Prompt: Its Inside + VHS Horror, suggested by @occultopossum :3c
Word Count: 1,618
You glance at the clock out of the corner of your eye. It's late. Additional glances spared from the game you are playing remind you that you still need to clean up a mess of snacks before you go to bed, too.
You finish the level you're on and barely manage to actually save and quit.
You turn off the TV, an older tube TV you play retro games on, just for the nostalgic feel.
Yawning, you collect the empty wrappers and cans and drop them unceremoniously into the can. You look around the room, already dim, and decide the rest of the cleaning can be done tomorrow, and so you turn out the lamp and go to bed.
You sleep well, but you wake up in the middle of the night. After a few moments you realize you need to go to the bathroom, and now that you've noticed it you can't will it away. So you groan and drag yourself out of bed and down the hall. As you pass the living room it seems a little bright, so you pop your head through the archway. The TV is on, silently sitting at the A/V channel. You switch the TV off, use the bathroom, and happily nestle back down into your bed.
You wake up the next morning and take your time getting out of bed; you check your phone for a while (not that there's anything new or important on it), and when you finally drag yourself out of bed for the day, the first thing you do is go down the hall to take a shower.
Shower complete, you finally feel awake and alive, nd make your way to the kitchen for breakfast. You fix a quick bowl of cereal and head into the living room to check the damage, and find the TV on. You remember waking up and turning it off but it's on the AV channel again. You disconnect your gamecube and turn the tv off again, googling if old TVs are prone to this kind of problem, since you did get it used from a garage sale.
Your search doesn't turn anything useful up, but stuff breaks all the time. As long as it keeps playing games it doesn't matter too much if it keeps turning on.
Hmm. But it will run up your power bill.
You finish your cereal and unplug the TV, just for good measure.
It doesn't turn on for the rest of the day, but the next night you wake up to piss again and find it on. Or at least, you thought you saw blue light through the archway as you walked past, but once you walked in the TV was off.
There wasn't anything you could see through the window, so you'd assumed it was passing headlights or something, though it didn't...quite look right.
You weren't sure what it was but something about it set you on edge.
Today you have nothing better to do, so you decided to put your worries to bed. You decide to spend the day reading a book on the couch.
As always, you can't sit still, and it isn't long before you wind up laying across the whole couch on your stomach.
A little after lunch time you begin to drift off to sleep.
You don't sleep for long at all before a whirring noise wakes you up.
You reluctantly open your eyes and stretch, the noise quickly getting under your skin.
It's the TV. It isn't on, but the built-in VCR player is open, and it sounds like its trying (and failing) to load a tape.
Maybe, you think, something got caught in the player and it's been turning on because it thinks I want to play a VHS? But then you remember that you unplugged it.
But it's not lit up now, so maybe the VCR just has an automated component that doesn't require power? You can open the disk tray of a powered down computer.
You kneel in front of the TV and peer into the tape deck. You don't see anything so you stick your hand in, maybe there's some dust or hair caught in the gears.
You don't feel anything but one of the gears catches your hand and pinches you. You pull your hand out and see that it tore a small piece of skin off. There's just a small dot of blood but you're about done with this TV.
You're considering throwing it in the dumpster before pickup this week when you start having trouble focusing and notice that you feel quite heavy and tired. You wake up with your face buried in your book and realize the TV is just fine. No whirring, and your hand is completely unmarred.
A nightmare. And a stupid one at that.
But the panic doesn't leave you, and though you try to get back to your book you can't help but glance up at the TV every so often, almost feeling like you can still hear the VCR whirring.
And then the screen snaps on. Just a blank blue screen, but you can hear static.
No, it isn't static, it doesn't sound right -
You can hear your heart beating, practically feel it in your mouth already as you listen closer to the noise.
It -
It almost sounds like - for the very briefest of moments the thought crosses your mind that it sounds like meat, that its chewing up the piece of your hand it bit off.
You kick it in a blind rage at the same time you realize what the noise actually sounds like - like meat, yes, but it sounds like the twisting fleshy sound that a whole nest of maggots would make.
Your kick is ineffective, jostling the TV slightly but it's not enough to break the screen or even topple it entirely.
You remember again, suddenly, that the TV is unplugged. Maybe the sound its making, maybe it's sparks or something going off inside - obviously something is wrong with it, but as you lean in toward the TV to get a better idea -
You almost scream but instead you stare, slack-jawed at the screen.
Not a blank blue screen as you had thought but...you can see so. many blue maggots writhing on the other side of the screen, pushing the screen forward in small bulges here and there as if it were not glass but a clear cocoon.
You sit there, on your knees, and stare in horror as your TV, which was working only a week ago, was now acting like a prop in a bad horror movie.
What are you supposed to do about this?
What are you supposed to do about this!?
As you stare you notice something in the sound of the writhing, it does almost sound like static but -
But.
Its whispers. Hundreds of tiny voices speaking at once.
You can't make out what they're saying but it almost sounds like singing, almost sounds like sense, and peace.
You place your hand against the screen.
It's warm, and it feels like soft rubber under your palm.
Only a second later you come to your senses and realize this was a terrible idea, just as a searing pain courses through the palm of your hand. You try to pull it off only to find that the rubber screen seems to have melted to your hand and a sensation that you reason is probably pretty close to a hot iron being shoved directly through your veins brings you to the edge of consciousness.
You regain your composure as the feeling lessons a bit and start pulling at your hand with all your might, careful not to touch a single other part of the TV.
It won't pull free no matter how hard you tug, though, and you feel that fire in your vein a second time now, worse than the first, and you think you might black out and get sick, but then you notice -
You notice that you can feel the maggots' flesh against your palm, and they are boiling hot.
You notice that a thin line is twisting up under your skin.
You do get sick.
You can do nothing but watch, and at some point you must have started screaming because you can hear your own voice in the background, behind the squirming.
Watch, as these maggots burrow and burn into your flesh.
They move so slowly up your arm, and you would try cutting them off if you could reach a knife or a shard of glass or anything sharp.
You begin to feel something else as the first of them finally starts to make its way toward your shoulder, but the strangeness is ripped out of your mind as a fatter maggot starts trying to get its way into your palm.
You scream.
And then the strange feeling returns, like a nausea in your chest, and you realize there's at least one of them in there, coiling around your heart, you imagine.
You can't feel the burning anymore, though, and you start to feel cold just a few moments later. As you start to lose consciousness your hand finally rips from the screen, and a whole mass of the cobalt blue worms tumble out and fall onto your leg.
You can barely feel them burning their way into your leg as you watch a final one finish making its way in through your hand.
You distantly notice, ad you start to close your eyes, that the arm full of worms has begun jerking.
Oh well, you think. It's someone else's problem now.
This is technically was just an old drawing but since the last drawing took me so long, and I wanted this drawing out there today, I just.. made some.. uh.. well changes to it, and I guess I'm pretty happy with how it turned out :)
