Life in the last few months has been difficult. It’s not the work, it’s not my health or the people around me…in a way, it’s nothing and everything.
I never felt like I belonged. I know that is a feeling that most people can understand. Whether it’s with the family that raised you, or the country you live in. Yet, nothing felt like the place I belonged. Worse still, I never had somebody come to me one day and say, “You. Your place is with me.”
It got so bad that one day I just found myself walking away from my friends in the middle of a hangout at the local bar. I saw the door open, I dropped the conversation and just walked out. To this day, I think the only reason they didn’t stop me was because they had as little connection to me as I did to them.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Maybe I’m just depressed. Maybe I’m assuming what’s going through other peoples’ minds. Maybe I’m feeding into my insecurity. I heard it before…and maybe it was right then…at that time.
Not now.
In late August, after my twenty-eighth birthday, I was looking for something to blow my cash on. While I might not like other people’s company, I like my own, so I thought I’d treat myself. Maybe a tub of ice cream, a pack of beer, and enough heavily salted pretzels to keep me drinking. Back then, that’s what I’d call a ‘real good day.’
I was walking home after work, window shopping as this plan formed in my head. I was debating whether to get chocolate or caramel when I stopped walking outside the video store. A real video store, DVDs, and cassette tapes. Somehow surviving in this day and age.
It was strangely nostalgic looking at it. There wasn’t any clear branding, just large neon signs that said “VIDEOS” and “DVD.” A private business, not a franchise. I remembered the day I rented Silence of the Lambs, chewing a cheap gumball from a crappy machine. The scratchy gray carpet, the stickers and posters on the walls.
Even now, those were times I remember fondly. When all I wanted to do was escape. Whether it was escaping my world or just getting out of my head - a video store had it all. I could hold that escape in my hands.
I thought I had an old machine at home. A good movie would go well with ice cream, beer, and pretzels. Before I knew it, I had entered the video store.
Opening the door triggered some kind of chime device. However, instead of a pleasant bell sound or robotic beep-boop, the scary movie ‘Wassup’ played through a cheap toy speaker. It was terrible and awesome at the same time. I didn’t know whether to cringe or smile.
I could see the owner behind the counter, staring at a TV set, his back to me. Long hair, glasses. He looked old, late fifties, wearing childish clothes. Like an LA skateboarder who bought one set of clothes in the ’90s and has not worn anything new since. I would have found it weird if it wasn’t exactly what I expected to see.
He turned to me, wearing thick-rimmed glasses and a bored expression. He nodded hello and turned back to the TV set.
I took that as the signal that I was free to browse.
The sections were marked with laminated pages that used special fonts straight from classic Microsoft PowerPoint. Sure enough, right past the metallic 3D science-fiction section was the Horror section. A little Chuckie clipart smiled at me from the corner of the page. I smiled back as I started going through the classics, as well as some recent releases I never even heard of.
I won’t lie, it sucked me in.
Everything was so…cozy. The faint sound of the air conditioner, the old action-thriller playing in the background. Even the smell of the place seemed to suck the urgency out of me. I spent way too much time reading the back of DVD cases or admiring the covers on VHS tape boxes. The old taglines, the memories…it had all reeled me in.
“Hey, I need to close up, man,” the owner said suddenly. “You wanna pick something now or come back tomorrow?”
“Mm?” I hummed, looking up at him lazily. “A little early to close?”
“It’s 10 pm. I don’t know about you, but I’m no nightowl. I hear a bed calling my name.”
“Right…let me…”
I looked back down at the movies I had gone through. Nothing really appealed to me. I was holding a movie called Driller - some slasher film about a bad-headed killer with a power drill. The name and the scantily clad women on the front made me wonder if it was a horror movie or something that escaped the porno section.
I put it back and sighed, genuinely unsure.
“What do you recommend?” I asked the owner.
He had his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth. He pouted his lips like a chimp and shrugged his shoulders up to his ears. He scanned the horror section with me.
“What are you looking for?” he asked. “Gore? Chicks? Action? Or something really scary?”
Something the way he said ‘scary’ sounded good to me. I asked what he had in ‘really scary’ and he gestured with his head to follow him. He led me over to the counter, skirted around it, and opened the door beside the TV. I didn’t notice it before, but that was most likely because he had a collage of posters across the wall and the door. The seams were practically invisible.
I waited for him to walk through, but he looked at me expectantly.
“Come on, I’m not going to carry them through,” he told me.
“Oh, uh…that many, huh?” I said, moving around the counter.
I was hesitant. I kept my distance. I’m not so trusting that I follow someone into a shady backroom. He walked inside and I could see stacks of boxes on shelves, tables, and piles of tapes and DVDs just on the floor. He walked over to the opposite side of the room, which had a beat-up sofa that looked like it had melted. It was so overused. There were almost ten TV sets on the opposite wall, from old to new. The oldest one had those bunny-ear aerials perched on top.
Stepping into the room, I decided to leave the door open. He didn’t seem to mind. He just patiently looted through an unmarked box. When I was standing in the middle of the room, he turned to look at me with squinted eyes, studying me,
“Ghost or killer?” he asked.
“Uh…ghost,” I shrugged. ‘Killer’ really didn’t appeal to me at that moment.
“Dead-person ghost or like a demon spirit ghost…thing?”
“Hey, you pick, man,” I said, my turn to shrug. “Whatever you recommend.”
The owner plucked a DVD out of the case. It was white, marked with numbers. Instead of walking over to me, he approached a more modern TV set and slid it into an open DVD player. Before I could say anything, the movie started.
No anti-piracy intro, no menu screen, and no logos. It just started.
A man was sitting at a desk in an office. The view was like from a security camera, fly-on-the-wall. White shirt, smart hair, sorting through papers, and writing things down. The only light was the desk lamp.
“Hey, I’m not going to watch it here,” I told him. “Besides, don’t you want to close up?”
“I have time for this,” he said, staring at the screen.
I guess I did as well. I was uncomfortable, but no more uncomfortable than I felt at work or anywhere else with other people. I knew it was wrong, but I stuck around.
“I’ll just watch the first few minutes,” I thought to myself. “Be polite, I guess.”
The man coughed into his hand and continued to work. It had gone on that way for almost two minutes. No music, no intro credits, and not even a different angle. A door opened, warm light, a shadow. A woman entered, her back to the camera. She was carrying a pile of papers.
Upon seeing the man, she dropped the papers and started making a funny sound. Like a small scared moan that eventually erupted into powerful screams. The man looked at her briefly before focusing on his work again while the woman screamed her head off.
It shocked me how real it sounded. I had jumped when it began, but the real fear set in when she continued to scream out of camera shot, her voice fading in the distance.
The video ended there. Like it was the end of some short indie film online. Strange, but it lingered.
“Pretty good, huh?” the owner said with a smile.
“Yeah…raised the hairs on my arms,” I told him and surprisingly, it did. I had seen worse than that, but it never had that effect on me. “Kinda short for a movie, though? Anything I can settle into?”
“Longer? A bit more…right, I got it. Have a seat.”
I didn’t.
I stifled a sigh and rubbed my bare forearms, warming them up. I would wait a little longer, just to satisfy my curiosity. It wasn’t like I had anything better planned.
“I’ve got a lot of cool stuff, man, been collecting them for a long time now,” he told me. “There are some messed up things here too, but it’s the subtle scares I like more.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
The owner plucked a tape out of the box this time. I stepped a little closer to watch him set it up. The machine he used seemed familiar, but I couldn’t see the make. It was covered in scratches. Like it had been stored in a box of nails. There was a whirring sound as it automatically rewound the tape. I heard the spring in the button twang as he hit play.
It was a voyeurist’s dream.
The location was a fancy place in the woods. Two floors from the looks of it. The camera angles switched between indoors and outdoors. Every room - basement, garage, and bathrooms. The tape’s views seemed to cycle quickly at first as if the person controlling them was looking for something.
Occasionally, they would stop in a room. I could imagine the operator focusing as if they had noticed something that I didn’t. Something in the darkness, something in the living room. It kept stopping in the living room. Every time it did, my eyes would dart around searching for what it could be.
Before I knew it, I had settled into the sofa, but my elbows were on my knees as I leaned forward with my mouth agape.
“Do you see it?” I asked. “Am I missing something?”
“I knew you would like this one. This guy’s stuff is good.”
“What guy?”
“Don’t know his name.”
The camera stopped outside the house, facing the driveway. A car was coming in, its lights were off. It was a dark shape in the moonlight, slipping into the shadows of the trees and briefly stopping outside the garage while it opened. I could see two people in the front seats. The woman in the passenger seat had her arms crossed, and the man held onto the steering wheel firmly, arms locked. The camera view followed them inside the garage, then switched as they walked into the hallway.
It was a couple. The two looked at each other for a moment. The man looked the woman up and down. Admiring her. She was in a fancy black dress, showing a lot of her legs. He smiled and she lowered her head, touching the side of her face, feeling the heat rise to her cheeks. Both of them were nervous. It was so close, so real. It was then I couldn’t believe it was staged, real footage of real people.
It felt wrong, but I didn’t look away as they stepped towards each other.
The tape cut off after there, close to thirty minutes after it started. Without a word, the owner sat up and placed the next tape in after the first. The machine prepared the tape and we were dead-silent as it did. The room was dark, the only light being the blue screen of the TV set. I don’t know where he turned the lights off.
Same house, some time later. The bedroom was a mess of pillows, sheets, and scattered clothes. The woman was sleeping, the man nowhere in sight. The camera started to switch through views until it reached the kitchen. The man was getting a drink, wearing only pajama pants.
He raised his head.
The camera switched views, eventually stopping in the living room again. Once more, I scanned it for something out of place. I just saw the furniture. A few books on a shelf, a TV on the mantle of a stone fireplace, and a few plants in the corner. Fancy, normal, empty of anything unusual.
The man entered the living room holding his glass of water. He was looking at the fireplace. There was something, a sound fainter than even his footsteps.
“Where’s the remote?” I asked the owner.
He held it out to me. I took it and started to raise the volume. It was already close to the max, yet that little bit helped me recognize a whining noise. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t like that of whining, but distant screaming. Screaming that echoed, that distorted with distance.
The woman had joined the man, wrapped in a white sheet.
Together they stared at the fireplace
“Is…what is..?” I heard the woman say.
The fireplace started. Bright orange flames so large they flowed out of the fireplace as if they were the fingers of some creature climbing out of the fireplace. The couple jumped as the flames grew more intense and maybe they would have run away if they were so focused on the center of the flames.
A man was climbing out of the flames, skin burnt and blood boiling in patches all over. The screaming was there, loud enough to make out. The voice was destroyed the same way his body was. Yet, I could make out the name ‘Damien’ - my name.
I couldn’t make out the burnt man’s face, but he didn’t seem to be staring at the couple in front of him, instead, he looked up at the camera…straight at me.
“Damien! Damien, come home!” the man screamed.
It felt like all the pain, the constant suffering he was enduring, was my fault. That if I did his bidding he would be free. The couple continued to stare, quiet and unmoving as if they didn’t see what I was seeing.
The tape ended.
“Ah, that one is always so short, I forgot,” the owner said, rushing over to the box. “The third is here somewhere…”
Darkness.
I remember flashes of the TVs, then the door, then the outside, almost getting hit by cars. My body had acted on instinct. Nothing stopped me. I heard nobody call for me. I had run so fast without interruption that my mind barely registered the journey home.
I remember being terrified of the walls in my home. The way the shadows within shadows seemed to dance like flames. Curling tendrils that whipped and melted into each other.
While the effect has faded, the memory is burned into my mind. That feeling of not belonging has reached its peak. Even my house no longer feels like home, it feels like I’m sleeping in a stranger’s bed - the sleeping made more difficult by the white shape of those burning flames burned into my eyes. Every time I close my eyelids I see that curling shape, pushing back the darkness.
Maybe I missed something. Maybe I did something…or the video store owner did something that screwed with my memory. I even wonder if I stuck around to see the next tape or not…my mind feels that both are equally true and refuses to recall what happened.
It’s been months and some effects still linger. I might have them for the rest of my life. The only thing I can say to you now is don’t watch the tapes in the video store backroom.