The Fall of Never(7)

“That’s odd,” she muttered. “If the tape was messed up, we shouldn’t have seen that image when I put the tape back in.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

She rewound the video and hit PLAY again. Nellie was back at the toaster once more, complaining about her hunger headache. The image held. The toaster popped and Nellie took the toast from it, set it on the counter, and began spreading jam on top of it while smiling absently at the camera. “Get too sick eating breakfast nowadays,” Nellie said on the video.

“Okay,” Kelly said, “two seconds ago we weren’t able to view this scene, and now we—”

As if on cue the image on the screen dispersed, splintering like rays of lights, just as a wave of peppery static flooded the screen. The audio went out as well—didn’t slow or bend or speed up, just went completely dead. Kelly let it run for a while, waiting to see if it got any better, but it didn’t. She kept it on visual fast-forward, but the picture did not return. Only snow and dead sound.

“They’re all like this?” she asked Josh. “All the tapes? Everything we shot today?”

“Everything we shot today,” he repeated dully, finishing off his pizza and taking a slug of beer. “I’m beat.”

She put the camera down and sat in front of her computer, her fingers quickly tapping over the keypad. “Rewind the tape back to the beginning,” she told Josh, “back to where it was fine.”

Josh did so as Kelly brought up the clear digital image in a tiny box in the upper left-hand corner of her computer screen. She typed some code that enlarged the frame. “Go ahead and let it play,” she said.

Josh hit PLAY on the camera and the video started up again, Nellie Worthridge talking about her hunger headache while fixing toast at the kitchen counter, the toaster popping, Nellie smiling at Josh behind the camera. Then it went to fuzz. This time, Kelly tapped out a procession on the keyboard and the lines of static minimized, showing only the faintest picture behind it, as if they were watching the scene through a partially opaque shower curtain.

“I can clean it up a little,” she said, “but it doesn’t seem to be doing much good.”

“And where’s the sound now?”

“I don’t know.” She looked at the audio bar at the bottom of the monitor. “Audio’s registering, we just can’t hear it anymore.”

“That’s so bizarre,” Josh said. He was scrutinizing the other videocassettes he brought with him in his nylon carrying case. Kelly turned to say something and caught the blinking red light of the camera out of the corner of her eye, and froze.

There is a door, and behind that door there is a flash of light, a very cold flash of light, and when you step into that light you can feel the hands on you, the hands guiding you, and you are stepping in something too, something wet and you think it is water at first, but then you realize that it is not water and it is coming from you, and you were laughing about it all just moments before but now you are afraid, now you are very much afraid, and now you think that you might even die here…

“Excuse me,” she managed, hopping up from behind the computer and barreling past Josh like a runaway eighteen-wheeler, her destination the bathroom at the end of the hallway. She hit the toilet bowl like a bull colliding with a matador. Lucky the lid was up, she vomited a filmy green foam into the bowl. Her stomach was empty—she hadn’t eaten anything all day—and she could feel the bile pulling up from the deepest bowels of her being, before breaking off into a series of barking dry heaves. After a few lumbering moments, she reached up and flushed the handle while catching her breath. Shaking, beads of sweat breaking out along her skin, she leaned back against the tub, eyes shut tight. She was aware of Josh standing in the bathroom doorway glaring down at her; she could hear his breathing mixed with her own.

“Kell,” he said, but nothing followed.

She just held up one hand to him, palm out, like a crossing guard halting traffic. The last thing she needed to hear right now was a lecture from someone, from anyone. She was suddenly too frightened to listen to rational thought, too. From behind her closed lids, the image of the blinking red beacon taunted her. And damn it, she knew that light, had seen it somewhere before but couldn’t put her finger on it. It was like some memory from another life, something she almost remembered, yet her physical brain would not allow the entire thought to fully process.

“I’m okay,” she finally managed. She thought Josh would come to her side and kneel down beside her, but he only remained standing in the doorway, silent and staring. “I just…something I ate today didn’t agree with me, I guess.”

“Yeah,” he said, his tone monotonous, “something you ate today.” He had been with her since dawn and hadn’t seen her eat a single thing. And she knew he was thinking just that.

“Don’t start, Josh.”

“No,” he said, “of course not. I’ll never start, right?”

She didn’t know what he meant by that and said nothing when he turned away and walked back down the hallway. Listening, she heard him gather his things, open the front door, and slam it behind him. Her head still against the rim of the bathtub, she listened to his footsteps recede down the hallway until there was nothing left to hear but the simmering hiss of the toilet.