2017

Not Scary At All

I was thirteen.
I still went to school with Klara, my only friend.
Every Wednesday at ten at night we watched a TV series.
It was our secret ritual.
Until one day, for no reason, it was cancelled.

Years have passed since then.
Now I live alone. My parents are gone, and Klara is too.
I work in a video game store, watching people pass by who never interest me.
One night, coming home, I found a package on the doorstep.
I hesitated whether it was mine, but the label confirmed my name.

I left it in the living room, heated up some dinner and,
while I ate, curiosity got the better of me.
I tore the tape and opened the box.
Inside were a dozen black VHS tapes, unlabeled.
I went down to the basement, where an old TV with a player still sat.
I put one in.

Klara appeared on the screen.
She was thirteen, just as I remembered her.
She danced with a man whose head looked like a moon.
The next cut showed her in a dusty dining room, devouring a heart that was still beating.
Then, inside a coffin.
The moon-man buried her, and the earth writhed as if it were breathing.
She was still alive, trying to hold her last breath.
Then, silence.

I didn’t want to watch anymore.
I went up to the kitchen, swallowed a pill, then another, until the bottle was empty.
That night I dreamed of Klara.
—Why didn’t you help me? —she screamed at me—. Nothing would have happened
if you had done something.
I tried to answer, but my mouth was sewn shut.
—Watch the tape again —she ordered—. Help me.

When I woke, another tape was inside the TV.
But it wasn’t Klara’s.
A boy was talking to someone in front of a vending machine.
Cut.
Now he was in a dining room, in front of a beating heart.
Cut.
Buried under the ground.
I put another tape in.
And another.
Always the same sequence.
Different faces, same fate.

I decided to watch Klara’s again.
But it was no longer the same.
Now she was walking through a park.
I stepped closer, and suddenly I crossed the screen.
It was like diving into water.
I knelt down, soaked, and she reached out her hand.
Her eyes were dark wells, ringed with shadows,
and her wide smile vanished as soon as she recognized me.
—Quick, come with me before he arrives.
I followed her, saying nothing.
On an empty street she spun around and hit me with a stone.
Everything went black.

I woke up tied up.
The moon-man approached with a slow step, then two quick ones, as if dancing.
He leaned over me, licked my cheek and whispered:
—Soon you will forget who you are.
Soon you will forget that you are going to die.
He opened his mouth and screamed without sound, but his distorted face was enough to calm me.
I woke up drenched in sweat.
I ran to the bathroom, washed my face.
It had all been too real.
To check, I took a box cutter and cut my chest.
No blood came out.
No flesh.
Only a liquid light, an explosion of colors that lit up the whole bathroom.
I pulled at the wound and the light kept flowing, endless, as if I myself were a television.
When he found me, I had already died of blood loss.