When I was thirteen, my family was murdered. The killer went from room to room in my home slaughtering my family in the early hours of a Sunday morning in June of 2001. My father was killed first—neck sliced wide and deep as he drank his first cup of coffee. My sister was next—a pillow over her face as she lay sleeping in her room, the bed and floor were covered in bloody feathers by the time the knife was done turning her head into a crimson ruin.
My mother died in the shower, a jagged piece of metal pipe being rammed through the shower curtain and her torso with enough force that she was left pinned to the far tile wall like a butterfly.
I was away at band camp that summer, and wasn’t due to be home for another week. I was mopping up water in the boys bathroom when I saw my aunt at the door, eyes red-rimmed and voice trembling as she told me something had happened and I needed to go with her. I knew right away it was something terrible, but as she told me the barest of versions of what had happened—that someone had come into our home and murdered my family—I felt myself disconnecting from everything, including her words. The next few days were just a red haze of shock and pain, and my first clear memories are over month after I’d moved in with Aunt Judith and her husband Ernie. They were good to me—I struggled with school and friends for years afterward, but they were always patient and kind, never failing to give me second and third chances until I ran out of excuses for punishing them and hating myself.
They never found out who did it or why. My parents weren’t wealthy or connected. They didn’t have enemies or rivals that I knew of. And while it was always possible that the killings were just random, the precision of it all didn’t seem like the work of a deranged spree killer. In high school, I spent years cultivating the theory that it was a local serial killer, but that was mainly fueled by desperation and bad internet research. I wanted to catch their killer, but even more than that, I wanted to understand why it had happened. Maybe they’d never give an answer, but if I could at least put a face and a name to the person that killed my life, it’d be a start.
But that never came. I wound up going to an art school for college, and between work, classes, and all the trappings that come with becoming an adult, my obsession began to fade. I’m ashamed to say it, but there are days now where I don’t even think about the family that was taken from me.
I work at an animation studio in the restoration department. My job is to repair and restore old or damaged footage for clients, and when possible, transfer the restored version to a digital format for both viewing and archival purposes. A lot of people hate that kind of work—it’s tedious, and while it makes a lot of money for the company, its not flashy like working on new digital animations or special effects. But me? I love it. I get to take things that people once had cared about and spent a lot of time on, things that might otherwise rot away or be lost, and I get to heal them. Make them new and alive again. Some people just see them as dumb cartoons, but I disagree. And if you’d asked me last week, I’d have said there wasn’t a better job in the whole world.
The package was sitting on my desk last Thursday. Brown paper wrapped around what looked like the shape of a small film reel and tied with a piece of grey string. It was strange, but only a little. While most of the work we did was for companies looking to re-distribute old assets they owned or had acquired on disc or streaming, occasionally a private owner with deep pockets would commission us to restore something they’d found in their grandparents attic or something.
It didn’t make any difference to me where it came from. It was something new and mysterious—a potential new challenge or the opportunity to see something few had ever seen before, at least not for a very long time. Sitting down my coffee, I carefully opened the package and pulled out the reel of film.
I looked for some kind of note or instructions, but there was none. That was strange. I called up to admin department, but they didn’t know what I was talking about at first. When they called back a few minutes later, the woman just said it was apparently a personal package dropped off for me, not anything for a client. There was a disapproving edge to her voice, but I ignored it, thanking her and hanging up before turning back to the film.
It looked to be well-preserved. No tears or cracks, and spot-checking a few frames showed no obvious signs of color shift or fading. It was just some kind of strange cartoon with an odd figure holding various sinister weapons. I didn’t know why, but my heart had begun to beat faster.
Normally I would document and copy each frame before attempting to play an unknown film—it’s to easy to miss imperfections that can cause damage when its run through a projector. But this wasn’t a real job, and I’d seen just enough in those few frames that I wanted to watch the whole thing right away.
So I locked the door to my office. Threaded the film into one of the 35mm projectors in the media room. And watched in horror at what began to play.
The cartoon began without any title cards or preamble. It simply showed an animated figure wearing a hooded sweatshirt or jacket entering into a house. There was no sound, but the movements of the character mimicked the fluid, exaggerated animations of characters in the 1920s and 30s—legs like slinkies encased in jello propelled him creepily along as he snuck deeper into someone’s home.
The figure went to the kitchen first. There he found an unsuspecting man sitting at the kitchen table, reading a book while sipping from a cup. The figure crept up behind him, waiting patiently, perhaps gleefully, until the man sat down his coffee. Then in one slow and fluid movement, he grasped the man’s forehead and pulled it back while bringing a comically large straight razor across his neck.
Cartoon blood sprayed out across the table and the far wall, but the figure and camera were already on the move again. The cartoonishness, the crude nature of the animation, should have made it easier to watch, but it didn’t. The killer was still moving with exaggerated sneaking steps, but now his chest was heaving with either exertion or excitement. As he moved to the back hall, I knew what was coming, but there was nothing I could do to stop it.
The figure eased into my sister’s bedroom. She was supposed to be going to college in the fall, and after that, to veterinary school. She was sweet and smart and beautiful, and I loved her so much.
On the film, the girl’s body was spasming as the killer stabbed the pillow he’d pressed over her face again and again.
When he was done, he moved on to the master bedroom and the bathroom beyond. Blue clouds of steam boiled out from behind the shakily twitching shower curtain as the figure gestured toward the camera as though telling the audience to wait a moment or keep quiet so they didn’t alert his prey. Partially unzipping his sweatshirt, he produced a long piece of pipe with a sinister edge on one end. In real life, hiding something so large would have been impossible, but in the cartoon logic of the film, I barely registered it before all thought was driven from me. As he drove the pipe through the curtain and into my mother. Drawn lines of blood shot out across the wall and down into the tub while a small, pale hand twitched pitifully from beyond the edge of the curtain.
I was gripping my knees so hard my hands ached, but I couldn’t look away. When the screen went blank, I let out a held breath, thinking it was finally over. My mind started racing. Who would have sent it to me? The killer? After all this time? Someone else? Someone playing a sick prank by taking what happened to my family and turning it into a cartoon? Neither seemed to make much sense, but I needed to…
The film flared back to life.
It was in a darkened room that had been drawn with more care and detail than the scenes that had preceded it. In the center of the frame was a pool of moonlight from a nearby window, and in that glow, a cartoon boy slept a troubled sleep. It was clear from the flowered comforter and the ornate porcelain lamps on the bedside tables that this wasn’t a little boy’s room. It was a guest room meant more for decoration than company, and it had been hastily prepared in the face of some unexpected calamity.
I recognized that room. It had been my bedroom until I went to college, but it hadn’t been decorated like that after that first…
After that first night. This was the first night I was with them. The night after my family was killed.
I jumped as the hooded figure suddenly appeared from dark at the moon glow’s edge. He leaned over the cartoon boy with almost theatrical malevolence, and for a moment I expected him to speak or perhaps even kill that past cartoon version of me.
Instead, a dark tongue snaked out of the shadows of his hood, trailing up the side of the cartoon boy’s face and ruffling his hair. Where the tongue had traveled, there was now a deep red mark left in its wake. The killer raised up, his shoulders shaking silently in what might have been laughter, and then the film went dark.
As it did, bright, wet pain seared across the side of my face and up into my scalp. Letting out a scream, I ran to the bathroom to wash my face. There must have been something on that film, or some contaminant from somewhere, and I was having a reaction. I needed to wash the area thoroughly and then check in the mirror to see what…
It was the mark. The mark from the cartoon. It blazed from the side of my face like a birthmark or old burn.
But that…that wasn’t possible. I didn’t have any burns or birthmarks. Never had, that I knew of. I squirted soap into my hand and feverishly scrubbed at the spot. It didn’t hurt any more, but I could quickly feel the skin growing raw under my attack. Forcing myself to stop, I rinsed off the soap and put a cold, damp paper towel against the mark. Maybe it was just a rash and would go away.
I stumbled back into the other room to find that the screen was still dark, though the reel continued to turn with no signs of running out of film.
I was moving to switch off the projector when the connected speakers crackled to life. A single distorted phrase poured out of them like a cloudy poison before the machine died on its own.
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