#&.alex

[wemultitudinous]

@bornbreathless

The path under Alex’s feet is barely discernible through the thick carpet of leaves, wet and slick beneath her boots. She can’t work out if the moisture is finding some way into her shoes, soaking into her socks, or whether it’s just the cold fooling her. In her gloved hand, she clutches too tight to her recorder, conscious of how easily it could slip from her grip and be lost almost immediately among the chaos of browned autumn leaves.

She describes the scene into her recorder, doing her best not to let the slight unease wedged between her ribs colour her words. Any forest is creepy on a misty, late fall afternoon as it creeps towards dusk. There’s nothing special about this one.

“According to the locals back in Roslyn, there’s a woman who lives out in these woods. No one seemed to know her name, but there are plenty of stories. Everyone had a different idea about the footage—some say she can’t die until she’s revenged some terrible wrong done to her; some say she’s already dead, a ghost; and some say she’s some kind of zombie—but everyone agrees that she lives out here, in the forest at the foot of the Cascade Mountains.” She picks her way around a fallen log, carefully skirting the soft and spongy bark that looks to be riddled with insects. “My producer Nic is probably going to be mad that I came out here alone, but I’m keeping an eye on my cell service, and it’s still good. I should be able to call for help if a vengeful, undead, ghost-zombie woman comes for me.”

Just as she’s joking about it, tucking her hair behind her cold ear, she catches sight of something at the corner of her vision. It’s a faint light, warm and yellow, at odds with the cold and fading light of the forest itself. With only a brief hesitation, she steps from the path, and squints through the trees. She’s pretty sure she can make out a small building, the light presumably spilling from a window or an open door. And what’s more, there’s someone moving around, too.

“Here we go,” she mutters, half to her recorder and half to herself, and then raises her voice. “Hello? Excuse me?”

[wemultitudinous]

@muddledmenagerie​ [ for elise ]

Alex peers down at her phone, hand cupped over it to keep the worst of the slanting rain from the screen. In the muddy light of the overcast afternoon, the soft glow of it is almost a comfort. The pulsing blue dot of the maps app is grounding, too: you have reached your destination, you are here, you exist.

God, she needs more sleep. She locks her phone, slips it into her pocket, and retrieves her recorder, clicking it on before she reaches up to knock on the door. It’s nondescript, an average door. There’s nothing creepy or weird or out-of-place about it. Alex wishes she found that comforting, these days. 

When the door opens, she fixes an open, friendly smile on her face.

    “—Elise Rainier? I’m Alex Reagan. I’m making a podcast and your name came up in my research, I was hoping I could speak to you for a few minutes?” I was hoping you could help me, she doesn’t say, because she’s recording, and Strand will listen to this later, and he already worries too much about her. “I’m recording, I hope that’s okay. It’s just a few questions about—your work?”

She hasn’t done her due diligence, she realises. A flush begins to creep up her cheeks as she shifts from foot to foot. This woman might have a perfectly normal job and perfectly normal hobbies, outside of what Alex has heard. She didn’t bother to check. There’s been too much unsettling her, too many bumps in the night, the dreams and—

       ⁠—she’d run here without even stopping to do some basic research. Without even telling Strand or her producer where she was going. Well, too late to go back now; she can worry about all that later.

“I mean—I was hoping you might be able to explain some things for me.”  

[wemultitudinous]

@kingofdirtandnothing​ [ dean ]

She feels like she hasn’t slept in months.

She looks like it, too; she knows because people keep telling her. As if she doesn’t own a mirror, or spend ten minutes in the bathroom every morning carefully pressing concealer under her eyes in an attempt to keep her friends from worrying about her. When she does sleep, her dreams choke her back to waking soon enough. And last night—

—dreams are the mind’s way of processing information, right? Sorting through sensory input and filling it into long-term storage. So it stands to reason that she’d read about this place, somewhere, or maybe Dr. Strand had mentioned it in relation to one of his cases, or something. That’s a logical explanation for the way she’d woken, sweat-cold and gasping, with the address on her tongue like she’d known it all along.

It’s difficult to explain what had driven her to pull on jeans, wrap a coat and scarf over her tank top, to send a text to Nic that she knows won’t be picked up until he wakes with her whereabouts. In the dream, the house had been full of dark figures, too-tall, the thrown shadows caressing their elongated limbs with a preternatural grace. She’d squeezed between them, desperate not to touch or to be touched, trying to find a safe path through. And they hadn’t known she was there, until she’d felt something drag up her calf, something dry and rasping, something that made her sick with familiarity, the nightmare coming back all too easily; the witch-demon-thing, the cats head held in her hands, the tongue dragging against her bare skin, pushing back the covers. Then all the dark figures had looked down, at once, and despite their darkness she’d seen their faces.

Their eyes where their mouths should be, and their mouths where their eyes should be. She’d tried to run, but she’d heard someone’s voice, calling her name, and—

—it’s just a house, she tells herself. There’s nothing inside; no ghosts with upside-down faces, no witch-demons, nothing waiting for her. It’s just a house, and that was just a dream. She clicks on her recorder, and takes a shuddering breath.

“I’m at a derelict house in downtown Seattle,” she tells the recorder. “I’ve never seen it before. Or at least, I don’t remember seeing it—I must have done at some point, though, because I recognise it from my dream. If Strand were here, he’d tell me I was just filling in details, that one house looks a lot like another and I’m just creating a connection. Nic, if I get murdered by a ghost here, I’m relying on you to pass on this message: ‘I told you so’.”

One more deep breath, and she pushes at the door. It opens easily, not locked or bolted.

“Oh my god,” she breathes. The place is empty. Or at least, it’s empty of people, shadowy or otherwise, but the walls are full; symbols and circles and rune-like marks dragged across wallpaper with no regard for fixtures or furniture, lines seamlessly travelling from wall to picture frame to mirror-glass and back again. “What is this—”