Chapter Text
"Statement of Joe Spooky, regarding sinister happenings in the downtown—"
"Tim, look out!"
"Sasha?"
Tim barely has time to comprehend what's happening before the woman in question is rugby tackling him to the ground. He looks up, mostly to ask what the hell that was for, when he sees none other than Jane Prentiss. She's lurching towards where he was just standing, staggering on half-rotted legs and catching herself on the wall. She turns her head, the joints of her neck clicking and popping, and she grins down at him. Stringy, greasy hair falls over her face, and behind it are two wide, wild eyes, a worm wriggling out from under the left lid. Her teeth are practically orange, plaque caked between each tooth, gums nearly black. Her chapped, skinny lips crack and bleed as she smiles. Worms force their way in and out of her skin, through old and new holes. They spill onto the floor, leap onto his trousers, leap for any visible skin.
Sasha runs in one direction. Tim runs in the other. It's such a blur that he barely registers that he's taken the worst turn possible. Jon's office is a complete dead end, and where most of the worms are currently spilling from. Frantically, and without much actual input from his brain, he stamps on the worms. The crush and squelch under his feet is enough to make him want to boke, but tripping over into the enormous blanket of worms might actually do the trick.
Luckily for his lifespan, but maybe unluckily for his ribs, he lands squarely on a box of cans. They burst under his weight, pressurised CO2 filling the office. The worms scream as they writhe under the gas, shrivelling up until they stop moving. He doesn't think it kills all of them, but they do stop pouring out the wall. A nagging feeling tells him they're simply redirecting.
Turns out, breathing in a metric shit ton of CO2 instead of oxygen is a little bit bad for you, because he truly has no idea how he's ended up in a tunnel system (he has a vague memory of bashing in the wall in Jon's office, widening the dent that was already there). It's damp and echoey and cold, but he trudges on through, trying to avoid the worms even as his head spins. There seems to be less of them, but they move faster, unless his eyes are playing tricks on him.
He ends up stopping at a wall, heaving for breath and hoping that maybe it'll get some more air in his lungs and clear his head. The fire alarm sounds distantly, running employees thumping above him. Voices come from the wall under his ear. A panicked voice, someone yelling. Tim presses his ear to the wall, straining to listen.
"Jon, no! Calm down!" Martin shouts. A crash. A shatter. Pained groans. Something like... static? Is Jon alright? Did Prentiss get in? Martin shouts again, followed by a thump. "Shit!"
Still a little delirious, Tim takes a step back, and rams his shoulder into the wall. Another yelp through the plaster.
"I thought that wall was meant to be solid?!" Martin shouts. Jon does not reply. Tim slams into the wall. Then again. It feels like it's giving under his side. If Jon and Martin are in danger, he has to get through, he has to help them. What would he do with himself if he stood by and let his friends get hurt? "Shit, no, Jon, wait—!"
Tim barely has time to catch up before he's flung backwards in a shower of plaster and drywall. Pain cracks up his spine as it hits the brickwork on the opposite wall, then scrapes to the side as he's thrown down to the damp ground. When his vision goes from triple, to double, and back to single, he looks up.
Above him are eyes.
Glowing green eyes, spiraling around and looking at him. Seeing him. He feels naked. Like the layers of his skin are being peeled away, stripped bare, observed in the most intimate of fashions. It feels violating in an terrible, sickening way, and he can't move, why can't he move? Stuck in an awful sprawl on the hard, uneven floor, he pictures a moth tacked down with pins by the wings. Ears ringing, heart pounding, chest heaving, he looks into the centremost eye and it watches back.
"Jon, stop!"
Martin tackles the mass of eyes to the side and it feels like Tim was ripped away with it. What the hell just happened? What the hell is happening now? From what it looks like, Martin is wrestling an enormous ferret with horns. It looks ridiculous; his feet keep lifting off the ground, and his arms are wrapped awkwardly around the thing's snout. And what's best about the image that Tim wishes he was recording, is that Martin appears to be winning.
Eventually, it does shake him off, huffing and nudging his chest with its snout. Martin scratches behind its ears before he ducks back through the hole in the wall without a word of explanation to Tim, where the back end of the ferret is still curling into. Tim forces himself to sit up and get a proper look at it.
It's a bit hard to see it in the dim light, but its fur is black and tussled. A mane covers its neck and shoulders and chest like the collar of a fur coat, big enough to completely block the view further down the tunnel. It sets its chin down on the floor, long spiraling horns flattened into its fur, and the eyes still watch Tim, but with less intensity. Now, it's harder to see the green with how much the pupils grew in the darkness. Tim shuffles to lean against the wall, as far away from the ferret monster as he can. Christ, he's already had to deal with one monster today, since when was there a second one? And why does this one respond to Martin, of all people?
"So, uh," he tries, and the ferret lazily looks at him. "You Martin's pet or something?" It chuffs in response and, worst of all, moves closer. Its eyes flick over Tim's face, managing to press the end of its snout to Tim's shoulder to get a closer look, even as he tries his best to move away. It doesn't have a nose, persay, the snout just kind of... ends. No mouth, either.
"Uh..." Tim looks up, hoping Martin will miraculously come back into the tunnels, tell his giant, freakish pet to back up, but he doesn't. It looks at him expectantly. For something. Carefully, slowly, Tim raises a hand and sets it on the snout. Almost immediately, a loud purring, heady as an engine, starts to fill the tunnels. Tim strokes the snout, petting under his chin with his other hand. The eyes squint closed. "Good ferret!"
"Found it!" Martin shouts through the thoroughly destroyed wall, clambering back through with a tape recorder held above his head. A tape recorder that is currently hurting Tim's ears with some sort of death rattle, or something. After a moment it fizzles out, and the ferret suddenly lifts its head.
"Are you back now?" Martin asks.
"Yes," the tape recorder responds in Jon's voice. The ferret turns to look at Martin. "Sorry you had to see that. I can't imagine it was very nice."
"Well, I looked away mostly, thought it'd be rude to watch."
"Thank you, Martin." The ferret looks back at Tim. "Are you alright? Sorry for knocking you over, I didn't hurt you too bad, did I?"
Tim points at the ferret. Points at the tape recorder. Then the ferret. The tape recorder. Ferret. Tape recorder.
"Good job, Jon," Martin sighs. "You broke his brain."
"JON?" The shout echoes for a good few seconds. "This thing is Jon?!"
"No need to be rude, Tim," Jon scolds, the ferret thing looking displeased. It's really odd, hearing Jon's voice all the way across the hall, but seeing his face—in the barest of terms that this monster is Jon, and so it technically is his face—barely two feet from him.
"Why do you know about this?" he asks Martin, shuffling even further away from Jon.
"I was just- out. One night. You know. Cryptid hunting."
"Excuse me?" Jon turns on Martin, wriggling as much as he can in the cramped space of the tunnels. "Hunting? You were hunting me?"
"No, no, just- trying to get a picture! There are a lot of statements about people seeing you, and I just wanted to—"
"So you knew there was a dangerous creature out in the woods and you went looking for it? Without telling anyone?"
"Hey, I'm fine! You didn't kill me or anything, what's the matter?"
"Oh, that's the bar for fine now?"
"Considering we were literally seconds away from being eaten by a hoarde of worms just there, yes, I'd say not dying is a pretty decent bar to set!"
"Not to interrupt this lovers' quarrel here," Tim manages to get in between the bickering, "but how are we gonna get out of here?"
It turns out, reversing Jon out of the tunnels like a giant truck is what works. It takes a very long time of shuffling, readjusting, and Tim trying to refrain from comparing him to Austin Powers and failing, but they do manage to get all fifteen feet of Jon out of the tunnels and into the bullring. The worms have mostly left the Archives, it seems, because all that's left is the occasional pile of the things and some crushed or asphyxiated ones. They seem to have fled the archives with all the noise and the CO2.
"So, what now?" Martin asks. Jon's eyes glow green for a second and the tape recorder hums.
"Everyone's left, thanks to the fire alarm, but..." His eyes widen, all at once. "Sasha. Sasha's in Artefact Storage."
Without another word, he shoots out through the double doors and up the stairs, and it takes three whole seconds for the end of his tail to reach the exit. Martin darts after him. Tim sits on the floor, then flops onto his back. He'll catch up when he isn't two seconds from passing out, either from lack of air, or shock.
He's sure Jon has it handled.