Chapter Text
Cast: Taylor swift - a 5'4, half ingenious, and half Chinese teen, he/she, red hair that reaches to the upper back, typically tied into two pigtails, black to red gradient dyed hair.
Scene 1 - introductions to a higher power, by: Marry Keay
INT. Taylor swift’s bedroom - Dawn
The whirring of a tape recorder echoes throughout Taylor Swift's bedroom. It bounces off the posters and merchandise of anime’s way past and in their prime, through the glass casing of survival gear and the deep red shag carpeting, and through body sized pillows and plush animals. Even through the weighted blankets and other bedding she thought that would drown out the sound.
She breathes in a deep sigh as she sits up from her bed and cranes her head towards her desk, sitting there hungry and inpatient is the recorder. Waiting and sitting with a bulbous and protruding sense of urgency. And she was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Taylor flops down back onto her bed before breathing out a sigh and gets up from her bed.
Letting the stuff on her bed fall to the floor she walks to her desk and pulls out a chair. Sitting down she waits for the recorder to speak its incomprehensible song, a song filled with tragedy and pain of those who are not worthy of a name; as static fills her ears she hears what it wants.
“Statement…of…regarding the…supernatural happenings that…her…statement…begins”
Irritated, she clicks off the recorder, going back to pick her bedding off the floor she hears it click on. Throwing the stuff she’s picked up onto her bed, she clicks off the recorder; it turns back on again, before she could even turn away. If it were possible she would be even more annoyed, sitting back down at her desk she shifts through papers. Each and everyone a horror story waiting to be seen and dissected by the cold hard stare of being known and understood.
“Statement of Lisa Redding, regarding her time spent employed at…” the static filling her ears gives her painful pins and needles.
Rolling her eyes she begins to read another one, “Statement of Gabriel Law, regarding their father’s new health kick…” once again the static gives her pain.
Closing her eyes in pain she finds another one, “Statement of Erin O’reilly, regarding its new friend's strange quirks…” the static pain grows.
Clutching her head, she listens to the recorder speak its incomprehensible speech once again.
“Statement…of…regarding the…supernatural happenings that…her…statement…begins”
She begins to speak as she now understands.
TAYLOR(V.O)
Alright, fine. If you want a live one just say that and stop being so cryptic, I need my sleep.
So what do you want to know, how I found you, that’s a story to tell. Or how I was rightfully a “scared child”. Hmm, it doesn't matter I guess as long as you get fed.
Let's start at the beginning.
I’ve always been a “scared child’, or at least that’s what my mom always described me as. It fit though, I once cried so hard at kindergarten that I had to be taken home cause I thought I saw a spider on my leg.
I went through phases like that, where I was so scared of one peculiar thing and I would always claim that I saw it everywhere. First it was the spiders crawling up my leg, then it was the man in the wolf mask with the knife, and then it was the “ Flesh Ball ” which I don't even know where to begin to describe it; the only thing that comes to mind is moist.
But the point is I was always a scared child , my mother took it in stride, being a single working mom is not easy, through it was significantly easier with the money she saved. But still, she was still working on sets at the time, voice acting not even on a synapse in her mind. She would have paid someone to take care of me, but she didn’t want me to turn out like she did. Resentful of her parents and more than a bit emotionally stunted.
It was on the set of one of her movies that something supernatural first occurred in my life.
The was “The Ever-Chasing Desire”, an indie film split into two storylines. The first one we’re introduced to is about a woman in her twenties, trying to live her life as normal as she can in light of her father’s crimes. And the second is about said father and what he’ll do to protect his daughter from a mysterious group of people his wife was mixed up in. a group of people calling themselves ‘those who sing the night’.
Supposedly based on a true story, though only in the way The Blair witch project was found footage of a film crew that went missing.
But I digress, I was around five or so when it happened. My mother was filming her chase scene- which reminds me near the end there was a chase scene. Or rather scenes if you want to get technical.
Both father and daughter take chase after the one thing that they think will solve all their problems: the daughter thinks the nightclub singer whose songs are so visceral that the audience themselves begin to change along with the tune will give her the truth of why her father did what he did. And the father thinks the wild animal of burrowing and slithering worms will finally be what keeps his daughter safe. But as they plunge their respective knives into their respective monster, they realize that what they’ve been after hasn’t been able to be given to them by their monsters, so the daughter begins the chase again, and the father stops running.
It’s a really great scene, and even won a few awards for the cinematography. It's an amazing mix of green screen, live stunts, and sound effects, and good ol’ movie magic.
As amazing as it was, the filming was a disaster. Light would go out, even if they were freshly changed. Props and sets would have deep gash marks strewn across them, sometimes even needed to be reconstructed from scratch. And even a few of the cast and crew went missing, causing the re-shooting of several scenes.
Some said that the angry spirits of the dead were trying to stop the production of the film due to it being based on a ‘true story’, though that was proven false; and there was the ‘classic’ Indian burial ground story. Which I truly hate that was a thing, but the past and all.
Where was I? Oh- right, during my mother’s chase scene is when the lights went dark, the lighting for the scene was only one lightbulb, trying to get the feel of a dark alleyway. but like I said the light went out and that has been happening quite a lot, so one of the lighting crew grabbed a light bulb and tried to fix it. But as she went to unscrew it, someone made a sound.
I don’t want to say something that made the sound, even though that might be more correct than saying someone. It was this deep, bellowing sound in some language that I still don’t understand.
Normally you could hear people talking about nothing in particular when the lights went out. But after that sound was made, the message was clear to everyone including me.
To be quiet or else we would be hurt.
Even I understood that simple yet effective command. So we all stayed silent, for what felt like hours, but could have only been a few seconds till another sound was heard. This time it was this Shrill, high pitch screech of ‘want’, or a better word is reverence.
Reverence for a thing that’s just beyond your grasp, a thing that would never and could never let you in. A thing cold and late distant, and yet was oh so beautiful. II don’t know how long we stood there just listening to that voice before another came, then another, and then another, till the voices became a choir.
Then there was the shifting and shuffling, a dance that we couldn’t understand. Why would you sway in such a way, in a way that makes you look like you’re forced to be there, forced to sing and dance.
Soon enough a few of the cast and crew began to sway, and sing . Though compared to the choir it was barely even above some rabid animals shreeching.
And then the light turned on.
I…don’t remember what happened after. Only a lot of crying and filming being shut down.
The next supernatural occurrence was an elevator, and fear of falling.
I don’t want to get into it. Just know that falling at such a Velocity, you’re supposed to lay close to the ground, not jump and mess up your leg for the rest of your life.
I’m not too upset about it, at least I got a cool cane. So who's the real winner here?
The elevator, but still.
…
…oh! Fine, someone like me needs to know what her audience wants. I’ll only divulge a little.
It was about 5 years after “The Ever-Chasing Desire”, I was almost 10. Me and a few school friends went to the local mall, well, what was the local mall before it was demolished to make room for that…office building, I want to say. I’ll have to check.
Anyways, the mall had for some time been closed and abandoned. So I got the bright idea to grab some of my friends and do a little urban exploration . If you catch my drift.
If you don’t, then we broke in to see if we could loot it.
We didn’t, well we didn’t exactly have time to search the place, again remember if you're in an elevator and it’s falling, stick to the ground. Unless you want to see the bones in your legs to both be visible and 150 degree angle. Sorta like that one doctor board game, the one that buzzes. I never liked that game. Too punishing.
But I digress.
Like I said, me and a couple friends from school went to the old mall to see if we could find anything interesting. It was my friend Caron who got us in. He picked up a rock and threw it into the glass doors, he’s always been the strongest. It take much to break, but it didn’t make a loud sound like you’d expect, that’s not to say it didn’t make a sound; instead it felt like it was far away. Like the sound waves were already a fair distance from us. My friend anny made some comment about it, but I don’t remember it. I’ll have to ask her about it when I see her again.
Anyways we started to comb through the first floor, we didn't find anything, that’s when a few of us started to split off, to cover more ground one of us said. That’s when I was left to my own devices since nobody wanted to go down where I wanted to; that was fine with me.
I was wandering in and out of stores, most of them picked clean.
except for one, well to say that means there was something to take, honestly I don’t even think it was a real store or even had things to take. It was at the end of the hall with an unassuming sign, something about music for stoners or enthusiasts, founded by: someone, Freeman? I want to say.
Not even a few feet within the store, a metal box with a slit down the middle, sitting front and center. The walls around the box stretched out for what looked like miles upon miles, the ceiling was the same way too. The only way I knew that there was even a ceiling was the fact that it was the same color as the walls. A dull sorta gray color, it made me feel like I was a tiny ant drowning in the crashing waves of this. Apathy, or passivity. That should have set some alarm bells, but something about the name of the store and the cool air made me feel. Relaxed, I want to say. But that’s not it, more like the same type of dull as the store.
It felt nice in a strange sorta way.
I don’t remember when the doors opened to an impossibly cold room, so cold that a strange fog- No, fog is typically dense. This fog was empty if that makes any sense.
I don’t remember getting into that death trap.
And I don’t remember that feminine voice telling me to select a floor, and the fact that it took till the fifthteenth floor to take and make her stop saying the same thing over and over.
But what I do remember is the falling .
And I do remember that utterly terrifying feeling of not being sure I would stop falling, of being unsure that when the elevator doors opened that there was going to be ground or not. Of not being sure if that.. that gaping maw would swallow me whole and never let me go.
But, I was mainly terrified that I wouldn't see my mom again.
After the filming of “The Ever-Chasing Desire”, it took not even nine months for them to release the movie to the world, even though the backlash of the still missing cast and crew’s family was large that the producer when into hiding.
I saw it somewhere, an ad, or maybe even a clip. But it sent me back to that now insistent singing, it was bad. That goes for my mom too, it was her scene, she was at the forefront of it all.
Something must have triggered her too. And then the next thing we knew, we were sitting in the middle of her bedroom, with any and every light one could find, holding each other close. She loved me and I loved her. Each other the center of the other’s world.
I started crying, after what felt like hours in that metal death trap. And as my tears continued to fall, the elevator stopped.
After that everything was a blur, from my friends finding me losing a lot of blood and my friends calling an ambulance, to my mother crying at my side as i fade in and out of consciousness and waking up in the middle of surgery grabbing at on of the nurses and saying something about “ what waits of us all ”.
And when i woke up i needed a cane to walk, and i needed to take something for the pain. Luckily I could take them as needed and not every few hours. My family has a history of addiction on my father’s side apparently.
So for the next six years I stayed clear of anything dangerous, well anything truly dangerous. I did other things like horseback riding and that one time I tried fire breathing.
Did not work well. Almost set my house on fire.
…
Then the latest supernatural moment in my life was finding you.
I was snooping around the attic, looking for some instances of my father being real. I was going through a bout of ‘some flight of fancy’, or whatever you want to call it. Doesn't matter as I was rummaging through boxes and boxes filled with old and forgotten things, like old and slightly damaged photo albums, which I started to comb through to avail. Just some pictures of me and my mom, and some other adults and children. I went through some other things as well. Old folders filled with paperworks, old and dusty memorabilia from sets my mother’s worked at.
And other more…embarrassing things.
But as I went to put stuff away, that's when I heard it, heard you. Just behind the box I had finished checking, there you were, a rectangular shaped device with a row of buttons on the top and in the center was a compartment where you could put something rectangular in, and at the very bottom peaking up at the edges were uniform holes.
Later after doing some research I found out what you are, a tape recorder. And like most things in this day and age, you’re analog. But before I did that and learned how to work with you, I found the things that you came with. A small box labeled “Taylor”. It was dusty and had cobwebs sealing it shut, I had to rip it in half to open it.
The contents within was a plethora of tapes each labeled with some sorta numbering system.
I believe it’s the last three digits of the year, then the day, and finally the month. But I could be wrong.
Also within the box was a stack of paper, some papers were statements of people and their experiences with the supernatural, and others were reports. Reports and compiled information about ‘those things that skirt at the edges of our world.
So many things I now begin to understand.
The Dark and The Hunt, The Vast and The End, and finally The Eye, or The Web. I understand not all but enough, one of those things is their “rituals”.
like water they rush-in to wherever they can fit.
One is of a- a group of hunters tearing through whatever stands in there way, another is the dance of unreality performed by the once-not-living. And that gathering of things-that-slither-and-crawl, which I can only describe as lewd.
I know many things now, and I don’t know what to do with it.
Taylor looks down from where she was staring, a poster of… well, she wonders if she ever owned a poster like this. The poster itself is of simple design, a person stands in the right form for a pirouette and with their face obscured by their red-striped top hat.
The background is a stage with red curtains and the focal point is wearing a red ringleader's outfit. The words underneath read ‘join the dance: performed by the circus of the other’.
Blinking and rubbing her eyes she sees the poster clearer, the poster is a simple anime encouragement one. ‘Hang in there’ are words under the character hanging from a cliff. God, she must be tired.
Getting up from her desk she plops down onto the bed. The tape recorder clicked off, and waits for sleep to take her.
…
Not even 10 minutes later, her alarm blears.
“Sekai de ichiban ohime-sama, Sou iu atsukai kokoroete yo ne-”
Taylor groans and switches off her alarm. Sighing she gets up from her bed and walks towards her bathroom.
Someone somewhere runs through an alleyway with their heart racing.
She’s been through this alleyway everyday since she was able to walk to school by herself, and yet it’s never this long, never had a left turn. Or ever really had a turn for a matter of fact.
She curses that girl her age for asking for directions, and leading her to this parody of what she once knew.
As she runs, a ‘click’ is heard.