The following story is based on Tecmo's horror game Fatal Frame.
It is posted in two parts due to size limitations.
At the conclusion of this thread please go to thread number two, where it will conclude.
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Fatal Frame: Hide and Seek
by L. Greqoh
http://qlipothica.tripod.com
The camera lay forgotten in an old box of photo albums and notebooks. It was ancient looking, covered in dust and absurdly large and cumbersome.
And Allan lifted it out of the box as if he had found some prized antique."Look at this!" he said. "I wonder if it still works?"
"No way," Roger answered, "You won't ever find any film for that anymore."
Sheila kneeled down and started going through the box.
"Look at these!" she said holding up a few abandoned rolls of film."I bet it does work. It looks fine to me," she added as she took the camera from Allan.
He walked over to the pile of junk Sheila had lain aside while going through the box."Anything else in there? Something worth anything?" Roger asked.
"No, it doesn't look like it. Just these notepads and photo albums," he answered.
"I wonder what this stuff says?" he said as he look at the Japanese writing which look like some cryptic alien cipher.
"Who cares? There's nothing else in here. We had better get going now," Allan said.
He was getting nervous. Upstairs the body of an elderly Japanese man still lay where it had fallen. Allan did not mean to hit the man so hard.
He had answered the door and Allan had asked to use his phone. He told him that they had broken down and needed to call someone.
The old man was so nice that, as he had invited them into his home. Allan nearly couldn't get the nerve to do it.
But as the man handed them all something to drink, commenting on how thirsty they must be walking such a long way, Allan took out the pipe he had been hiding and clubbed him in the back of the head, making a sickening thud.
The nice old man probably never even realized what was happening. He collapsed without a word or sound, twitching oddly, and just like that his many years on this earth had come to an end.
Now this break in had turned into something else.
Roger drug the old man's body to the top of the basement steps, and tossed it down, as if to make it look like he had fallen.
The three of them stood and stared silently, until Sheila descended the stairs again, and bending down, snatched a silver pendant from the man's throat.
"Now that is cold...." Allan laughed.
As they quickly packed some of the man's more valuable possessions into the van, Allan wondered aloud if they were wrong...maybe the man was still alive.
Roger looked at him sternly and said "He's as dead as we're all going to be if the police catch us here! Now get in the damn van and let's get out of here!"
As their old Chevy van backed out off the gravel road that led to the dead man's home, quietly sitting in the back, and still in shock, Sheila noticed that without thinking she had carried off the old worthless camera and still had a few rolls of the film.
She raised the camera up to her eyes and gazed through it at the house. She thought she saw something move at the window and she felt as if an icy current of electricity shot through her stomach.
"He's alive!" she yelled. She lowered the camera and looked at the empty window, feeling foolish.
Alan stopped the van.
"Are you going to be OK with this?" Roger asked impatiently. "It was a mistake...none of this ever happened! Do you understand?"
"Leave her alone!" Alan snapped. "She'll be fine."
"She'd better be." Roger said in a low voice.
She nervously raised the camera once more, her hands clumsily adjusting controls, as she once again stared at the house.
It was then that she knew madness, for there was now no mistaking it...the old man was staring out at them, his mouth hanging open, and his flesh a sickening unnatural white, his hand pointing accusingly at them as he began to come out of the house after them. She gasped and dropped the camera from her face and again...nothing was there.
They pulled out of the driveway, and Sheila once again looked through the lens, to see the man once more...
His eyes met hers, she was sure of that.
Her finger pushed the button and there was a flash.
"Jesus!" Roger again snapped. "Put that damn thing down!"
She lowered the camera to her lap, and as Alan pulled onto the highway, and Roger counted the money from the old man's wallet.
Sheila said not another word.
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It had been almost two weeks since they had divided up the spoils they had taken from the old man.
Sheila had only gotten some jewelry, a little of the cash and the camera. She could not be persuaded that it was worthless and insisted on keeping it...for her own reasons.
She sat alone at the table, her hand playing with her new silver pendant she had taken, as she stared down at the camera trying to figure out how to load the film.
Allan had went out with Roger again and left her alone.
She was getting tired of these boys nights out.
Next Saturday it would be her turn.
She finally figured out where the film went in.
She took the old film out of it and reloaded it.
Nightmares had been coming for over a week now.
Every night, she would awaken in terror, but have no memory of just what she had dreamed of.
She had changed since the encounter with the old man.
She had become even more hardened and cold, even darkly perverse, than she had been before.
She could not be sure whether what she had seen in the car was real, or if she was merely having a breakdown.
"God is punishing me..." she thought as the silence of the empty apartment crept inward to her soul.
She looked down at the instrument of her spiritual sentence, this absurd old camera. While what she had seen through it horrified her, she could at the same time not throw it away.
The mysteries of the other side teased her, claimed her imagination, more every day, as she passed many evenings alone, her hands finding the demonic object, feeling it's unnatural coldness, wondering what was around her, which her eyes could not see, but afraid to look through the lens lest she find out.
There was noise from the neighbor's house.
Flashing lights caught her eyes as she saw some men carrying out a stretcher.
"Mr. Garner," she thought to herself.
She put on her shoes and jacket and ran over.
They were putting the covered body into the back of the ambulance.
"What happened?" she asked.
A police officer solemnly asked "Did you know him?"
"Not really. we talked a few times." she answered.
"Suicide. A damn shame," he said, visibly shaken.
"How did he?" she paused.
Another neighbor answered in a low voice..."I heard he...shot himself."
Sheila returned home.
She thought about Mr.Garner.
He had taken his wife's accident last year very hard.
His children had perished in the crash as well, and she had not seen him for some time.
She wondered how long he had been rotting in that dark house. Then...she wondered something else.
She looked at the recently loaded camera on the table, and resolved that she would learn it's mysteries.
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Please continue to Fatal Frame...Hide and Seek Part2 Thread.
