Emma stared at the wall, struggled for words. “The projector here wasn’t broken. I don’t know why I lied. I broke it by accident because I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. I tried to fix it, but I only made it worse. So I just sent the reels to you all. I had too much else to do.”
Another silence. Emma sipped a freshly opened beer. Once again, she wouldn’t meet Julia’s eyes.
“Oh, so you were going to watch them.”
Emma cleared her throat, but didn’t respond.
They exchanged phone numbers in case anything else came up.
For the next two days, Julia was swamped with schoolwork. Dr. van der Meer mentioned nothing about the reels, even after Julia emailed him to explain their contents. She’d left out the first one. If Emma thought she was crazy, she didn’t want the man guiding her education to reach the same conclusion. At the end of each long day, she showered, and each time, the loofah and hot water abraded her skin. A new brand of lotion didn’t help. When the red splotches lasted for hours afterward, she stopped using the loofah altogether.
Her brain shifted seemingly at random between lucid clarity and muddled confusion, like neurons were firing through a milky membrane. At times she caught herself staring at a textbook page for several minutes without comprehending a word.
Once, while studying at home, she realized she’d been staring at a patch of red on her paper for some unknown duration without noticing it was blood. She wiped her nose and examined the dark red streak across her hand, then rushed to the bathroom to clean it off.
That was strange; she never got nosebleeds.
“Have you heard of an early filmmaker named Hans Veldt?”
Dr. van der Meer looked up from his computer screen and peered at her while she leaned in the doorway. He looked much more natural when bookended by posters for Ciske de Rat and Soldaat van Oranje. In the fluorescent light of his office, she hoped the dark circles beneath her eyes weren’t obvious. He hesitated at the sight of her, but when he gestured to the chair in front of his desk, she slunk into it.
“Veldt.” He fiddled with a pen on his desk. “I’m not sure. I take it a web search wasn’t helpful?”
“No.” Two hours of scrolling through pages had turned up nothing but passing mentions from journal articles, and those were only references. Nothing concrete or helpful, but at least they confirmed he was real.
“I assume he’s Dutch?”
She smiled. “With a name like Hans Veldt?”
“Ah, we weren’t always so peaceful, you know.” He leaned back. “We have a reputation of spreading to lands we weren’t invited to.”
“Fair, but those reels from the anonymous donor were his. I’m pretty sure he was Dutch.”
As soon as the words left her lips, she wondered at their truth. Play us forever was written in English. For some reason she hadn’t considered that earlier.
“Hmm.” The old professor’s eyes glazed as his mind wandered. “Well, there’s no guarantee you’ll find anything, but there is a section of the library with old, undigitized texts. I haven’t looked through them myself, but I know it’s almost all Dutch, and I seem to remember being told there were some historical film documents. You’ll need an appointment, but I think I can probably get you one.”
“Yes, yes please. That would be amazing.”
“Why so interested? From what you told me, those reels sounded rather boring.”
She squirmed in her seat, searching for a suitable answer.
“I get these weird obsessions sometimes. The more niche something is, the more desperate I am to follow the rabbit hole.”
Dr. van der Meer laughed and slapped a hand against his desk.
“Ah, I know that feeling well! It is because of obsessions like this that we end up studying obscure fields like film preservation.”
He scribbled out a note in Dutch and handed it to her.
“Give this to the librarian. She will help. Perhaps if you ask nicely, she’ll even translate the results for you.”
“All you have is a name?” The librarian raised an eyebrow beneath her blonde bangs. Her smooth skin and smirk made her look too young for the profession. “You might find this . . . challenging.”
Julia nodded. The library room was smaller than her apartment, but the shelves lining every inch of wallspace were jam-packed with old tomes. Their entrance stirred up dust, and she sneezed into her hand. When she pulled her hand away, red painted her fingers, but she wiped them clean with a handkerchief from her jeans pocket before the librarian noticed. The warm liquid seeped through the fabric and clung to her skin.
“I have more patience than most,” Julia said. “Just going to search through the indexes. If I find his name, will you help me read it?”
The woman raised her eyebrows in annoyance. “You can’t read any Dutch? You didn’t bring someone who could translate for you?”
Dutch brusqueness still caught her off guard sometimes.
“No, I didn’t bring a translator, but considering I’m the only one here, it looks to me like you can spare a few minutes.”
“Fine.” The woman rolled her eyes. “You know where to find me.”
Thankfully, most of the books had clear indexes, and when she passed through the V’s and found nothing, they were easy enough to discard into an ever growing stack of rejects. She soon discovered they were loosely divided into similar lengths of shelves. Dutch history, governmental procedures, and art history all had their own subsection of the room.
She pulled out her phone to translate a few titular words from a book, but the screen wouldn’t unlock. Two more times, her fingerprint failed. She resorted to typing her PIN. After she logged in, she examined her finger closely, wondering if it was still smudged with blood. She could make nothing out—no striations in the flesh, no looping patterns—just smooth skin. Even when she held her finger up to the fluorescent light, her print wasn’t there. Other fingers showed the same absence.
“What the fuck is happening to me?” she breathed.
The room didn’t respond, so she distracted herself by continuing the search.
Eventually she encountered a technical manual for early cameras, and her adrenaline surged. After digging through the stack for fifteen more minutes, she spotted the name “Veldt” in an index, and rushed to the librarian's desk.
“I guess he made documentaries,” the librarian told her after reading through his article. “That’s what this whole book is about. Let’s see. His style was ‘direct cinema,’ minimal intervention. He wanted to film people and places as they were, to preserve them. Lots of shots of Dutch streets and stuff. Maybe he predicted the war. But since you couldn’t find his stuff online, it wouldn’t surprise me if all the films got destroyed anyway.”
“Anything else?” Julia asked.
“Uh, looks like he had one popular film called ‘The Balance of Decay.’ That’s basically it though, it’s a short article.”
Julia shuddered. He was a preservationist like her. The Balance of Decay. Veldt’s films must have been a counterbalance, tools to keep the past suspended in light on a movie screen.
Julia thanked the librarian and headed toward the large study room of the library. She needed to walk, to pace. In an area full of desks and chatting students, she went to a window between two bookcases then gazed through it. A rare sunny day in Amsterdam’s October. Laughing students whizzed by on bicycles. A group of tourists—likely drunk or high already—giggled as they approached the entrance to the Torture Museum nearby.
A man in a gray overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat stood in the middle of a bike path, facing away from her as he looked out over the water.
Idiot, she thought, remembering the many times she’d lamented absent-minded tourists who walked through bike lanes.
One cyclist flew by the man, yet he didn’t flinch. Didn’t move a muscle until, slowly, he turned to face her. Julia could have sworn he was looking directly at her, but his face was obscured in shadow.
But they passed right through the man as if he wasn’t there. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. He didn’t move, just stood and faced her.
Her cheeks went hot. She gulped and forced herself to look away.
On Thursday, she hacked up blood. She leaned along the railing of a canal in the Jordaan—half-lit by the evening gloaming—when a bout of coughs turned violent. She spat what she assumed was phlegm into the canal, but it was tinged with a dark crimson that looked almost black in the wall’s shadow. None of the other pedestrians noticed, so she carried on as if nothing was wrong and hurried home, wondering at what point she should see a doctor. If it would even help.
When she got there, she opened her laptop and put on an episode of Star Trek. A hot plate in the kitchen boiled water for spaghetti. The episode was one she’d seen before, but even so, her mind repeatedly wandered, and she couldn’t keep track of the plot. Finally, she paused the show and let Hans Veldt’s words fill her head: Play us forever.
Ignoring the impossibility of being recorded by the first reel, she couldn’t even make sense of the situation on its own terms.
You are mine.
Was she meant to constantly play the reels? It didn’t add up. If Hans truly wanted these films—these people—to be preserved, she should never play them. Each viewing degraded them slightly, brought them closer to their demise. Tucked away in a temperature and moisture-controlled environment, they could survive indefinitely.
But could that be called surviving?
Perhaps she could digitize the reels. Play them on a loop in some corner, forever ignored. Yet somehow, she knew that wouldn’t work either. What’s the purpose of a film nobody ever watches? What good is an unperceived life? Besides, something told her a reproduction wouldn’t cut it. There was no true way to digitize film without losing something inherent from the original. Dr. Sanchez had taught her that in Intro to Film Theory, what felt like a million years ago.
She rested her forehead on her palm and closed her eyes, thoughts spinning so quickly she couldn’t make them out for a moment. These bouts of fuzziness were becoming more frequent, often accompanied by more blood from her mouth and nose. She was degrading quickly, losing her essence like a photograph left out in the sun. Whatever Hans had done, it was working.
Forever.
What was forever, anyway? Julia was only human. Someday she would die. Even if Hans could force her to keep playing the reels until then, they’d still eventually be lost to the torrents of time. And the reel that had tethered her was gone, now scattered ashes spread throughout the screening room and a nearby garbage can. How could it hook someone else? Was Emma’s grandmother tethered? If so, what happened to the reel that hooked her?
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” So many questions. So few answers. The most immediate: how the hell was she going to get those reels back? She’d already asked Dr. van der Meer for access again, but he told her they were stuck in the archive for another week.
She unpaused the episode and desperately tried to let it distract her. It didn’t work.
When she finished preparing her meal and stuffed the first bite of spaghetti into her mouth, it was so tasteless she thought she’d forgotten the sauce. The sight of red smeared across the noodles nearly made her retch. But she hadn’t hacked up more blood. It was tomato sauce; she just couldn’t taste it. The two meatballs also proved flavorless.
She forced the bland dinner down anyway, then shut her laptop and cried. For almost half an hour, she let herself feel it, let the tears come.
“How is this happening?” The words, over and over, coaxed no answers.
In the bathroom mirror, she saw where the blood now came from. It streaked down her face from her lower eyelids to her chin, eyes sunken above the crimson cascade. Her skin was pale, almost grey.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out and read a text through the faint pink veil across her eyes. A request from Leonie, one of a couple film school acquaintances straddling the cusp of friendship: Niamh and I are going for espresso martinis tonight, care to join?
She tossed the phone aside. Her guts twisted, desperate for the warmth of cocktails and companionship, but they couldn’t see her like this. She hadn’t even been able to confess the situation to her loved ones back home, whose correspondences were already suffering from distance and time-zone disparities.
When she left the bathroom, she approached her window without thinking. It made no difference if she saw him; she already knew he was there, waiting. Though she was four stories up, she could make out his silhouette standing across the street. Faint traces of a bushy mustache were visible under the golden glow of a streetlight.
She shut the curtains and tried to pretend he wasn’t there, but his hidden gaze permeated the thin-walled apartment. She needed to leave anyway. There was only so long she could pretend she was okay, that she didn’t desperately need a hospital.
Once again, alone. Her faded face looked back at her from the doctor’s office mirror—a sunken, hollow expression. The ubiquitous glow of the fluorescent lights did little to soften the blow. Now she could only wait to see if modern medicine could deter her ailment—fat chance, but a chance all the same. She shivered in the cold, sterile examination room, where muffled beeps and voices permeated the walls and a sickly clean odor wafted in under the door.
The door swung open and a spectacled man entered the room, not looking up from his clipboard. “Julia Williams?”
“Yeah.”
He paused for a long moment while he continued to look over her chart.
“What can you tell me about your symptoms?”
She told him about coughing and weeping blood, about her fingerprints and raw skin. The doctor said nothing, just examined her closely—first her throat, then her eyes, ears, skin, and fingertips.
“Hmm.”
Anger welled. “Is that all you have to say?”
Immediately, she regretted the outburst, but the doctor didn’t even look up.
“Julia, I’m going to write a recommendation for a psychiatric specialist,” he said, jotting something down in Dutch.
“W-Why?”
He glanced up at her, then back to his clipboard.
“You said your fingerprints were fading. I brought an inkpad, would you like to test it?” He held it out, a moist, spongy blue rectangle. She dipped her left pointer finger and pressed it to a sheet of blank paper. When she lifted it, she gasped—the looped striations were all there.
“Like I said, Ms. Williams, I think it would be best if—”
A sizzle and crack. The lights flickered violently and Julia jolted. Artificial yellow transformed to the blood-red glow of a photographic darkroom, and the doctor’s features receded into his silhouette. The red light strobed, and she stifled a scream as she scooted backward on the examination table. Closer and closer the silhouette came, until his tousle of hair spread into the wide brim of a hat. She couldn’t see his face, but she didn’t need to.
From some unseen source, an image projected onto the wall, where a human anatomy chart was smothered by a familiar scene: Julia in the screening room.
Her mouth went dry; she could not decide whether to look at Hans or her phantom image. The impossible camera zoomed in like a movie star’s close-up. The youth and luster drained from her face. It shriveled and wrinkled like a timelapse of a rotting corpse. The version of Julia on screen did not notice, not when her hair fell to her shoulders and drifted to the floor, not when her eyeballs liquified and poured from their sockets, not when her skin dissolved like ash and her bone-white remains received air for the first time.
She couldn’t stifle the scream—didn’t even register it was happening. The whirring, absent projector and the flashing red lights swirled into a s
ensory maelstrom, and the vinegar smell of spectral acetate drowned out the hospital scent. Pressure built in her brain, threatened to explode. All the while, Hans stood still and silent because his punishment said it all.
She closed her eyes and willed herself to stop screaming, and when all went silent, she opened them.
The doctor was no longer stoic. His hands shook, eyes watered with fatherly concern.
“Julia, call this doctor as soon as possible and set up an appointment. Please.”
“Yeah. Sure. Okay.”
When she got home, there was still a little ink on her fingertip. She pressed it against a page in her notebook. Solid blue.
She cried reddened tears.
While she waited for the ferry, Julia’s phone buzzed in her pocket. Emma’s number.
“Hey.”
“Julia? How are you?”
I’m literally falling apart, she wanted to say.
“I’m okay. How are you?”
“Something else turned up today,” Emma said. “I found another box with a picture of that man with a little girl. I can’t say for sure, but she looks like my grandmother. I think she was his daughter.”
“Holy shit,” Julia said. “He cursed his own daughter?”
Silence on the line.
“‘Cursed’? Wait, what? Julia, what’s really going on?”
After a brief hesitation, Julia spilled her guts—blood, skin, fingerprints, tastebuds. Her belief that she must play the reels, now more urgent than before. She only left out her visions of Hans.
Silence again.
“What the fuck did I do to you?”
“It wasn’t you, Emma.”
“I still can’t help but feel responsible. Is there something I can do?”
Julia hesitated. Though Emma had triggered this situation, she couldn’t help but gravitate toward her anyway. The only person she could talk to. The ferry arrived and lowered its gate. Bikes, scooters, and pedestrians all moved in a huddled mass to board it.
Howls From Hell Page 10