11calls | (no subject)

You really don’t know why the hell you came out here. At first it had seemed like a good idea, to go into the woods into a cabin and try and catch up on some sleep. God knows you need sleep--it’s been almost a year now since you’d started sleeping badly, after visiting the cabin with Tannis Braun where Sebastian had been held. Maybe if you’d just gone with Strand then you would have been fine, but Tannis had booked it out of there faster than you ever would have expected. Tannis Braun, you expect would survive a horror movie--at this point it’s looking more and more like you will not.

It’s stupid to think that, and you can hear Strand’s voice in your head for berating you about thinking of it. When it’s the middle of the night and the forest is especially loud, you dig out masters of the show and play it like it’s practically a bedtime story, one that you can recite word for word only instead of it being about three bears or a princess, it’s about apophenia and how demons and the Unsound aren’t real.

You want so badly to believe that The Unsound isn’t real.

Honestly, you can hear it sometimes, you swear, in the confines of the cabin but it’s quiet as if it’s being played in a far off room. Even after all this time, it’s beautifully creepy, or creepily beautiful you never can decide which. Too bad it comes with the caveat that after you listen to the Unsound, you die in a year. You have twelve hours.

Twelve hours is long, it stretches out in your imagination, and you dutifully make another sleep note for Nic, one that you’ll need to drive forty-five minutes to post and you tell the listeners on the show, you tell yourself that the reason that you think you may have come out here is to face your fears, all of the things that the show has stirred up since you first saw a shadow that was too tall to be a person on a boy’s birthday tape recording, and a man’s wedding video and Sebastian Torres had told you that his imaginary friend said that you didn’t want to meet him.

You have twelve hours and you still don’t know who started that fucking countdown and sent it to Nic, you still feel like there’s someone watching you in the house at night, and you still hear the fucking Unsound in the back of your mind as if somehow if you relistened to it, the countdown would start over.

The minutes are slow, each one dragged over your nerves like shards of glass--they press and they pull and you try to ignore the need to spring salt over the windows, to go and get rosemary for the entryways and everything else that you’ve researched on your phone in the Cumbies parking lot where you have service on how to keep demons out. More than a little part of you wants to call Strand, if only so he can yell at you for being an idiot, but you haven’t spoken to him since he’d learned you’d recorded him and Amalia, since you’d found out that there was symbols under the blood at Maddie’s house. No small part of you is convinced that he hates you now, and honestly you can’t blame him.

You still can’t believe you did it. Even the explanations to yourself sound stupid as hell: you were jealous, you’d thought they were going to cut you out of the story, you were going to show Richard Strand that he doesn’t get to push you around. In the end, you fucked up, and you’ve been fucking up for far too long. You know that you’re lucky that Terry, Paul and Nic didn’t fire you over that stunt, or any of the others.

Instead you call your mom and tell yourself that it’s just a checking in phone call, not a just in case phone call.

Four hours. It’s 11:15. You know that you should eat something, to put something in your stomach other than coffee. Maybe doing it would help with the feeling that you’re not in your body. You tell yourself it’s apophenia as you practically wear a hole in your friend’s rug. An hour passes, and another and you’re using all of the tricks Dr. Bernier taught you to attempt to control your panic when you jolt from a nightmare. Square breathing, grounding, and in the end you break out the vodka that you’d purchased on a whim.

If the world is ending, if you’re dying and you’re facing it alone, at least you don’t need to do it sober.

One hour now, and your stomach rolls from the adrenaline and the lack of food. There’s a weird twitching between your shoulder blades, the kind that comes from a lifetime of having eyes on you when you don’t want them. It’s a sensation that magnifies as time goes on, and you throw back another sip of vodka, because if there’s going to be shadows in your eyes it’s better that they spin than if you try and think about them.

Half an hour, and you put the vodka down, actively fighting not to cry and not to be sick. This was the stupidest idea that you’ve ever had in your life, and for you to think that you know that it’s probably bad. “Apophenia.” You say the word aloud, just so there’s something else in the silence, but you can almost swear that you hear a single knock in response. It can’t be--bilocation isn’t real and Simon’s not answering her and she’s just losing her fucking mind.

Fifteen minutes and you’re thinking about your bucket list. You never went back to Turkey like you wanted to, you never went to Egypt, you never saw Anarticia… You find yourself saying the things aloud, counting them off on your fingers as you attempt not to do the math of how long you have to live.

Five minutes. Four. Three. In the end, you find yourself picking up the bat that Sara keeps here, just in case. A bat probably won’t do anything for demons, but it feels better to hold onto it with slippery palms. Two minutes and you wonder if you should pray, even if you don’t know what you believe in anymore, other than demons and Tiamat and the Unsound. One minute and the Unsound rushes in your memory, and your heart is racing and you’re hyperventilating. Honestly, you’d wanted to face your death better, braver than with tears and holding a bat, but you can’t.

Thirty seconds and you hope Nic is okay, that he and the interns and everyone else who listened to the show are fine somewhere. That it’s just you that this takes because it’s your fault all of it, and you’re so sorry. You wish you could tell Strand that. You wish you could tell him that you hope he finds Coralee. You wish you could tell him that you’re sorry you dragged him and everything into the light like this.

Ten seconds and you wish you had time to wash your face so the medical examiner doesn’t know you’d been crying.

Five seconds. You’re glad you put on clean underwear.

Four. Three. Two. You hold your breath. An alarm on your phone beeps. And then it’s three fifteen and two seconds on April 23rd, 2016. It’s been over a year. 3:16. You breathe in case whoever started the countdown was wrong. 3:17. You start to laugh. 3:18. You’re alive. 3:20, and you’re still laughing. You pick up your recorder and record a new sleep note.

You can feel how alive you are in your voice. It sounds like you. You sound like yourself as Strand would say. “Okay good news. Actually a couple of good news items.” You sigh. “Well, it’s April 23rd, 3:15 pm. And obviously I’m alive. But really that should come as absolutely no surprise sends the Unsound is nothing more than an urban legend but my relief is a good indication of how malleable all I've become. I’d allowed myself to actually believe the curse of the Unsound for a bit there. Okay maybe more than a bit I feel like my lack of sleep was contributing to a sense of worry about something that I understood conceptually was nonsense…”