Credit to B.F. McBride and Colin Harker for providing the impetus for this story, via a conversation about surveillance and art. McBride’s take on the topic can be found here, and has been followed by other short tales of artistic horror.
About 1,300 words below the cut.
He stepped through the door and squinted against the overpowering white light flooding the room from scores of glowing television screens.
He stood in the entryway for a moment, letting his eyes adjust and recalling all the chatter he had heard about this exhibit. From all the criticism, he couldn’t discern whether the art was supposed to be meaningful or banal, beautiful or ugly; the only consensus was that it was the ultimate mirror for self-reflection, an opportunity to confront oneself and reconsider one’s place in the world. He couldn’t have imagined how apt that description would turn out to be.
The individual pieces followed a linear pattern throughout the gallery, with arrows on the floor pointing the way from one to another. As he moved to the first piece he found himself watching the video of a child being born. It was like any other home movie, but it played on an approximately 30-second loop, depicting the baby breaching over and over again, its eyes shut tight against the encroaching world. No other faces were visible in the clip, but as he watched it repeat four times over, he felt a strange twinge of recognition.
Though he tried to deny it at first, the source of that feeling became steadily more evident as he moved past the next dozen screens, noting that they depicted short scenes charting a chronological journey through a human life. He beheld an infant latching onto its mother’s breast, a toddler taking its first steps and later repeating a few disjointed syllables as it struggled with learning how to speak.
It seemed strange that the child in each clip seemed to be the same. It was downright unsettling that while most of those initial clips appeared to be extracts from home videos, a couple of them had been recorded at a distance with what must have been either a spy camera or a closed-circuit monitor.
Who had gathered these images, he wondered? The child’s parent, a friend of the family; or could it have been a complete stranger? But by the time the child on the television screens had grown to about nine years old, that question took a backseat to a growing suspicion, which made itself known through a tightening sensation in his throat.
Three clips further on, he found himself staring in wide-eyed disbelief at looped footage of a boy tumbling off his bicycle and suffering a serious gash to his right shin – a gash that would require eight stiches, leave a faint scar throughout his life, and form one of his clearest childhood memories.
“That’s me…” he said out loud to the empty gallery before pulling his attention away from the screen and looking around for some explanation, some sign that this was all just an incredibly elaborate prank. But when the television screens simply went on broadcasting the abridged story of his life, he continued his forward progress through the gallery, clinging to the hope that it would all make sense by the end.
Covering floor space five feet at a time, he watched as it replayed some of his life’s greatest triumphs and tragedies, but also mundane moments like an evening spent doing homework in 10th grade, a shopping trip with a college girlfriend, excerpts from conversations with neighbors on sunny days.
With dread, he realized that the screens were also broadcasting his secrets, things he would wish no one else to know and things he was quite sure no one else did know. Hints of unconventional sexual proclivities; moments when he had cheated his closest friends to get ahead, self-indulgent tears and outbursts of rage in his most private moments. What sort of sick person could have recorded all these things? And how?
Somewhere underneath these urgent questions, other, more arcane curiosities were stirring. The question “why me?” was at once rhetorical and academic. What reason could there have been for someone to focus their camera upon him for three decades? What meaning was he supposed to discern from it? Could eighty or ninety thirty-second snippets of his unedited life be considered art?
As he made his way from the front to the back of the gallery, his appearance in the clips began to catch up to his age as he stood there before the screens’ glowing mockery. With the end evidently in sight, his hope grew that there would be some hint at the true identity of the artist, as well as the nature of his intentions.
The penultimate clip depicted him on the street outside of a nondescript building. The large storefront windows, though bare, gave the impression that it might be an art gallery. Was it the gallery he stood in at that moment? He couldn’t quite say. Although the chronological layout of the exhibit and his appearance in the clip made it clear that this one had to be the most recent, he could recall the memory only distantly. The clip resumed its loop just after it showed him stepping through the door.
Finding no significance in that, he moved along to the last screen on the wall. At first, he saw only black, apart from the vague image of his reflection in the switched-off television monitor. This one had presumably been linked to a motion-sensor, because it sprang into life when he took his place before it, broadcasting his image directly over the place where the reflection had been.
He found himself looking directly into his own eyes, and assumed it to be a live image. But although the setting of the clip was generally the same as the place where he stood, when he examined the background he noticed that the walls of the on-screen gallery were bare. No glowing televisions; no images of his own life stretching back to the moment of childbirth. The scene showed only him, reflected upon emptiness for about ten seconds until another figure crept into the frame.
The strange man in the background wore an expression that could have been either curiosity or malice. The viewer instinctively turned around only to find himself still alone in the gallery – a fact that only now struck him as strange. Turning back to the screen, he saw that the figure had drawn closer to the foreground where the viewer’s image continued to stare forward from a place he could never remember being in real life.
“Some camera trick,” he reasoned, recognizing that it would be far from the most amazing thing he had seen during the visit. Nevertheless, he cast another sharp look over his shoulder when the strange man stood just behind him on the screen and stretched a garrote taut between its hands. Still finding nothing at his back, he resumed watching in mute horror as his own face on the screen turned red, its eyes bulging as he fought against the strange figure’s grasp. He continued watching as his face turned purple, his eyes glazed over, and his head hung limply over the wire around his neck.
For his part, the strange figure continued to wear the same dispassionate expression, even as he released his grip on the victim to let him slump out of the frame, before the eyes of the shocked and baffled onlooker. And at that, the strange man looked straight out from the screen, stepped forward, and switched off the camera. The viewer’s reflection reappeared for a long moment, and then the same clip resumed again.
“What is this all about?!” he shouted, outstretching his arms and once again looking around the gallery for another sign of life. “Who is doing this?” Receiving no response, his gaze fell upon the floor, and he realized with renewed dread and fascination that he had not yet reached the end of the exhibition. An arrow pointed the way from the terrible, infinitely-looped image to a separate room, which apparently remained unexplored.
He stepped through the door and squinted against the overpowering white light flooding the room from scores of glowing television screens.
Edward, the Killer Carney 