Alex (clockwork) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2018-07-06 14:36:00 |
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Entry tags: | #november 2017, alex, alex x mike, mike |
Who: Alex & Mike
Where: Phone and Mike's house
When: Sunday afternoon 10/29
Status: Complete
Mike stayed in bed as long as his bladder would let him. He felt a little beat up after the night before because there had been drinking and jamming and he'd maybe overdone it a little because the day had just been strange. He'd still been sober when he saw that lady standing on the corner of the street, all dressed up like she was going to a renaissance fair but not super fancy. Mike had chalked it up to it being the weekend before Halloween but then she'd just gone ahead and vanished. Just like that. He would have written it off as nothing but it happened again an hour later. He'd wanted to spend more time online looking up possible hallucination effects from his medication or the disease itself but he'd had to get ready for the gig that night.
Still in bed he was hopping between tabs on his laptop, going from reading boring medical shit to browsing facebook to see the pictures the band had been tagged in. They'd looked good up there, a demon, a mad hatter and Elvira rocking it out. It had been a good show and Jack hadn't gotten grievously hurt like he'd worried he would so all and all the night was a success. Maybe too much of a success because Mike was paying for it now. He finally wandered off to the bathroom, then returned to check his messages, sending one to Alex.
You didn't even show up for the gig with a little frowny face. It was a joke, of course. The gig had been more than an hour away from Point Pleasant and Alex had told him he wasn't coming.
Alex’s Saturday had been a strange one. Nothing out of the ordinary had really happened and like every Saturday, he had worked until the early afternoon then he had headed home to listen to music, to watch TV, to chill as the kids said. Except during his day, there had been… something or rather, someone. He had caught her in the corner of his eye more than once but her disappearance every time he turned in her direction meant he never saw more than the briefest flash of her clothes. He couldn't place the time period exactly but something in the back of his mind niggled at him. He was so sure he'd seen her somewhere before…
Not that it happened, of course. She wasn't real and it was just his mind playing tricks on him. Too many horror movies and Halloween talk. Of course. It was much easier to pretend he was going crazy than to dare admit anything he couldn't explain. And besides, he hadn't seen her around the apartment since he'd woken up so… That was something. He'd probably just been tired yesterday. Sure.
Alex had been awake for an hour but was still tucked warmly in his bed when his phone buzzed in his hand. He exited the ebook he had been reading to check the message and smiled. I decided not to cockblock you and let the groupies have easy access.
Mike rolled his eyes and tittered when he got the reply. He had gotten a blowjob the night before so he couldn't really call Alex out and tell him it hadn't worked but he was pretty sure he would have gotten it anyway - unless he'd been too busy chatting with Alex, that counted as a cockblock too, he supposed.
He flopped down on his bed again and thumbed in a quick reply to send back.
Thanks? lol! Thank god you weren't there
A second after sending it he had an idea. He was bored but lazy and Alex had been fun to hang out with so why not? It was doubtful Alex felt up for anything either but it was worth the try. Home delivered company was a good idea at least. He added another text on the heels of the first one before Alex had replied to the first one.
Wanna come over? Show me your guitar skills? :P
Alex was about to reply to the first text Mike sent with something equally snarky when his phone vibrated for a second one. He deleted the start of the first reply then considered the offer. Actually getting up and out sounded like a lot of effort when he could just stay in bed but he lacked enough opportunities these days that he jumped at the chance. Why not? I’ve got nothing better to do. :P Send me your address and I’ll be there soon.
Mike started writing his address down but then he laughed a little to himself and deleted it writing another one instead.
You're the worst stalker ever if you don't know where I live by now
Of course he followed that up by sending his address but they had joked about Alex stalking him so why not play on that joke a little. He dropped the phone and headed back to the bathroom, figuring he should probably brush his teeth and try to clean some of the leftovers of the dark smudgy eyeliner off if he was having company.
Alex hadn't even waited for the reply before he pulled himself out of bed and headed for the shower. He got ready quickly and by the time he was finished, Mike had sent the address. He didn’t bother to send back a reply before he headed over. It didn’t take long and once he was there, he sent a text from his car. I think I’m here? Come outside, I’m not ringing a doorbell unless I know for sure.
Mike couldn't help but roll his eyes at the message but he headed out to the front of the house and waved at Alex. "Pretty smart," he said sarcastically when he was close enough to talk to. "This is a really dangerous neighborhood." He grinned and stepped aside to let Alex in. He looked good, better than Mike, so he'd probably not been up all night partying like Mike had.
Alex had been fairly certain the address was right but he was still reassured when Mike appeared in the doorway. Once he saw him, he quickly got out of his car, locked it and headed up to the front door. “Well, I mean, you live here…” Alex replied with a smirk. He followed Mike’s guide to head inside then paused to wait for him. He took the time to look around the entry. It was nice, neat and had a more homely, family feel than his bachelor pad though. He turned back to look at Mike, “By the way, you look like shit. Big night?”
"You saying I'm dangerous?" Mike murmured, cocking a brow as he closed the door. "I guess I can be if I put my mind to it... And yeah, most of this is make-up though, couldn't get it all off." He gestured vaguely to the dark smudges around his eyes and smiled as he pushed past Alex and led the way to his room. "You missed a good gig, did you do anything fun?"
“You need that magic stuff girls use. It’s some kind of special water...” Alex frowned as he followed after Mike, trying to remember what the right word was. It started with M, he was sure, but he had never had a need to remember it. He shrugged it off. “Honestly? I went to bed early and went to sleep. I was having one of those weird vision migraines where you keep seeing shapes and things that aren't there.”
"Make-up removed?" Mike suggested helpfully. "Yeah I know, I'll get some from mom later, right now you just have to deal with it." He smirked and led the way to his bedroom where he unceremoniously flopped down on his bed once the door was closed. "You get those migraines often?" he asked with some concern. "With the... Like halos, right?"
Alex was about to answer about the migraines when the name of the specific make-up remover came to him. “Micellar water, that’s the stuff. I’ve heard that’s good.” He stood awkwardly into the bedroom doorway and looked around, taking it in. It wasn’t exactly what he’d expected but it was still very him. “Sorry, migraines, right. Not a lot but yesterday’s was weird. I just kept seeing stuff in the corner of my eyes.” He shrugged. “It didn’t hurt though, that’s something.”
"I've only heard about the ones where you see spots and auras around stuff," Mike murmured. "At least you weren't hallucinating ghosts like me. I don't know what I was smoking." Aside from the fact he hadn't been smoking but he had a feeling it could be a belated effect - or he'd eaten something bad which probably meant he shouldn't have gone out drinking but he'd never been good with caution.
Alex had been looking around the room slowly when Mike’s words caught him off guard. It hadn’t really been a migraine but he’d described it as such because what else could it have been? He frowned as he turned back to face Mike’s bed. “Let me guess, she looked like a witch?” He rolled his eyes. Why did he even stay in this creepy town? Something supernatural was sure to get him one day. “So when I said migraine… It was more like I kept seeing something and since it’s, you know, impossible, I thought my head was messing up… Did she do anything other than just, you know, appear and disappear?”
Mike felt a little chill crawl up his back in that way ghost stories had made him feel as a kid. It was stupid and there was definitely a rational explanation for it, he just couldn't think of it right now. "They all did," he said flippantly. "Like the six." He let out a little huff of a laugh and shook his head before gesturing at the guitars lined up in the corner of the room. "You should try one out," he muttered. "Show me what you got, you get to pick which one."
Alex felt the hair standing on the back of his neck as he stared at Mike. He hadn't got a good enough look to really recognise all of them but the one he had managed to look at straight on definitely resembled the pictures he'd seen. “Well, fuck,” he said and gave an involuntary shiver. But it was done and wasn't worth thinking about now. It was easier to just brush it off as just one more weird thing in this horrible town.
He stepped closer to the guitars and without even thinking about it, grabbed an acoustic one. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took a moment to get comfortable, running his hands over the neck and frets. “This is way better quality than I'm used to,” he said with a laugh then began to strum slowly, testing each string. It was in tune, of course, so after a moment he began to play something with a medium pace.
"Yeah I'm spoiled," Mike murmured and as if to prove a point he rolled to the side to open the mini fridge at the side of the bed, pulling out a couple of sodas. He sat one of them down within Alex's reach and popped the other open for himself. He was more than happy to ignore the weird topic of hallucinations that matched, not at all in the mood to try to rationalize it and even less so in the mood to believe it meant something. "I don't know why, I always like the bass best. Guitars are nice but yeah... What kinda music do you like to play?"
“Well, I usually don’t play and don’t know many songs,” Alex said as he kept playing without any direction. If he had been trying to impress a girl, he would have actually paid attention to what he was playing but because it was Mike, he just strummed the rhythm he had going, repeating the same couple of chords. It was nicer to be able to keep a conversation than to concentrate on being ‘good’. “But I like listening to prog rock, I guess. What about you?”
Mike liked not quite playing, it was a soothing thing that reminded him of being a kid, hanging out with his dad. "Oh nice," he murmured. "My friends say I’m a hipster whore, I like indie. That’s what Drowsy Getaway was supposed to be all about but my best friends are rockers." He couldn’t help but smile at that, shaking his head. "We should probably change the name."
“I did think the name sounded too… relaxed for the music you play,” Alex admitted. He hadn’t seen them live yet but he had made the effort to find a couple of live videos on their Youtube account to find out what they sounded like. It wasn’t terrible so that was something. It would have been too hard to pretend he liked Mike’s band if they were some garage band that shouldn’t leave it. “Maybe more something more about getting a quick getaway instead.”
"Angry getaway," Mike chuckled but despite his attempt to change the topic his mind was still on how weird it was that they'd both seen the same thing the day before. "So yesterday-" he started a bit reluctantly. "Were you on something?" Not that it explained how they'd both seen the same thing, maybe if it had been the same day as the witch tour they could blame that, but a week later? It was weird. There were too many weird things happening lately and he wanted to find the rational explanation for it all.
Alex frowned and moved his eyes down to the guitar. He changed the pattern and turned it a little faster, a little trickier for his out of practice fingers so it looked like he was concentrating on that instead. He stayed quiet and for a moment, it was more tempting to pretend he hadn't heard than to try to find a reasonable explanation. Finally he sighed and shook his head. “No but I wish I was.”
Mike was pretty sure he knew what Alex was doing and he could relate to it pretty strongly. Ignore the weirdness if you can't explain it, someone will come along and explain it eventually. There really was no point in getting all hysterical about something like that, he'd feel like an idiot when some James Randy type of guy showed up with tools and science on their side. "I'd totally think it was just some kind of weird viral marketing but the witches' tour is over and it'd be creepy to project something like that into people's homes," he said with a little smile. "But I know you can see things sometimes if there's a certain frequency of sound. You can't hear it but it makes your eyeballs vibrate or something."
Alex wasn't really sure if the vibrating effort theory really made sense. Even if it were possible - and maybe it was, though he'd never heard it before - it didn't really explain why they saw the same things. ”That's…convenient,” he said slowly. He understood why Mike wanted to deny it as much as possible. He could even relate but it was one thing to ignore it if it wasn't hurting anybody and remain blindly, stubbornly ignorant. That could get you killed. “But what would be making that sound? And is it just us or did anyone else on the tours see anything too?”
"I don't know," Mike admitted. "Airplanes, any kind of machinery. Maybe that institute that took your mom is doing mass experiments." He arched a brow at that, unsure if he was actually joking or serious. "Like that chemical spill or whatever in the fog? Where people just went nuts." He had no good theories but the more he thought about it the more he wanted to know.
“Maybe…” Alex said with a careful shrug. He used to want to believe in the supernatural so badly but would tell anybody who asked he'd never seen proof yet. He'd thought he would have jumped at the chance to find a ghost or demon but now that he had, it was harder to accept it was real that he'd expected. He kept his eyes low on the guitar but his fingers were barely moving anymore as he focused more on the conversation. “But,” he said quietly, each word calculated before he said it. “What if we consider the opposite? You know… that it was exactly what it looked like. Occam’s Razor and all.”
Mike frowned softly at the thought but at least he thought about it, shrugging one shoulder slowly. "I wouldn't know what the hell to do with that," he admitted. "I mean, I love all that stuff, all the weird and crazy, I'm an artist and all," he rolled his eyes a little at that but it was true, he was much more of an artistic soul than an analytical one and yet it was hard to let go of the logical way he'd been brought up. "But there's a big fat line between fiction and reality, you know?"
Alex wasn't so sure that the line between the two worlds were as clear as Mike wanted to admit. From his own experience, he knew the line was so blurred in places it was completely worn away but if he hadn't seen it for himself, he'd have had the same opinion as Mike. “Maybe… But I've seen enough to know that all sorts of crazy things are possible so…” He shrugged. ”But, hey, either way, they seem to have got their thrills out of scaring people with, you know, looking. I haven't seen any sign of them today, have you? Maybe it's just because Halloween and the thinning barrier or whatever.”
Halloween's thin barrier was an old as fuck tale and Mike sighed as he smiled. He didn't like the thought of ghosts coming through because some sketchy as hell barrier wasn't strong enough to keep them out. He'd read too many horror stories and could too easily imagine something worse barrelling through if it could. It was safer for his sanity's sake to think of it all as fiction. No life after death, just the here and now and science, bitch. Still he couldn't deny what had happened and it made him think of Jack and his so called curse. "Thinning barrier," he said quietly. "And Friday the Thirteenth curses."
“I'm not too sure I could handle Friday the Thirteenth curses being real. Think about how often they come around.” Alex gave a small shiver. At least Halloween was only once a year. He slowly stopped playing and once the last notes had finished ringing, he set the guitar down across his lap. “I've never noticed anything different on those days but I don't know, maybe I just get so much bad luck anyway that I never noticed.” He laughed.
"Well, you weren't bitten by a black cat on Friday the Thirteenth," Mike said with a little smile. He'd seen how clumsy Jack had become lately and he still chalked it up to something psychosomatic but this whole ghost thing was giving him pause and he hated that. "I still they were on something, you know? But that doesn't change the fact that they both got bit. How fucking weird is that?"
Alex burst into laughter. He had heard the story when they met but had thought Mike was joking. He was surprised to find he was still falling for what was obviously a prank. It took him a moment to calm down and when he did, he looked at Mike with a dubious but amused grin. “Sorry but I still think your friend is pulling your leg. Does he become a werecat now?”
"I guess we'll find out on the next full moon," Mike replied, infected with Alex's laughter as he tittered along. "Maybe I'll put him in a cage, just in case." Oh Jack would love that. "I'll tell him it's for his own protection because he's been so clumsy lately and when he doesn't turn into a were cat I can prove to him it's all psychosomatic." He did enjoy the thought of Jack in a cage - Jack in a box? - for reasons he wasn't going to look too closely into. "Seriously, if he's faking it he's a masochist."
“He probably does believe it. I've met so many people who think things like the full moon makes you crazy or they're always unluckier on Friday the 13ths. Superstition and all.” Alex's own mother had been one but inconsistently enough that he was sure any imagined symptoms were psychosomatic. She hadn't been the only one either, it was definitely a thing. “I mean that about the curse, not about the cat. I still think he's leading you on there.”
"Yeah I don't know what his game is, if he was joking he'd have told me by now," Mike said with a shrug. "I think maybe he really believes it which doesn't make it true but it means he doesn't believe he's lying to me. Which... Is kinda way more worrying." But maybe Jack was no less crazy than Alex with his conspiracy theories that made a weird amount of sense. "Have you found anything more out about the stuff you're crazy about?" Mike asked casually, tongue in cheek.
“It was probably just a kitten or something he was playing with and, hey, ouch.” Alex clutched a hand over his heart dramatically and laughed. “That was a terrible segue but, no, nothing really new to report. I started looking for police members who were working when it was running and I've got a couple who still live here. I'm going to call them tomorrow, see if I anyone is willing to sit down with me.” He paused then added, ”What should I ask?”
"I don't know," Mike chuckled. "You're the investigative writer here. Maybe watch some crime documentaries and see what kind of things they focus on there?" He shrugged. When it came to anything but music he was a consumer, not a creator. Especially when it came to having to think too hard. He'd long since decided to just have fun in his life while he still could.
“ Gee, thanks, you're a help,” Alex said with a small laugh. He had spent most of his recent researching time focused only on finding names and the story he'd tell to convince them to meet. He hadn't thought about what came next but he realised he'd need to figure that out fast. “You're so invested in hearing about it but you make a useless sidekick, you know?”
"Merely an observer," Mike said smugly. "Hardly a sidekick." He flopped down more comfortably and checked his phone. "There are actually two documentary makers in town you could team up with, but they're in the debunking game so maybe not. I met one of them at the museum, they have some debunking videos up on Youtube. Maybe they'd have some ideas about questions and stuff."
“That's actually not a bad idea… Good job, Sidekick.” Alex gave Mike a cheeky grin and took a moment to think about it properly. Whilst he wasn't a skeptic, perhaps going in with less certainty of his way of things wouldn't hurt. He was sure he'd forget that during an interview but he'd try to remember. “Do they live here or were they just visiting for the festival stuff?”
"Just visiting," Mike replied with a roll of his eyes. "Their friend went missing and they're looking into it, I looked at their channel and it's interesting. Here..." He grabbed his ipad off the nightstand and opened a browser, looking up a video before handing it over to Alex. "I only met one of them but he seemed cool."
“Thanks,” Alex said as he took the ipad from Mike. He recognised the two men Mike was talking about soon as he looked at the video and grinned widely. “Oh, hey, I’ve met these guys. Noah and Magnus, right? They often come into my work a bit and I kind of hung out with them at the witch tour.” He watched the video for a moment but it didn’t really help with any ideas for questions. Though now that he knew they were looking for someone too… He banished the thought. If they were skeptics, they’d probably just think he was crazy if they found out his theories. “I didn’t know they were only here looking for a friend. Do you know who? What happened?”
"Danny Valiant," Mike replied. "He was a radio host who just up and disappeared one day. Cops haven't found anything but what else is new." The video wasn't helpful, he could see that, but then he thought it'd be more helpful to actually talk to the guys. "I only met Noah, he came to the museum the other day. Oh and Danny's show was all over the supernatural so I bet there are theories about how he went missing."
“That name is kind of familiar,” Alex murmured. He paused the video and brought up a browser to type the name into. As soon as he saw it, he knew why. The Night's Owl had been a show Fin had recommended months ago when he'd first gone to Books n Beer. Alex realised he must have started listening right around the time of the guy's disappearance because soon after, everything about the show had stopped. It had been weird but he'd never assumed foul play. “Oh…” he said quietly as he handed the iPad back to Mike. “I guess that's why the guy won't answer my emails.”
"Pretty good reason," Mike replied with a wry smile. "As far as excuses go, you know..." He took the ipad back and turned the video off before tossing it aside on the bed. "C'mon, let's see if we can rally up some questions for you to ask. Tell me what you've got so far and we can brainstorm something." It might not be much and Mike not be an investigator at heart but it gave him something to do to pass this dreary hangover Sunday.