ONE
The young woman was sitting on the toilet. As lots of young women are known to do she was playing with her phone while she was on there. She was wearing a pink tank top, white short and panties were down on her ankles. She was quite pretty, short blonde hair in a pixie cut, multiple piercings in her ears.
There was a banging on the bathroom door. She was startled, almost dropping the phone.
“Huh? Who is that?”
More banging.
“Stop that! Leave me alone!”
More banging.
“I said to leave me alone whoever you are. I’m calling the cops!”
The wood of the bathroom door splintered. A machete that had saw teeth and strange, rune-like carvings on it cut through the splintered wood. A gloved hand slid through the hole it had left, looking for the door’s lock. The woman screamed. Shaking, she put the phone to her mouth, trying to dial 911. If only she could stop her fingers from shaking like that.
The door was pulled open. In front of the woman was a tall man, dressed in a black leather trench coat. He was wearing an old-fashioned plague mask. The man lifted the machete. With one swift stroke he beheaded the young woman, blood spurting from her neck, covering the leather coat with red splotches. The head rolled out of the bathroom stall.
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Then there was nothing but static on the screen and the movie stopped playing.
“Whoa! That looked fucking realistic,” Dave Slatter said, sitting in his lazy couch in front of his widescreen TV. “But why the hell did the movie stop like that?”
He got up from the chair, pushed Eject on his old VCR. The VHS tape he’d been watching popped out. It was blank aside from the words VHS NOSTRADAMUS written on it with a sharpie. He’d found it at a local thrift shop. As a writer for several horror publications he was eager to see it. He’d never heard of the movie before but he figured the title sounded ominous and mysterious enough to interest him.
He checked the tape. It seemed in okay condition. There was at least an hour of playtime left as well. He figured that’s what you got with old tapes like that. He was lucky it didn’t fuck up his VCR player in the first place.
What he’d seen intrigued him though. He’d seen thousands and thousands of horror movies. Never before had he seen one so realistic. But what the hell was that young woman doing with a smartphone on the toilet? Smartphones weren’t a thing back in the glory days of VHS tapes. He decided to put in the tape again, have another watch.
He put the tape in, pressed Play and sat in his chair. He waited for the movie to play. Nothing but static.
“Well shit, that was a waste of two dollars!”
Dave started up his laptop, eager to find out more about this mysterious movie. He searched all the movie sites he could think of, from the bigger ones to the obscure ones. Nothing. He decided to place a few posts on places like Facebook, Google Groups, Discord and Reddit, asking if anyone knew more about this mysterious video.
As it had gotten pretty late he decided to finish his beer and go to sleep. He had a deadline to finish on an article about Hammer films so he’d better make sure he was up on time the following day. Hopefully someone would have answers to his questions about the movie tomorrow. He hated it when he didn’t know the details about movies like that.
Shit, he had to admit that movie looked real enough to even cause him nightmares.