Claire looked at the tape as she took the elevator to the Center for Disease Control's AV room. To all appearances, it was a perfectly ordinary video tape. 'Aiden's Copy' was written on the label, and the little tab which allowed someone to record over the content was gone. Why is this so important to Rachel Keller? I could just tell the head of the CDC she won't cooperate. But I did make a promise.
Reaching the AV room, she turned on the television and moved a chair into place. I wonder how long this is? She paused before she popped it into the combination VHS-DVD recorder unit. She said to make a copy. If I'm going this far, I might as well go all the way. There was a stack of blank DVDs by the recorder; she put one in and pressed 'record' at the same time that she popped the VHS tape in the other side.
Then she watched.
First, a ring of light. Then a burst of static. Blood swirling in water; Claire was reminded of a childbirth in a tank of water she had assisted with. Amniotic fluid and blood flowed out into a billowing cloud around the mother as she labored. Was that the meaning of that ring of light—birth from the perspective of the baby?
A chair, isolated in the frame. The frame went dark. Then several light lines darted through it. It took Claire a moment to realize the darkness was hair and the light lines a comb. Then a woman in her forties, seen combing her hair in a mirror. A flicker—the mirror at a different angle, reflecting a dark haired child. Then the woman again.
A caterpillar spun itself a cocoon, winding silk out of its own spit, writhing as it did so. A nail with a drop of blood—the Snow White fairy tale? Mirror mirror on the wall? The queen sat by a window with an ebony frame, looking out at the snow while sewing. When she pricked her finger with her needle, she said, 'I want my daughter to have skin as white as snow, hair as black as the window frame, and lips as red as blood.'
A man looked down from a window, his face hostile. Birds swarmed over a horse carcass, tearing at it with their beaks, gobbling its flesh.
Black plastic over someone's face, suffocating them. An egg, rocking and fracturing as the creature within fought for its life and freedom. Birth and death again. A tree on fire. The tree of life? The crescent moon. A female symbol; the maiden, the virgin.
A ladder, which suddenly twisted into a spiral. The DNA structure. Life again. A finger being impaled on a nail. Ouch.
A mound of bread dough, filmed with time-lapse photograph, rising and swelling. A mound of maggots seething on meat. A mother robin stuffing grubs into the mouths of her greedy hatchlings.
A box of severed fingers, twitching. Stick them in some ice! They can still be sewn back on.
The woman in the mirror again—she turned to look straight into the camera, right at Claire. Her face contorted with anger, hate, and fear.
The window again, only without the man. A handful of feathers, blowing away in the wind. This is an amazing piece of work, but what does it all mean?
Dead horses on a beach, the camera pulling in for a close-up on one glazing eye.
The chair again, spinning. Too much of that, and I'll get nauseous.
The ladder, falling away. A ring of light, growing larger, disappearing into a disk of light. A woman, her face unseen, silhouetted against the light, her hair falling around her face, and growing longer and longer, until it became a rope ladder. That's almost Rapunzel, only instead of helping her prince up a tower, she's looking at someone down a deep hole.
Then a well in a clearing in the woods. Something white appeared on the edge.
Then static.
Claire sat there for a moment before she shook herself. Oh. My. That was…I don't know what it was. Powerful, that's for sure. She stopped both the tape and the DVD.
Then her cell phone rang.
Rachel waited, impatient. Please, let her have watched it. Please, God!
"Did you watch it?" burst from her as soon as the doctor reentered the room.
"Yes."
"Tell me what you saw."
"It started out with a ring of light…"
As the doctor described what she saw, Rachel grew more and more confused. That's not what I remember. Why should it have changed? Then again, the images on the tape were put there psychically by an angry dead girl, so why shouldn't they have changed?
"The last image was a well in a clearing. Something white appeared over the edge, and the video was over. Have I held up my end of the deal?"
"What? Oh. Yes. Sorry, I was just thinking. I said I would tell you everything I knew, and I will. Even though it sounds insane." Rachel began. "My involvement began when my niece Katie died suddenly…"
The explanation took a while. "…So now that you've watched it, you need to make a copy of it and show it to someone else within a week. Please. Believe me."
Rachel couldn't tell by the look on the other woman's face if the doctor believed her or not. Doctor Winslow took a deep breath. "So that's how this virus is supposedly transmitted? By watching a cursed videotape and passing it along?"
"I did tell you it would sound insane."
"Ms. Keller, your story is very dramatic, and you tell it well, but I can go through and come up with real-world explanations for every thing you've said. To begin with, there's the virus. It exists. I've seen it under the microscope. It's shaped like a ring, or at least it is in its active form, in both Noah Clay and in your son Aiden. In you, it's changed shape, become a spiral. The ring-form can multiply, the spiral doesn't. That's why you're alive. It stopped attacking your cells."
"Aiden! Have him tested again. You'll see it's changed. He's out of danger now." He has to be. "And if you have yourself tested, you'll have the ring-form in your system."
"I might. And if I do, it's because I picked it up during the autopsy. We still don't know how it's transmitted. It might be as easy to catch as a cold."
"Then what about my niece and her friends?"
"I'll put in a request to have tissue samples sent here for study. You said the tape came from a guest cabin up at Shelter Mountain, and that the body of Samara Morgan was found in an old well underneath it. That's probably the source of the contagion. The humid environment of the well, a corpse to provide nutrients—almost anything could breed under those circumstances. Your niece and her friends picked up this virus there. You went there, caught it yourself, and passed it on to Noah Clay and your son. It has an incubation period during which it multiplies in the body, and it takes a week to build up to the point where it's lethal."
"Then why didn't Katie and her friends pass it along, too?" Rachel left her chair, placed her hands flat on the glass separating them, and glared at the doctor.
"The Great Flu Epidemic of 1918 killed healthy adults while infants and senior citizens survived. We still don't understand why." The doctor glared back.
"Then—then did you get a phone call? Right after you finished watching the tape?"
The doctor smiled grimly. "I did. That's the weakest part of your story, Ms. Keller. You should have coached that little girl better, because she giggled when I picked up, and she got her line wrong."
"What do you mean? Didn't she say 'Seven Days'?"
"No. She said 'Seven Weeks'."
A/N: So, why are the images different? Read, review, and I'll write more!
