Gluetrap

Gluetrap is a story written by Iron Eater. It originally ran in Issue 123 at https://www.shousetsubangbang.com/mirror/gluetrap/.

Summary

Beau receives a visitor to the archives who's found more than old clothing in a relative's basement.

"This is where they keep the videos that kill you when you see 'em, right?"

Beau craned his neck over the well-worn piece of A/V equipment he'd been working on all afternoon and furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. "What?"

"You know, cursed video tapes and shit. Haunted DVDs found at a flea market. TV shows that never aired because demons ate the crew before broadcast. Those little, fuckin', ansaphone cassettes with phone calls from other dimensions. You got any of that stuff?"

It had been a minute since Beau had last heard someone refer to an answering machine as an ansaphone. The locals sure didn't use the term. Working in his chosen field made unfamiliar slang vastly more interesting than people asking for horror movies.

Had the archives (not technically what they were called) been properly located inside the library like they were supposed to be, there would have been a few more sign-in sheets and desks between Beau and people walking in off the street; his current unusual circumstances meant it was an awful lot easier for people to bother him, in exchange for making it an awful lot easier for him to know who was coming in and out. He placed a few smaller, more easily lost components on the cloth on the desk before answering whoever had invaded his space. "This building hasn't always been part of the university," he said, not bothering to look up from his toolkit. "Past faculty weren't always as invested in preservation as they could've been. If you want a specific student project, I can't guarantee we have a copy."

"I'm not looking for a tape. I'm here 'cause I got one."

Connections

Gluetrap is not connected to any other stories.

Related Links

Gluetrap has no related links.

Author's Notes

I was told by no less than two separate people to make this story worse, extremity-wise, than the draft they received, both of which I was already concerned might've been going too far. Take that as you will.

The original conceit for this piece was "what if a guy was dating a J-horror cursed tape monster and kept feeding people he knew to it" and things got rapidly out of hand from there. I sadly wasn't able to watch as many classic movies as I'd wanted in preparation due to being busy in real life or things definitely would have felt more oppressively Italian. I should note that none of the movies mentioned in this story are actual works, nor is the namedropped actor a real person. I will not provide the names of actual films as a form of guardrails for the curious. If you want to seek more of this stuff out, start by looking into the aforementioned genres themselves and make personal decisions from there.

So what's the point to this one other than giving the reader a bad time? Well, you could argue it's got something to say about the nature of archiving media, on how the act of preservation can inherently remove something from its original context, on how there are varying levels of ethicality on keeping things, and on whether or not Beau is contributing to global knowledge or just hoarding things jealously. You could argue it's about how the media people consume can potentially consume them without sufficient interest in the outside world and the people in it. You could argue it's a reflection on how a curated work can easily become what the curator wants it to be over what the piece originally was. You could also argue that it's mean and gross and sexually uncomfortable as a way to put the reader off-balance to think about their own media diets. Many options!

But it's not not about providing a bad time.

The photographs used for the art assets are from the A Place Without Bodies photoset by Colin Spacetwinks, while the Betamax inverse silhouette is edited from a Creative Commons image hosted on Wikimedia Commons[1]. All art was made using Clip Studio Paint EX.