Just a quick note that this is a horror short.
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Two reels turn slowly as the tape opens and is pulled against the tapehead, white and black static flickering into life on the screen as the ripple of electricity interferes with the picture for a moment. It’s faded at first. Like seafoam and oil the picture on the screen broils shifts, never mixing. In time the brightness builds. These old TVs are always so slow to return to life. A stale wind, long trapped beneath the stone and dirt of Marseille, finally released.
The air leaves so much dirt in this city.
I wake to the cold unnatural blue of the AV screen filling my workshop darkly. It is night, I had slept for a time but had found no respite against the chipped wood of my workbench. To my left a soldering iron lay smouldering, a tiny glow of ember red light the only counterpoint to the dreary shadow of unnatural blue that bleeds from my monitor.
I roll back into my chair and feel every strain baulk in retribution for allowing myself to fall asleep here. My neck cracks and a stiffness moves across my shoulders. I twist, hoping to slip the knot but can only weakly return to the quiet pain of my awakening.
‘The time?’ I say aloud to the empty workshop and close my eyes to escape the light for a moment. When had I fallen asleep?
I reach for my desk lamp and the opalescent glow waxes and wanes as the filament bursts into the bright decay of its burning away into nothingness.
Good, I think, switching off the power to my soldering iron and leaning back in effort to collect my thoughts. I had slept. Too many days sat at a poorly lit bench, staring at the lines of failing componentry.
I’m tired. I’m tired of my job and I’m tired of how frail technology has become.
Standing, I notice the disassembled VCR blink 00:00 on its pale screen. Some capacitor miraculously finding charge from whatever dry dielectric that had previously failed. A false hope of life, one last momentary gasp of fading air.
I needed light.
Memory in movement, I thoughtlessly made my way to the light switch of my office and pulled down at the cord.
It is an old building, my store. Thickly painted brick and sloping ceilings have always left it with an untidy look, and the muffled voices of my neighbour’s could be heard distantly in the pipework as if ghosts of another time.
I pull at the switch and the room remains in darkness. Again, I pull, testing the mechanism and I feel as it springs back towards the off position.
‘Must every globe have broken?’ I lament pushing the cord away and watching it arc through the flickering blue glow, stuttering in its travel. A power surge, I decide hoping that I hadn’t given myself a shock while I was working on the VCR and blown a fuse. Images of my grey eyed landlord came to mind, “I warned you on the last time,” he would say, “I’ll not be replacing it again. Let it be winter and may you freeze for the trouble you cause.”
Not a power outage, I decide, the screen atop the mess of my bench glows, the VCR blinks.
Returning to my bench, I shuffle through the draws and retrieve a candle, long unused and partially crumbled from its life in inertia. It lights and I use the sputtering flame to light a cigarette, the smell of old tobacco so engrained into my workshop that I barely notice that it is burning at all.
I breath, closing my eyes in exhaustion and I suddenly feel the light of the room change. In shock, I cough on the withdrawn smoke and see the shifting static of blank tape apparate itself into life upon my monitor. Caught by the shifting pattern, I stare for a moment, reaching forward and only becoming stirred as a fleck of ash falls against my finger.
I wake, the blue light of the monitor fills my workshop as I again wearily raise my head from the desk.
To the left, the soldering iron glows. At my right, the VCR display blinks 00:00 with a pale light.
What cruel dream exists so harshly as if to taunt me on this night? Must rest be so weakly followed by the kiss of its absence?
And yet, a mark is felt on my finger. A red welt burns still where the ash had fallen. Checking my cigarettes, I count seven and struggle to recall how many I had seen in dream. I cough and a tail of smoke departs into the darkness.
Lights blown as they were before, I hurry to the door but am halted by the gentle whirr of tape clicking into movement. In a stutter, white light fills the room and I turn to see the static once again upon the monitor and shifting with fury. It is brighter this time, somehow deeper than in it was in remembrance. I take a step backward and feel my hand brush against the door handle.
The hum of a test tone builds from inside the monitor, as the static grows more and more erratic. I shake, desperate to look away, and clutch at the handle, frozen, unable to pull it down.
Louder the pattern builds, a piercing wail rings and I drop to my knees, falling deeper and deeper into lightlessness.
I wake, again shrouded by the impassive light of the monitor but my hands and bench are no longer shrouded by blue. The static remains now. Bleak whites and blacks moulder as if unable to remember their form. It is closer now. I see my reflection in the glass screen and the static seems to shape around my features. It pushes against the glass of the monitor. I close my eyes.
I sleep.
I wake.
I reach, movements slowed as if solder too cold to pool. Again and again, I fall from consciousness but still I reach for the VCR. I feel caught in the flicker of the LCD, only alive for short fragments, a dying image soon to be left as a ghost on the cooling screen.
I feel a button depress beneath my hand, blue light again fills the workshop as the whirring VCR abates to a few mechanical clicks and then silence.
No noise. No movement.
All I can see is tail of smoke coiling from my soldering iron, an unlabelled tape sitting in the deck of the VCR, ready to be withdrawn.
I switch on my desk lamp and the light glows steadily now. A blessing of normalcy on a night so haunted.
I take the tape and cut the ribbon inside. No sound, no force resisting, just the snip of scissors and the feeling of another thing broken, another piece of wasted technology needing repair.
It is late.
I pull on the tape and hold a section underneath the lamp light, the thin brown plastic feeling so fragile, so light. I pull more. More and more of the unlabelled tape is drawn free of the spool until it covers my workbench totally.
Good, I think as I drop my iron amongst the tape and leave the workshop for the night.
Some things can stay broken.
J. McCray
2023
Sunday Short Stories 