Yet despite returning to the city, his mind grew only more turbulent. Though the figures he thought he saw in the woodland could have easily been a trick of the light amidst his spinning vision, he nevertheless had the sense that there was some truth to what he saw. He knew that sooner or later; his employers would catch onto his shirking of his assignments. He did not know the consequences of failing to fulfill obligations, only that they possessed the habit already of probing him in any which manner, at any which time, and from any which place that they desired, thus he wished to not provoke them into further torment.

However, this presented a problem. To receive the order from his employers, he must locate the missing item from the briefcase that must have been replaced - by some obtrusive fiend - with the immeasurably maligned memory stick before he retrieved it. This narrative he had settled on, for his employers had never previously directed him towards the forest, nor was the nature of the recording and its ensuing chaos in line with the style of his employers. If, however, this was the work of his employers, the instincts that led him down this path were, after all, what he was hired for. He could not discern for what exact goal his employers had actually hired him to achieve - no clear specification was given, only the promise of regular income in cash, flexible hours, and a workload that lacked in monotony, in exchange for his promise of ‘an open mind and soul, and passionate devotion…’

By now he had made considerable progress into the city, and presently found that the fog around him was dissipating, not entirely, but enough to see more distinctly in front of him. His instinct was to head back to the lowly bench where he first acquired the briefcase, and scan the area for clues, but he was halted in his tracks once again by tingling nerves. A wailing was echoing among the fog. This time it was not all around him, but from a distinct location to his side, across the street. It was not the eerie sighs of the forest, nor of his previous encounters, but a deep, guttural moaning, one of physical discomfort. Sweating nervously, he crept towards the reverberating moans, and as he did so, the fog parted to reveal a lonesome, rusting caravan parked up on the street, with a wonky, half-constructed merchant’s stand pitched up next to it. At the stand was a withering old man, half bandaged and dreadfully frail, groaning in anguish as he sought to pluck a tooth from his mouth. Just as he arrived at the scene, washing over with relief, and wiping away the sweat from his brow, the old merchant successfully severed the tooth with one final yelp, and bent over pitifully, unscrewing a jar containing some queer liquid, and dropped the tooth inside, before hastily concealing the jar and staggering upwards to meet the perplexed gaze of his latest customer. They locked eyes for a moment before the pale, unkempt old man waved at him with a bloodied, dripping, shivering, shriveled hand, conveying that in his current state speaking was not to his preference.

As the old man hobbled around the back of his motorhome, he glanced over what was on sale. They were a varied collection, or more so a disordered heap, of grungy videotapes of a distinctly lurid quality, most of which were old-school pornos or obscure editions of once banned video-nasties, some he recognised as being screenings he had attended in the local cinema - now closed - when he and his wife had first moved into the city. The gore films he had never minded, but it was the more psychological ones that were plagued with subliminal, headache-inducing imagery and a silent, sickening droning, which perturbed him. Such exhibitions were only short films, often unnamed, and played between feature screenings, and were deceptively harmless and often domestic in content, yet nevertheless disturbing in a manner hard to pinpoint. They unsettled on a purely sensory level; there was something uncanny to how the film would linger on certain images and repeat certain sounds, producing audiovisual distortions of otherwise banal occurrences, as if the film was warping reality before the eyes of the audience, and weaving like a spider, tendrils of abstract notions into the very dreams of the viewer. His wife had eventually refused to go to the cinema due to the frequency of these shorts, saying that it was not normal practice, and they made her both anxious and ill. He had kept on attending screenings however, until the cinema had closed. There were rumours a fire had been set in the building, likely by a group of outlaw residents that were in fact a cult of psychedelic using metal purists - as close to Amish as this new urban ecosystem offered - who, according to news reports, proclaimed to wage war with the “blasphemous alloy world” and spread earth’s “spirit” in place of the sickly evil they saw to fester in the cities. Why these cult members had attacked the cinema specifically was unknown, though with consideration of their obsessive abuse of hallucinatory plant-based chemicals, they were likely as clueless to their motive as anyone else, or so it was said.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

He continued to scan the videotapes - most of which seeming to be old, third-hand VHS copies - until he saw one with no label whatsoever, caked in dirt and mud. Intrigued, he held it in his hand, and felt a strange pull towards the object. As he did so, the old man returned, carrying with him an overbearing odour as if the man’s body was already decaying whilst still yet animated. Seeing him with the tape in hand, the rotting old merchant waved his hand harshly at him. In response he began to pull money out of his coat pocket, but the merchant continued to wave at him, almost hitting him, gesturing him to leave with the tape. Regardless, he felt pity for the lonesome old coot who served alone on the street in the twilight haze with only old videotapes and a severed tooth, so he tossed some money over to the man and elected to purchase a VHS of an uncut edition of ‘The Evil Dead’. Holding the tape of the film gave him a melancholy nostalgia, for it was this exact film that led to meeting his wife in a screening at the theatre in his hometown those precious years ago before they had relocated to the city. It was also the film that they had first watched in the city upon passing through, and it was the happy coincidence of the local cinema screening films such as this that convinced them, as one is often convinced by ultimately trivial and meaningless coincidences, to reside in this city above all others. It was odd, he thought, that today of all days he was drawn to purchase this film, but he saw it as a chance to reflect on his memories and begin the process of healing over his grief, the grief that still struck him sick and squalid and screaming into his bedsheets when sleep would not visit him. He clutched both tapes tightly and submerged them into the depths of his coat, and he turned to thank the ageing merchant, but as he turned, he saw the man muttering incomprehensibly to himself with glazed over eyes, hobbling around idly, as if in a deluded rapture. Upon this pitiful sight, he took his leave without a word.