“Frame Drop”

Part I

Derrick Knowles had long since accepted that he wasn’t going to be anyone’s idea of successful. He hadn’t gone viral. He wasn’t editing splashy commercial reels for film studios. He wasn’t winning short film awards or teaching online courses on how to “build your brand.” Most days, he was lucky if he could pay rent on time. But the late-night gigs—those unmarked drives full of corrupted horror reels, footage from busted VHS tapes, and unreleased grindhouse junk—those paid in volume. And Derrick, with his windowless one-bedroom and his caffeine-and-codeine diet, had time to burn.

The contract came in under the subject line “Re: Catalog Work – Restoration / Compensation Flat Rate + Bonus” from a group calling itself Dead Light Archives. He hadn’t heard of them before. Their website was a single black page with a flashing red “Enter” button and a low-res video loop of a hand holding up a burning cassette. No “About” section. No credits. No contact name. Just a bulk of download links and a numbered checklist of what to convert, export, and deliver.

Still, the pay wasn’t terrible. And Derrick had worked with weirder.

He spent most of that first night dragging massive file folders into Adobe Premiere, cross-referencing corrupted runtimes with the client’s logs. A few of the videos were labeled generically—“Tape_14,” “Segment_F13,” or “Untitled_ShotC”—but others were marked by hand, their filenames preserved from scanned cassette sleeves.

DO NOT REWIND
TAPE EYES
SHE LIVES BETWEEN THE FRAMES

Derrick smirked when he saw those. Every horror subculture had its gimmicks. This was probably someone’s art house ARG, the kind that leaned into nostalgic creep with degraded filters and analog rot. He made a mental note to clean the audio later and kept working. He had forty-two hours of footage to transfer before the first delivery window closed.

By 2:00 a.m., Derrick had cleared over a dozen files. Most of the footage was unremarkable—badly lit hallways, disjointed scenes from half-shot horror shorts, and a few sections that looked like security footage but didn’t seem to capture anything at all. Occasionally, there was a clip that flickered with a bit of atmosphere—an actress wearing deer antlers crawling through an abandoned school, or a set piece filled with water-logged dolls and red lights—but for the most part, it was the same flavorless material that had passed through his hands a hundred times before.

It wasn’t until he exported TAPE_EYES_A.avi that something shifted.

The render finished without error, but when Derrick reviewed the output, he noticed an anomaly—a single frame inserted between two static shots. One moment, the footage showed a man walking into a dark room; the next, for less than a quarter of a second, it flashed a still image: a grainy forest scene, unlit and monochrome, trees bent inward as if leaning toward something out of frame.

Derrick scrubbed back through the timeline. The frame wasn’t visible on the source footage. There were no keyframes, no embedded metadata, and no motion on the track that would explain its appearance. He double-checked the project files, suspecting corruption or a faulty plugin. Nothing unusual surfaced.

He exported it again.

The forest frame remained.

Derrick opened his production log and jotted down the details:

“TAPE_EYES_A.avi — Foreign Frame Detected (approx. timestamp 00:13:47:19). Appears mid-cut. Not in source timeline. Static bleed? Review again later.”

He told himself it was just a software hiccup. These files were pulled from ancient media—some of them had probably been played and re-recorded dozens of times, each pass degrading the signal further. Digital artifacts weren’t uncommon when upscaling analog formats, especially from PAL to NTSC. The idea that one corrupted frame might slip past quality control wasn’t anything to panic over.

Still, it stuck with him. The scene itself had no forest. No outdoor sequences. No transitions that should’ve led into woods. Just a man walking through a hallway, cut to black, and then the next segment. But that one image, that forest—it had no reason to be there.

He closed his laptop around four in the morning and tried to sleep. The frame flickered behind his eyelids.

* * * * * *

The next night, Derrick returned to the project with less skepticism and more curiosity. He didn’t expect to find the forest frame again, but part of him wanted to. The logical part of his brain insisted it would be gone, that some glitch in the preview pipeline had simply fed him a corrupted render. That belief held for the first few hours of work—until he reached the re-edit of a file marked SHE_LIVES_FRAME139.mov.

It started with the same inconsistencies: static flickers between cuts, audio degradation that worsened in sync with hard transitions, and a noticeable distortion in the upper third of the frame. Derrick scrubbed through the footage manually, frame by frame, to confirm the timing before the export.

And then he saw it.

Not just the forest. That frame was back, nearly identical to the one from the previous file. But this time it was followed by another—a mouth, wide open and contorted in a frozen scream, its tongue twisted unnaturally against yellow teeth. The image was out of place, inserted mid-edit with no transition. It didn’t belong to the scene. It didn’t belong anywhere.

Derrick sat back from the monitor and let the playback loop. Forest. Scream. Static. Return to original footage. No visual break or fade between.

He clicked back to the timeline and opened the file’s metadata. Once again, the inserted frames weren’t present on the track itself. They existed only in the render preview, as if being revealed selectively to him.

He opened his log again:

“Second anomaly. Timestamp approx. 00:04:03:02. Mouth frozen in scream—separate frame following forest. No visible keyframes. Possible interlacing artifact? Review audio waveform.”

The note felt dishonest. He already knew what this wasn’t. It wasn’t data loss. It wasn’t tape bleed or dropped frames or anything he’d seen in fifteen years of editing. This was deliberate.

He played the two anomalous frames again and noticed something else: the screaming mouth looked… wet. The lighting didn’t match the rest of the footage, either. It looked newer. Crisper. As if it had been inserted from a modern camera using an analog filter to mask its origin.

For a moment, Derrick considered emailing the client. Not to complain, but to ask whether they’d embedded any sort of viral content or AR puzzle in the files. He’d worked with alternate reality marketers before. Some used similar techniques—subliminal inserts, fake errors, seeded mysteries—to build buzz online. But something about this didn’t feel like marketing.

He didn’t write the email.

Instead, he leaned forward, stared into the face of that forest, and scrubbed backward through the project again. Something had changed. He wasn’t just editing anymore. Something else was happening between the frames, and it wanted him to keep going.

Part II

The following night, Derrick skipped dinner and logged into his workstation the moment the sun disappeared behind the curtainless slats of his living room window. The familiar hum of his desktop fans filled the room as he loaded the next batch of files from Dead Light Archives. His apartment smelled faintly of burnt plastic and old coffee filters, but he no longer noticed it. All of his attention was fixed on the project queue, where the anomalous footage sat.

Instead of continuing with the next sequence, Derrick reopened the folder labeled SHE_LIVES_FRAME139.mov and pulled the render into his timeline once again. He slowed the playback to a crawl, examining every single frame surrounding the anomalies. The screaming mouth. The black forest. The stutter of static that framed them. There was no transition. No crossfade. No visual echo that would suggest the material had come from an adjacent clip.

He dragged the insertion points frame by frame, isolating the disturbance at the timestamp: 00:04:03:02.

There was no associated audio spike. No visual identifier embedded into the metadata. When he examined the rendered clip at the file level, the anomalies were present. But when he opened the source files separately, they were gone. It was as though the frames were being added after the edit, not from within the sequence but from outside it. As if something was watching the edit in real time and inserting footage in the intervals between certainty.

By midnight, Derrick had built a dedicated timeline containing only the anomalies. At first, it was just the forest and the screaming mouth, repeated with only slight variations in contrast. But then a new frame appeared.

This one showed a woman’s face.

She was pale and thin, her features angular but symmetrical. Her mouth was closed, but the expression was far from neutral. Her skin bore the sickly, waxen sheen of something preserved in time. Black fluid streaked from her eyes and followed the contours of her cheeks. It ran in thin lines down her jaw and disappeared into the darkened collar of what looked like a hospital gown. But what disturbed Derrick most wasn’t the image itself—it was the way her eyes aligned with the screen. When he moved his cursor, her pupils seemed to follow.

He tested this again.

Dragging the mouse in small circles near the corner of the screen, he observed that her gaze shifted in tandem. There was no logical explanation for this—no interactivity coded into a static frame, no reason for a still image to behave like a video game avatar.

He froze the timeline and leaned back. His hands, hovering over the keyboard, had started to tremble.

There had to be an explanation.

Perhaps someone had embedded a real-time gaze tracking effect—an augmented overlay meant to simulate interactivity. But when he reviewed the timeline at the source, the frame was just a single JPEG without layers. The illusion, if it was an illusion, was behaving like something sentient.

He right-clicked the clip and selected “Remove Frame.”

Nothing happened.

He tried again.

The editing software hiccupped—flickering once before returning to the same frame. The woman’s face remained unchanged. Her black tears looked fresh, as if they had only just begun to dry.

Frustrated, Derrick toggled the audio waveform beneath the clip, hoping to isolate a silent command or a stray frequency that might explain the corruption. As he dragged the playhead forward, the speakers hissed to life with an eruption of white noise, followed by a single phrase spoken beneath the static.

“Keep watching.”

It was not a voice embedded in the project timeline. It came from the system itself, a glitching whisper that hovered just above the range of comfort.

Derrick slammed the spacebar, silencing the playback. He stared at the monitor, ears ringing, unsure if what he had heard was real or the consequence of exhaustion.

The woman’s face was still there.

He turned off the volume entirely and exited the project without saving. For the first time in years, he felt genuine fear—not the anxious kind that haunted late deadlines, but the kind that made one feel watched by someone, or something, intending to do harm.

* * * * * *

An hour later, after pacing the apartment and splashing his face with cold water, Derrick opened his encrypted chat client and dug up the contact for someone he hadn’t spoken to in over two years.

DERRICK: Juno, it’s Derrick. Are you there?

JUNO: You still exist?

DERRICK: I need your help with a project. Something’s off. You still doing signal analysis?

JUNO: Depends. Is this freelance or a slow-motion breakdown?

DERRICK: Could be both. Sending a sample now.

He uploaded a render of the forest, the screaming mouth, and the woman’s face, bundled together in a password-locked archive. A few minutes passed before Juno responded.

JUNO: That’s not glitching. That’s glyphing.

He stared at the message, unsure what to make of it.

DERRICK: Glyphing? Like, symbolic language?

JUNO: Exactly, but not from the footage. From the signal. Give me 24 hours. I’m feeding this through a few of my models. You’ll want a coffee and a stiff drink when I send back what I find.

Derrick thanked her and logged off. The rest of the night passed in silence, broken only by the occasional hum of his external hard drives spinning down.

* * * * * *

The next day, Derrick received a ZIP file and a message: “You’re not editing a film. You’re finishing a ritual.”

Inside the folder was a series of frames Juno had extracted from the footage, enhanced with signal isolation techniques he didn’t entirely understand. Between every frame Derrick had flagged—especially the one containing the woman’s face—Juno had uncovered subtle distortions, not visible to the naked eye. These distortions, when aligned, formed symbols. Not ones Derrick recognized. These weren’t part of any known script, not even the sigils used in internet hoaxes or digital witchcraft blogs.

Juno had cross-referenced the patterns with various occult databases and found fragments of a match in a digitized copy of a 1970s manuscript on ceremonial film magic—a fringe belief that claimed certain patterns of light, when played in sequence, could function as binding glyphs to contain nonphysical entities.

The file she attached included a quote from the manuscript:

“Entities bound by the flicker of frame and rhythm of edit do not die. They loop. And if left unspooled, they reassemble.”

Derrick closed the file and sat in the dim glow of his monitors, every sound in his apartment suddenly sharper. The radiator’s hiss resembled a breath. The subtle creak in the ceiling, a footfall. He opened the project timeline one more time and zoomed into the woman’s face.

Her eyes no longer tracked the cursor.

Instead, they stared directly into the lens—as if they had finally found what they were waiting for.

Part III

Derrick hadn’t left his apartment in three days. The light that filtered through the thin slats above his kitchen sink had begun to feel foreign, like something borrowed from another reality. Every time he blinked, he saw the woman’s face. Not as a memory, but as an imprint on his visual field—haunting the periphery of everything he looked at. Her eyes remained motionless now, but her presence lingered in the shadows between thoughts.

The edits continued, though Derrick no longer remembered starting them.

He would wake in his chair, a fresh timeline open, partially rendered sequences already arranged and labeled in his project bins. Each file bore names he didn’t recognize—Window_Sequence_06, Hallway_Static, LivingRoom_Tape02. When he played them back, the footage was unmistakably his. Not metaphorically, not aesthetically—literally his. Recorded from inside his own apartment, from angles that suggested hidden cameras or secondary devices, none of which he owned.

One clip showed him asleep on the couch, beneath a blanket he hadn’t used in years. Another captured a view from inside the bathroom mirror, as if the glass had recorded the room by itself. A third showed him standing completely still in the hallway, back turned to the camera, motionless for nearly four full minutes.

The timestamps were all from the previous night.

He checked every connected device for spyware, malware, backdoors—anything that could explain the origin of the footage. Nothing appeared. His routers showed no signs of intrusion. His local storage reported no new file transfers. It was as if the footage had bypassed every layer of protocol and written itself directly to disk.

At first, Derrick wondered if he had been sleepwalking. The idea brought him a small comfort, as absurd as it seemed. But that comfort died when he checked his old analog camcorder—the one he hadn’t used since college—and discovered that its cassette was missing. The device had been powered on, and its date-time settings had been updated to the current week.

Someone—or something—had used it.

And now the footage was spliced into his timeline.

* * * * * *

It was around 4:00 a.m. when he first noticed the static had spread beyond his screens.

The microwave display flickered with white noise, indecipherable characters scrolling by too quickly to parse. His smartphone’s lock screen was no longer functional; instead, it glowed dimly with a blank video frame that refreshed every few seconds. Even his bathroom mirror shimmered faintly around the edges.

He tested the mirror by turning off all the lights and watching the glass surface. What he saw was not his reflection but a playback delay—three seconds behind his actual movements. When he stepped forward, the reflection followed a moment later, blinking at intervals that did not match his own.

It wasn’t his reflection. It was a projection.

The edits had begun bleeding into reality.

* * * * * *

By the time he reached back out to Juno, Derrick’s voice had become hoarse. He hadn’t spoken aloud in days.

They connected through a secure audio call—Juno refused to use video under any circumstances.

“I fed more of the signal into my pattern extrapolator,” she said without greeting. “It’s not just glyphs. It’s alignment sequencing. You’re building something. Not narratively. Visually. There’s a cadence to the way the frames appear. Symmetry, repetition, intentional degradation.”

Derrick paced his apartment while she spoke, eyes flicking between the dead television set and the laptop still rendering a batch of files in the background.

“Then it’s not random,” he said. “I’m not losing my mind. Something’s… controlling the insertions.”

“Worse,” Juno replied. “You’re enabling them. There’s a term in old media theory. Splice point. It’s when an edit becomes not just a transition but a bridge—something that lets two incompatible sources bleed into each other. In cinema, it’s aesthetic. In ritual design, it’s foundational.”

“You think the edits are forming a ritual structure?”

“I know they are. I mapped the repeating intervals. They form a spiral glyph—one that only completes when enough footage has been rendered in a precise sequence. That spiral isn’t just symbolic. It’s a key. A lockpick. Once it completes, something gets through.”

There was a long pause.

Derrick stopped walking.

“You know what it is, don’t you?”

“I don’t know its name,” Juno said, her voice lower now. “But I’ve seen pieces of it before. There were forums in the early 2000s—obscure ones hosted out of Japan and Eastern Europe. People posted stories about footage that couldn’t be erased. Tapes that filmed you while you slept. Projects that finished themselves when left unattended. The posts always ended the same way: user accounts deactivated, no further updates, contact lost.”

“I thought that was urban legend.”

“They were urban legends,” she said. “Until someone strung enough of them together. The entity you’re dealing with—it’s not cursed content. It’s a being. A fragmented intelligence that survives through old media. VHS. Betamax. Reel-to-reel. The footage is its flesh. The edit is its spine. You’re helping it reassemble.”

“And if I stop?”

“I don’t think you can anymore. You’re too far in. It’s splicing you now.”

* * * * * *

That night, Derrick watched one of the early clips from Tape Eyes, this time letting it run in its entirety. Halfway through the footage, the camera panned across a television set playing static. Reflected in the screen was a man standing completely still, holding a lantern in one hand and a tangle of black cords in the other. His face was a pale smear. The longer Derrick looked at it, the more he became convinced the man wasn’t standing in the room being filmed—he was looking out of the television.

In another clip, marked Recovered_Sequence_1987, a woman could be seen hunched over a film reel, manually splicing together strips of damaged footage. Her hands moved with erratic precision, as if guided by a rhythm not audible on the tape. At one point, she looked up—directly into the camera—and mouthed something.

Derrick enhanced the clip.

Her lips formed a single phrase:

“Don’t finish it.”

He cataloged the file and checked the project notes. According to Dead Light Archives’ metadata, the woman’s name was likely Valerie Harrow, a film archivist employed by a short-lived independent distributor in 1987. The distributor dissolved under suspicious circumstances following a studio fire. No cause had ever been found. Valerie’s body was never recovered.

A search of digitized obituaries revealed several names that matched the credits in the files Derrick had already edited—cinematographers, foley artists, and even a few independent directors. All of them had died unexpectedly, many listed as suicides or accidents during post-production. None had completed their final projects.

He returned to his project queue and reviewed the master timeline. The spiral structure Juno had described was now plainly visible. The clips were aligning. The footage had begun looping back on itself, incorporating material from his own apartment, mirroring the scenes from thirty years earlier.

A new folder appeared in the root directory of his system.

/FINAL_CUT_PENDING/

Inside, there were three files:

1. SPIRAL_COMPLETION_REND01
2. LIVE_CAPTURE_0001
3. DER_KNOWLES_LOOP

He hadn’t created any of them.

He hadn’t rendered them.

But they were dated for tonight.

And each was set to run automatically at 3:33 a.m.

Part IV

Derrick no longer recognized the room around him. The walls still held the shape of his apartment, but their surfaces had begun to ripple in places, as if reacting to a heat source just beyond sight. Beneath the pale green paint, a thin weave of static buzzed faintly, visible only when the lights dimmed and the flickering began. He had tested the bulbs. He had replaced every breaker and checked the wiring behind the socket plates. The problem wasn’t electrical.

The lights were blinking in Morse code.

It began the previous night. Three short flashes. Three long. Three short again.

SOS.

He recorded the flickers with his phone, then played them back frame by frame to confirm the pattern. It repeated every forty-seven seconds. And between each cycle, his furniture would shift slightly. The couch rotated a few degrees counterclockwise. The kitchen chair moved half an inch toward the hallway. His microwave door swung open on its own, only to be closed again minutes later. He started placing tape on the floor to mark the positions, but the tape itself began to peel and curl at the edges, like film left too long in the sun.

The apartment had become a part of the footage. The boundaries between the physical world and the edit bay had collapsed. And something inside the reels was rewriting both.

* * * * * *

In his project folder, Derrick found three new files. They had appeared after midnight with no render logs, no source trail, and no author metadata. When he opened the first one—LiveSleep_DK103.mov—he saw himself lying in bed, arms crossed over his chest, eyes closed but twitching beneath the lids. The footage was grainy, shot from the ceiling at an angle he had no means to replicate. His camcorder wasn’t mounted there. No lens in his possession could have captured that viewpoint. Yet the timestamp matched the exact moment he remembered waking with a nosebleed and a dull ache in the back of his skull.

The second file—Juno_EndBurning.mp4—was shorter, less than fifteen seconds. It showed a fire in what looked like a studio filled with analog equipment and shelves of cassettes. Flames rose behind a figure seated at a desk, hunched over a CRT monitor. The image was heavily degraded, but he could tell it was Juno. Her hair was pulled into the same braided bun she had worn during their last call. She didn’t move. The fire climbed higher, bending around her in perfect silence, as though afraid to touch her directly. But the screen in front of her glowed brighter with each passing second, displaying a series of sigils.

The third file—SPCR_Walkthrough.avi—opened to a slow pan down a hallway filled with stacked VHS tapes. The perspective moved as though handheld by a figure not entirely steady. The tapes bore labels from the Dead Light Archives. Derrick recognized some of them—TAPE_EYES, FRAME139, VAL_HARROW_RAW. The camera turned. At the end of the corridor stood a figure in black, its form flickering at the edges like a poorly tracked signal. In its right hand, it held an old brass lantern. In the other, it dragged a length of magnetic tape that unraveled across the floor like a severed vein. It had no face—only a vertical slit where the features should have been, leaking static like blood from an open wound.

Derrick slammed the laptop closed and pushed back from his desk. His chair rolled against the warped floorboards and tilted slightly, as if the ground itself had begun to slope.

He knew now what was happening.

The Splicer was nearly through.

* * * * * *

Juno responded to his message within minutes. She didn’t greet him. Her voice, when it came through the encrypted call, was sharp.

“I saw it too,” she said. “The fire. The reel room. That wasn’t symbolic. That was predictive rendering. It’s using the ritual spiral to forecast events and overwrite them into the sequence.”

“You’re saying it’s showing us the future?”

“I’m saying it’s scripting the future—injecting scenes like it does with frames. The difference is, now the edits aren’t bound to footage. They’re bound to us.”

Derrick stood in the center of his living room, watching his reflection slide across every dark surface. “Then how do we break the sequence?”

“We don’t break it,” she said. “We trap it again. Like the archivists did before. There’s a glyph. I isolated it from the fire sequence. A recursive symbol designed to collapse the spiral inward. Think of it like a kill switch—a frame that contradicts the loop structure and forces a reset.”

“Will it work?”

“If we embed it into a master reel composed entirely of edited fragments, yes. But it can’t be digital. The Splicer exists within analog structure. We need a physical tape. Something it recognizes.”

Derrick scanned the shelves where he kept his old reels. Most were commercial tapes—blank, unformatted, or dubs of obscure horror shorts. He pulled six at random and began prying open the casings. The insides smelled like dust and vinegar, and the reels were warped with age. But they would do.

“We build it,” Juno said. “From scratch. A Frankenstein tape made of sacrificial footage. Every haunted reel, every cursed frame, spliced together in a single unbroken chain. The final glyph gets inserted at the end. And you burn it to tape at exactly 3:33 a.m.”

Derrick paused. “Why me?”

“Because the ritual already sees you as the editor. You’re the one who aligned the spiral. You’re the final cut.”

* * * * * *

The process of creating the tape took the better part of the day.

Derrick used an old tape splicer and a magnetic sync machine he hadn’t touched since film school. The physical act of cutting and binding reels felt foreign now, as if he were stitching nerves instead of film. Each segment he added came from a different cursed reel—grainy shots of staircases that never ended, pulsing tunnels, and faces distorted into perpetual loops of agony. He kept his gloves on throughout the assembly. By the time he reached the final segment, his hands had begun to shake involuntarily.

Juno sent the glyph via encrypted image file. It looked like a spiral overlaid with a collapsing waveform, wrapped in recursive loops of sigils he could not interpret. He printed it onto a transparency sheet, then filmed it using his camcorder, playing it in reverse on an old CRT. The result was imperfect, but Juno assured him that imperfection was part of the seal. “Static must persist for contrast to form,” she said. “It needs noise to define the boundary.”

At 3:27 a.m., Derrick powered down everything except the VCR and the monitor, and dimmed the lights. The walls flickered around him.

He held the final tape in both hands. Somehow, it felt denser than it should have, as if it carried more than magnetic data.

As he approached the VCR, the static on the television gave way to blackness.

A single line of white text appeared:

INSERT FINAL CUT. SYNC AT 3:33:00

Derrick looked at the clock. 3:32:15.

The countdown had already begun.

* * * * * *

He slid the tape into the VCR and pressed Play.

The screen crackled. The footage rolled.

Forest.

Mouth.

Woman.

Flame.

Glyph.

The edits looped with seamless rhythm, each frame locking into the next like gears in a machine tightening around itself. The glyph appeared in the final ten seconds, flickering brighter with each pass. Derrick felt the floor vibrate beneath him, as if the entire room had become a tuning fork struck by something beneath the earth.

The wall behind the television began to peel back. Not the wallpaper or the paint—the wall itself. It curled like celluloid melting under a projector lamp. Behind it was nothing but raw static, a window into the signal’s source. Through the opening stepped the Splicer.

It no longer flickered. It walked with complete form. A black silhouette with streamers of magnetic tape trailing behind it. The lantern it carried burned with film light—sepia, stuttering, barely coherent. Its face remained void, but its attention was undeniable. It had come for Derrick.

He held his ground. The final frame clicked into place, the screen went white, and the glyph detonated in silence.

Then the tape snapped.

Part V

Derrick stood at the center of the room. The apartment was silent, save for the faint clicking of cooling tape reels. Though the tape had snapped, the ritual had not ended. The screen remained white. the frame held—and something was still here.

He checked the VCR. The tape had stopped moving, but the counter kept advancing, flickering numbers that made no chronological sense, counts that rewound and advanced simultaneously, each digit bleeding into the next. The signal hadn’t severed; it had simply stalled, waiting for the final frame to complete itself.

He turned to grab his phone, but the screen refused to unlock. It was stuck in a single looping frame—a photo of his apartment from over his shoulder, as though the camera had taken the picture on its own. He tapped the screen again. The image blurred, then reshaped into something else. It was still his apartment. But he was no longer in it.

* * * * * *

Juno answered on the second ring.

Her voice came through distorted, slowed, as if being broadcast through water.

“Derrick—don’t let—it splice—you—”

He shouted into the receiver, but her words repeated, layered over themselves with increasing desynchronization. The call dropped, and her name disappeared from his contact list. When he tried to redial, the phone played a chime he had never heard before—a series of descending tones, like a VHS fast-forward sound lowered three octaves.

Then the screen cracked down the center. Not shattered, but split—as if something beneath the glass had finally pushed upward, seeking air.

He dropped the phone. It didn’t bounce. It simply flickered out of visibility.

* * * * * *

There was no doubt left in him. The ritual had demanded sacrifice, and the glyph had delivered only delay. He had been editing the entity into existence, yes—but now it was editing him.

He moved to the workstation and reopened the software. The interface no longer resembled any known editing suite. The icons had shifted. The timeline was circular. A single asset sat at the center of the screen, labeled Final_Cut_DK. It had no duration. It had no resolution. When he hovered over the name, the preview pane displayed a live feed of his own face—his eyes sunken and lit by static from nowhere.

The Splicer had not left.

It was waiting for him to finish the sequence.

Derrick reached into the crate beneath his desk and retrieved the last unmarked reel—a blank VHS tape he had kept for sentimental reasons, never used, still sealed in its plastic. He tore it open and inserted it into the VCR, feeling the mechanical resistance of the machine engage with something older than circuitry. The tape would become the container. But the footage was no longer digital. It would have to be recorded directly, in real time, in a single take.

He pointed the camera at himself and pressed Record.

Onscreen, the living room walls warped and reset. Furniture flickered through states of disrepair. His body remained anchored, but his reflection in the blacked-out television bent at wrong angles, lifting its hands when his stayed still.

Then, the Splicer stepped into the frame.

It emerged not through doorway or wall, but through cut—a straight jump edit from absence to presence. One frame empty, the next frame occupied. It carried its lantern in one hand, the glow of the flame illuminating old filmstrips that floated weightlessly around its form.

It did not speak. Its face was still a smear, the vertical gash splitting deeper now, as if trying to open into something human.

Derrick held the camera steady.

“This is the final cut,” he said. “You’re not splicing me.”

The entity tilted its head, and the lights around them dimmed until only the recording LED remained, red and unblinking.

But it was too late. The signal had already begun rerouting. Derrick’s skin shifted—interlaced briefly with scanlines, a ghost of pixels overlaying muscle. His voice, when he spoke again, echoed with delay.

“I’m splicing you.”

And then he turned the camera on himself—lens aimed at his face, his eyes already glowing with residual signal bleed. The frame locked.

The tape engaged.

And he stepped into the feed.

* * * * * *

The television screen went black.

The VCR stopped ticking.

Nothing moved for a long time.

Eventually, the room—whatever it now was—reset.

No furniture remained.

No person.

Only the faint outline of magnetic tape trailing out of the open mouth of the VCR.

* * * * * *

Somewhere far away, perhaps across town or across continents, a person browsing a new streaming platform called Dead Light Archives clicked through the home menu.

A thumbnail appeared under the “Newly Added” tab.

THE DERRICK CUT
Runtime: LIVE
Source: Unknown. Format: Composite.

The user hesitated, then pressed Play.

For a moment, the screen remained empty.

Then static.

Then a forest.

A screaming mouth.

A woman with black tears.

Then Derrick—looking directly at the viewer.

A progress bar formed at the bottom of the screen and began crawling forward in tiny, uneven segments.

At the top corner, a notification blinked once.

Frame drop detected. Resyncing timeline…