“Hey, give me another beer” will said to the bartender.
“Ok…and for you?” The bartender gestured towards me.
“Uhh… can I get a martini?”
The bartender gave me a look like I had asked him to meet me on the other side of the hole in the bathroom stall.
“We have beer, and beer.” He said plainly.
“Weeell, one of those then” I replied.
I turned to will “so what are we doing in this shit hole again?” I asked.
“I told you, bill wants to meet here today” will said.
Bill was my tapes guy. About 10 years ago I started a gore site online. At first I could barely scrape together enough money from porn ads posted to my site to make rent. But then the competition started to grow, and I just didint have enough “unique” content to gather views.
Until I met bill. I don’t ask bill where he gets his tapes, he just brings me a crazy new batch every week, I pay him, then we go our separate ways.
Usually me and bill meet at a tacobell or a pub, but today he dragged us half way across town to some scummy dive where half the patrons look like they would sell their mothers cooch for a hit of anything. Probably a good half of my website viewers were in here.
“Fine but why this place?”
Will rolled his eyes, gave a shrug and took a big swig of the beer in front of him, I looked at mine and did the same.
A couple beers later and I was starting to get into the heavy metal blasting on the juke box, then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey boys, follow me” it was bill.
Bill gestured for us to follow him to a table in the back of the that was unoccupied.
“Cmon bill” I said “why did you take us to the place Ted bundy picks up his dry cleaning? What was wrong with meeting at a Wendy’s?”
“Ahhh it’s not that bad” bill said winking at a beer bellied biker chick on our way to the table. “we needed someplace loud, besides, check out the tail in here”
“I’ll pass” I groaned
“Suit yourself” bill pulled out a chair for himself and placed a duffel bag on the table.
“Got something old school for you today” bill beamed at me as he produced three blank vhs tapes from the bag.
“What’s this? Columbine security tapes?, a 3rd angle of the jfk assassination? Long awaited osama bin Ladin death footage?”
“Cmon” bill grunted, clearly done with my sarcasm.
“This is gonna turn your brain to shit, I got em in New Orleans. Eeeeethentic voodoo magic inside the tapes. You just write a name on the blank card on the front of the vhs and the death appears on the tape! You could reuse this to have a slew of constant celebrity deaths on your site!!”
"”Well wouldn’t people expect it to be AI generated footage or some other trick? It’s not like “watching Taylor swift die” would mean anything if she’s not actually dead.””
“Oh….but she would be” bill said in a growly whisper.
“What do you mean?”
“Voodoo magic!” Bill replied, a glint in his eye. “You think im joking!?”
Bill had never done me wrong before, but I was starting to think all the acid he’d taken in the 90’s had caught up to him.
“Well… no….what do you want for the tapes bill?”
“50 large”
I almost spit out my sip of lukewarm beer.
“Really…that’s well over 4 times our usual rate.”
“Well you won’t need me for a while after you buy these, I also need time to restock my personal Stache. It’s not easy coming up with the shit I get for you weekly.”
“Alright fine, I’ll give them a shot” I said as I shook bills hand.
If I knew that was the last time I was going to see bill I would have smashed the tapes then and there.
Me and will left the bar and went out separate ways home, I think bill decided to stick around a bit longer to fawn over the biker chicks, the old dog.
It was getting late when I got home but I decided I wanted to see what I had spent half a months earnings on. I opened up the duffel bag bill had left me with and pulled the tapes out. Each was in a dark red leather sleeve that was cold to the touch.
I sat at my work station and looked up to one of my computer monitors I had left open on a twitch stream and got a horrible idea.
I did a quick search for “jumboshrimpharry33” a pretty big streamer that had been found guilty on all counts of abusing his kids and wife. Hell, a video even leaked of him strangling his 5 year old daughter but he somehow got out of it in court. Surly nobody would miss him, right? People just watched him in wait of some new morbid fuck up on his part.
I wrote his name on the tape, wondering if the voodoo magic would understand twitch handles and stuck the tape in the small vcr/tv combo I had on the left of my corner desk. The tv crackled to life and a recording of jumbo shrimps stream started to play. I looked over at my monitor with the live stream, he was playing the same game but the tape appeared to be an hour ahead judging by the clock visible on his stream.
I heard a loud banging coming from the tv, I looked back at it just in time to see a SWAT team burst through his door and start pumping round after round into his chest with automatic rifles.
The SWAT members started to leave the room single file, leaving jumbo shrimp sputtering and twitching on the floor. All except one SWAT. He stood there, just staring into the camera. He took a step forward, then another and another until he got to the streamers body, then he reached down and forced his hand into his chest, ripping his still beating heart out.
Between the riot gear on his face and the grainy vhs footage I couldn’t make out who it was under the helmet. But I swear I could make out a thin, evil smirk.
The SWAT guy walked over to the door where they entered, heart still in hand and began to write “another one!!” On it in blood before everything cut to static and I was left alone in my room, wondering what the actual fuck I had just witnessed.
I turned back to the live stream and waited, sure enough, he was swatted an hour later. It was different from the tape though, the swat called out to him and he pulled a small gun from somewhere out of view. When the SWAT entered he took aim and fired before being gunned down. The team then surrounded his body and one ran over to shut off the stream.
I was flabbergasted. At this point it was close to midnight and knew calling bill would be fruitless, he was probably balls deep in some trucker mama from the bar at this point so I decided to turn in for the night.
Around 3am I woke up to a banging, like somebody was throwing something around. The banging sounded like it was coming from my office so I went to investigate.
I cracked open the door and saw one of the tapes whipping around the room but when I entered it fell to the floor. I checked the label on the tape and it said “James and bill” my heart jumped into my throat then plummeted into my stomach.
I popped the tape into my tv and saw a man I assumed to be James in a room with walls of tapes with labels written in marker. James was backing up into a corner screaming
“BILL!! YOU DONT HAVE TO DO THIS!! TAKE ANYTHING YOU WANT!! BUT WE HAVE TO BURN THOSE TAPES!! IT MAY BE OUR ONLY CHANCE TO BREAK THE CURSE!!!”
“You never told me the tapes kill anybody that uses them” bill said coldly. “If I’m going down, you’re coming with me” bill said pulling out a small revolver from his pocket.
“BILL STOP I-I DIDINT KNOW!! I TRACKED THE HISTORY OF ANYBODY THATS USED THEM AND THEY’RE ALL DEAD!! I TRIED TELLING YOU ABOUT FRED LAST WEEK BUT YOU WOULDN’T LISTEN!! YOU SON OF A BITCH!!! YOU NEVER LIS-“
James didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. Bill aimed the gun at James right temple and pulled the trigger, the force of the gun was so strong James eye popped out as a river of blood poured poured out of the wound, filling the empty socket.
Bill then put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, falling somewhere off screen.
There were about 10 seconds of silence only interrupted by the drip drip drip of James excess blood slowly puddling to the floor as he sat propped against the wall.
I sat in shocked silence. I reached for my landline on the desk beside me to call bill and try to stop him from taking his and James lives, when I saw a new tape propped against the phone with my name on it.
I felt like somewhere in between throwing up and shitting my pants as I popped the new tape in. I was greeted with a shot of myself apparently watching this tape. It was like a mirror, I waved in real life, I waved back on tape.
Then I stopped waving on screen and out of nowhere, two hands clutching a garrote threw themselves over my head and began working the tool back and forth, slowly slicing my throat open.
It’s a surreal thing, watching yourself die. I spun around to make sure nobody was in the room with me and turned back to the screen. The garrote was halfway through my neck and oozing blood when the hands stopped cutting, and started pulling my head back, tearing it clean off as a geyser of blood rained out.
The hands pushed my body aside revealing a small, thin lipped man who had a face like a weasel. I immediately recognized those lips as the same ones worn under the riot armor from my tape experiment earlier.
“You like that?” The man asked “this could be you…unless you want to do something for me…”
“What”? I stammered
“Check the list of names I just slid under your door”
“The list that you..”
I heard the rustling of paper and saw something shoot under my door, I rushed over and flung the door open to catch this bastard… but nobody was there. I retrieved the piece of paper and walked back to tv where the man was practicing lay ups with my severed head.
“Ahhh perfect” the man said when he saw I had returned and quickly shot my head into the trash can under my desk.
He got nothing but net.
“So you’re going to write every one of those names on that list down, every name gives you another hour of life…unless you actually want your head to be used for a game of h-o-r-s-e. When you finish this list I’ll have another ready for you, do anything to those harm those tapes and I’ll gut you like a fish quicker than you can light a match, cheers!!”
The tape stopped.
So now I’ve been writing names down onto the tapes in between writing paragraphs here in some last ditch attempt to clear myself but I know sooner or later, he is going to come for me. I’m going to have to sleep at some point, I’m on my fourth list and can barley keep my eyes open. I don’t know what will happen to the tapes once I’m gone, but please, if you find them in a thrift store, online or any other place.
Stay away.