About the movie that gave everyone nosebleeds. It was much more dangerous than that. I was the only survivor.
My biggest worry is that it was entirely correct. I am worried that the movie, the nosebleeder, the one I watched, is the sequel that everyone is waiting for.
I can remember all of my friends, but I can’t remember their faces. I always sat in the back, so I could be a peanut gallery without bothering anyone. It was just how I was. Movies were often worth making comments about, and I saw no point in watching a movie with Library silence, when movies are loud anyway.
One of my friends got a bootlegged copy from someone in an email. My friend had it on a laptop, downloaded. All of my friends gathered at my friend’s house and we were set to watch the sequel early.
It wasn’t supposed to be out for about a month, on Christmas. So we were very excited about the release of our new favorite movie. There were snacks and chairs in the garage where the TV had to be moved.
Everyone was excited to watch the movie early. We gathered and sat around while it was cast from the laptop to the TV. We had the bootlegged sequel before Christmas, when the movie was set to release.
What we watched, however, was not the right movie. It was something left over from a different kind of Christmas, from long ago. It was horrifying.
We turned it off and sat in mortified silence. My heart was beating from the film we had watched. It was not the movie we were expecting. It was something real and terrifying that someone had filmed. It was beyond anything comprehensible, and it had killed the participants. We had watched the singers of the evil Christmas songs die horribly as it grasped them with its different parts and twisted them in half.
It had continued to move towards the fleeing congregation, but that is when we turned it off. The angle of the camera was all wrong, far to centered and focused. Someone had known what was going to happen, to have filmed it like that.
There was more to the movie, but I couldn’t remember it. The clarity and brevity of it is what strolled through my mind. I just got the idea that someone had deliberately made the film, and rejected the rest. It was easy to do, after all, it was just a movie.
Except we all knew deep down that it was real. Denial is a powerful thing, a traditional survival mechanism. Except when it puts us back into danger.
There was no thought about the copy of the movie we had. We just deleted it and it was gone.
But it wasn’t long before the symptoms started.
It began when all of us, one by one, got nosebleeds. The profuse bleeding would not stop. We were all scattered at that point, but met back up at the hospital.
Since the emergency room had a resident virus expert, I overheard a recommendation to quarantine all of us. We got quarantined soon after when we started getting headaches, dizziness and nausea.
It was soon after that when the rest of those who had watched the movie arrived. They were taken straight to quarantine. There we were all reunited and discussed what was happening.
We got much sicker as we remained there. The symptoms became flulike, fevers and delirium. It felt like I was asleep and awake at the same time, my body paralyzed while I stared, unable to wake up. It felt dreamy and horrible.
We started to feel better, but not before the first one of us went blind. It was a day later when another and then another day before another. Every day or two, another of us went blind. Then the worst happened.
The first person who went blind began to rot, their flesh becoming moldy and pocked. Then the next person, all the while more people, one by one were going blind.
I hadn’t gone blind, but I was the only one who hadn’t, when the first the begin rotting died of septic shock. Their bowels emptied and they cried out in a lung emptying scream of death and agony.
I realized the only difference between me and the rest of my friends was their exposure to the nosebleeder. I did recover after their symptoms terminated. They didn’t, but I did. I had to learn to understand why, to ease my ‘survivor’s guilt’.
I had watched the nosebleed movie from the back row and had missed parts of it as I looked away. I had also talked, from the back row, over the evil Christmas songs being sang. My complaints had drowned out the sounds of evil the most for me. Somehow it was enough to let me recover.
After all of my friends were dead, the movie stopped playing in my head. I felt better, except the stench of their dead bodies. I was taken out of quarantine and checked on my doctors in special suits.
When they found no signs of a contagion on me or the autopsies of my friends, they decided to let me go. I went home and tried to recover.
It was frightening how quickly it had all happened. Most of the time I had spent just sitting while they ran tests, although it had felt like the horrible part had lasted longer. It was only a few days. Or perhaps it was a whole week. It was, at first, very difficult to recall any details leading up to or about what had happened.
I still felt afraid, realizing that something was wrong. I worried that the movie was the actual one set for a release on Christmas. I almost forgot that worry, I almost felt better. Unfortunately there was a calendar where I could stare and piece together the timeline, slowly comprehending each moment of the tragedy. I was about to move on with my life, try to be normal again, but I knew I couldn’t. It only took an epiphany about the date I was staring at.
I decided to try and make a note of it, to piece together what I knew or could remember. Lately, that seems to be working.
Recently, when I almost felt better, I looked and saw that it was almost Christmas.