VHS TAPED HORROR

Everyone of a certain age ends up with a small pile of old video tapes, of weddings and christenings and dance performances and school plays and much-loved films, and no VCR to watch them on. The more organised will find a one to borrow, and buy a gizmo that lets you record to digital on a laptop off a VCR, and the more well-off will send a pile of tapes off to a service that will do it for you, and many will do nothing at all until one day they happen on a VCR at a car boot sale that they’re assured is working and is worth taking the chance on anyway, because it’s only twenty quid.
You might find, that in amongst the pile of videos is one that’s not labelled, so after watching some of the best ones you put this one in, just to see if you’d recorded something worth keeping.
You see the static of a blank tape, and are about to press stop when a picture flickers on and off, indistinct and jumpy but you can just about make it out it appears to be a London street, with people running about backwards and forwards, and what at first you thought was interference on the tape is smoke.
You frown, and think what the hell is this. Isn’t any TV programme I can remember recording, and the camera moves as if it is being hand-held, an amateur video shot on a camera that is nowhere near professional standard. You turn the volume up, and can hear what sounds like metal grinding. And screaming. Lots of screaming.
As the shot shudders and jerks around, you can see why. As well as the people running, there are people just lying, arms and legs jumbled at awkward angles. You want to look away, but you can’t, and the camera stumbles forward, swings to one side, up almost towards the sky, then comes back again.
It’s closer to the people lying in the street, broken and pale, close enough to see that one of them is you, and the one lying next to you is the one you had such an intense relationship with years ago, the one that you talked about being forever, but in the end, like a firework, you were both bright for a moment but then done.
You hit the stop button. Sit there for a minute or two, and your hands are trembling.
Seeing the two of you made you remember the street, that day you’d spilled out of a long lunchtime pub session and were hurrying home, both having phoned in sick to your employers. On this one street, you both fell silent. Held hands for comfort, not a promise of what hands might hold later. Something felt strange, and wrong, and when you turned into another street and the world felt right again, you both walked that little bit more quickly until you were home, but for some reason the walk had taken an hour longer than you thought it had.
When you find the courage to play the video tape again, it’s just static, a snowstorm against black. Nothing to be seen. Maybe. There are moments when you think you can see things in the static.
You burn it at the end of your garden.
As you dig the ashes into the soil, the thought comes into your head that nothing might ever grow in that spot.