Weirdbook Annual #2 by Darrell Schweitzer

Author:Darrell Schweitzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy;horror;occult;Lovecraft;Cthulhu
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2019-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

YELLOW LABELED VHS TAPE, by R.C. Mulhare

“Who hauls in all this junk? People that clean out hoarder houses and old people’s attics?” Mason grumbled, as he trailed his Aunt Melanie down the main aisle of the Red Dot Flea Market, located in what had been a box factory on the outskirts of Leominister. The place resembled a row of stalls full of junk typical of most attics or basements: one consisted entirely of porcelain dolls, the shelves of another groaned with hardback bestsellers from the last fifty years, including what looked like the complete works of Stephen King. The next one was jammed with boxes of baseball cards, some still sealed in cellophane. Most of the sellers and buyers had put age forty well behind them, except for the babies and second-graders obviously out with Grandma.

“Trust me, Mason, I’ve found a lot of treasures here,”Aunt Melanie said. “A lot of the sellers don’t know what they have on their hands, or they want to move it fast.”

“How about they don’t move the creepy dolls?” Mason said, looking away from a booth full of kitchen gadgets, FiestaWare and more porcelain dolls. He could just imagine the little darlings with the masks of innocence coming to life and finding creative uses for the orange peelers and egg slicers in the baskets below them.

“Yeah, there’s always a lot of those,” she said, approaching a large booth of furniture, mostly corner tables, standing desks, an armoire and a heavy carved-wood headboard that lacked a foot board.

“I don’t wanna think about why they’d have so many of those,” Mason said.

“You wanna keep browsing while I talk with Jake about that armoire?”

“Sure, anything to give those things some space,” Mason said, moving on, dodging a woman in a purple sweatshirt and a red church hat with a purple sequined hat band, riding a purple scooter towing a tiny trailer full of shopping bags behind her.

He quick walked past a booth of shoddy-looking tools, and another full of fiber-optic silk flower arrangements and other fiber-optic doodahs.

Wall to wall VHS tapes filled the shelves of the next booth, mostly commercially taped movies and box sets of TV series, some easily available on DVD now and others hard to find, while the lower shelves held bootlegged movies on previously blank cassettes, titles hand-written on labels or the slipcases. In a corner, on the floor, he found a box of tapes shuffled together into a pile. Mason sorted through them, reading the labels: “The Telephone—Poulenc”. “Hopfrog—Poe/DeJasu”, “The Driving Lesson”, “Titus Andronicus”, “Ingrid’s Monologues and one woman shows”, and one with a yellow label with no title written on it.

A shadow fell over him. “You like VHS?” an older man’s gruff voice asked.

Mason looked up at a man taller than he, despite how the other’s frame had settled from age. “Yeah, I like the format better. DVDs don’t have the same quality.”

“Too clear, I take it? Yah, something about that picture quality, it’s too sharp. And fuggetabout HD or BluRay.”

“Even better if it’s a home brew tape,” Mason said.

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