Waiters and waitresses, I bring you fresh pasta, an hour old appetizer but a minute old meal.

I was driving to a man’s house (although he was just a college kid I’d met a few weeks back at a party) because he and I were going to go and shoot some pool and he needed a ride. Although I live in FL and have never seen the snow I imagine this took place in South Carolina (scenery + light snow). He lived in a wooded area and when I pulled up to his driveway I was surprised to see that he lived in what looked like an old grain silo that had been furbished (like Bam Margera’s house). The sun was setting and as I walked up to his front door I noticed that the gravel in his driveway was made out of coal.

Anyways, the guy opens the door and he’s of Vietnamese decent and he’s like “Oh hey thar [my name here] why don’t you come in while I get ready?” and “I’m like sure thing!” and as soon as I walk in I notice that there aren’t any lights on and that the place smells like garbage.

So the guy (I think his name was Tommy) tells me to go ahead and sit on the couch and that he’s gonna make some popcorn real quick because there is a movie that he wants me to see. His couch is one of them old cracked black leather ones and he’s got a small television set sitting on top of a VCR on the coffee table in front of it, so I shrug and pick up an old looking video tape that was on top of the tube and I pop it in.

At first it looks like home movies, the camera is focusing on the face of a very, very pretty blonde girl.

Well the blonde girl starts talking and while I don’t remember what she was saying I remember realizing pretty quickly that she was mentally very special, talkin’ about her big brother and stuff. The camera zooms in to the point of blurriness and then cuts off. When it cuts back in the same girl is there but she looks like she hasn’t showered in a while, she’s still talking like a retard, but she doesn’t look as happy as before.

“I’mmm nott sm-smart l-like Tommy s-s-s-so he’s gonna m-make me better” was one of the few lines I remember clearly. The camera goes up and down as though it were nodding and then cuts out again.

When it cuts back in the same girl is sitting on a bed (the entire sequence is in a bedroom) but the curtains are drawn. While it’s hard to make out any distinguishing features I could tell that the girl was starting to look really sick.

“Tommy, I don’t feel good” she said, and I remember thinking it was odd because she was losing her retard-accent. The camera was kind of shaking like the guy holding it was excited.

The camera guy flips the lights on or something because suddenly, well, the lights turn on and the girl throws her hands up in front of her eyes with a muffled yell. The camera guy steps up and pulls her hands away and zooms in on the girls eyes, I only saw them momentarily before it cut out but they looked like the whites were a pale yellow, like she had liver failure.

At this point it dawns on me that the timestamp in the corner of the film puts this at about three months ago, and that the curtains were the same curtains I had seen in the guest room coming in.

The film cuts back in and this time the girl is crying on the end of the bed while pulling out fistfuls of her pretty hair. With a heart-wrenching sob she looks at the camera and cries “Why are you doing this to me, Tommy?” and her mental retardation seems almost completely non-existent in her speech. A small hole has opened up in her left cheek and I think that I briefly saw her teeth through it. The girl goes back to pulling out bloodied clumps of her hair and the camera guy zooms in on the top of her head (she’s crouched over). the film cuts out.

At this point I’m starting to feel really nervous, but I’m afraid to move because I don’t hear him in the kitchen anymore but I know that if I turn around and leave hell be right behind me and at this point I am terrified of him.

The footage cuts back in and the girl has lost most of her hair, the wound on the side of her face has gotten to be about the size of an orange, and she’s laying in the bed under the sheet, but I can see where blood and a blackish-blue fluid are causing said sheet to stick to her still voluptuous figure. Her words are labored now, but she’s talking about growing up she always wished she could make her older brother Tommy proud of her. One eye flicks to the camera while the other eye stays staring straight at the ceiling,

“Tommy, please let me go, I won’t tell anybody, please.”

When there is no reply that eye slowly drifts back to stare at the ceiling with the other one. The timestamp in the corner reads about a week from the last entry (these are playing like video diaries). The next clips click on and I have to throw my hands up over my mouth to muffle my screams. Laying in the bed (which is disgusting looking now) is the most horrific mbum of flesh, teeth, hair, and appendages that long-since lost definition. The timestamp has it being about a week and a half from today. The camera guy speaks for the first time and in Tommy’s voice I hear “Cheryl, tell me how you feel.”

Somewhere in that horrific mess of Lovecraftian terror a mouth opens and a very clear and seductive female voice whispers “I feel beautiful”.