Analog Ritual, Tape 6
A Tale of Nostalgic Horror
Hey, gang. Happy February and almost Valentine’s Day. It’s my daughter’s fourth birthday today, Texas weather can’t decide whether it wants to be hot or cold, and we’ve got lots of planets visible in the night sky. Let’s get weird.
Some housekeeping stuff before the story: my mascot/logo, made by artist extraordinaire Jim Agpalza, now has a name. I ran a giveaway on Facebook, and thanks to Autumn Hanna, this creature shall henceforth be known as Iris.
Isn’t she purty?
Currently reading: Hell Hath No Sorrow Like a Woman Haunted by R.J. Joseph and “Children of the Kingdom” by T.E.D. Klein.
Recently watched: The Unknown (directed by Tod Browning) and Wolf Man (directed by Leigh Whannell)
Currently listening: 83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff (re-listen) and A Rat Falling Apart from the Heart by Rubix Kitten.
I’ve still got copies of Meat District and Other Horrors over at the webstore. It’s a chapbook containing four short splatterpunk stories, and once they’re gone, they’re gone, so make sure you get on that.
All right, here’s this month’s story. It’s called “Analog Ritual, Tape 6.”
The weekend after her father’s funeral, Juniper Lee had the house to herself. Her mother was at a business conference and her brother Jacob was sleeping over at a friend’s house. She had the opportunity to stay with a girlfriend that weekend, but she opted instead to stay home and get used to the idea of this new emptiness she still couldn’t comprehend.
Her restless pacing that Friday night eventually took her to the basement. What her mother called her father’s Man Cave, like it was 2010 and that wasn’t the cringiest thing in the world. Her father called it his study, though what he was studying down there was never readily apparent to Juniper.
She descended the wooden stairs, listening to them complain under her weight as the dank smell of the underground space engulfed her like an unseen fog. The concrete floor gave her much-needed stability.
The basement had many of the expected items stacked against its cinderblock walls. Tools hanging from hooks and boxed-up holiday decorations. Cans of paint and expired cans of emergency food. Mostly, though, the chamber contained a series of wooden shelves, a boxy television and VCR, and a weathered recliner. The shelves were packed tightly with VHS tapes with titles ranging from the eerie-sounding Legend of Hell House to the outright lurid, like Cannibal Holocaust.
There had to be at least a thousand of these movies down here, but she could remember watching none of them. She hardly remembered coming down here at all, only standing at the top of the stairs to call her father up for dinner from time to time. If she had come down here to spend time with him, she couldn’t remember. It was his space, somewhere he went whenever he needed to decompress—the same way she sometimes locked herself in the bathroom with only her phone for company.
She browsed through the tapes, reading the titles on the spine and occasionally taking a box out to view the pulpy artwork. Some covers she recognized from T-shirts her father owned. On one of the bottom shelves, several tapes in generic cases sat together. They only took up half the shelf, but they had no other tapes beside them. She bent and grabbed one at random. It was marked TAPE #3. With a frown, she replaced it and saw all the blank tapes were numbered.
She took TAPE # 1 off the shelf and turned it over in her hand.
Almost impulsively, she slipped it into the VCR and pressed PLAY. There was a click and a whirring sound. The television screen went blue, and the word PLAY flickered at the top right corner of the screen. The blue cleared on scanlines over a black background.
The scene faded in on a campfire. Six figures sat around the blaze, all of them awash in a haze of orange-filtered analog fuzz. Everyone seemed to be in their late teens or early twenties. Despite the age and resolution of the footage, this appeared to be a professional production. The shot was competently framed and complemented by the sort of droning synth score common in movies from several decades’ past. Peculiarly, no title card or credits of any kind showed onscreen.
Still, Juniper could not look away.
The campers drank beers and passed around a joint. A girl with her dark hair in pigtails rested her head against the shoulder of a guy in a Slayer shirt. The overall mood seemed jovial except for a guy with a crewcut who was wearing a generic sports jersey. More and more, the camera seemed to angle on him. Though he probably wasn’t the protagonist, Juniper’s filmic understanding told her that he would soon say or do something to set things in motion.
“We shouldn’t be here,” he said, proving her instincts correct.
The music stopped. Everyone else looked at him.
“What’re you talking about?” Slayer said.
“They’re his woods, you know? We shouldn’t be here.”
“Who?” Pigtails asked.
Crewcut went into an expository monologue about a maniac who supposedly used the surrounding woods as a killing ground. A leather-clad dude with red hair worn in a feathered mullet chimed in, saying he heard all about that. The killer was supposed to be a preacher’s son. He’d watched his father steal from the collection plate and deflower teenage girls from the congregation.
“Or so the stories say,” Crewcut said.
“That’s disgusting,” said another one of the girls. She had bleach-blond hair that flared out at the bottom and kind of reminded Juniper of Brittany Murphy.
“So, anyway,” Crewcut said. “He was willing to turn a blind eye because he feared his father and was maybe even a little afraid of God. Like, what would God think if he turned against his father, even though he was pretty sure his father was a sinner? Honor thy father and mother and all that.”
“But that changed when preacher man’s next conquest was the girl our budding serial killer had a thing for,” Feathered Mullet said.
“That’s right,” Crewcut continued. “Watching his old man defile the girl he loved broke him. That night, he burned down the church with his father inside. And to atone for that transgression, he walked into the fire before the authorities came.”
“To cleanse himself,” Slayer said, seeming to contemplate the action.
“Ah-ha, but the Devil wouldn’t let him get off that easy,” Crewcut said, and Pigtails rolled her eyes.
At this point, Juniper considered shutting off the television. She had seen this movie. Well, not this specific movie, but plenty of movies like it. Killer in the woods. Young campers. Creepy backstory (though, she had to admit this backstory seemed somewhat original). Thinking of her father, now in the ground forever, she decided to keep watching. This was her way of keeping him around. Sure, any other movie on these shelves could do it, but the unmarked nature of this tape lent it a certain intimacy that the other, properly packed and labeled and presumably more widely distributed tapes did not have.
The characters at the campfire paired off. Shortly thereafter, the killing began.
Feathered Mullet was first to go, after stomping off angrily when one of the girls wouldn’t do more with him than a few brief kisses. He met his end via a sharpened stick rammed into his eye socket. The weapon pierced through with such force, it broke through the occipital lobe, emerging with its tip flecked with slimy chunks of brain matter.
Bargain-bin Brittany Murphy got her back broken over the killer’s knee when she left the tent she shared with Crewcut. This scene provided a shot of a bare breast, which popped out of the victim’s loosely buttoned flannel when the killer dropped her twitching form. She coughed flecks of blood onto the exposed flesh as she died, a visual the camera made sure to zoom into for a grisly close-up.
Crewcut opened the tent for the killer, thinking it was his lover returning, and received a hatchet to the mouth for his attempt at chivalry.
Slayer died trying to protect Pigtails but got felled by the same hatchet which dispatched Crewcut. His valiant effort was all for nothing, too, as Pigtails met her end after she, predictably, got her foot caught in a protruding root and fell. The killer pressed her face into the grate over still burning campfire. Her flesh bubbled, blackened, and cracked until enough heat and pressure caused her head to burst, spraying its chunky, wet contents into the roaring blaze.
Only the girl who’d turned down Feathered Mullet survived. She crawled into a cave, unseen by the killer who tromped angrily into the night.
The camera focused on the fire as it cooked the juices from Pigtails’ ruined skull before dying and causing the screen to fade to black. Juniper expected this to finally lead to a title card, but the darkness lifted to show a road traversed by an RV filled with another group of young people looking for an exciting weekend in the woods. They were all headed to a similar fate as the victims from the cold open, albeit at a slower pace to keep the movie’s runtime over eighty minutes.
In the final act, the cold open’s survivor emerged to help push the killer over a steep, stony cliff. The two final girls drove down the mountain together. Before the credits could roll, a man inferred to be the devil came to the side of the killer’s broken body. Using a magic that manifested as bright orange orbs rendered in primitive computer effects, he resurrected the menace so that the filmmakers could make a sequel.
The screen faded to black again. In lieu of credits, scanlines split the screen. The tape whirred and groaned, and the screen turned blue.
Juniper sat in a state she couldn’t define. It felt neither like shock nor nostalgia, but some elixir of the two that left her paralyzed in place until the tape rewound to the beginning and spat out of the VCR. Juniper put the VHS back in its cardboard case and took TAPE #2 from the shelf.
Juniper fell asleep in the middle of Tape # 5. She woke up with a hangover, though she hadn’t had a drop to drink. Fatigue weighed down all her limbs, and her head was throbbing. She got up from her father’s recliner and headed up the stairs. In the kitchen, she gulped down two massive glasses of water and prepared a cup of instant coffee. Outside, someone honked a car horn.
Everybody’s in a rush, she thought and encircled the coffee mug with her hands. She let herself relish the warmth and tried to remember what happened the previous night. Before she could recall anything beyond putting in the first tape, the horn honked again. This time, it was three beeps in rapid succession.
Juniper pushed away from the breakfast nook and peered out the front window. An old pickup truck was parked in front of her house. A woman wearing a flowery dress was making her way up the path to Juniper’s front door. Juniper didn’t recognize her, but she caught herself admiring the lady’s wavy brown hair. It fell past the visitor’s shoulders and flowed like something out of a shampoo commercial. Butterflies of anticipation fluttered in Juniper’s stomach as the woman reached the front door and the bell dinged.
Juniper opened the door and said, “Hi.”
“You’re not dressed?” the newcomer asked. “Junie, we gotta go!”
“Go?”
“To the mountains, of course. Don’t tell me you forgot.”
The truck’s horn honked again. The driver was leaning on it now. He was a dude in a muscle shirt and a green mohawk. He held up an impatient hand.
“Just a sec, Holden!” the woman at the door hollered over her shoulder.
“I … don’t know who that is,” Juniper said.
The woman frowned. “Are you feeling okay, Junie? That’s Holden. My boyfriend. When I feel like it.”
“And who are you?”
The woman’s frown deepened. Then, she rolled her eyes. “Wow, Junie. Is this your idea of a joke?”
Holden revved the engine. “Come on, Daria. What’s the holdup?”
Daria sighed. “Tell me you at least packed a bag.”
“Uh-uh,” Juniper said.
Daria rubbed her eyes. When she lowered her hands, she said, “Okay. Let me in, and I’ll help you.”
“Just wait a minute!” She paused. Daria stared, waiting for her to finish. Juniper had the words teetering on the tip of her tongue like kids on a diving board—I don’t even know who you are? Where are you taking me? What’s going on?—but they dissolved before they could take the plunge. Daria was her best friend. They were going to Mount Bloodmoon with some other friends this weekend. How had all that been so unapparent to her just seconds ago? She must have been hitting her mom’s liquor harder than she thought last night. “Sorry, just give me a few minutes.” She called out to Holden, “I promise I’ll be quick!”
Holden shook his head but didn’t protest further. Juniper went back inside, a bounce in her step.
She could hardly wait for their trip to the mountains, legends of undead serial killers be damned.