Edgelord

“I’m just saying people say things — ”

“What?”

“Anybody can say anything at any time.”

“Alright, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that people can do anything at any time…”

Prologue

What if there was a portal that you could open — like, a movie that opens like a portal and if you go in then you have a fifty-fifty chance of salvation because I swear to God, the movie was listed as Silent Night, Deadly Night Part IV on Amazon Prime, but it was for The Toy Maker, and Silent Night, Deadly Night V was listed as Initiation on their posters, but this is the opposite when you click on them. It’s that old feeling that I can’t help but follow the path toward damnation. I suppose we’re going to just click to confirm purchase of the guardians in the eyes and faces of stuffed animals.

Part V Initiation beckoned, and with Would you like to proceed now before me I saw the eyes of the stuffed animals and the sallow-looking, frowning boy. I froze at the moment where I saw that cover image and the option to rent it for $2.99, then backed out of it as I made the comparison to the 1968 film that I had watched in a dark room before dawn on Christmas, a black and white original. For some reason the narrator said at the very beginning that that was an adaptation of the author’s darkest tale, and later after watching I found the central character so contemptible, and the effects so cheesy it left me pondering why. Was there something that I was missing?

Where did I go wrong?

Part 1: Immortal Wager & the Key

What if there were a film you could watch that would make you lose your faith, maybe, and the Mephistophelean wager once you hit OK, once you bought it, was that then you entered into a gambit?

At first, I backed out of that. I wasn’t going to watch Part V Initiation and risk it. In that pre-dawn darkness, with the jolly, multicolored lights of the mini-Christmas tree beside me, I needed more time. I would procrastinate what the heart wants. So I surfed onto YouTube, to see if there was something else that I wanted to see.

The heart wants what the heart wants in that moment. The face of the child on the screen with the jagged, asymmetrical mouth and jagged teeth, took on a galvanized quality like it was searing out of the screen. Edward Munch-style scream — holler, wail, and I knew what I would do.

First, I left the TV room and went into the dark kitchen. It was still dark before dawn on the day after Christmas . I perched myself before the greenhouse window, the one that jutted out from the exterior of the house. A number of my mother’s plants sat on the metal shelves. I was visiting home for the holiday, but my parents were still asleep. Outside it was completely still.

Except, there was a nutcracker decoration fluttering on the single lamppost on the corner. It was cold out, but nowhere near as cold as the previous year. The street was dark. No decorations across the way this year left on in the night, or at all. A waning gibbous moon, nearly full, hung over the lamppost where the nutcracker decoration silently fluttered.

The light of the lamp post exhibited a capacitor logic: it was mainly dark, yet it flickered with a glimmer of incandescent light. The lamppost itself was made of black fiberglass, set on the curb above the rough, unkempt blades of grass and the wide, pitted concrete of a sewer drain beneath a manhole on the curb. Within the streetlight, there was a glimmer of this incandescent light, flickering purple like the base of a campfire, as if struggling to live, at its last gasp, and gradually, it increased until it once again flared into life like a match igniting, and it would go from the blue-purple color of the flicker to the ignition of the orange incandescent glow, and that would blossom, as the nutcracker decoration fluttered, and the moon hung over this scene. I saw the dewy blades of grass, and I observed this progression peripherally through the glass panes of the greenhouse window. And then the light would extinguish and the pattern would repeat.

I triangulated between the fluttering fabric, the illumination of the lamppost, and the moon. As I did this, I felt around on the marble slab of the windowsill. In the darkness, my hand moved over an oblong metal object — like the outline about the size of a paperclip — but it was open on one end. There, instead of a rounded tip, at the opening was a small metal filament.

My hand froze. I thought I recalled seeing my mother place these objects here the previous afternoon. The triangulation of the observed scene was connected to these filaments of metal, some kind of tuning rod; The pattern of the flickering light was the resonance of these metal dowsing rods.

It was the key. This would be the key to escaping from this realm that I was about to enter: all I had to do was utilize it.

When I moved my finger from the surface, however, the thin filament that served as an endcap slipped away. It fell to the ground on the tile. Frantically, I ducked down and gently felt around the area near the small baseboard where it must have fallen. I did not want to turn on a light, but ultimately I had to. There was no metal pin there. The oblong-safetypin-sized metal arch was still on the marble sill, but the small metal rod was nowhere to be seen.

Could it have been a pine needle, perhaps? There was a branch of pine decorating the greenhouse window. I turned out the light, thoroughly discouraged. I resolved that it must have been a pine needle that I felt, but I couldn’t shake the belief that I’d seen this configuration on the marble sill the day before. That mustn’t be the key, I reasoned. I returned to the TV room. There had been something not quite metallic in the texture of the rod and curved object, as if it were made of quicksilver. Too malleable to be metal.

Part 2: No Turning Back Now

The decision to press rent was made and what followed went like this: it was as if the plane of the TV, a glowing square in the dark morning TV room, opened like the roof of the…of the…

If you are walking through the vast hall of the Hassan II in Casablanca, through its three naves that run perpendicular to the qibla wall, with its varous enormous Murano chandeliers, and above you, the mezzanine floors with their dark carved furnishings, where the women huddle, carved cedar from the Atlas range, and marble from Agadir…you wander among the endless arches and muqarnas, the walls adorned with zellij, and then the roof begins to open, all two hundred meters in length along the hall, sliding apart in two halves, to reveal: the sun, the open sky, or night, with her moon and stars, and this sunlight or starlight or whatever filters down through the glass floors into a vast ablution room with fountains shaped like giant lotus blossoms of alabaster, with coffee and cream swirls of the Tadelakt walls.

Thus, when I pressed rent, it was as if the TV screen itself split in half and, like the symmetrical, rectangular sides of a vast glass prism, opened and the axis of the world shifted by ninety degrees so that the source of gravity was now centered somewhere below the plane of the TV screen, but it only affected me (not the furniture, not the walls or the trees and other houses outside) and I dropped inside. I descended slowly between the split panes of the screen, the black void of a blank screen, my body still illuminated, as if by the light of the TV that was radiating upwards into the room, and downwards into the darkness where I plunged — the radiant darkness of a blank television screen left on in a dark room — and I was terrified now that it would shut behind me, and I would be walking a very tight path in this respect, I wagered, tight as the contrast between that darkness and the illumination of the 75" plane screen, 4K TV (and, furthermore, as the black and white contrast of the 1968 rendition that I had watched the morning before which, come to think of it, could have been a gambit of a sort). Would you take that chance with your faith, a kind of inverse Pascal’s wager?

My body was casually frozen there watching the film, but actually, this descent was what was happening to my soul. Probably you wonder what I saw in this film Initiation V. Well, let’s say the young man and his anthropomorphic stuffed friends emerged from out of the closet. I won’t tell you what I saw, exactly, but I can describe the context, and the general mood and the wager that I had with the demon. You can judge from that.

I had assumed that there would be something difficult to watch in this film, but one should always test their strength, particularly of their faith. Otherwise, what’s the point, right? But then it was there in the darkness on the edges of the screen through which I had descended and beneath which I hung, suspended in a column of light. It emerged from the void into my peripheral vision, over by the edge of the screen where the darkness fringed the light, and I could see it: not human, not alive. It appeared as a kind of flesh gargoyle, the orifices of which were wounds. I didn’t look directly at it, but I could tell somehow that it was a living wound.

When we got to the part where the stuffed toys surrounded the boy and began to restrain him, it called out to me. It said:

Now, are you sure you were prepared when you entered into this game, for when we get a little further along in the film, you will see something that may cause the tether to this material world to be broken. Then you’ll be trapped in here forever with the darkness. You won’t be able to go back.

I steeled myself, but then minutes later, I really was aghast. I felt the fear, the terror of certain kinds of spectacles that function like a demon robbing the viewer of their humanity.

Now I felt the fear like I could not get back. It felt like I had had a golden key in my heart and I had blown it, forfeited it. Like that quicksilver configuration on the countertop, somehow I just lost it… I could picture it in my mind, but now I was almost certain it was gone. There was an absence inside where that golden key had been. Now the flesh gargoyle had seized the opportunity and ascended up beyond the invisible boundary of the aperture between the plane of the TV screen that had split, and, as I was hanging in the balance, it stood in our reality looking down into the darkness where I was dangled and it let out a chilling laugh like something half human half dog that was whimpering.

You’re afraid, but I can offer you a bet… I bet that you cannot watch the entirety of this film without losing your faith, it said and with that it let out a cackle that resounded in the void, and it danced a little on the edge of the TV screen — but of course, this meant it was dancing around on the surface of the upright TV screen, in defiance of gravity, and I could see the dark window of my bedroom above him, and outside it, high above us both, the waning gibbous moon. So the axis of the world itself had shifted impossibly.

“You’re on!” I replied. I didn’t hesitate, but then inside I wondered if I’d made the right choice?

Thus I continued my viewing, which was a catastrophe from the beginning. Part V Initiation began with the child, as I said, a young male not more than seven. Not more. He was in his room. It must have been the mid-1990s. The carpet was new, but eventually it would be dirty with time. As if seen from above, behind his head, I saw him open the wooden, slatted doors that were Louver Pine Plantation Interior Closet Bi-fold Door, and slowly opened them. The incandescent light inside flickered on and the eyes of the stuffed “friends” (for that is what he called them) flickered to life. One lion, one sheep, one furry friend with sharp teeth.

That is when the animals, the stuffed friends, began to descend the closet and he was laughing and in his Underoos pajamas. They encircled him.

Just then, that cover image flickered into my mind. I couldn’t believe it. The one from earlier. Recall that, before I pressed rent and went to the kitchen and looked through the greenhouse window and all that, I searched on YouTube for something else I could watch. It was procrastination.

But the heart wants what the heart wants. There was this advertisement on YouTube for a short film about a fourteen-year-old who games a raffle to win a Tesla S-model, the one who’s visage appeared as the cover image on YouTube. He had an asymmetrical mouth and jagged teeth, and the eyes and outline of the head seemed to burn out of the screen, which evoked a Munch-style scream. The autoplay had said that I could skip in ten seconds. This had been annoying. I watched anyway. It began with the young lad in a hoodie and his friend at their high school.

Part 3: The First Trial

“Whoa, look at that Tesla model S! It’s so beautiful. One day, I’m going to be driving that!”

“Yes, I feel you,” said his friend, who was a bit shorter and with dark hair and pudgy.

You saw the Tesla cordoned off with red velvet, and then this guy came out. He was a bald, middle-aged guy and maybe ethnic with a smile, he said, “We’re having a raffle, a lottery, and you can win this car!”

I continued to watch the scene in Part V Initiation, with the young boy surrounded by his furry animal friends with glowing eyes, five of them, who pinned him down and drew a pentagram across his chest in the light of the incandescent bulb that fell obliquely through the slats of the louver bi-fold doors, upon the carpet, something that had been purchased at a home goods store, one with a Native American pattern on it, the one that would become dirty over time — but I continued to dwell on the commercial.

Why were some people making this video? Was it produced locally? It seemed to be produced locally, and if I were a fourteen-year-old loser growing up today in this area of the country, I, too, might focus on production work to see if I could make a movie that garnered enough likes to afford a Tesla Model-S. Because that is what society told me I should want.

I had grown up in this area, and look at what I had become. But that was decades ago, before social media.

I recalled the eerie cover image for this video, where the boy’s face was screaming in excitement, cut out and pasted over a black void. The eyes flared blue, and their outlines seared out of the plane of the TV screen, a luminous blackness you have to understand?? And his face was cut out and hovering over that luminous darkness, and his mouth was somewhat asymmetrical with little sharp teeth like stalactites over the black cave of his open mouth and the eyes were searing out of the screen — blue. It was like that painting by Edvard Munch and it made me wonder who was outside just now. Who was in the neighborhood and the region and who was on this planet of ten billion people? I could feel the collective fury and resentment of the youth and felt the terror: what was I going to do? I’ve never had to stand on my own before, not without my parents there to protect and lead the way, give me guidance? What will happen to me? How will I make my way?

Just then I felt my right back foot slip off the icy edge. My breath caught in my throat, and I scrambled to claw at something sheer, a sheer face. My palms became sweaty and it was like I was watching myself teeter backwards into the void. Time stopped, and I recall the high winds blowing across my body. But somehow, I managed to get my footing and clung to the sheer face of sanity.

That was a warning, said a voice from above. Looking up, I saw the demon, illuminated by the dark void. His eyes were sharp knife wounds in flesh, and its mouth was a horrible flesh-wound rictus across skin, and it had these devilish little nubs, two of them, on either side of its skull and these were like horns, but covered in flesh drawn over them. It had ratty, flesh-colored wings, too.

I perceived the entire visage as if through a shattered mirror.

You will never make it through, it taunted from above where I clung, hanging from the edge of the screen, which delineated a doorway in space. I remained hanging there by a filament of light, by my fingertips until I regained my footing only a moment ago.

Part 4: The Second Trial

I’ll double your odds: he doesn’t even make it past the next one, came another voice, and to my horror, I saw that there was another creature above the lighted edge of darkness, up above in my reality.

“You’re on,” said my first tormentor.

“I’m just saying people say things — ” replied the second.

“What?”

“Anybody can say anything at any time,” it said.

“Alright, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that people can do anything at any time.”

“OK OK OK yeah people can do anything at any time,” said the first demon, and threw its clawed hands up in the air with a kind of exasperated gesticulation, walking to the edge, focused on my next move in the game.

I continued to edge my way further into the film, Initiation V. Now the five animals restrained the boy in his pajamas, at first laughing, then against his protests. One of them, the lion one, used its claws to cut the pentagram into his chest. Stifling his screams, while the fuzzy snake creature pinned his arms, and the octopus restrained his kicking legs, the stuffed bear pinned down the nylon straps across his throat, silencing him to a horrible gurgle. This wasn’t so bad, but then the lion produced a butterfly knife and I’m not going to say what he did but just then I felt my mind slip, again, as if I were inching my way across a sheer, two-inches or less ledge, and I came up on another face of the mountain and met a sheer wind, cold and cutting right through me, making me shiver, tremble. But I had to take the edge, and I stepped over, somehow, impossibly.

Now, in the light of the incandescent bulb that cut obliquely through the slats of the bifold door, I saw what they did to the boy. There is no need to repeat here what I have seen. And so the scene progressed. No words.

From here on, I wound to the top of a mountain peak of fear, a glass edge of the aperture of the TV screen that somehow stretched and warped, inching my way along an icy ledge — not even. It was less a ‘path’ than mere jagged rocks and crevices, where I needed to gain a foothold or hold tight with my hand some sinister, freezing outcropping of rock. Worse, as I followed the spiral, I realized that one of my legs had shortened by half, as had my arm, so that i had to go crawling along in a loping gait. Another of their tricks!

“Anybody can say anything at any time,” I muttered in the howling wind with my cheek to the rock. Then I screamed aloud: “The world has always been a mess!” That would be how it would end, I reasoned. For me. As it had for the boy.

“‘Anyone can do anything at any time, that’s all I’m saying.’”

His voice came from up above on a precipice of rock with the moon behind him and then I felt the blast of freezing cold water. A torrent, coming down the mountainside. I clung to the rock and convulsed with the agony of cold, vaguely perceiving the moon through blurry vision. A rigor passed across my body as if my insides had turned to ice.

It was like when I was in the kitchen just now, standing in the dark, and there was a bump and a whir, and my heart stopped and then I realized that the ice had fallen in the icemaker inside the freezer. The appliances have a vocabulary of their own.

Anyway, I felt the shiver go through my body and knew I was still fast to the rock face.

“See! See! He didn’t fall off!” the first demon cackled. Gasping for breath, eyes wide and alert with fear, I could see the second shaking its head.

“Alright, alright. You got me this time.”

“You had your fun,” said the first. Then, it turned back to me. “If you stay put there any longer, I’ll blast you off with a freezing river,” said the silhouette with its two nubby little wings, a shadow in the center of the full moon. “Now MOVE!”

I continued to inch my way up along the ‘path.’ I could no longer feel my body, I was numb and my extremities were ice. I haplessly, blindly groped my way through the moonlight from one rock outcropping to the next, keeping my body close to the rock. My path was impeded and made more complex by the misshapen form my body had taken, as if I had been some beast that had adapted to the spiraling rock face. At one point the rock gave way beneath my right foot and fell and I could feel my heart stop and my body felt like it was made of ice. I shut my eyes and hugged the bare rock close, listening to the rock tumble away until the sound disappeared into the howling wind.

Part 5: The Peak

I crawled slowly, mechanically over the ridge, when finally I made the peak, and collapsed in the freezing snowdrift, face down in a child’s pose as the wind scoured my back. I lay there, motionless in the moonlight. I had crawled back out of the television screen, but the plane of the TV had somehow been warped into a vast and arid mountain peak in a wasteland. Don’t ask me to explain.

I don’t think the demon had expected that I would make it this far. It was actually the second of the two, the one that had lost the wager. The first was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps I had the element of surprise. Now he was perched like a flesh-colored gargoyle, facing away from me and the moon, looking out over the freezing expanse of the wasteland and mountains, a vast black undulating terrain interrupted by periodic lakes and bays only distinguishable from the blackness because they glimmered under the moonlight, reflecting a moon in parts across them, that, if added together, revealed the true scale of the lunar surface.

Strewn about the frozen mountaintop were random objects from my room: furniture, books, some clothes half-burried in the snowdripfts. Just then the demon turned to me and gasped. He pointed. Weirdly, perhaps conveniently, on the rocky surface before me sat a shot glass and some freezing cold Jagermeister. They must have somehow gotten dragged into this realm, too.

“Anyone can do anything anytime, right?” I yelled into the howling wind.

It nodded.

So I poured myself a shot. I downed it and put the glass firmly down in the snow.

“Why don’t you tell me more about your experience here,” I shouted.

The demon, taken aback, paused in the moonlight. He eased his martial stance. Relaxed in position amid the wasteland and the incessant, unforgiving winds.

“You really want to hear about my story?”

“The privilege would be all mine,” I said, looking him directly in his ‘eyes’ (for again, nothing but wounds there).

“For eons, I suppose, I have persisted here. Been imprisoned here. I cannot remember when I first entered. It had the sound of a mountain collapsing, the earth cracking in two. That is how I remember waking in this place. A cthonic schism. An elemental breach, and then…

“They say that God divided the parts of Himself away from Himself, sometime in the early universe, pushing outward… empty angelic husks. The Binarus, when the shells of the Qlippoth blew outward from the presence of God and formed the empty spheres, in the primordial Creation.

“I have never known anything other than this empty plain, this empty rock where I wait for God’s return. But perhaps now, now that there is another here, something to divide self from other…” and it cackled, and the wind surged around us.

“Yet it is said that it is the absence of God which most assuredly — ”

And that’s when I kicked it off the edge of the mountaintop.

I walked to the edge, the wind cutting against my skin and the moon behind me. I looked down at it, clinging there for dear life against the sheer edge as I had been not long before. A queer, asymmetrical smile crept across my face.

“Please, I didn’t mean it when I bet against you! You have to believe me. Okay, okay, listen: I was a man. I remember what it was like to be human. Please, you have to help me. You can’t leave me here!”

The gateway was opening again, the white neon outline of the invisible glass field, an aperture opening above me. I looked up and through, back into my realm, then down again, grinning at it. Its fleshy claws clattered along the ledge, anxiously grasping like manic beetle legs.

“Kicked in to a huge fucking pit,” I shouted as I kicked it in the face and the demon tumbled back off the edge into the void with a howl that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and I prepared to ascend, like an Angel, through the prism of light, through the opening in space, and that is when I found myself crawling through the open window of my childhood bedroom.

Then the window opened and I was lost in that no-man’s land between Christianity and Wicca, the winter came in and invaded the room through the broken window with ice cystals on the walls and the holiday lights.

Interlude: The Light is Coming

Something was wrong. Just at that moment the film stopped and an error message was displayed. When I went back onto the page for the film, however, it said that I hadn’t rented it. Now I knew that was wrong. What’s more, because of the confusion of the title images provided with either movie, Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 and 5, I was paranoid that if I were to rent it again I might rent a different version this time — the correct one? — and incriminate myself, but in a different way.

How to resolve this in my present state of mind? There was not much time and the light was coming. I opened my laptop, opened an Amazon page and then clicked on the Customer Service button. Then it took me to a new page that asked me if I needed help with a recent item, but my video rental was not listed among the options, so I clicked on Help with something else, and then the Prime Videos option, then problems streaming option, but then as the options weren’t available to resolve the particular issue, I had to click on “I need more help,” and as it was apparently more advisable to begin a chat rather than to request a phone call back, I began a chat.

I was paranoid, of course. Paranoid that if I revealed to the agent (and it would be recorded in perpetuity) that I rented the version of this movie Part V Initiation, then there would be evidence that I had. Maybe if I backed out halfway through the feature, then it wouldn’t count.

Why wasn’t the chat coming up? Oh the pop-up window was blocked. I clicked to enable it and the chat began. There was an option to cancel the order. I thought about what it would mean if I did this. There was also an option to get troubleshooting with streaming video. First I clicked on the option to cancel the movie. Maybe, just maybe it would be like it never happened.

Strangely, the movie wasn’t even listed. Instead, there were a couple I recognized but also a film called Ashes on My Pillow that I never rented. Well, may as well get that refunded.

3:41 PM

Messaging Assistant | Customer Service

Ok I see that your order was placed over 14 days ago, or has already been streamed or downloaded. Because of this, you can’t cancel this order. Sorry for that.

But if you ordered this by mistake, we can help you set up a pin code. Would you like to do that?

3:41 PM

Contact us for one-off exception

3:41 PM

Messaging Assistant | Customer Service

Sure, what’s the reason for canceling?

3:41 PM

Bought accidentally

3:41 PM

Messaging Assistant | Customer Service

Thanks, we can cancel your video and refund you $2.99 within 3 to 5 business days. Sound good?

3:41 PM

Yes, cancel & get refund

3:41 PM

Messaging Assistant | Customer Service

OK, we’ve canceled your video and removed it from Your Video Library since you’re being refunded for it.

Your refund will appear as a credit on your statement within 3 to 5 business days. Have any questions about this?

3:41 PM

Yes, ask an associate

3:41 PM

Messaging Assistant | Customer Service

OK, I’ll get someone to help you here through chat.

3:41 PM

OK, get help through chat

3:42 PM

Messaging Assistant | Customer Service

If you have details you think would help the associate, type them here.

3:42 PM

I had made up my mind. I knew in my heart what I wanted, and what I wanted to was to finish watching that movie. There was no reason to be coy about it now. Even if the governmet or some entity was keeping tabs on this. The NSA keeps all this information in a centralized database anyway, they have fiber running straight from the servers at Amazon, after all. They knew what I watched. They know if I’ve been sleeping, they know when I’m awake.

A

Apoorva has joined and will be ready to chat in just a minute.

Hi good day

3:42 PM

Apoorva | Customer Service

Hi, Apoorva here to help you!

Allow me a moment to look into the previous correspondence

A

3:43 PM

This is unrelated to that.

3:43 PM

Apoorva | Customer Service

How may I help you today?

A

3:44 PM

Yes I just rented Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 and i’d like to Double Down on that.

3:44 PM

Apoorva | Customer Service

Could you please elaborate the issue for me?

A

3:45 PM

Right, I watched about half (46.53 to be exact) and then accidentally exited out. Now it’s saying I didn’t rent it.

Can you go into my account and reactivate it or something?

{Just like the day before, when I had asked the representative to help me with the region where I was logged in, I figured the representative could help me to reset the video. The damn region had been set wrong on my Amazon account. I tried at first to order one film and then another that had been saved to my watchlist. But it said the films were not available. When I chatted with the representative, I expected her to guide me through steps to do something to change the region, but she had done it remotely, just like that.}

3:46 PM

Apoorva | Customer Service

Allow me a moment to look into this for you

A

3:46 PM

Please, dawn is coming!

3:48 PM

Apoorva | Customer Service

I just restored the rental.

A

3:48 PM

Thank you!!! :D

3:48 PM

Apoorva | Customer Service

Is there anything else I can help you with today?

A

3:48 PM

How will I know it restored?

just a sect

3:48 PM

Apoorva | Customer Service

You can go to your library and start playing it again

A

3:48 PM

just a moment

Brilliant thank you!

Happy Holidays :)

3:50 PM

Apoorva | Customer Service

Happy Holidays :)

have a great day ahead

A

3:50 PM

Apoorva has left. Thanks for contacting Amazon!

I shut the laptop soundlessly and looked around the room. The windows wide open, the treeline was a mere silhouette of darkness. The small silver Christmas Tree on the nightstand by my comfy chair was aglow with multicolored Christmas lights that shown reflected in the black window.

And before me, the movie still said it was available to rent and I realized I hadn’t needed to chat with the representative in any event. I just had to restart the app.

‘Have a Great Day Ahead’

I crawled in through the smashed window, into the TV room which had been my childhood room. Winter had invaded the room through the broken window and ice crystals fanned out across the walls. It was a wreck. My little multicolored tree was still on, and all the furniture was haphazardly cast about everywhere. The incandescent closet light cut across the snow, falling obliquely from between the slats of the louvred bifold closet doors, one of which was ajar. The incandescent light inside periodically flickered on and off. The bed was in a snowdrift. I crept across the windswept room, which had taken on the air of the icy mountaintop, toward the creature that stood before the open television screen, a black void. It was the first demon, the one I’d made my original wager with.

“Then you have survived my trials,” it said and I could even hear it’s voice above the howl of the wind. “As I gave you my word, then you will be free to leave. You have salvaged your soul. Except that now you die!”

It lunged at me and I met it’s claws with my frozen hands. We grappled there in the snow, I holding the elf-like demon at bay with all my might.

He had a crumpled face like leather that has been abused. The wounds of his eyes no longer seemed fresh; they no longer bled. Perhaps the blood had frozen; but now they were just dark slits in its crumpled leather face, and the mouth, too, was a gash that must have coagulated, frozen blood — its form looked as if wounded flesh had been drawn over some kind of skeleton, and the skull was more rodent-like, with the flesh as if pulled perversely across and taut over a proboscis of bone. I shivered and in the low light beheld him with abject horror, my own gaze frozen, face expressionless and icicles hanging from my hair and face, and icicles hanging everywhere in the corners and edges of the room now.

It’s clothing, too, seemed to be of brown burlap, and it had a little brown conical hat of burlap that was roughly sewn and hung down to one side. I felt its claws digging into the flesh of the back of my hands.

“You thought you could get away, but I am of my word. So now here is your last trial. The interlude.”

Ah! Oh there was a movie inside of this movie! A mini-movie! No!

What was this? It was a film that I had watched the night before and that I had forgotten, about a man, an academic. He was on vacation by the seaside. The film was black and white, and when I started watching it I unplugged the tree emphatically. I would watch it in total darkness.

You see, there were some films that, if you watched them, you ran the risk of losing your faith. Faith in God. Faith in humanity.

The story begins when the man travels to a seaside inn. There, in his solitude, he arranges his books and his bullshit, his pens and pencils. He takes the time to arrange these “plumb-order” and then it’s time for supper and he’s constantly eating and I wondered: does thinking require this much eating? perhaps it does, as if you are transforming something intangible, immaterial into form. Where do ideas come from? Where does imagination end and reality begin?

Two women making quick work of fixing up the bed in black and white. The two early 20th-century maids are shown fixing up the bed at an odd angle, one younger and one older. You had to be quick about it and exact. But it was clear from, perhaps the young woman’s eyebrows (was it the way she plucked them?) and the stage lights reflecting off her skin, the albedo, that this was actually a woman in period dress, and the whole thing was given away as a production from the 1960s. Nevertheless, I continued to watch, in the dark room. The man eats all the time and the scene with the maids making up the bed would have been incredibly comforting, to the uninitiated, I suppose.

If all the sounds were taken out then that would be a comfort, but the part where he loses his mind, where an intellectual man who is secure in his beliefs has his mind burned out — as burnt out and black as the cold ashes of a fireplace in the dark of an early morning in winter. For if he had been as secure in his logical reductivism, in the application of reason to language as I was in my faith in God and the hereafter, then this character’s break in the film would be like a reflection of my fall, my loss of faith. Why was this his darkest tale? What if you see something or are introduced to an idea but you can’t understand why you have lost your faith until after it is gone, an intellectual consequence?

Just then it was like a blizzard blew out the windows in my room and I was frozen there in my chair where I had been watching as snowdrifts gathered beneath the sills and ice crystals crept across the walls.

It had not, after all, been a Christmas ghost story! That had been the deal: you must choose to watch a Christmas ghost story, but this one had aired before the Christmas ghost stories. When had it first been broadcast? The ritual was a failure! And that was why I was going to hell!

I started up and there was an animated sheet hovering high above the four-post bed. The expression was one of real malevolence when I dared for a moment look it in the face — of hatred, with a baleful dark well where the mouth gapped in a holler of detestation, two dark depressions beneath the ridge of a heavy brow, eyes that glowered with an inner cold flame, illuminated as if each were a cavern that held a single candle in the socket. The noisy spirit held the center of a maelstrom in the room — and it issued an angry cry of hate that seemed to emanate from the center of space.

I cowered hid behind a chair, shut my eyes and put my hands over my ears. And then it stopped all at once. It was silent again in the room again and shuddering, gasping for air, I dared open my eyes.

The light had come now.

In that early, 1960s video, in the glare of the lighting on skin, the white reflection of human flesh contrasted with the black and white shadows, I caught a glimpse. It was like the burned-out ashes of a cold fireplace in the darkness before dawn on a winter day…

Nothing. The ludicrous figure of a professor, confronted with the ineffable: a sheet on three pieces of fishing line in slow motion, with the sound slurred, his mind broken.

The permanence of death is only cemented by the hollow failure of human attempts to represent it. Somewhere in the contrast between the black and white of the early 60s era videotape, I lost my faith, scattered in the cold morning ashes of a burned-out hearth.

At first, I believed I had won. The game wasn’t about watching Initiation V at all. That was just a distraction.

No, the game was to watch only Christmas ghost stories, you see? Unfortunately for me, this one first aired in March.

But… then the next day I did some online reasearch, and, according to the Wikipedia, as it turns out, it is “often included” as part of the original series. I had escaped the realm. I made it out beyond the sliding glass doors of the screen, but then thought, perhaps, I had pushed too far. But when I read that Wiki entry I believed I had won. But later it occurred to me, had I really?

The wind whipped through the broken window of my childhood bedroom, from a blackened mountaintop under moonlight and unforgiving, undulating obsidian terrain far, far off.

But Initiation V wasn’t nothing compared to the movie I really watched.