The Seven Wonders +1 (Part 1)

“Hey, Evan,” I said one rainy afternoon while the two of us were killing time after school in HQ. “If you could have one super power, what would it be? The catch is that you have to choose a downside. Like a monkey’s paw thing. Basically, you have to pay a price whenever you use your power.”

“Like Darker than Black?” he asked without looking up from his phone.

“Yeah.” I was surprised he had seen it, but that was exactly what I had in mind.

“Already have one,” he said, to my further surprise. “My power is being able to talk to people like a semi-normally functioning person. The price is that afterwards I have to mutter ‘I’m gonna off myself’ under my breath a couple times.”

“Wow. That’s dark, man.”

“Er.”

“Er?”

“Than black.”

“That’s it. I relinquish my title. You be RED from now on. I now pronounce you Evan Evans, BORED”

“No thanks. That wasn’t even a pun anyway.”

“Still dark though.”

“You asked.”

“True.”

We kept on listlessly passing the time like that, in pointless idle conversation. Paying no mind to us, and us no mind to it, time went by. Outside, the world slowly darkened to black. That I would go home when the rain stopped was what I had been telling myself, but even once it had, I couldn’t motivate myself to trade the comfort of the couch for the cold that awaited outside, and so I stayed. As the old saying went, necessity is the mother of invention, and boredom is the mother of unimaginable laziness.

Or something like that.

Ok, fine, it wasn’t a real saying. Only now it was, right? Because I said it. The only requirement for a saying is that someone needs to have said it. This was a new phrase that I was coining. I was pretty sure people the world over were going to be saying it in no time. But come to think of it, who coined the phrase “coining a phrase?”

Before my thoughts could get any stupider, they were interrupted. I heard it before I saw it. The sound of heavy footfalls coming up the stairwell at the speed of a centipede scuttle, only heavy, pounding against the floorboards like a pound of feathers. Or a pound of bricks, depending on how you looked at it. How I looked at it, personally, was “not at all,” because, like I said, I heard it before I saw it.

Seconds later, Greg burst into the room. He had a look on his face like he’d won the lottery, spent the money on more lottery tickets, and won again. But from the neck down, he was nothing short of a disaster. He was dripping enough sweat to fill an Olympic swimming pool. I’d never seen him so winded. This was the guy who averaged a 13-minute mile in P.E., taking his sweet time walking loops around the track and snickering at every idiot lapping him. “Idiots. Why work up a sweat for nothing?” he’d always say.

I tended to agree with him.

“What’s up?” I asked.

He was heaving so hard I genuinely thought he might keel over, but he managed to wheeze the words out through sheer willpower. “Guys! You’re not going to believe this!”

His voice was as raspy as a chainsmoking rooster with a lung infection.

“What is it? What’s wrong? Are you ok, Greg? Please tell us everything’s alright.” In contrast to his words, Evan’s tone was flatter than the Siberian steppe. He couldn’t have sounded more disinterested if he tried.

“Check this out,” Greg said, finally catching his breath. He whipped something black and rectangular out of his pocket. Two slightly rounded windows on one of its flat faces showed off its insides, guts of plastic and winding reels.

What was it that he was holding, you ask? Is it not abundantly obvious? It was that. You know. That. That thing that previous generations loved. That thing that adults these days always assumed kids didn’t know about, even when that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

You get what I’m getting at, right? The thing Greg was holding was a…

“A bomb!? H-he’s got a bomb! Everyone get down!!” I yelled as I hit the deck.

An explosion roared through the room, ripped through our ears, tearing the soft patter of rain on glass and the ticking of the clock to shreds and replacing them with painful, searing agony.

“Shoot,” said Evan. “I died.”

The bomb blast emanating from his phone speakers died down, and then, after a second of silence, the sounds of gunfire and explosions flared up again. Man, the respawn times in Cross Crash were a lot shorter now than when I last played.

“It’s not a bomb, you oxymoron. It’s a tape.” I was pretty sure Greg didn’t know what “oxymoron” meant. Seeing as how I had mistaken the thing in his hands for a bomb, I’d call it even.

“Tape?”

“Yeah. You know. Like a VHS tape.”

“Yeah, dude,” said Evan. “Like what people used to watch movies on.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. A lightbulb went on above my head. Then it flickered off again. Stupid broken ceiling lamp. All this time and I still hadn’t gotten the thing replaced. “Like, those things you could go and rent, right?”

“Yep,” Greg confirmed.

“And they were how people used to watch anime fansubs before the internet,” Evan explained.

“So what are you doing with it?” I asked Greg. “I thought you already went home.” The sweat was still dripping off of him like he was a cold aluminum can in the sun.

“What I’m doing with it,” he panted, “is showing you guys. And I did already go home. But you need to see this. What’s on it, I mean. You have a VHS player in here, right?”

“Uh, yeah.” I nodded. “I think.” I rummaged through some junk that Lily kept on a shelf in the back of the room — stuff that she claimed might come in handy one day, like a bunch of one-size-fits-none latex gloves, and a box of old German flip phones — until I found what I was looking for: a vintage VCR hooked up to an era-appropriate CRT, both so mint they’d freshen your breath just looking at them. Lily sure had a knack for rare finds.

We set up the monitor and VCR. Greg’s palms were clammy with sweat, and he missed a couple of times trying to slot the tape into the player. It was weird. He should’ve been well on his way to cooling off at this point, but it looked like he was only getting sweatier and stickier and gunkier and meltier by the second. “Hey, Wallace,” he said. “Turn on the light, why don’t you? I can hardly see anything in here, man.”

“I dimmed it for atmosphere, dimwit,” I said sarcastically.

“Oh, right.” He remembered. “Borked bulb.”

“Yep.”

Finally, the tape slid into place with a plastic clunk. The machine whirred alive, and the screen lit up with an old-fashioned film leader that started counting us down from 8. Greg was getting even more riled up, more anxious the closer we got to 0. He was on the edge of his seat, his eyes bulging out of his skull like a bug’s.

The countdown ended, and I heard Greg gulp. Audibly.

And that was when it hit me. Hit me like a truck carrying a ton of bricks. Or feathers, depending on how you looked at it.

“Hey, wait a second.” I was so jittery all of a sudden I almost wet my pants preemptively. “Is this some kind of old shock video you found? Or like a jumpscare thing? Or worse?”

Greg said nothing, just fixated on the screen till it went black, and for a second, the room darkened and we couldn’t see anything anymore.

“Ah!! Ahhhhh! What’s that!? It’s got my leg!?!!?!?!”

“Oh come on, Evan! Cut it out!”

“Sorry.”

…He was enjoying this, wasn’t he?

The end of The Seven Wonders +1 (Part 1)!
To be continued in Part 2!