Chapter Text
a latent image — an invisible image produced by the exposure to light of a photosensitive material such as photographic film; when photographic film is developed, the area that was exposed darkens and forms a visible image.
Day 1
Saturday
Saturday was the night the ordinary college rules dissolved into a low-resolution blur. It was the type of night when students stopped caring about the curfew as they infected their systems with cheap beer and pixelated violence.
The living room was small and cluttered like a cardboard dumpster box. All the furniture they had was either donated or thrifted as they couldn’t afford buying new things. There was an old checkered couch that was scratched on the armrests with foam poking out which meant that its previous owners had cats. Max liked to hide the imperfections with throw blankets, draping them all over. It was like sticking a smiley bandage on a rotting wound.
Next to the couch there was a colorful patchwork print armchair. Whenever someone asked about it, Will would go full mode lecturing about batik style, a dyeing technique using wax, and how cool was that, and that he found that armchair on a street market, and that the vendor was kind enough to cut the price to just 10 dollars. 10 dollars, can you believe it? A wooden chair from IKEA is like 90 bucks! He didn’t care that it had organic stains of unknown origin.
Music posters were hanging on the creme yellow walls, hiding the cracks and little abrasions. The singers’ faces were suffocating with a layer of dust on them. No amount of wall paint could hide the age of the house – it was an old bungalow on the verge of collapsing. Just 350 bucks a month, a safe price for a dirty life.
Will thought that old houses were like finished books – they had some story behind every crack. They had character. He wasn’t a fan of minimalist loft designs that were becoming increasingly popular in modern houses. Max thought the loft interior was made for pretentious pricks who never left tips because they felt entitled to the service.
Half empty pizza boxes were lying on the table and some on the floor, the grease dried out and cheese no longer stretchy, the meat rubbery and hard to chew. Beer cans were scattered at the foot of the couch because no one bothered to put them in the trash can. The bready smell of the remaining liquid hung like a venomous cloud in the air.
The fabric lampshades cast viscous yellow light that clung to the surfaces like something organic but actively decaying. Like banana peels that had been left in a corner for days.
The grey plastic console sat comfortably on the carpeted beige floor, the cables swirling around it like black snakes. It was Lucas’s most important mission for nights like this one – to smuggle his bulky PlayStation in his backpack, sneaking out of his dorm room. He always made sure to put all the cables, plugs, the memory card and the controllers in his sporty bag. He didn’t need to bring games because Dustin was the one responsible for that: he always took a few games to choose from, making sure he didn’t forget Sonic because Jane was obsessed with it.
Now the black Zenith TV, a black bulky box buzzing with static, was glowing with the Tekken 2 character selection screen. Upbeat synth music was coming from the speakers, urging the players to pick a character.
“C’mon, Max, one more!” Lucas cried out. He had been losing miserably for the whole night and was on the verge of throwing his controller out of the window. His right leg was bouncing as he was hunched over the coffee table.
Max was sprawled out next to him, the grey controller sitting in her limp hands and threatening to fall any second. She was annoyed. “For the last time. Don’t cry after.”
Off to the right Dustin was sitting criss-cross in the armchair, scribbling something hastily in his notepad. “You should definitely change your strategy, Lucas. It’s not looking good for you.” He had an expression of utter concentration as he was studying his notes. A responsible jury had to keep track of every win and loss.
Jane was leaning on the armrest and watching the screen. “Maybe pick a girl? Will picks girls all the time.”
Crunch.
A particularly loud crispy sound made everyone look at Will. He was sitting on the carpet and nibbling on a dry pizza crust. It sounded like tiny glass shreds between his teeth as he chewed on it, crumbs falling on his lap. He was a bit tipsy from the beer, so the world around him had those soft and dreamy blurred edges. He smiled. “The big guys are just boring. It’s not about hits, anyway… It’s about movement.”
Will naturally gravitated towards female characters in games because they were much more interesting than the buff terminator type of dudes. The male characters were blocky and muscular, taking up half of the screen. They looked ugly, they were either shirtless or in some generic male outfits. They represented the thing Will despised with his whole being — the brute force.
But the female characters were slim and stealthy, they moved like fluid. It was like watching a choreography lesson. They looked like an art object installation, appealing to Will’s artistic spirit.
He didn’t want to be a chick, no. He just knew how to appreciate beauty.
Besides, there was nothing more satisfying than watching Lucas losing his shit when he played as a wrestler and got his ass kicked by a sultry woman in high heels. Whenever Will picked Anna and beat Lucas, she stroke her victory pose (ass shaking in front of her lying opponent), and then Lucas would mutter “fuck this shit”, as Will snickered at him. Anna’s movements were elegant and precise, and Will thought it was so much cooler than ripped men throwing hard punches.
Lucas rolled his eyes. “Yeah, whatever you say, man.”
“He’s damn right,” Max said when she picked Michelle. Max’s strategy in fighting games was always to dodge all the kicks. She was very dexterous and used the glitchy graphics to her advantage. She didn’t particularly care about what character to choose, she could play a girl, a ninja or a cyborg and still make Lucas regret his life choices.
Synth down-tempo music started pouring from the speakers as the two selected characters appeared in a fighting area. With unbreakable determination, Lucas picked his buff wrestler King again – the same fighter he had been playing his last 5 rounds. Max lifted her eyebrows and threw him a glance that was saying "are you serious?"
Click. Click. Click.
The pixelated blocky figures were throwing hits, as the sound of aggressive button jamming was overlapping the music. Every hit was accompanied with a loud grainy moan piercing through the static and a bleeding cloud on the screen which looked more like a spark of fire.
Dustin muttered something about strategy, and Will rolled his eyes. Dustin always picked a robotic type of character and was hell bent on creating a crazy combo that would make him win. Will thought it was ridiculous to note down every kick. In his turn, Will didn’t have any strategy at all, he just pressed the buttons intuitively hoping it would work. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn’t. Just like in life, he thought, you couldn’t be winning all the time.
Furrowing his eyebrows, Will felt his mood drop. As if the murky shadows of the room were trying to get into his head and plant a rotting seed there.
He surged forward, grabbing another beer can. “Beast Beer” said the label with an angry bear on it, promising everyone who drank this a “beastly experience”.
Crack.
The smell of yeast and some intoxicating sweet notes were rather pleasant, before the taste hit your tongue – it was like drinking diluted water mixed with a hint of beer. It tasted light, but hit your head hard. Will didn’t count how much he drank but he already felt the heaviness in his head, his movements were becoming more languid and uncoordinated. If he were to play in his current state, he would lose, and no super combination would save him.
“—get her, get her, get her!” Lucas was whisper-shouting, and his face looked like it would explode any second. It was in such a stark contrast with the hyper focused frown Max had.
“Anyway, why does he have a jaguar mask on?” chirped Jane as she stared at the screen. She loved asking hundreds of questions on the lore of the characters and the mechanics of fights, and Dustin was more than eager to explain it to her, even if he had already done it 3 times.
“He’s a luchador. A professional Mexican wrestler. They wear masks to hide their identities—”
Ring.
A sharp trilling of the telephone, loud and demanding, pierced through the air. Like a brick thrown into the window, it shattered the static around Will.
Ring.
“I’ll get it,” he said and got up from the floor. Swaying from the sudden change of position, he shuffled out of the living room.
Ring.
“You better come back soon. Once Lucas loses, I’ll show my new combo!”
Ring.
Will huffed out a laugh and dusted off his hands, sweeping the remaining pizza crumbs. He made his way to the hall, closing the glass door behind him. The corded phone was mounted on the wall, the plastic yellowed from age. Will briefly wondered how many sweaty hands had touched it before he and Max moved in.
“Pizza delivery? You’re late, we’re starving here,” Will slurred and looked back at the living room — Lucas jumped up from his seat with a pissed off face and threw the controller on the couch. The muffled laughs seemed like they were coming from the bottom of the swimming pool.
The other end of the line was quiet for a moment.
“You seem to be very comfortable.”
The voice was clear. There was no fuzz or static, no distortion like on a long-distance line. It was… almost crispy.
Will chuckled. “Ooh, that’s scary.” He remembered Jonathan was working on a home movie project where he had to call his friends and record their voices with different modulations. “Jon, is that you? I thought you've finished your project.”
“Do I sound like Jon to you?” the stranger asked and it seemed like he was talking from inside Will’s head. It felt hyper real, and Will had a fleeting thought, I should quit beer. It’s messing with my hearing.
Will pressed the phone to his ear tighter and smiled, his brain all mushy in a beer haze. He leaned on the cold wall and hooked his pointer into the coiled cord, twirling it around his finger. “Then who is this?” he asked, his voice dropping a little.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Will huffed and rolled his eyes. “Wow, so mysterious.” The “S” came out as a prolonged hiss. He was feeling playful.
After a bit of silence, the stranger asked, “Tell me… What’s your favourite scary movie?”
It was the lamest and most unoriginal prank line ever. No punchline could save it but Will was bored out of his mind so he played into it. “Let me think… It’s gotta be the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The first one.”
The voice hummed. “A popular choice. Why do you like it?”
Will was waiting for that question but the second it came through his thoughts were all scrambled. “You know… it’s gross,” he giggled at his own words. “It’s very layered, like a junk collage. The browns, the reds… it’s the composition.”
“Seems like you appreciate the art,” the voice murmured in a low frequency, heavy and vibrating. It felt like the stranger was talking on a microphone of the headset, and the sound was like a needle piercing through Will’s ear.
Will purred. “I do…”
“When the hitchhiker smears his blood on the van, do you think it’s art?”
“It’s like a signature…” his voice dropped to a soft murmur, and he closed his eyes. “It says: I was here. I touched this. I’m real.”
“And what about the final girl?”
Will didn’t hear anything outside of the voice that seemed to be clearer than the rest of the house. Like it was resonating in his own bones. Was he hallucinating? Maybe, but he was having fun.
He smiled and looked at the white cord twirled around his finger, which started turning red. “She is so pure that… that you just want to see her get smeared. Does it make sense?” Will giggled again and bit his lip. “It’s like… the duality. She’s like an angel in the midst of dirt and rot. It’s beautiful.”
After a bit of silence, the stranger asked, his voice stripped of quizzical tone, “Do you want to get smeared?”
“What?”
“Do you want to be an angel smeared with dirt?” asked the voice, devoid of emotion.
All laughter was gone from Will’s face, and he frowned. “Okay, very funny. Who is this?”
“Someone who knows that you leave your window open at night.”
Click.
The dial tone, a long robotic sound, droned in his ear. Will was still leaning on the wall, his finger wrapped around the cord. The plastic was warm in his clammy hand and he slowly pulled the receiver away from his face. His eyebrows pulled together in confusion as he placed the handset back with a soft click.
What was that?
Unwillingly, Will glanced to the wooden door leading to his room, as the nerves were slowly eating away at him. His legs moved on their own. When he pushed the door open, it groaned. The room was dark, inky shadows coating every surface. The window was open wide as the white curtain was blowing in the night breeze. The chill air sent a row of goosebumps over his body. Will approached the window and snapped it shut, then locked it. The street outside was bathed in tar-like darkness as a sickly yellow light of the street lamp was flickering weakly, like a pulse of a dying man.
Will came back to the living room and sat down on the patched armchair. A strange dizziness took over his head and everything around blurred into a fuzzy mess. The material of his favourite armchair made him itchy, as if tiny bedbugs were biting at his forearms. The fabric of his pants felt tight as it clung to his legs like plastic wrap.
“—you’ve missed everything!” Dustin shouted from the couch waving the controller that was glistening with palm sweat.
Lucas was on the floor with a frozen expression of defeat and Max was crunching on the pizza crust beside him, the sound harsh like sandpaper.
The Zenith’s screen was glowing with oversaturated colors. The dust particles sat on the bulging screen, electrified and ready to hit anyone who touched it with a shockwave.
Max looked up at him, “Who was that?”
“Wrong number,” he shook his head and stared at the way Jane’s grizzly bear was assaulting Dustin’s cyborg on the screen. The bleeding pixels were moving like in slow motion.
Will tried to focus on the friendly banter, but the voices were distorted like on a ruined tape. Everything felt so superficial. So fake. His friends’ faces seemed like cardboard cut outs with commercial bright smiles. The pizza boxes and beer cans were plastic props. He felt like he was inside a toy box.
He reached for a beer can, expecting the feel of plastic and a heavy weight of the liquid inside, but the texture was foreign to his skin. The liquid was lukewarm, and Will thought he was drinking brown tap water.
Is this real? Am I hallucinating?
Will was glitching.
He was a pixelated avatar waiting for a player to pick up a controller.