For a few years in my 20’s I rented a house in the Hollywood Hills… don’t get too excited, it was a small house on the Valley side of the hill… no one was, nor should they be, unduly impressed. Still it was a nice house with plenty of space, a yard, and (strangely) a double-sided fireplace. It was open, spacious and modern and there was nothing about it that said “haunted house.” I just wasn’t that kind of place.
I had three roomates in this house and we all brought our own amalgams of furniture and decoration and so the house looked a bit like a gypsy caravan, especially in our living room where we had a “media center” built out of a bizarre collection of various bits of hi-fi eflluvia collected by four itinerant young men over the course of years.
All four of us worked in the movie business and kept strange hours so it was not unusual to find oneself alone in the house from time-to-time, even with four of us living there. As a student of my business I spent much of my alone time watching movies, filling in the gaps in my knowledge of film history.
I don’t remeber if I was in a Coppola phase or a Hackman phase when I decided to watch THE CONVERSATION. And I don’t remember where I got the copy of the movie I wound up watching but I remember very clearly that it was on VHS tape.
It was late in the day and whatever lights I had on were fighting a losing battle against the shadows that were creeping in from the corners of the rooms as day slowly gave way to night. Three of the four walls of our “media room” were lined with windows and they reflected my life back at me in real time as I set up the video system to watch my movie.
We had this huge cabinet stereo system with old-fashioned analog switches and knobs that had been donated to the cause by roommate Tony. I remember that to change the audio source you had to turn a knob, which would click from position to position as you turned it. In this way you would get the system to switch from, say, AM radio to the VCR. I dutifully turned the knob the required number of times, then switched the TV on and changed the channel to “3”, then I turned on the VCR, inserted the tape and pressed play.
I’ve said there was nothing scary about this house, and that’s true. But it’s also true that such things are not absolutes, rather they are determined by circumstance. And they can change in an instant.
I don’t remember the scene where it happened, but I know that a feeling of unease had already begun to creep in when it did. THE CONVERSATION is not a horror movie by any stretch, but it is deeply unsettling. And the feelings aroused by the film had begun to change the character of the house around me. The encroaching shadows seemed deeper now. The way the room was reflected by all those windows suggested that the windows were doing more than broadcasting my own life back at me. It had begun to feel like they were covering up something that I wasn’t meant to see, just beyond the glass. In the dark. Something watching.
“Jesus…” I thought… “stop with the paranoia… it’s just the damned movie eating at you.”
The tape suddenly stopped, with that audible “clack” sound that everyone above a certain age will remember from their own VCR machines. A second later the VCR turned itself off and the TV switched from the open input channel to static. And a second after that, rock music began to blare from the speakers, which I had turned all the way up to capture the subtle soundtrack of Coppola’s film about sound.
“What the hell?” I said, as I put my hands over my ears, got up and walked over the the stereo stack. The music was Godsmack. My roomate was in the middle of a Godsmack bender and had left the CD in the…
Wait… the CD?
I looked closely at the source knob and… yeah, it had somehow switched back to “CD.” Confused, and annoyed that the movie’s spell had been broken, I grasped the knob and click click clicked it back to “VCR.” Then I walked back to the VCR and turned it back on. Then I switched the TV back to Channel 3, which I also had to do manually. Finally I rewound the tape a few seconds so I could watch the interrupted scene again from the beginning.
I collapsed back into the couch, still more annoyed than anything else, and pressed play. The scene began again. As the story approached the moment where everything had first gone haywire, I tensed up a little, both wondering what would happen and knowing that nothing would.
And then… “clack”… static… VCR off… and a moment later… Godsmack.
A pair of icy fingers slid down the back of my neck now. This was getting weird. I got up and switched everything off again. In the sudden silence the house seemed supernaturally quiet. I remember standing in the middle of that dark room and thinking to myself, “Screw this.” I pulled the tape out of the VCR and walked into my bedroom where I had a strange combination TV/VCR contraption that I’d had since college. It was a much smaller screen but at that point I just wanted to finish the damned movie. I jammed the tape into the VCR slot, rewound it a bit, and pressed play.
I sat on the bed, but I wasn’t relaxed. I still had both feet on the ground, like I was expecting to have to go somewhere in a hurry. Around me the house felt like a spectator. Everyone and everything wanted to know what was going to happen next.
I saw that I had rewound the tape too far and as the scene began again, for the third time, I sat with mounting tension as the film inexorably approached moment where the tape had cut off in the other room.
And then it was seconds away. I found myself counting them down in my head. Three… two… one…
And then…
“Clack”…
Static…
VCR off…
And a second later, from the media room forty feet away… Godsmack.
I walked slowly into the media room, Godsmack bellowing from the cabinet speakers that I’d forgotten to turn down, on the stereo system that was not connected to the VCR in my bedroom in any way. I was looking over my shoulder now, feeling like busy ants were crawling over my skin.
I walked up to the stereo cabinet in something like a daze, my head buzzing with uneasy thoughts as I opened the glass door and saw that, yeah, the source knob had been turned back to “CD.” None of this was possible, I thought, as my eyes moved over the lighted display where the CD track information was displayed.
CDs do not work like cassette tapes. Unless you pause them, which I had not done, they do not pick up where they last left off. They start over again, with the first track. Except that the CD track display was not showing a “1”… it was showing an “8.”
“How…” I started to say. But I never finished the thought.
My eyes moved up the stereo cabinet to the CD jewel case sitting on top. I picked it up and looked at the track listing on the back, my eyes gliding down the list to the 8th cut.
“Get Up, Get Out!”
Friends and neighbors, I got up and I got out.
I didn’t come back until I was sure at least one of my roomates would be home. And I never did finish watching THE CONVERSATION.
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Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this short story, which by the way, actually happened. Just a short reminder that I pay for this site with my original fiction. You can link to all my available works here at my sister site, RIOT TALES. I would also encourage you to visit my listing at HELEN’S PAGE where you can download OWL BOY AND THE VOODOO PRIEST, because I believe we should be creating safe standalone platforms for like-minded folks where big tech cannot shut us down.