Chapter Text
Jon sat at a rickety cafe table across from the woman from the grocery store. Her name, he’d learned, was Ava, and whenever she wasn’t at work, she was actually quite animated. She moved her hands constantly while she spoke, and tripped over her words in her eagerness to get them all out.
“So is it an ARG?” she asked. “That’s what most people on the forums think, and I get where they’re coming from, but I dunno, it doesn’t really feel interactive enough for that. Some people have been saying it’s viral marketing – and, y’know, that and the ARG theory are not mutually exclusive, obviously – but what would it be viral marketing for? Tape recorders?"
Jon took a sip of his coffee. (He hadn’t been drinking much tea, lately.) “Why don’t you explain this to me like I have no idea what you’re talking about?”
“From the beginning?” Ava asked, and Jon nodded.
“Right,” she said, taking a deep breath in preparation. “So. So, I– So, there’s this– hmm…” She paused to gather her thoughts, and Jon wished briefly that he could still Compel a coherent narrative out of people. He felt guilty almost immediately for wishing that, but the thought remained.
“So, I take walks,” she said finally. “Pretty often. They calm my nerves. And there’s this old dirt road by my house that leads out towards some of the old crofts just outside of town. It’s usually pretty quiet, and you get a great view of the hills, and it’s– y’know, it’s just a nice place to walk if you’re looking to clear your head.
“A little over a month ago, maybe, I was walking on that road, and I saw something stuck in the mud – and when I say ‘stuck in the mud,’ I mean properly squashed down in there. It was right in the middle of some tire tracks, and it looked like it might have gotten run over a few times, but it’s sticking out of the mud, and it’s kind of shiny, so I get curious, and I pick it up. And it turns out it’s an old-fashioned tape recorder.
“That's weird enough – I mean, who uses a tape recorder anymore? – but what’s weirder is, it’s totally undamaged. Like I said, I’m pretty sure it got run over, but the thing didn’t have a scratch on it. And there was a tape inside. So, I took it home, and I listened to it.
“The tape doesn’t really make a lot of sense. It kind of feels like you’ve just walked into the middle of someone else’s conversation? Like, the people on the tape keep talking about people I don’t know, and there’s clearly a lot going on that I don’t have context for. Mostly it’s two men talking, and one of them sounds a whole Hell of a lot like you. I eventually piece together that the one who sounds like you is named Jon, and the other one is named Martin. Most of the rest of it went over my head if I’m being honest, at least the first time I listened.
“The main thing is, it’s weird. It’s clearly not real people just recording their own conversations – there’s too much going on. I mean, at one point it sounds like the sky turns into a giant eyeball, and I think I would have heard about it if that happened in real life. So I figure it might be a cassette of some radio show I’ve never heard of. I pop a few key terms into google – y’know, ‘Jonathan Sims archivist magnus institute’ and whatnot – and I don’t see anything about a radio show. What I do see is people on forums talking about these tapes.
“Apparently, people have been finding these all over – well, actually, they’ve mostly been finding them around London, but there have been a few in other places; there was even one in Beijing, I think. People keep finding tape recorders sitting around in places where tape recorders shouldn’t be, always completely undamaged, always with a tape inside. And anytime someone tries to upload the audio somewhere, or even just record it, the files get corrupted and refuse to save. I even tried it myself – first on my laptop, then I borrowed a friend’s, Hell, I even tried it on my parents’ computer the last time I visited them – nothing! It absolutely refused to take. So instead, people have been typing up transcripts.
“We’ve started to piece together a narrative. It’s tricky, there’s gaps – we definitely haven’t found all the tapes yet – and the fact that we can’t share audio makes things hard. If someone shows up on one of the other tapes and doesn’t say their name, I can’t just listen to it and go, ‘Oh, that’s Martin!’ Thankfully, a few of the London people have been able to meet up and compare their tapes in person.
“Oooh, actually, hold on a second…” She rifled through her bag to pull out her laptop. After a few moments of fiddling with it, she spun it around to show Jon a spreadsheet. It was color-coded and dense with information. He couldn’t take in all of it at once, but he saw that some of the many pieces of data collected were dates, locations, “characters” that appear, short descriptions. He glanced at that column.
Statement of Father Edwin Burroughs, regarding his claimed demonic possession.
Statement of Moira Kelly, regarding the disappearance of her son Robert.
Statement of Martin Blackwood, archival assistant at the Magnus Institute, regarding a close encounter with something he believes to have once been Jane Prentiss.
Jon felt a familiar flare of pain around the outline of his grief.
“The one thing no one can really figure out,” Ava went on, “is why. No one’s ever come forward as a writer for this, and there isn’t really a mystery to solve in the way you’d expect for a traditional ARG. It’s just… a story, spread across a hundred or so cassette tapes all hidden in places you can’t really expect people to find them.”
Silence settled between them for a moment. When it became clear that Jon wasn’t going to be the one to break that silence, Ava cleared her throat and said, as professionally as she could, “So… what the fuck?”
Jon considered his answer for a long moment. “If I told you that all of it was real,” he said cautiously, “would you have me involuntarily committed?”
“No,” Ava said, “but I wouldn’t just believe you without solid proof.”
Hmm. Jon thought it over for a second. “You said you hadn’t found all the tapes. Did you find the one with Jude Perry?”
“Jude Perry…” she said, scanning her spreadsheet, “is she the one who…”
Jon held up his scarred hand. Ava glanced up from her computer, and he could see her eyes roving over the burn, tracing the outline of Jude’s hand on his skin.
“Ah,” she said, and he thought he saw her turning her gaze to the worm scars on his face and doing some quick mental maths. “Well, that’s not proof, exactly, but that’s– that’s certainly evidence.”
“Well, if you’re looking for concrete proof, I can’t help you. I wouldn’t even know where to start.” He tugged his sleeve down over his scarred hand. Even though he’d been the one to draw attention to it, he still felt a bit self-conscious knowing his scars were under scrutiny. “How far have you people gotten, anyway? What’s the most recent tape you’ve found?”
“That,” Ava said, “is actually a pretty big debate in the forums, but for my money it’s got to be the one with Basira, Georgie, and Melanie.”
“Wait, what do you mean? Which tape with Basira, Georgie and Melanie?”
“Hold on, let me find the transcript… It was uncategorized for a while because no one could figure out who was speaking, but at one of the London meetups they were able to compare voices between tapes… Ah, here we go. Basira says, ‘Huh, still works,’ then Georgie says, ‘You found something?’ Basira: ‘Just one of the old tape recorders,’ Georgie: ‘God, tough little bastards, aren’t they–’”
“Let me see that.”
It was all Jon could do not to lunge across the table to look. Ava seemed to turn her laptop around and push it towards him in slow motion, but finally he was reading the transcript for himself.
The others were alive. There was no misinterpreting that. The others were alive, and their world was back to the way it was. The desperate, panicked, disastrous plan had worked.
And they hadn’t found any bodies.
He didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know how he felt. The empty space in his chest where his stronger emotions should have been gave a painful twinge that might have been hope or fear or grief, but he couldn’t begin to say which one.
He realized that he was crying only when he felt Ava staring. Her expression was hovering between concern and awkwardness as she asked, “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” he said, though his voice betrayed him. He was very audibly on the verge of sobbing as he said, “I’m just– I’m just glad to hear the Admiral’s alright.”
He didn’t expect her to believe him, but he didn’t see her reactions. His eyes were caught on the screen in front of him, and the words typed out in neat serif font.
If anyone’s listening… Goodbye. I’m sorry, and… Good luck.