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Afternoons were the worst.
The morning was well accounted for: Jay would be asleep, and whether he was sleeping peacefully for once or as restlessly as usual, it was still something to do. Even waking for half an hour stretches at a time was bearable, because he could say to himself, I am supposed to be sleeping now, and that took the pressure off. He didn’t have to find anything to do. He didn’t have to occupy himself. He should be sleeping, and failing that, he should be trying to sleep. That much was simple, and it kept him busy until what he regarded as an acceptable time to wake up came around. Considering how late he got to bed, this was usually around eleven in the morning, noon if he could push it.
In the evening, he could go online. There would be people around, messages to respond to, questions to answer, suggestions to follow up. From around eight in the evening until one in the morning Jay would not feel so alone, because there on the computer screen were words, directed to him from other people sitting at other laptop screens, and that was a comfort. There was someone out there in the darkness, someone awake just like him, and if Jay ignored the fact that chances were they were safe in their own house, perhaps with friends or family in the next room over or even on the other chair, he could pretend that he was not so different to everyone else after all.
The nights were for the tapes. Jay would spend the darkest hours terrified out of his wits anyway, so he might as well get it all out of the way in one go. When everyone else had gone to bed and the hotel around him was completely silent; when he was better able to spot abnormalities, hear anybody who might be coming his way, that was the time for the tapes. Usually this task was mind-numbing enough that it would gradually put him to sleep, but sometimes there would be something – on some occasions as quick as a glimpse or a flicker of movement – and the adrenaline would course through him, and Jay would find himself up until long past dawn, replaying and rewatching, cutting and editing and trying to glean some clue that might help from a fraction of a second of blurry film. For every question he might have been able to half-answer, he would find a dozen more questions. It was exhausting, and demoralising, but it was still better than the afternoons.
In the afternoons, there was nothing. Unless he had a video to upload, which usually consisted of staring at the screen and not daring to click any other tab lest YouTube decide to pack its efforts in for the day, the afternoons stretched out in front of Jay in an impenetrable mass of hours. On some occasions he would have a place to visit, but there was only so much he could do wandering around the same trails, and he could hardly spend more on gas money than was absolutely necessary. For that reason Jay stuck mostly to the hotel room, partly out of necessity and partly because he didn’t trust the world outside; didn’t trust himself not to see something else, something that might spell trouble and mean that he would have to move on yet again, and the moving on was more unbearable than the staying still. He wondered why that was, and then realised it was because the human mind was wired to associate going somewhere new with a change – either in circumstances, or routine, or something quantifiable. Jay, of course, would just go from one identical situation to another, and the idea of moving on made him feel relentlessly claustrophobic.
The afternoons were always the worst, because he had nothing to do but sit, and think, and listen to the sounds of the hotel’s other guests going about their lives blissfully unaware, and sometimes he just wanted to wrench open the door and scream at them. He didn’t even know what he would scream. Nobody deserved this. He wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemy. Maybe he would just scream at them to go away, to take their cheerful voices and their lack of this to another part of the hotel.
Or maybe he would beg them to come in, just for a little moment.
Jay wasn’t sure which option was worse.
*
He had watched so many hours of Alex doing mundane tasks that by this point it was as though the man had become a ghost, tailing Jay in his every move. Logically he knew that was because there existed footage of Alex doing every conceivable everyday task, and so of course the actions would be familiar; remind Jay of him. Other times he was sure it was something else, and it was often enough to make him wonder – seriously wonder – if Alex wasn’t actually dead after all, and his ghost really was keeping him company.
Jay thought of him every time he set up his camera for the night and then lay in bed, staring at the ceiling until the darkness cleared and took on the slightest tinge of red from the camera’s recording light. He thought of Alex every time he was sure he had heard a noise outside and leaned over to peer between the curtains, knowing exactly how the camera would have framed him, having seen Alex framed in the same way more times than he could count. He thought of Alex when the camera was mounted on his dashboard, capturing images of the road and the traffic and the trees, Jay sitting in tense silence just how Alex had done. He thought of Alex on the rare occasions where he ran into a superstore to get as much cheap snack food as he could find, though of course Alex was usually filling his cart with as many tapes as he could fit in there, but what did it matter under those identical too-bright lights and with the drone of shoppers and the beep of the registers providing the universal background noise? Sometimes Jay was absolutely certain that he would turn around, his arms laden with knock-off Doritos, and find Alex standing disapprovingly behind him.
“We have got to get you some real food,” he would say, as he had said so many times in college, and then he would drag Jay off to find a bunch of stuff that Jay had never even heard of. He remembered, now, that Alex had been quite the cook; that he’d loved cooking, in fact, and had done so often in college. Jay found himself occupied for several glorious minutes in Walmart that afternoon, staring at the endless display of chips and trying to pinpoint just how Alex had picked it all up – Alex had told him, he was sure, but it still took him a while of fevered concentration to remember. It had been because his parents had worked so much, Jay finally recalled, and he and his younger sister – he had a little sister, Jay remember now, wondering how on earth he had ever forgotten; hell, he’d even met her – had become fed up of the usual ready meals and simple affairs that were left for them in the fridge. Alex’s mother had a handsome display of cookbooks, display being the word to pay attention to (“I don’t think she ever opened them once,” Alex had once said) and Alex and his sister had decided to try them out. So it happened that the two middle schoolers had probably ended up dining better than their parents.
“Excuse me,” said an apologetic voice to his left, and Jay jumped. “Could I just squeeze past you there?”
“Oh,” he said, after a moment of delay. “Right. Sorry.”
He stepped back, and an elderly lady in a mobility scooter moved neatly forward, stopped, and selected a few bags of chips. These she placed in the scooter’s basket and, with another kind smile at Jay, she moved on down the aisle. Jay forced his feet to walk, but for several more minutes he wandered around the aisles with no destination in mind, his thoughts snagging and lingering on that woman’s smile. It had been so straightforward, so nice; just a kind smile from one stranger to another, because she was having a good day or because she was the kind of woman to smile at strangers or because she had seen Jay’s distant look and nervous attitude and had decided maybe he needed to see a kind face. She had been right – Jay didn’t realise how much he had missed normal, straightforward, pleasant interactions until that moment – not the customer service smiles of receptionists and cashiers but just another random person who didn’t have to smile at him, who didn’t have to be nice to him. This woman was probably somebody’s grandmother, and she would perhaps go home and cook a dinner for them when they visited later, or maybe she would simply take her chips and curl up on her couch with a dog or a cat and watch her television shows, but she would lock the door tonight and she would be safe and she would not have to worry about anything peering in through the window with its sightless gaze.
Jay sometimes wondered if he was cursed now; if other people saw it on him. He wondered if the woman’s smile was proof that he wasn’t marked, or proof that she was just an incredibly good person, who saw the taint on him and decided he needed to see a smile more than anyone else. He could think of no adequate answer to that, and quickly gave up the philosophising before he had even finished driving out of the parking lot, but he was still thinking about her smile even as night drew in again.
*
A hotel room was not the best place to try and relax, and over the months Jay had grown used to being woken by all kinds of things – usually it was a relief when it turned out to just be inconsiderate guests. Still, sometimes it would frustrate him, when his neighbours in the next room over would decide that five in the morning was the perfect time for an argument that was not as quiet as they hoped it would be, or drunk guests would stumble up the hallway and lose their balance, thudding against his door with a sound that sent his heart racing for his throat.
One night Jay awoke not quite knowing why, and then he heard it – somebody was trying to get into his room. He could hear the jiggling of the handle, quiet, like the person on the other side was trying very, very hard not to wake whoever was within. The locks were operated by key cards, and Jay could hear the distinct click of the lock mechanism as a card slid into the lock and was rejected – surprisingly, Jay thought, because he had half expected the door spring open. Shakily, he got to his feet and tiptoed over to his camera, being careful to pick it up slowly, so it made no scraping against the desk. Turning to face the door, he saw that the light seeping in from the hall outside was broken, and there was distinct blurred movement there. Treading carefully, Jay moved closer to the door, every movement of the handle sending his heart racing. He leaned in closer, careful not to breathe too loudly, suddenly paranoid that he would somehow trip and fall heavily against the door. The key card was tried again, and somewhere in the back of Jay’s mind it registered that it was very odd, that somebody should be trying to get in using a key card. Generally speaking, the things that followed him around did not travel via any conventional means that Jay had identified, but at the same time, could he really be so dismissive? What if this was some brand new danger, some other aspect of all this that he simply didn’t know about yet; something he had failed to spot, perhaps. He had missed things before, after all. He was quite sure a good chunk of this mess was probably because he hadn’t been observant enough, or quick enough, or maybe he had just been too slow at putting everything together. It would be easier, if he had another mind to bounce ideas off of, but of course there was only him – and people online, he supposed, but they didn’t know the whole story and also he was convinced that most of them thought this was all some elaborate interactive horror series, anyway. How could they take it seriously when they didn’t even believe the danger was real?
He pressed his eye against the peephole, squinting slightly in the glare from the hall lights outside. He could see the shape of somebody, leaning down by the door, but he couldn’t see anything that immediately leapt out at him as familiar. His dread deepened, and he was quite sure now that this was yet another thing he had missed, yet another danger, yet another thing to go running after in search of clues, and no doubt returning only with more questions. A sudden surge of anger obliterated Jay’s fear long enough for him to fumble with the door and wrench it open, almost catching his toes on the bottom of it. A figure stumbled back in surprise, and when he straightened up Jay immediately saw that it was just another guest, hopelessly drunk, clearly at the wrong room.
“Shit,” the man slurred. “Shit, man, sorry, dude. Thought this was my room, man.”
“It’s not,” Jay said, in a tone cool enough that Alex would have likely been impressed by it, had the words not been so redundant.
“Yeah, guessed that now,” the man replied. “What floor is this? I’m in… uh…” He stumbled back and leaned heavily against the wall. “Three-oh-seven, I think.”
“This is two,” Jay said. “And also the wrong side of the stairway. Odd numbers are on the other side.”
“Right,” the man said, nodding decisively. “Right. Cool. Yeah.” He quite clearly did not understand anything Jay had said. “Makes sense.”
“Go upstairs,” Jay said clearly. He thought briefly about trying to reiterate what he had said about the odd and even room numbers, but quickly realised that would be pushing his luck. Besides, once this guy was off the second floor, he would no longer be Jay’s problem. “Upstairs,” he said again, very clearly. “Third floor. Got it?”
“Right,” the man said again, pushing himself away from the wall. He looked at his key card, and then back to Jay’s door, like he still expected some kind of conspiracy to reveal itself. Then he shook his head. “Nice camera, dude,” he added, before stumbling back up the hallway, towards the elevators.
Jay went to step back into his room, but for some reason he lingered in the doorway, watching the drunk man make his stumbling way along the hall. He reached the doors at the end, leading to the stairs and the elevators, and all but fell through them; Jay could hear him laughing to himself as the door closed, muffling the sound from the stairwell. Then the hallway became quiet again, the lights too bright, and Jay could feel the yawning emptiness of his dark room behind him. He no longer felt tired, but there was no way he could get up now – doing so would only prolong the emptiness of the afternoon, make it stretch an extra six hours. That was more than he could bear, so he went back to bed and lay there restlessly instead, wondering about the drunk man and the kind of night he had had; why he was here in the first place, what cause he had for such a thorough celebration. A wedding, maybe? A reunion? A group of college friends, revisiting somewhere that meant something to them, or roadtripping until they ran out of money? The possibilities seemed endless, and that set Jay off wondering about all the other people he passed, and what their lives were like, and if anyone else had things like this to worry about.
Statistically he knew he could not be the only one going through this, but what did that matter? Regardless of if others were going through it or not, he was still on his own. The very nature of this situation made it so that Jay could never find anyone who could help; could never do anything to help others. They were all in essence going through it alone, individual private hells that left no room for anybody else.
It was about the cruellest thing Jay could imagine.
*
Money was a constant worry, so on the days where it wasn’t too cold and it wasn’t going to be life-threateningly hot to sleep in the car, Jay tended to economise. He didn’t like it, because there was something deniable about living in hotels that he didn’t have when he was sleeping in the back of his car. When he was in a hotel, he could imagine that he was on a trip, or in a temporary situation, or one of those European eccentrics who would live in hotels for months on end, driving the staff to distraction before absconding to another. When he was sleeping in his car, there was one hard, undeniable truth that dogged his every moment: he was homeless.
Like everyone, Jay had had his assumptions about the homeless. He had never thought any of them wanted to be there, or at the very least they hadn’t started out that way, but he had thought there was an obvious train of events that would cause the problem and yes, there had been a time where he had foolishly assumed that a person could have always intervened. How, he wasn’t sure, but when he had been in high school he had been of the opinion that if they had just been a little more careful with money, or simply given up an addiction, or just not been fired, they would have been alright. Only as he got older did he realise how complicated it really was, and that there were plenty of homeless people who had done everything by the book, and who had planned and saved, and who had tried to get help, but they had been failed over and over again from every single angle. Jay had learned this as his political awareness had grown, his emotional intelligence matured, and then he had had the realisation underlined when he had become homeless himself.
Of course, there was the slight issue that whatever was going on with him was obviously supernatural, but if he hadn’t had the tapes to prove it (the tapes of him, of course; if he hadn’t had Alex’s tapes he wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with) he could have easily believed himself to be one of the countless mentally ill Americans left to fend for themselves. As it happened he was not insane, but he was in a uniquely difficult situation, so he could hardly blame society for having nothing to deal with faceless creatures stalking people. The rest of it was still the same, though: the lack of options, the lack of nutritional yet still cheap food, the lack of places to wash his clothes or shower or even go to the toilet without having to spend money, the hostility that complete strangers would direct at him. He knew what they were thinking, of course – that he was some deadbeat, that he had made stupid mistakes, that he was an addict and had therefore done this to himself. Sometimes he wondered if they would be any easier on him if they knew the truth, and believed it, but he thought probably not. People were so eager to blame the homeless for their plight, probably so they could continue believing that it could never happen to them. A false sense of security, pretending like they had control, and they weren’t just one missed paycheck or one health scare or one mental breakdown away from being in the exact same position. No doubt they would just shake their heads and tell him that he should have been more proactive when it came to avoiding the faceless creature, or more assertive telling it to leave him alone.
He supposed, at the very least, he had his car. On sunny days like these, sitting with the trunk open and his legs dangling out the back, he looked like just another college student waiting for friends, or wasting some time. The treeline was behind him here, with one of his cameras pointed at it at all times; his other camera was hidden behind him, pointing outward and keeping him firmly in frame. Ahead of him was the parking lot, and to his left was open greenery leading off to the children’s playpark. The grass area was quite lively at the moment, filled with several dozen people – it was graduation day at one of the nearby colleges, and some of the graduates and their families had come to the park for a cook-out. The tables there had metal plates for portable grills, and there was a section of concrete on the grass for larger ones; this was dutifully filled by a rather impressive gas-powered contraption that somebody had obviously hauled all the way out here and set up, and the picnic tables were covered with coolers containing various drinks and cold sides. Sometimes Jay caught the breeze and on it the scent of cooking meat, and it was enough to make his mouth water. He rarely had an appetite these days, which was a blessing, but times like these it assaulted him with terrible ferocity.
From this distance, he couldn’t make out what was being said. He could only hear the babble of voices, excited chatter and the frequent rise of laughter. Everyone was smiling, and the sun was high in the sky, and the graduates lounged around still in their gowns, the decorations on their caps glinting in the light. They seemed to Jay, in that moment, to be ridiculously young; they were only a couple of years younger than him, but in the warm daylight they looked soft-faced and bright-eyed, and they were larking around with the excitement of young children, carefree and totally buoyant with the excitement of the day. They were surrounded by their proud families, they had achieved so much, they had their whole future ahead of them and right then, despite any worries that they might have, despite the multitude of stresses that every person had to reconcile with even across the course of the happiest life, they probably thought they could take over the world.
Jay envied them, and he was happy for them, and he felt horribly, horribly apart from them sitting there; but above all in that moment he hated them, and it was this that made him feel most wretched of all.
*
Jay was in another Walmart, but once he was inside it all looked the same. The most exciting thing was the fact that they were always arranged a little different, and some of them were slightly larger than others and therefore had more of a selection. Jay could kill several hours going around a particularly large Walmart, looking at all the different departments, going around and pretending that his money was unlimited and deciding what food he would buy if he had a choice; he would look around the clothing section and think about how nice it would be to have some new clothes, rather than the ones he had been wearing for what felt like forever now. He had left his apartment with only a small bag of clothing, figuring he could risk returning every so often to wash it or change it out, but of course the fire had put an end to that plan. Now those clothes made up the only things he owned – a single pair of jeans, a single pair of shoes, a couple of T-shirts, a single hoodie, and his hat. He could probably get a couple more items, but it didn’t seem as important to him as food or gas or money for hotels, so it had fallen by the wayside and now he found himself standing in the middle of the clothing displays and realising that he wasn’t even entirely sure what size he was anymore. He knew his old measurements, and he certainly hadn’t grown any taller, but he had lost a lot of weight. He could see it in the mirror, in the shaper angles of his face, in the delicate slimness of his wrists. His jeans were much smaller on him, and to keep them in place he’d had to go to the last notch on his belt. At the rate he was going, he was going to have to use his knife to poke a few extras in.
For some reason, it was this – standing there, realising his clothing barely fit anymore, realising that he was even more out of touch with the latest fashion tan he’d ever been, all the colours and styles completely alien to him – that made him fully appreciate the fact that this was his life now. Before it had seemed only temporary, but some part of him had held on to the hope that he would work it out, and he would find Alex, and it would all fall into place somehow, and there would be an answer that might not be simple, necessarily, but it would make sense, and they’d be able to deal with this or outrun it or do something other than live only a half-step ahead at all times. Now he realised just how long it had been, and how little progress had been made, and how he could look into the future with as much hope and as much determination as he wanted, but it didn’t change the fact that this was all there was ever going to be.
Jay stood there for a long time, taking advantage of the fact that the place was pretty empty at this time on a weekday, where most people would be at work. The displays were tall, coming up right over his head, and the sound of the clothing muffled the noise from the rest of the store. He had nowhere to be, and nothing to do – just time to kill today, and tomorrow, and for the rest of the week, and then on and on it went. There had been a time where Jay had sincerely believed that a whole day of absolutely nothing would have been brilliant, but now he realised how naïve he had been. It seemed impossible that this was now his life, and not only because of the events that had led to it – for some reason, in that particular moment it wasn’t the faceless creature stalking him and the masked strangers following him that seemed unbelievable, but rather this: the simple fact that he was in a nondescript clothing aisle in a nondescript Walmart, realising his life was over.
Somebody entered the aisle at the other end, and Jay quickly snapped back to reality. He didn’t want to stay there with them; didn’t want to have to make small talk. He wasn’t one of them anymore. He turned, walked a step, and then turned the other way and exited the aisle that way instead. At the end of this aisle was a row of shirts and ties and suit jackets, and as much as Jay wanted to choke on bitter laugher whenever he thought about it, he had developed quite an aversion to that kind of thing.