Chapter 4

Oak Ridge, TN – May 27th, 1983 – 9:15 PM

Sheer bliss. Summer was going to be sheer bliss. Jon had talked to both his friend John—and they just used their names when they talked to each other; nothing clever like Johnny Two or Mr. Miller, because they both knew who was which—and Megan, who had called him. She hadn’t exactly been in a good mood, and had done nothing but complain about her parents for an hour and a half, but she had been talking to him. For an hour and a half! During which, he had beaten his previous high score in Pitfall. The boy was hot tonight.

It was funny. The sort of sharing of miseries, of grousing about parents and general, implacable unhappiness of life, that Jon found so tiresome and even grueling from his sister was bearable, even kind of nice, from Megan. And, more and more, it had been Jon she had been calling to share her miseries with. Even if sometimes Megan could descend to a desolate bleakness that was far blacker than anything Stacey had ever cooked up, from Megan, it was a privilege. Even if, in the end, it meant he was the “friend” and Johnny Two, or some other eligible young buck, got the boyfriend position. Something was better than nothing, and it seemed harmless to let himself fantasize that maybe one day she could be sharing her misery in person while he consoled her, and as her voice trailed off and their heads slowly moved closer to each other, their lips almost touching . . .

On the television, Jon’s little Pitfall dude got stung by a scorpion and fell into a tar pit. All right, maybe he was getting too distracted thinking about Megan. But, it was time to move on to something else, anyway. Is was getting near ten, on the first official day of summer vacation, and he had barely scraped the surface of what he wanted to do with this immensely valuable time. Time to start programming. He had some ideas he wanted to play with, and wanted to make sure this summer ended in a finished program—he wanted to write an adventure game like Zork or Bedlam or one of the Scott Adams adventures, and he didn’t want to have to do it in BASIC. Maybe one day, he could do really cool video games like Pitfall. But he knew something that advanced was still a long way away for him. But a text adventure? He was up to it.

So, he disconnected the Atari 5200 from the old RCA television and hooked up his TRS-80 Color Computer, stuck in the Editor/Assembler cartridge, and got to work.

“Thanks for listening, Jon. You’re a really good guy,” she had said. How could that not lead to a kiss? Like, a French kiss. When a girl sounded that grateful, she’d put her tongue in your mouth, given half a chance. Jon was sure of it. If only she had been coming over tonight.

Jon shook his head. Yes, it wasn’t even the first official day of summer, but summer vacation was short and Megan wasn’t there to kiss or be kissed. He needed to focus. Flipping the manual open, he began work again on the second tutorial—generating a siren sound that changed pitch by which key on the keyboard was pressed.

It was just that she smelled so good. There had been long pauses in the phone conversation where Jon had just listened to her breathing, and he could almost smell her hair. Like flowers and water. Then she would start again, telling him about her parents, or her friends and school, or her own general depression, her voice low and deliberate, as if she were tasting the words as she said them. She could talk, sometimes, in this low, smoky voice—like everything she said was at once a seduction and a secret. It was wonderful to listen to.

“I just wish someone would take me out of here. I wish I could get out. You ever feel like that, Jon?”

“Sometimes. Not all the time. It’s better now that my sister moved to Memphis.”

“Yeah. And you’re mom’s never home, is she?”

“Nah, she’s got other shit to do.”

“You’re lucky. My mom and dad are home a lot. They argue all the time. They are always yelling. I can hear them now. Right now, they are fighting about some stupid, trivial, nothing piece of shit thing. They won’t let me do anything.”

“Damn, that sucks,” John had replied wisely.

“Yeah.”

In his mind's eye, he was no longer just reliving the earlier phone conversation. Instead, they were sitting his living room, talking by candlelight. As she talked, she took his hand and moved it towards her breasts, which seemed suddenly larger than before–

“Oh, for the love of . . . ” Jon muttered, trailing off. What the hell was wrong with him? He had cool stuff to work on right in front of him. He’d pick the real, live Megan over programming or video games any day of the week. But just thinking about her? Re-imagining their phone conversation? He could do that while he drifted off to sleep, or when he was stuck somewhere boring. Right now, he had a challenge, and he wanted to get to it. If he got to the end of the summer not knowing Editor/Assembler, he’d never catch up. There were already twelve-year-old kids submitting assembly language programs to the contests in the Color Computer magazines. If he had to stretch out learning assembly through 9th grade and into the next summer, how would he ever catch up?

If it was the real, live, warm, supple Megan, whose hair smelled like flowers and rain–then, sure, he’d give up learning to program forever for the real deal. But for just thinking about her? That was nuts.

Anyway, when it came to even having a shot at Megan, it wouldn’t hurt to have some sort of impressive accomplishment tucked under his belt. If he could be writing commercial-grade text adventures and programming in assembly by the end of the summer, he reasoned, well, that would seem pretty damn impressive to him.

So, back to work.

Three lines into the tutorial, he could almost feel Megan’s lips against his. He could feel her tongue teasing him. He had never actually French kissed a girl, but he had seen it on TV and in movies often enough and it looked like it would be really cool. So long as the girl didn’t have bad breath, which Megan wouldn’t. He could see it in his mind, as if watching a film, and Megan was almost chewing on his face, working her mouth and jaw so vigorously and intensely it was almost like she wanted to eat him. As they kissed, her hand wandered down towards his lap . . .

“Crap!” Jon stood up, dropping the Editor/Assembler manual on the floor. He was having issues. It wasn’t the first time he had had these sorts of thoughts, of course, or had been excited by them. But this was the first time the opportunity to play video games or work on his computer hadn’t been able to trump them. I’ve got to get back on track, he thought. How am I going to get anything done if I keep getting all weird over Megan?

He knew a cold shower was supposed to help, but he didn’t like the sound of that. “A walk around the block,” he said. “I’ll walk around the block. That’s supposed to help.”

Jon grabbed his keys, put on some tennis shoes, and ran out of the house. But he made sure the door was locked; his mother would kill him if she came home and the door was unlocked. Walking briskly, he made his way around the block in the warm night air. He circled the block four times before deciding that it wasn’t, as a practical matter, doing him much good. Maybe, he thought, he should just give it up and give it a clean start tomorrow, and do his programming tutorials first thing in the morning, before he did anything else.

As he finished his fourth and final circuit and turned down the cracked cement walkway that led to the door of their admittedly cheap, but very functional, rental house, he stopped with a jerk.

The mail! He had forgotten to check the mail. What the hell was he thinking? That was always supposed to be the first thing he did when he got home. If his mom got home and found out he had forgotten to check the mail, there would be hell to pay. Absolute hell. Among a dozen other things, Doreen Edmonds was paranoid about people in the neighborhood stealing the mail and doing something sinister with it. He had forgotten to get the mail before she had gotten home once last Fall, and the ensuing ass-chewing had been vicious. Worse than the time he had set his bed on fire when he had tried to improvise his own chemistry set out of common household cleansers.

He ran back to the mailbox and pulled open the door. It was loaded with mail, top to bottom. Letters and bills and magazines and a fairly sizeable box. Jon felt his pulse quicken. He felt the skin on his arms and back dimple up with goose bumps. A palpable sense of nearly avoided doom settled on him. Dear God, if I had forgotten to get this mail . . .

No time to waste. Jon pulled all the mail out and rushed into the house, sorting it quickly, just in case his mother showed up early. It was almost eleven, and it was rare on Friday nights she would get home that early. But it did happen.

Bill, bill, bill. Doreen Edmonds, you could already be a winner. Dorna Edmund, you could already be a winner. Bill. Victoria’s Secret—Jon liked sneaking a peak at it, but did not like to think about why his mother got the stupid thing. The thought of her wearing this kind of stuff was just unpleasant. It made him shudder just to think about it. J.C. Penny—that was more like it. Ms. Magazine. A subscription offer to Popular Mechanics, addressed to Jon. Maybe he could guilt his mom into getting that for him. He sat that aside. And . . . a box. A box wrapped in brown butcher paper, with Jon’s name and address neatly penned in blue ink on the top.

For a moment, his heart sank. All thoughts of Megan were finally wiped from his mind. A box. Addressed to him. No return address. That didn’t bode well. The obvious, and depressing, thought was that it was something from his dad. Some object with some letter he didn’t want to read. Some peace offering sent ahead of coming down and wasting futile hours and even days of the valuable summer time to try and make up for—or, let’s be honest, make excuses for—having been gone since before Jon was born. A curse on what was supposed to be the most perfect summer ever.

He needn’t have worried. At least, not about that. Inside was an unlabeled video cassette with a square of notebook paper loosely inserted with it.

Urgent! it shouted, in the same neat, blue-inked penmanship that the box had been addressed with. He could almost believe it was from his dad, but a video cassette with no label? When his dad, Mr. No-Money-For-Child-Support, ought to know they wouldn’t have a BetaMax. Well, perhaps saying he ought to know was giving his dad too much credit. But they didn’t have a video cassette player, and the only person he knew that had one was the other John. And urgent. Who would send him a BetaMax video cassette with a note that said “Urgent!”? Was it a joke? What could possibly be on it?

Jon was dying to find out, but he had to admit that nearing eleven o’clock at night was too late to call up Johnny Two and see if he could come over and watch some weird video tape that came in a box with no return address. John would be fine with it, but his parents would be home, and they’d pop a gasket.

Jon shook his head. Weird. He put the note down and picked up the video cassette again. It was compact and seemed heavier than he remembered Johnny Two’s video cassettes being. The surface seemed slicker, too. He rubbed his hand over it. It was cool, even cold to the touch. And, as he listened closely, he could swear he heard something whirring.

The video cassette shifted in his hands. The center plate, where the label should have been, rotated and rose up from the tape. The surface of the clear plastic that allowed one to see how much tape was currently unspooled clouded and turned silvery, and sprung up, stopping at a forty-five degree angle. The black piece on the opposite side also clouded and then turned a reflective silver, and lifted away from the body of the video cassette at a forty-five degree angle.

“Jon,” the video cassette said, clear as a bell. “Do not be—“

There were sparks flashing between the two elevated, reflected plates. Jon squealed and tossed the video cassette on the floor. He struggled to breathe; his feet felt frozen in place, and his heart was beating a hundred miles a minute. “Omigod,” he said. “Omigod. Omigod. Omigod.”

The tape, black and lifeless and completely normal, sat quietly on the floor.

Jon just stood, staring at the video cassette, for a full five minutes. It did nothing.

“I’m going crazy. First, I can’t stop thinking about Megan, and now this.” But, even in his highly agitated state, that didn’t sound right. There was a big leap from a teenage boy being unable to get his mind off an attractive girl, especially one that might possibly like him, and seeing household objects come to life. And he wasn’t exactly seeing all the household objects come to life. Just this one video cassette. That had arrived in the mail, with no return address.

Jon waited another five minutes. Then he bent over, picked up the cassette and held it for a moment. He waited.

Nothing. It was just a video cassette, that was all. He was just . . . tired. He had over exerted himself walking around the block. Or maybe he had been drugged. He had taken some aspirin earlier for a mild headache; maybe he had taken one of his mother’s indecipherable prescription drugs by mistake? Sometimes she would put them in regular medicine bottles. That seemed feasible.

The tape whirred again, and this time, more rapidly, the two silver panels lifted up and the center plate extended itself and rotated.

Jon let out a strangled gurgle, throwing the tape over to the sofa. “Omigod omigod omigod.”

The video cassette sat silently on the sofa, doing nothing.

“What’s going on?” Jon asked the empty room. “What is this?” He was breathing in rapid, sharp exhalations. His throat felt tight. He felt light-headed. He wasn’t entirely sure what hyperventilating was, but as he seemed unable to control the rapidness of his breath, he thought he just might be doing it now.

Jon ran to the kitchen, peaking over the divider between the living room and the kitchen area—in truth, it was just enough room for a person to squeeze in between the stove, refrigerator, cabinets and microwave–to make sure the video cassette hadn’t moved. It hadn’t.

He began searching for something to hold the tape with, or maybe just poke it with. For a fleeting moment, he had a crystal clear vision of the cassette, whirring and clicking, sprouting mechanical legs and leaping at him from across the room, shooting sinewy, web-like magnetic tape all over him. Then it would descend, reflective, silvery fangs sinking into his neck with high-pitched whine of an electric motor.

He looked up at the video cassette. No movement. It was just sitting there, being a tape.

“Okay, good, Jon.” He wiped sweat off his forehead with his shirt. “Schools out and I’m going nuts.”

He quickly rummaged through the drawers, looking for the BBQ tongs. They never actually used them, at least that Jon recalled, but he knew they were in there somewhere. Then, he put on the bright yellow oven mitts that dangled off the oven handle for added protection.

He approached the tape slowly. No change. It just looked like a blank video cassette.

“Careful, careful . . . ” Jon muttered to himself, sweat beading on his forehead. He extended the cooking tongs gingerly towards to the video cassette. “Careful . . . ah!” The tong slipped as he tried to grab the cassette. The video cassette did nothing.

“Damn,” Jon cursed, and made a second pass. This time, he got one side of the tongs firmly under the video tape, and clamped down. He lifted it in the air, held it steady—and as far away from himself as he could with the tongs—and waited.
Nothing happened.

Sweat was beading into his eyes. He spared a moment to glance away to the kitchen clock, a yellow cat with a swinging tale and rolling eyes that told him it was 11:15. He stood as still as he could, holding the video tape out in front of him, watching it carefully.

It began to shake. Jon gasped, and then realized his arm was shaking. The tape wasn’t doing anything, it was him. He looked back to the clock. It was now 11:17. Nothing had changed.

Jon slowly brought the video cassette closer to him, and then placed it gently down on the free oven mitt. He was now holding the video cassette. He stood for thirty seconds, carefully holding it in his left hand. Nothing happened.

The fear was subsiding and the curiosity was rising. Certainly, he reasoned, if it was going to blow up—or turn into some sort of mechanical spider and kill him—it would have done it by now.

Putting aside the tongs, he grabbed the tape firmly with both hands, still wearing the oven mitts. He waited. The yellow cat’s tail swung back and forth, marking the seconds. Thirty seconds. Forty. Nothing happened.

“What the hell?” Jon marveled, beginning to doubt he had actually seen what he had seen.

He took his left hand out of the oven mitt, and touched the video cassette with his bare fingers. The surface was smooth and cold; it felt like polished marble. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a regular video cassette.

The tape whirred and clicked. The two silver panels lifted up and the center plate extended itself and rotated. The area above the center plate began to sparkle.

“Yah!” Jon yelped, his heart jumping again. Not quite as much this time, though. He immediately withdrew the hand touching the tape, and with two beeps and a series of rapid clicks, it was back to normal. It looked just a like a video cassette.

“Okay. This is weird.” Jon put his hand back down on the tape, waiting. A few moments later, he heard the clicking start and he lifted his hand off. It stopped. “Freaky,” Jon muttered. “Freaky, freaky.”

He put his hand down again, this time placing just his palm against the top of the video cassette. He waited. Tick, tock, went the kitty. Nothing.

Jon thought for a moment, then placed just one finger firmly against the side of the video cassette.

This time, it was faster, the panels were up and the center plate extended before he had time to gasp, yelp, or gurgle. The center plate was practically spitting sparks. In a tinny, but clearly recognizable voice, the tape started talking to him.

“Jon, don’t be alarmed. As you have received this, I will be dead. Well, for the time being, anyway.”

Curiosity was gone again. Now, it was just pure fear. Jon couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. He just stood there, over the sofa, holding the spark-spitting tape in a large, yellow oven mitt, one finger almost comically extended, pressed firmly against the left side of the cassette.

The voice the tape was speaking with was Dr. Bernhard’s.

The sparks emitting from the two silver panels began to coalesce over the center plate of the video cassette, forming a translucent image. It took Jon a moment to make it out, but it was a head. Dr. Bernhard’s head.

“Holy shit.” Jon blinked. “Holy, holy shit.”

“I’m so sorry, Jon, to put you in this position,” the translucent head spoke. “But I am afraid you are in tremendous danger. And I’m afraid I’ve put you in it.”

Then the phone rang, and Jon screamed.