Bootleg VHS: Angelic Manifestations

Bootleg VHS tapes of people Becoming circulate on the grey market; not exactly illegal, not controlled in the same way that information about making new combat dolls is, but generally understood to be illicit.

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⸢Angelic Manifestations⸥ Selected.

The tape is shit quality, footage full of splotches and distortions; whatever closed circuit system it was recorded on was obviously too close to the manifestation. There's no sound.

Even the title card is glitchy, over-copied, illegible.

That's just how things are with tapes like this. You're lucky this one doesn't have images from some recorded tv show ghosting through.

It opens on a view of a mirrored elevator, the sort you'd find in so many pretending-to-be-fancy hotels.

Nothing happens for a bit, then two women stumble in. You can almost smell the alcohol on them, even through the tape's distortions; it's a miracle that one of them manages to hit a button before the other pins her against the wall.

They sloppily make out as the elevator rises.

There's something off about the image, though—the camera's not at a good angle to see the mirrors, but …

The one who's being more aggressive, the smaller woman pinning her larger friend (girlfriend? lover? there's not enough context to say), doesn't seem to have a reflection.

Or …

Well, it's hard to say. The angle wouldn't make it easy even if the image was clearer. Her friend is between her and the mirror for most of their time in the elevator, and she leaves first, tugging her friend after her.

The door closes and the tape cuts.

It's a fucking ugly cut, this one, obviously done by hand. The frames aren't quite realigned when the elevator door opens again and the larger woman stumbles inside. She's very much worse for wear—her clothing is torn and there's blood dripping from her head.

The camera doesn't permit a view of whatever's outside the door, but she hammers the close button in a panic. When it finally does she collapses against one of the walls, visibly hyperventilating, as the elevator begins to descend towards the lobby.

The next cut is even filthier as the view changes to the hotel's lobby; there's the front desk, an elevator on the near side and a door to a staircase on the other. The clerk is dozing, half-asleep in the middle of the night shift—there's no light shining in from the windows that make up the lobby's far wall, no cars passing in the street outside.

The elevator door slides open and the larger woman half-falls out, only barely catching herself on the edge; the clerk jerks awake (startled by something she said? A scream?), cranes over the desk to see her, then falls out of his chair.

She starts walking towards the center of the lobby; he pulls himself back to his feet and comes out from behind the desk; his body language is cautious, helpful. It's a surprise that he didn't just phone the cops; maybe things would have ended better—

Because just as he reaches her is also when the staircase door opens, and the thing that comes out of it in a glowing splotch of burnt tape swats him clean across the lobby and through the wide glass windows.

He doesn't get up.

The entire tape fills with static distortions for a moment, whatever system originally recorded it struggling to make sense of the world, and when that clears there's the two woman in the lobby. The larger one is on the floor, the smaller one looming over her. There's blood spreading out across the floor from the wound in the larger woman's head, and the smaller one is covered in strangely glowing splotches—almost like she broke a glowstick over herself, but far too bright in the lobby's sterile fluorescent lights.

This when the tape starts to get really bad, and also the point which the real connoisseurs of tapes like this start to get Interested. If you look at the tape's label you see that someone scrawled on the timestamp for this—but really, what sort of person skips to the climax without watching the buildup through at least once or twice?

The figures of the two women remain, even get a bit clearer than they were before, but everything around them changes. Sharp-toothed patterns flow across the carpeted floor in endless repetitions; the clerk's corpse outside melts away into a puddle of perfectly formed flowers. The desk turns in on itself and diminishes to nothing as the elevator door multiples around it.

Neither woman reacts.

One of the greatest flaws of this particular tape is the lack of audio: everyone who watches it wishes that they could hear what the two women talk about. The photocopied pamphlets which accompany some copies include bullshit speculation allegedly from trained lip-readers, but you can just as easily make up your own dialog:

Some viewers jerk off over the idea that it's just the larger one pleading for mercy and the smaller one denying her.

Others imagine it to be something more complex, more intentional. An incantation? Reminiscing? Did they even know each other before this?

The weirder types swear it's just glossolalial babbling, and do their best to pick out the syllables, to replicate its rhythm. They claim it's a potent incantation.

It's impossible to say.

They talk for a strangely long time as the world flows and shifts around them; after the first few minutes the smaller one starts to get twitchy, looking around her, whirling around once or twice like she expects something to be right behind her.

Then, finally, as the swirling patterns on the floor solidify around the larger woman, the smaller one Sees them and jumps back almost all the way to where the desk should be. She looks around wide-eyed, panicked, her body language abruptly changing from predator to prey.

She tries to run and the ground moves beneath her feet, a treadmill denying her escape; she tries to leap again and slams into an afterimage of the desk. The entire world conspires to draw her back towards the center of the lobby (and, happily, the center of the tape).

The larger woman's body is wreathed in twisting patterns, drifting up above the floor; she spasms beneath them, hardly visible through her cocoon of twisting flaming petals, eyes bubbling to the surface, something peering into the world through a kaleidoscope, something from so far outside that it can barely understand the boundaries between one body and another, between air and floor and thought and action—

It looks into her.

The tape jitters (and bursts into flame, if you were unwise enough to watch it on an improperly prepared VHS player), image clouding with angry static, with after-images and half-images and bursts of light and all the myriad joys that attend physical recordings of the Divine.

It comes in waves rising and finally receding, leaving the world behind them shaken and changed; the smaller woman sprawled in the shattered ruins of the hotel's front desk, the clerk's corpse outside no more than a puddle of smeared viscera …

And the larger woman, the thing which was once her, floating in the middle of the lobby.

The tape clears in time to see the last moments of her new halo knitting itself into being above her head; there are bloody protrusions beneath her dress, a dozen new limbs trying to stretch out of her back and into the world. Her eyes blaze with something not entirely unlike light, the same light that shines upon her from all around—she is free of the shadows cast by the world, free of the vagaries of light cast by earthly sources. She looks like she's been badly pasted in to the video, like she's being green-screened into her own life.

She opens her mouth and screams,

And the tape ends.