Jay backs away farther, farther from the door. The camera shakes, but that's fine for now, really.

A pale face appears in the doorway, yellow eyes shining bright enough to blind.

Furiously, it scratches at the doorframe, wood splintering until it can force its shoulders through. Again, the air buzzes and hisses, and the textures glitch, stripping away the skin for a split second to reveal a bent-wire ribcage, twisted black cellulose convulsing in a horrible imitation of lungs, a heart.

It turns its searchlight gaze on the growing flames. On Tim. On Jay.

It pauses.

Again, it looks around. Takes a slow step forward, gradual, almost delicate. Its bad leg trails a smear of wet tar.

It looks down, gaze lingering on Jay.

Jay lifts one shoulder in a hesitant shrug.

Visibly agitated, it shifts on its feet, focus now fixed on Tim. Expectant.

It isn't watching when a spit of flame shoots out from the growing blaze. It's too late to react. The film catches alight.

For several moments, it almost seems like it won't be deterred even by that. Its exterior crawls away with a pitched digital squeal. Every bony, rake-thin mechanism bares itself in an amalgamation of stitched-together barbed wire, pulsing organs that contract like a fist squeezing over one's own heart.

It doesn't see the fire as it leaps along the wood and latches hungrily to fuel it knows will burn forever.

"Back, back!" Tim barks, snapping one hand around Jay's wrist. He has little doubt that once it realizes it's doomed, it'll do everything in its power to take them both down with it.

Jay allows Tim to pull him back, camera still trained on the creature. Still watching.

The shadow screams, pulling its injured arm to itself, pressing into a corner. The flame spreads fast, twisting and flickering across the exposed patch of film like steel wool, burrowing under the skin. It claws at the wall desperately, but all it does is leave deep grooves in the wood. It's not strong enough anymore.

Instead, it turns to the two observers, and in a motion too quick to properly track, it twists out of a crouch and reaches for Jay, pinning him to the floor. Jay struggles furiously, shoving back against its vast, gnarled hand nearly hard enough to wriggle out, but it's not enough. The shadow peers down at him, waiting for the flames to spread.

Motion out of the corner of its eye catches its attention, and it looks up. It looks at Tim, the one who started the fire, the one it can blame. In a clumsy jerk of deteriorating muscle, it reaches for him as well.

It moves too fast for him to track, raking clawlike hands across Jay's front and trapping him a cage of spined fingers against the deteriorating floor. Lighter in one hand, knife in the other, Tim -

Tim lets it grab him.

Lets it drag him closer.

Every instinct screams for him to bolt, to run, to do anything but sit here patiently and let it reel him in like a fish on a hook, but it pulls him close, close enough for Tim to click his lighter to life and meet its spotlight eyes with a flinted glare.

He holds the stilling flame beneath the shadow's chin.

It wants to hide its face so bad?

He'll give it a reason to.

The flame melts through the skin in an instant, and the film underneath crackles and warps. With a high, panicked radio-static squeal, it drops Tim, scrambling to get away.

For a terrifying instant, it leans its weight on the hand caging Jay, sending a bright shock of pain across his chest.

The shadow flees toward the far end of the room, clawing at its face, at its neck. Its movements are unnatural, dragging, as the skin flakes away from the twisted wire underneath. It's falling apart from the inside.

Jay tries to catch his breath, tries to pull himself into a sitting position, but god, it stings. Gritting his teeth, he forces himself up. The camera's still running, and with an awful twinge of pain that worsens as he tries to steady himself, he lifts it to face the shadow.

Heaving, its chest rising and falling like a broken bellows, it crawls into the small pool. It curls into itself, trying to submerge itself completely, sending waves of hot water sloshing over the edge and across the floor, but there isn't room. The fire keeps burning. There's not much left now.

The lights behind the cracked mask gutter and die. The breathing slows.

The shadow's body crumbles, rust and decay crawling across its remains in uncanny fast-forward.

Soon, all that's left in the pool is a bony human body, battered and burn-scarred, with a cracked mask still over its face. It twitches, taking in a thin, wheezing breath, and grabs for the edge of the pool with a shaking hand. Its grip falters.

Jay pulls himself to his feet with a small, pained cry he can't quite suppress. He takes a step forward, pauses, glances over at Tim.

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