Why do the VHS tapes play scenes that weren't filmed? What makes the security cameras show impossible angles? How do the shadows form scenes from unwritten scripts? Why do the televisions display static that forms patterns? What causes the rental cards to show names from the future?
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“A picture is worth a thousand words…and a video is worth a million pictures…”
― Ankala Subbarao
As evening fell, fluorescent lights flickered on within the aging strip mall. I wandered past shuttered storefronts towards the fading glow of the video store at the end.
Through its smudged windows, shadowy forms moved amid sagging shelves packed with faded boxes. The cramped interior was littered with cobwebs and dust, tapes splayed across Formica counters as if disturbed in haste.
A static-laced TV played an obscure horror flick, scenes cut and spliced into incoherent nightmares. No patrons browsed, yet I felt unseen eyes observing from dusty VHS cases as I perused their crumbling titles.
Each box I plucked from the shelves seemed to exhale a musty presence, covers depicting wonders and terrors beyond mortal ken. As the skies darkened, flickering bulbs cast shifting silhouettes amongst the displays like mute sentinels.
At closing, the old clerk emerged from a back room smelling of decay and solvent, shoving me forcefully out into a parking lot. No cars remained beyond drawn shutters facing emptied plots across the road.
Grunting drew my gaze towards heaped garbage bulging and trembling as rain fell in sheets. Something tore free with a gurgle, fixing a nightmare visage upon me under sizzling security lights.
I fled to seek shelter within that decrepit storefront, barricading the warped door against rasping breaths drawing nearer. A rumble came as darkness consumed the lot, leaving only the building alive amid a deadened strip where I remain as the hour grows late, surrounded by terrors on these moldering shelves.
