Suddenly, he heard noises of gigantic muscles working at the lid and held his breath as it raised nearly a sliver of an inch before settling back into place. Hudhayfah was back! Something quite weighty, some nebulous force was exerting itself to keep the enormous one imprisoned, holding it down,
From below came the surprised exclamation of a subterranean vocalization growing louder as the seconds passed.
“What are you doing, Alan?” it came, an eerie cry of desperation. “I have your penny! Release me and I will give it to you.”
“Nothing doing,” returned the lad, a broad smile expanding upon his face, growing wider as he heard more struggling sounds of the genie attempting to push the lid aside. They ceased after a few moments when the imprisoned grotesque realized it was having no effect.
“Forget it, treacherous one,” advised Alan. “Do you really suppose I’d release you again?”
Alan’s thoughts drifted over other challenges he had won during his exhilarating career, pondering many years laced with some failures but more successes. Satisfied with his life’s work, thus far, he wondered what, if any, adventures were destined to come his way.
Now in the prime of life, his hair thinning and turning from gray to burnished silver, Alan reflected upon the curious, extremely dangerous but meaningful life he led spending a good many years pursuing creatures wallowing in the dark crevices of the world.
“You seem so remote, so introspective, dear,” said Sheila, coming from the house and arriving with a tray and glasses of iced tea. “A penny for your thoughts.”
“That’s all? A meager cent? I was thinking of Hudhayfah, a creature I knew many years ago—ugly as proverbial sin—wondering if it continues to exist confined in the twisting corridors beneath the streets of Arkham.
“Someday I’ll tell you how a penny saved my life.”
YELLOW LABELED VHS TAPE, by R.C. Mulhare
“Who hauls in all this junk? People that clean out hoarder houses and old people’s attics?” Mason grumbled, as he trailed his Aunt Melanie down the main aisle of the Red Dot Flea Market, located in what had been a box factory on the outskirts of Leominister. The place resembled a row of stalls full of junk typical of most attics or basements: one consisted entirely of porcelain dolls, the shelves of another groaned with hardback bestsellers from the last fifty years, including what looked like the complete works of Stephen King. The next one was jammed with boxes of baseball cards, some still sealed in cellophane. Most of the sellers and buyers had put age forty well behind them, except for the babies and second-graders obviously out with Grandma.
“Trust me, Mason, I’ve found a lot of treasures here,”Aunt Melanie said. “A lot of the sellers don’t know what they have on their hands, or they want to move it fast.”
“How about they don’t move the creepy dolls?” Mason said, looking away from a booth full of kitchen gadgets, FiestaWare and more porcelain dolls. He could just imagine the little darlings with the masks of innocence coming to life and finding creative uses for the orange peelers and egg slicers in the baskets below them.
“Yeah, there’s always a lot of those,” she said, approaching a large booth of furniture, mostly corner tables, standing desks, an armoire and a heavy carved-wood headboard that lacked a foot board.
“I don’t wanna think about why they’d have so many of those,” Mason said.
“You wanna keep browsing while I talk with Jake about that armoire?”
“Sure, anything to give those things some space,” Mason said, moving on, dodging a woman in a purple sweatshirt and a red church hat with a purple sequined hat band, riding a purple scooter towing a tiny trailer full of shopping bags behind her.
He quick walked past a booth of shoddy-looking tools, and another full of fiber-optic silk flower arrangements and other fiber-optic doodahs.
Wall to wall VHS tapes filled the shelves of the next booth, mostly commercially taped movies and box sets of TV series, some easily available on DVD now and others hard to find, while the lower shelves held bootlegged movies on previously blank cassettes, titles hand-written on labels or the slipcases. In a corner, on the floor, he found a box of tapes shuffled together into a pile. Mason sorted through them, reading the labels: “The Telephone—Poulenc”. “Hopfrog—Poe/DeJasu”, “The Driving Lesson”, “Titus Andronicus”, “Ingrid’s Monologues and one woman shows”, and one with a yellow label with no title written on it.
A shadow fell over him. “You like VHS?” an older man’s gruff voice asked.
Mason looked up at a man taller than he, despite how the other’s frame had settled from age. “Yeah, I like the format better. DVDs don’t have the same quality.”
“Too clear, I take it? Yah, something about that picture quality, it’s too sharp. And fuggetabout HD or BluRay.”
“Even better if it’s a home brew tape,” Mason said. “The sound, too, it’s like that tishy sound on vinyl LPs.”
The man looked at him sidelong. “You one of those hipster kids?”
“Not really. I just like old media. What’s the deal with this box?”
“Came from some college theatrical troupe. I do clean-outs on old houses, basements, attics. Found this in the back of the living room in an older woman’s house, when she was moving into an assisted living facility. Seems the tapes belonged to her niece, was a hippy-beatnik type.”
“So the niece was an actress?”
“Yah, told me she kept them after something happened to the niece. Didn’t say what. Told me she wanted it to go to someone who’d appreciate them.”
“Think I can give them a good home.”
“How’s twenty bucks for the box sound?”
“Takes me two hours slinging groceries at Market Basket to earn that. How’s fifteen sound?”
“Fair price. Thought you’d beat me down to ten.”
Mason took out his wallet, counting out three fives into the guy’s hand before the guy handed over the box.
Mason met up with Aunt Melanie near the main entrance, where she had the armoire on a flatbed cart, pushing it toward the open doors and the yard beyond where her pickup truck waited.
“Hey, found some treasures?” she asked. “VHS tapes again?”
“Kid, you like some old stuff,” said an older guy watching this.
“Yeah, I’ll shelve them next to my cuneiform tablets and parchment scrolls,” Mason said.
“Got some good movies?” Aunt Mel asked.
“Some kind of home recordings from a hippy theater group,” Mason said.
“Didn’t think you were into that sort of thing.”
“It’s fun to watch and snark at the more pretentious stuff,” Mason said. “Shake your head over Shakespeare in a laundromat or something like that.”
* * * *
“The heck you got here?” Lexus asked, a few days later when she came to Mason’s apartment for pizza and to catch a movie. “God, my grandmother has these.”
“Never got rid of the VHS player when DVDs came out,” Mason said, hunting up some paper plates.
“So what are these, little kid recital tapes?”
“Some kind of beatnik theater group. Thought we could watch it and have a laugh.”
“Really cultured laughing.” She pulled up the blank yellow label tape. “This one doesn’t have a name.”
“Mystery theater. Could be interesting.” She handed over the tape. He slid the tape out of its slipcase; the label, also yellow, on the center of the cassette casing read “The King in the Tattered Cloak—Castaigne”
“Sounds like a faery tale.”
“Or some kinda Midsummer Night’s Dream thing. How ‘bout it?”
“Nothing else, we get a nice bedtime story.” He slotted the tape into the machine. The drive clacked and pushed the tape out. “Heh. These things can be stubborn.” He pushed the tape back in, firmly, the drive door shutting behind it. The player clicked and clacked as the tape heads engaged and the motors started humming. Mason scooted back to p
lunk down on the couch, cracking open a soda. Lexus helped herself to a slice of pizza and settled next to him.
The screen lit up, a back-lit off-black square, tracking bars shifting at the top and bottom edges. A single vertical line of static danced down the left hand side. The screen jumped to the image of a hand-drawn and shakily printed program cover bearing the title on the tape label now in neat calligraphy, as vaguely medieval music played. The page slid aside, revealing another card, listing characters and cast members playing them.
“Hah, like those 1940s movies,” Mason said. “Like someone’s turning the pages in a book.”
“I always like those, like you’re reading a book and playing the story as a movie in your head.”
“It’s like they went for that look in purpose. If I didn’t want to sound all Film-Student-Who’s-Watched-Citizen-Kane-Twenty-Times, I’d think it was taped off a TV broadcast.”
The play started out as most of these amateur productions did. The costumes looked cobbled together from thrift store finds and bits of fabric in purple and red. The play seemed Shakespearean in scope, if not in language, though it still sounded high-falutin’ and literary. It seemed to take place in some made-up kingdom, which they’d given a timeless if vaguely Victorian look, where an aging queen intended to hand over her crown to one of her three children: a kid too young to rule, an elder son too hot-headed to make a half-decent ruler, while the only vaguely competent one, her daughter and eldest child, acted like a dim bulb socialite. Add to this a subplot hinting at some weird cult or the god thereof seducing the elder son.
They’d started on the second act, a scene with a weird old-timey costume party complete with masks (clearly party store domino masks that the costume creators had decked out with whatever feathers and beads and sequins they had on hand). At midnight, the guests would remove their masks. On the moment where the Queen and her daughter confronted an uninvited guest who’d slipped into the party, the screen froze. The tape squealed and the screen went blue. The drive growled and spat the tape out.
“That’s odd,” Lexus said.
“The hell just happened?” Mason said. “Never had it do that before. Had them shut off and need to be ejected. Had them jam up solid and get stuck, but never making all those noises.” He pushed the tape back in, but the drive refused to take it.
“Better than having it get stuck.”
He took the tape out and shook it gently before sliding it back in. As before, it would not go in, not far enough to engage the drive heads. “Guess we don’t find out tonight which royal kid gets the crown or what the hell Carcosa is.”
“What are you going to do with that tape?”
“I know a guy who can fix it. Got me onto VHS in the first place.”
Lexus giggled. “Got you onto it. You make it sound like a drug.”
“Best legal fix ever.”
* * * *
“Probably dust clogging the mechanism,” said Davan, studying the yellow label tape.
“Yeah, but it shuts down and the player spits the tape out. Never had a player do that over dust.”
“Could be the tape is twisted inside the case.” Davan reached for a screwdriver on his work bench and removed the screws holding the back plate of the tape before removing it. “Hmm…”
“Is that a good ‘hmm’ or a bad ‘hmm’?”
“It’s an in between hmm. Tape’s not twisted. Probably dust, like I said.”
“Like I said, the jam wasn’t like a dust jam.”
“Hand me the canned air, it’ll probably clear this up in a jiffy.” Mason handed over the spray can sitting on a shelf. Davan shuffled the reels gently to loosen them before spraying them, then put the tape back together before slotting it into the player in a rack of equipment near the work bench. The motors hummed and clicked, but the player stayed still.
“It mocks us,” Mason said.
“Like it’s tensed up. What did you say this movie was called?”
“The King in the Tattered Cloak. Some kind of Shakespeare on meth thing put on by a hippy theater company.”
Davan took a step back from the equipment rack. “You serious?”
“Yeah. What’s the look for?”
“I thought that was just a made-up story going around on the Internet.”
“What, something to scare the kids and the old people?”
“Yeah, it’s a creepypasta.”
“Something involving scary macaroni?”
“No, idiot, it’s a story that gets shared around, copy-pasting style, like a campfire story. In this one, you watch the play, you read the play, hell, you act in the play and perform the whole thing before an audience, you go all kinds of cray.”
“And you end up dead after seven days.”
“No, you go bug-eating crazy for the rest of your life, saying some tatty king or something else is coming for you.”
“Right, campfire story like the guy with the hook for a hand who scratches up your car or hooks you dead if he catches you on lovers’ lane.”
“Which had it’s own grounding in reality. Ever watch that documentary Killer Legends? Turns out there really was a guy out killing couples in cars, back in the 1940s or something.”
“Weird. But back to the tape.”
“If it’s locking up, and if this tape is what I think it is, you could be getting lucky and something’s protecting your pasty butt.”
“Protecting me from what?”
“Whatever it is about the play that makes people go bat crap cray and cut other people. I ain’t tinkering with this tape one more minute. I say you dodged a bullet and you leave it be. I don’t want you going bonkers and literally chewing Lexus’s face. Or your own. I don’t want that on my conscience.”
“You sound like those crazies that think violent video games make people turn into crazy killers.”
“I’m only telling you what I heard.”
“If I get any crazy ideas, I’ll check into the hospital. Try backing the tape up.”
“All right, but here’s the part where the genre-savvy friend tells the over-confident protag, ‘don’t say I didn’t warn you’. Do I want to know what you’re looking for?”
“Just want to see if the tape loosened up.”
Davan threw him a Look, put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones not plugged into anything, then slid the tape back into the machine, rewound it and averted his eyes from the screen as he hit ‘play’.
Mason watched the screen, now showing the masked ball scene, the queen confronting the uninvited guest. Behind him, a figure loomed up, which Mason didn’t recall seeing during his first viewing.
“Oh crap,” Mason said.
Davan hit the pause button. “What? Do I dare look at the screen?”
“I think I saw something in the background that wasn’t there before.”
“Too much information.”
“Maybe I just missed it the first time.”
“Maybe it’s whatever makes people go crazy when they’ve watched the thing.”
“Or it could be something in the background that looked like a figure.”
Davan stopped the tape and ejected it, holding it at arm’s length. “If you said it wasn’t there before, it probably wasn’t there before. I’d nope out of this movie, if I were you.”
Mason took the tape. “Good thing I’m not you.”
* * * *
That night, Mason had a shift at the grocery store, rounding up stray shopping carriages under the circles of yellow light cast by the sodium lamps in the parking lot. “You all right out there?” Martin, the front end manager, asked. “You’ve been out there a while.”
“Busy day, lots of stray carts,” Mason said. “Don’t send the search party for me just yet.”
Once home after his shift, Mason called Lexus to ask her if she wanted to come over and watch the rest of the play. She said no, as she had a paper due and needed to finish revising it.
“All right, I’ll tell you how it ends,
” he said, shutting off his phone.
This time, he watched the tape more closely, keeping an eye out for the mystery figure, that strange face (if it was a face). No sign of it just yet, no more problems with the tape locking up. The story went on, of the fate of the kingdom on the shore of Lake Hali beneath its twin moons, the devotees of Hastur descending upon the last of House Aldonces. The story ended in a Grand Guignol denouement. He caught himself trying to figure out what techniques this bunch of amateurs could have used to pull it off. It convinced him more than the usual stage blood bags and cow tongue tactics these types tended to use.
It left such impression that the drama went on playing in the theater of his dreams, the insides of his eyelids the projector screen to catch the images. The red streaked figures in tattered garments, limping in procession along the dead shore of Lake Hali, the poisoned trees with their gnarled limbs stretched up to the sky, the two moons and the black sky with the even blacker stars mirrored on its surface, the darkness of the water rippling. The marchers cursed their fate, singing songs in strange keys, crying out wordless curses, emitting retching yowls, their bleeding faces and mouths streaming. The weaker marchers stumbled, falling, the stronger marchers trampling them, grinding their bleeding flesh into the dust of the roadbed.
Mason snapped awake, to sunlight glinting off a yellow school bus chugging below his bedroom window. He looked to his clock, the time telling him he was already late for a job interview at a public access cable station in Andover.
He had a feeling the job was toast even before it started, the way the assistant director asked him the questions in the most perfunctory voice. I’ll be stuck working grocery and helping Aunt Mel the rest of my life, he thought afterwards as he drove home. Maybe I can get a gig making commercials for them.
Busy day moving stuff out of the warehouse-barn behind Aunt Melanie’s house and onto the shop floor that took up the whole downstairs, and he took a corner hard while helping her with a sideboard, clipping the back of it and swearing.
The Third Cthulhu Mythos Megapack Page 12
