part one: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/a017a1/theres_something_wrong_with_the_film_im_making/
I woke up the next morning and realized I’d forgotten to scrape the tape markers off of my floor. I’m old enough now that I ache at the end of the day, so it’s no wonder I’d skipped crawling around on my hands and knees the night before. But when I had my first sip of coffee and walked back out into the living room, the marks were in the wrong places. The wrong place, actually. All of it was smooshed together in one area of the hardwood, and I padded over in my slippers to see.
The strips of tape had been torn to half their width, skinny and flimsy as if to be more economical with the material, and rearranged in a message.
TURN IT OFF
“Jesus--”
Since I’d just woken up and was still kind of scared, I didn’t think to take a picture to send to my friend. It might have been a good thing; if I’d shown it to him he might think I’m the one pulling the pranks.
But neither of us are like that.
I scratched it off the best I could; it had been on there so long it wouldn’t just peel off like it should, so now there’s a sticky spot on my floor.
We met at the edge of the woods with all of our equipment. He’s the proud owner of a tripod, and he carried it over his back like a stick with a bucket of water on each end. It’s a short walk up the trail to this big field on a hill. No one really can claim ownership of it, so the grass grows tall and never gets mowed. This time of year it’s all turning brown, shaking and flowing in the wind. It’s a beautiful sight, and we were beaming to be able to capture it on film, even if it’s a little dramatic for the comedic aspect of the film. But we’d be dumb not to take advantage of the opportunity, so we set up the tripod near the base of the hill. It’s a chase scene, and one of the shots is very wide, just my friend sprinting across the crest of the hill to get away from me. Needless to say he has quite the lead on me in the script. The idea of his long limbs flailing in the distance as music blares made us laugh hysterically.
There was no use tiring both of us out, so he climbed the hill alone, noting how out of shape he is. I shouted something up at him about how next time we should get salad instead of pizza, and he gave me an exhausted thumb-up once he reached the top.
I gave him some time to recover while I set up the shot. We have a deal with one another when it comes to directing. I used to be an art history major, and looking at so many busy landscapes, so many depictions of Greek myths and the abject terror or Hieronymus Bosch has set me up to be really good at the composition of wide shots. He’s much better with things that are closer up. We both agree on a storyboard before shooting so it’s cohesive in style, but we know how to play to our own strengths.
I broke the composition up into approximate thirds. The top third was the sky, homogeneously overcast. The middle third was the horizon he’d run across, and the start of the hill, and the lower third was the bottom of the hill where the color of the grass was cast in shadow.
“Whenever you’re ready, run!” I shouted at him, starting to record. I stepped back, my eyes darting from the top of the hill and to the view screen, back and forth.
At first I thought my eyes were fucking with me, tired from moving so much, so I focused on the far end of the top of the hill. The rightmost area captured in the shot. The wind seemed to cluster there, like a tornado. It spun the thick, tall grass and I grimaced, wishing the entire landscape could stay a bit more uniform. The little twister would be distracting.
My friend had his hands on his knees, stretching and cracking his neck to get ready, so he didn’t see it at first. He didn’t see how that patch of grass seemed to grow and rise, twirl like a storm up from the ground.
“Hold on--” But I wasn’t loud enough. He began to run, straight across the crest of the hill, making a beeline for the churning grass.
I’ve never seen anything like it. It seemed to stretch from the ground like a parasite from a dead bug, or like tentacles surrounding a ship in a pirate movie. Golden-brown and slithering upward, a veritable tower of dying grass. It grew thicker, longer, gaining limbs.
“Connor--!” I shouted. Clearly he’d noticed what was happening, because he stopped dead in his tracks, craning his neck to look up at the monstrous thing. It bent forward, as if it had the capacity to inspect him. The sound it made...it was as if the wind had gotten trapped between the fibers of the blades of grass, and it howled so deep I swear it shook the earth beneath my feet as I ran.
I don’t know why I ran. And not even away, like a smart person might do. I can line up a shot, but maybe my self-preservation suffers for it. All I knew was that my friend was being dwarfed by something impossible. Something huge and billowing, something I could tell was filled with malice.
I sprinted up the hill, no care for my lungs, shouting his name between bounds. About halfway up, I felt my foot hook beneath something like an old tree root. But there were no trees, not for yards and yards. I hit the ground with a grunt, palms outstretched and digging into the dry dirt.
“Shit--” I squirmed, turning over to try and free my ankle. What had tripped me was no root.
It gave me pause, even in my urgency, to see brightly colored tape clasped over my leg. The same yellows reds and greens as we use to make our marks.
Breathless, I struggled, bending forward to tear at the tape. I’d gotten good at it that morning, scraping it from my floor, but still I winced at the sticky feeling on my fingers and under my nails.
“Connor!” I shouted, into the void, hoping he was still alive to hear me up at the top of the hill, knowing my soft spokenness would drown in the field. I twisted myself free from the rest of the tape and scrambled to my feet, trying to orient myself and find him.
The horizon was flat above me. No monstrous grass tornado, no gangly, frightened man.
“Fuck--” through my panting and my panic, I mumbled. I could feel a lump in my chest that wanted to rise. I wanted to cry, like I could, in that moment, process that my friend might be hurt. By whatever the fuck that thing was. Gulping and gasping, I made my way to the top of the hill as fast as I could. I ought to have been wary of tripping again, but as I said. Lack of self-preservation. A lack of understanding how the hell that tape got there.
I tried to cast a wide net, spreading the tall grass with my arms, hunched over and looking for him. I’m not a big dude, so you can imagine the frustration at how little ground I was covering.
Finally I saw the soles of his shoes. Old things. He’s had them forever. I dropped to the ground and climbed toward him, grasping for his wrists to feel a heartbeat. But first, I saw that his chest and stomach did rise and fall. Too quickly from the fright.
“Oh thank fuck--” I scrambled up closer and hooked my hands beneath his arms to try and right him. He was wide-eyed, shivering. “Did…” I whipped my head around as if I could catch the thing. “Did you see it?”
He nodded and turned his head to me, a desperate and pleading glance on his face.
I knew then that he understood. What happened the night before had been no prank. Something is wrong, either with the world or with us, and we know well enough and from experience which of those is more likely.
I helped him to his feet and we made our way back down the hill. The tripod was still upright and the camera was still rolling. I switched it off without hesitation. I just...didn’t want to deal with the fact that I’d caught it on camera. Like most things between us, we understood the truth, though. We’d have to watch it at some point.
“Maybe we’re just tired,” Connor suggested. This time he had his tripod, collapsed, in both of his hands, held tight to his chest.
“Yeah, and...I mean, we both saw it, maybe we’re spending too much time together.”
“Yeah, like how we finish each other’s--”
“If you say ‘sandwiches,’ I swear to god.”
Even if the slight sense of calm we felt from joking around covered our terror, I knew we were both still reeling. He got into his car and I got into mine. Maybe we need a few days off from the movie and from each other. It happens in even the strongest of friendships, though admittedly for very different reasons.
So I’m home now, the camera placed decidedly on the countertop with the lense cap on. I just can’t deal with it right now. All I want to do is finish writing this and have a drink or eight. All I want to do is wash the sticky feeling out from under my nails.
Submitted November 25, 2018 at 06:29PM by AJ-M https://ift.tt/2Bxno1T
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