“It’s happened before.”
“What has?”
I was having a hard time keeping up with Collin as he ran. For a guy that looked like the product of an apocalypse, he sure as hell was fast on his feet. Sven and Jimmy followed behind, shouting after him.
“Him disappearing. The southerner is right. When he bleeds over into our world, he tires himself out, especially if he keeps taking on different forms.”
“What? How the hell do you know all this?”
He suddenly stopped running, causing me to nearly crash into his back.
“I…” he began, before taking a deep breath. “It’s a long story. I’ll have to explain quickly.”
And as much as it scares for me to admit… his story sounded eerily similar to mine.
It all started with the incident years prior. The last time Mr. Blank had made an appearance. When Sven’s fiancée had disappeared, Collin’s brother had disappeared along with her. He was living halfway across the country when it’d happened, though. When he’d heard about his missing sibling and the obscure details that went along with it, he booked the first flight over and attempted to figure things out for himself.
It went as you’d expect. Devoid of any trustworthy leads. Lack of any real direction. It took him an entire week of relentless (and dangerous) searching to learn the name “Mr. Blank.” And that’s where it all started going downhill for him. But even then… he didn’t stop.
Collin started getting “visits” from him, the same way that I had. Just like he’d done with me, Mr. Blank’s psychological torments started off fairly surface-level. 80’s horror movie villains, ghosts in the closet, creatures standing outside his window, etc.
While they certainly took a toll on him at first, he endured, continuing his search in spite of it all. He even tried attacking Mr. Blank directly, just as I had. Wouldn’t work out so well, as he went on to learn.
Maybe he was just lying about it all, I don’t know. But I could feel my anger towards him gradually fading as he relayed his story to me. He hadn’t really done anything different than I had. Well… I guess he had. He did everything completely alone. I had Mike and Rose with me.
After Collin had trudged through Mr. Blank’s initial onslaught, the latter started pushing harder, trying to break him completely. This is where Collin’s story truly began diverging from my own.
Mr. Blank began using more “abstract” scare tactics.
For example, Collin came home once to find his father standing in the corner of his bedroom. His father had died some years prior. He didn’t do anything, though. He just stood there with a blank expression like a mannequin, day and night, for nearly two weeks.
On top of that… he’d get more and more frail by the hour, as if he were rapidly losing weight. By the end, he was essentially a skeleton. That resulted in the first bonafide mental breakdown of Collin’s life.
And of course, it wasn’t even close to ending there. The psychological stress and torment he experienced sounded like enough to make anybody lose it completely. He’d see faces of pure malice and hatred staring at him in the mirror. He’d see a bottomless pit in the middle of his living room, while hellish screams constantly emanated from within it. Every time he’d open up a toilet, the face of his sister (drowned to death) would be staring up at him, gasping for air. He couldn’t bring himself to describe the worst of it, though. Just that his deepest, most visceral fears were manifesting in front of his very eyes. And it was breaking him minute by minute.
It did reach a point where he attempted suicide. He walked onto his balcony in the middle of the night and looked over the railings from the 14th floor. He stared down at the ground with his mind running a mile a minute. But before he closed his eyes and took the plunge, he saw a figure with a blank face staring at him from below.
He said that he froze in that moment. While they stared at each other, he said that he was coming an understanding. An implied agreement.
Do what I want, and I’ll end this hell for you.
He felt a transitory comfort, combined with a sensation of overwhelming coercion. In other words, he didn’t have a choice in the matter.
“It’s not like I can explain it,” he said. “He was fucking with my head. It felt like… I’d face something worse than death if I didn’t play by his rules. If I didn’t do what he said. Go ahead and think what you want about me. But… you weren’t there. You couldn’t have understood.”
“Right,” I said, trying to digest what I’d just been told.
“Do you still hate me?”
I sighed to myself. I don’t know, did I?
“Depends,” I finally said. “You said that we had a chance. What did you mean by that?”
He nodded. “Yeah. We do. I can help you get her back. Everything just has to go right.”
My ears perked up. “Alright. Go on then.”
“We can defeat him. Kill him. All we have to do is… capture him on tape.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s it? Are you kidding me?”
“No, it’s not what you think. What’s been chasing you up until this point hasn’t been Mr. Blank. Not his real form, anyway. That’s what we need to capture. Don’t ask me how it works, but… he can’t exist in two mediums, or digital spaces at once. His one real weakness. The film that was shown when everybody went missing, that’s the first one. Get him on tape with your own camera, and that’ll be the second one.”
“Well, how the hell are we supposed to see his true form?”
“That’s… the hard part. He only sends out puppets when he crosses over into our world. In order to see him as he truly is, we have to enter his.”
“Is that where…” I began asking.
He nodded. “Yes. That’s where your girlfriend is.”
“How do we get there?”
Collin reached into his backpack and pulled out a film reel.
"Watching the film almost acts like a passageway between his world and ours."
A more involved explanation really wasn’t necessary. In fact, the whole situation began making a lot more sense. I used to ask myself why Mr. Blank chose our town. Why the hell he just had to come here.
Well, the theater that it happened at was an older one. A “classic” place, so to speak. It was one of the few places that still used projectors.
“What’s… it like in there?”
Collin shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you. But from what I’ve learned… the people trapped in his ‘world’ are essentially being used as fuel. Mr. Blank feeds on inherent negative human emotions. Anguish, uncertainty, despair… fear. He doesn’t kill them. Just keeps them there for himself. Keeps them in a constant state of terror. Most go catatonic after a few years in real-time, but it hardly feels like a week for them while in there. That’s why he keeps coming back here for more. He’ll never stop. Even if every theater stops using film, I’m sure that he'll find a way."
He sighed. "I'm not proud of what I've done. But if I'm going to do anything good with my life... it's stopping this fucker forever."
If that was true, then Lacey was essentially in hell. She’d been in hell for weeks. But I suppose it only felt like a few hours to her.
“How long do we have until he comes back and tries to kill us again?”
“I can’t give you an exact amount of time,” I said. “But I doubt that we have more than a few hours.”
I took a deep breath as we reached the edge of the forest. Sven and Jimmy were close behind, catching up to us soon after.
“What in the hell were you two yammering on about?” Jimmy asked.
I turned and looked at him.
“Jimmy, we might need your help for a bit.”
Then I turned to Sven and grinned.
“Let’s bury this bastard.”
---
Credits
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