‘Well, that was ominous.’
Across the duality of times spent working or left in waiting for work to end, the final rostered hour of Balendup’s lone video shop had long maligned the attention span of the store’s most adjacently-dedicated staff members.
Too late to put on a good horror movie and too early to put on any of the banned ones, the shift-waning, clock watching dreariness dragged solemnly across each weeknight and, in spite of the best principals of time and relativity, seemed to drag longer than the sum of the hours before it.
Tonight, the store was empty.
Buzzing fluorescent white light suddenly faltered, plunging the store into darkness and then quickly returning to brilliance in a cacophony of electric clicks and dancing shadows.
Rows upon rows of moderately alphabetised VHS cassettes shifted on their metal display shelves as the air took on a vaguely smoky feel as if the automatic-popcorn display had been mistaken for the returns bin again.
Having crept back into the staffroom with some trepidation, Marla and Kate looked down at their smouldering Ouija board and wondered if it would be better to call the fire brigade or a priest.
‘Well, the smoke alarms are definitely broken.’ Kate coughed while tipping the remnants of a can of passiona onto the board, extinguishing the remaining embers. ‘I’m just glad that Peter wasn’t here to see that. He would have backflipped himself trying to explain how it was all scientific.’
‘He would still be off running down the street, wouldn’t he? Did we just actually see a ghost?’
‘You’re the Ouija expert, Marla. I was just trying to spell a swear word.’
There was a moment of silence as the cheap wooden board gave one last thaumaturgical spark and then finally sizzled out into a tendril of smoke fruitily scented and coiling. Somewhere in the breakroom a VCR started rewinding.
‘When a ghost says “see you soon” do you think that it counts as an omen? It didn’t really seem like a threat.’
Nudging the sodden Ouija board in hopes of extracting one last spectre, Marla inspected the burned surface and then wondered where they kept the paper towels.
‘A demon like Nezgul Roth is usually clearer when giving omens. “See you in the burning pits of blah” “May you crumble into the endless so and so” see you soon just feels like something you’d say to a friend.’
Frowning at the absorbency of the shop’s coming soon pamphlets, Kate began to riffle through the cupboards under the sink for something more suited to waning phantasms and spilled soft drink.
Having loitered within the store for long enough to have been given a uniform, the weeknight shifts of watching movies and judging customers rentals had suited Marla and Kate so neatly that a payslip was nearly a formality.
The store was a refuge. No matter how often they would sort through the aisles of muddy genre, there would always be something new worth watching and they often revelled in finding a movie that either had never seen.
They laughed at dramas and cheered for the villains in horrors. Weeks had been lost searching for a particular comedy, and hours had been spent daydreaming in the alcove dedicated to the artistic kind of world cinema that would have definitely upset their grandmothers—and in Kate’s case, received a hearty chuckle and a pat on the back from her pappas.
The aisles were tangled in a way. The odd shape of the video shop had all the nook and cranny charms of a labyrinth, and the high shelves did little to help people locate the exit. Customers would wander in, become just lost enough that they became distracted, and then would inevitably reach the rental counter with a confusing mix of tapes that they were too embarrassed to find where they had picked them up from.
‘There’s no chance that we summoned a ghost.’
‘Look, the word summon is a loose term’ Marla replied, waving her many-bangled arms in a vague circle for the drama of the gesture. ‘Caught the edges of the afterlife, maybe. Remember ages back when you tried to tape The Muppets Christmas Carol with a stuck eraser head?’
Kate stared into nothing for a moment and remembered the static-lined ghost of Christmas future that still returned to haunt her in the more troubled parts of her wandering nightmares.
‘We don’t mention silent Kermit.’ She said flatly, pushing at the sodden Ouija board with handful of paper towel as if it were still burning.
‘Fine, but you can’t deny that a wispy voiced something was trying to get out of the TV screen. Why did it say see you soon?’
With unfortunate timing, a VHS chose to eject itself from the staffroom VCR in reply and both Marla and Kate shared a moment of conflicting eye contact before rushing towards the motionless cassette.
‘Don’t play it-‘
‘Let’s play it-‘
~
The tape had a certain weight to it. Evenly balanced, even though it was wound to its home position.
A thin strip of translucent tape could be seen clearly intersected by the coiling dark that spun in ever narrowing circles around the plastic reel.
Marla had set a blank tape to play as ambience. She had brought in a Ouija board on the darkest night of the year and said, “Let’s try something fun.”
Scan lines cascaded down the screen in a flicker of shifting noise and static. The tick a whirr of a VCR that had spent the majority its life rewinding buzzed as the worn motors struggled against this foreign direction.
Was there really a person in the static?
‘Can we just play the first five minutes?’ a muffled voice called from inside the broom closet. The chair that had been kicked up against the handle creaked slightly as the person on the other side tested to see if it was still there.
‘And every time you ask, I reset the timer.’ Kate replied, rolling a set of worry beads between her hands and staring at the tape that she had set on top of the Ouija board.
‘Marla?’ she called after a moment.
‘Still here in the cupboard.’
‘Let’s say we recorded a ghost onto a VHS.’
‘Excellent. I’m listening.’
‘Let’s say we played that VHS and then the ghost got out. What’s the next step?’
There was an excited pause as Marla considered all the terrible things that could find their way into the material plane should a loose stich be unsown. The scythe-walkers of the desolate plane, Tharmul Rasa and its penitent echo of unmaking. All of these were exciting, but they were also just as unlikely.
Ghosts were boring. They were the daggy uncle-like apparitions of an occult world that had most likely had bumbled their way into haunting rather than evoking themselves out of malicious purpose.
‘The best case is that something gets possessed and we have to trick the ghost into watching a reflection of the tap being rewound.’
‘And the worst case?’
Kate had worked too many shifts with her friend to accept anything that followed the words best case.
‘Something, something, we get trapped in the VHS. Why are we worrying about worst cases though? You have to be positive in these situations. Be more like Andrew.’
Thinking on the permanent glaze of terror that their friend Andrew seemed to exist within two steps of, Kate put a pin in positivity for the moment.
‘Ok. I have a plan.’
Marla listened to a rustle and then then sound of a plastic case snapping closed. Footsteps disappeared off into the store and, after a moment of silence, returned again.
‘Ok. The tape is somewhere in the store. I’ve swapped the case and the label. You can find it in your own time or someone very particular will one day get their money back and a written apology from management.’
‘Next time, I get to pick the boardgame.’
~
Somewhere to the north of Sydney a small town sleeps through another cloudy morning of joyful aimlessness.
Dundelong Rd is quiet that morning, six shops hemmed together by a sidewalk and carpark are graced by the arrival of three cars, all regulars within the daily comings and goings of life in Balendup.
The air is fresh, the fragrances of a soon to open bakery are undercut by an oily plume of the tuck shop heating up its long-blackened hotplates and dusty coffee grinder.
Beside these stores, a quiet video shop sits patiently awaiting the opening time of nine o’clock.
Within the well-trodden carpet and plastic smelling popcorn of this store, a single VHS lurks amongst a line of $2.00 head cleaner rental tapes. Lungless, the tape exhales knowing that one day it will be soon picked from the shelf.
To the tape, time exists only within the concerns of the living. Stagnation matters not to that which knows not age nor decay.
Within its case, a tape begins to play.
‘See you soon.’
~
J. McCray
2024
Sunday Short Stories 