Chapter Text
It had been a bad week for Jessica Locke.
The headaches had been getting worse, and she’d been having trouble sleeping. When she did sleep, she had nightmares; dreams of being a little kid again, playing in the woods. She was alone, exploring among the trees, when the sun went down, unnaturally fast, within seconds, and then she was running, running down endless trails through the dark, a sea of trees looming out at her in new, threatening ways, until one tree blocked her path, different from the others, except it wasn’t a tree at all, it was a man, or something like a man, and she tried to get away but every direction she turned, the figure was there in front of her, dark and tall and-
Awake again, head pounding. Every night the same dream.
On this particular night she awoke with her heart pounding, drenched in sweat, but her fear was quickly replaced with frustration as she came back to awareness of reality. That dream might have been recurring, but she wasn’t getting used to it; every time it happened her body reacted as if the dream was real, and it took her a few minutes to calm down afterward. She rolled over, checking the digital clock by her bed. The display, its red numbers faintly glowing in the darkness, read 4:44 AM. Jessica groaned, and had to fight down the urge in her throat to start coughing.
As if the nightmares and the migraines weren’t bad enough, she’d been having coughing fits. Her doctor had put her on a new prescription, but it hadn’t been helping much. In fact, she had just been getting worse. Her throat was raw and hoarse from the coughing, and though she’d been consuming copious amounts of honeyed tea, it still hurt to swallow. She had a suspicion that her doctor didn’t know what was ailing her any more than she did; he had been unable to provide a concrete diagnosis, making the new pills seem more like a shot in the dark than a legitimate treatment. What was worse, her ability to function had become impaired enough that she’d had to take several days off work, and with no sign of improvement in her symptoms, she was becoming seriously worried about how she’d make next month’s rent. She made enough, under normal circumstances, to afford a modest, solitary existence in a little one-bedroom apartment, but that meant she lacked a roommate whom she could fall back on for support if something happened.
That thought sent a familiar ache of sadness through her. She missed Amy, her old roommate who had become the best friend she’d ever had. It had been years since Amy and Jessica had lived together. Years since Amy had disappeared without a trace. Jessica didn’t like thinking about it, so of course she couldn’t help but do exactly that. Not a day went by that she didn’t pray that Amy was still alive somewhere and safe. She had just vanished one day, leaving everything behind, and no one had any clue what had happened to her, not even Amy’s boyfriend Alex. Come to think of it, she hadn’t heard from Alex Kralie in a long time, either. The last time she had seen him had been…she racked her brain, but thinking about Alex just made her head hurt even worse. It was as if there was a thought or a memory just out of reach, hidden behind some impenetrable fog in her mind. The harder she tried to think of it, the further away it seemed. Jessica had experienced this feeling intermittently for years now, and it troubled her. She felt like there was something very important just outside the boundaries of her memory, and she wasn’t sure if the feeling could be believed or if she was just imagining it.
Giving up on grappling with that puzzle for the moment, Jessica found her thoughts turning instead to the one person who might know what was happening to her. She remembered how concerned Tim had been for her wellbeing the last time she’d seen him (he’d asked twice if she was doing okay), and how bad his own condition had been at the time, how he’d ended up coughing his lungs out on hands and knees in the doctor’s office parking lot. He had insisted that he was fine, however, and after a few moments the coughing had subsided, and he’d retreated to his car. In hindsight, Jessica realized, the coughing fits she’d begun experiencing recently were similar to what she’d witnessed with Tim that day.
That had been around a year ago, and she hadn’t seen Tim since then, though she’d received a few phone calls (perfunctory affairs, asking in broad terms how she was doing and providing little in the way of details about Tim’s own situation; Jessica had gotten the vaguely frustrating impression of a parent calling the babysitter during their night out to check in and make sure their child had not burned the house down or been stricken with a sudden illness in their absence). After a while the frequency of those calls had declined, and it had been several months since she’d last heard from him. He never told her why he left town or if he was ever coming back. She wondered where he was and if he was okay.
Jessica realized that she didn’t even know Tim that well, and would probably never have met him in the first place had it not been for the mutual doctor that they shared, but he had always been kind to her when they had interacted. Almost weirdly so, in fact, to the point where at first Jessica had assumed that he had ulterior motives (she generally wanted to believe the best in people upon first meeting them, but she’d had far too many disappointments from men in that regard not to be wary). But she had warmed to him over time and repeated encounters, as his interest in her had seemed to come from a place of genuine desire to help. He had given her tips on how to handle the side-effects of the medication they both took, even told her a little bit about how he was taking care of his friend Jay who apparently was sickly and needed someone to look after him. Tim had always been a bit evasive, deflecting questions about himself with vague, simple non-answers, but she had felt like she could trust him. He seemed to understand her in a way that she didn’t quite understand herself. If there are things he’s not comfortable talking about, Jessica had reasoned, that’s his business. She wasn’t going to pry.
Her train of thought was interrupted by another spasm of coughing. She groaned and sat up a little, sipping from the cup of water on her bedside table. Maybe it was the illness, or maybe it was the muggy Alabama weather (it was only mid-June, and already threatening to hit 90°F), but Jessica was beginning to feel overheated, so she got out of bed just long enough to raise the blinds and open her bedroom window a crack, letting in some cool night air from the street outside. Clambering back into bed, she tried to clear her mind of the thoughts bouncing around her skull, keeping her brain active. Trying to focus on how tired she was, instead of how miserable she felt, Jessica rolled over onto her side, coughed again, and slowly allowed herself to succumb to exhaustion and fall into an uneasy sleep.
In her slumber, she never saw the figure approach outside, a dark shape blotting out the moonlight through the blinds. Nor did she notice the camera it held observing her through the open crack in the window, recording her fitful tossing and turning in her bed, a thin mesh screen all that stood between her and its gaze.
As the emotionless, mechanical eye of the camera regarded her, Jessica dreamed an all-too-familiar dream.