CreepsMcPasta Creepypasta Radio - "I’m an employee at an unusual movie theater. We don’t open 'Screen Zero' to the public" Creepypasta

Episode Date: March 28, 2021

CREEPYPASTA STORY►by Darkly_Gathers: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comm...​Creepypastas are the campfire tales of the internet. Horror stories spread through Reddit r/nosleep, forums and blogs, rather than word of mouth. Whether you believe these scary stories to be true or not is left to your own discretion and imagination. LISTEN TO CREEPYPASTAS ON THE GO-SPOTIFY► https://open.spotify.com/show/7l0iRPd...​iTUNES► https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...​CREEPY THUMBNAIL ART BY►Josh Harrison: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xJ...​SUGGESTED CREEPYPASTA PLAYLISTS-►"Good Places to Start"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7YCb...​►"Personal Favourites"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEa2R...​►"Written by me"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX6RA...​►"Long Stories"- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...​FOLLOW ME ON-►Twitter: https://twitter.com/Creeps_McPasta​►Instagram: https://instagram.com/creepsmcpasta/​►Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/creepsmcpasta​►Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CreepsMcPasta​CREEPYPASTA MUSIC/ SFX- ►http://bit.ly/Audionic​ ♪►http://bit.ly/Myuusic​ ♪►http://bit.ly/incompt​ ♪►http://bit.ly/EpidemicM​ ♪-This creepypasta is for entertainment purposes only-

The movie theatre complex I work at is a pretty standard one. Large lobby, popcorn and confectionery stands, and film posters everywhere you look. Numerous screens with row after row of seats and soft, here for little dusty red fabric. We have 12 screens in total, officially. They're pretty obviously laid out. You grab your ticket and head past the attendant and the little rot-off gate. Down you go through one of the wide scarlet corridors of the complex, Pass large, faintly glowing white signs with enormous numbers printed across their faces.

Screens 1 to 5 on the left, screen 7 to 12 on the right, screen 6 straight ahead. Screens 9 onwards requires you to head around a corner at the far end, and for screen 12, another still. There's a bunch of stuff back there. A large supply closet, a vending machine, restrooms, employee only areas that lead you to some of the screens backstages, not as exciting as you might think. And then, there's something else as well. We don't really know much about it.

The big boss has forbidden us from heading down, but he's never actually here. So, naturally, we ignore this rule pretty frequently. My immediate supervisor loves going down. When there's a few of us off shift, we'll typically sneak off as a little squad, head down with a few boxes of popcorn, and watch for like an hour or more.

It's always fascinating, and it's always different. Screen Zero There is no glowing sign with a zero on it, if that's what you're wondering. Screen Zero is just a nickname we've decided on, as a collective. Seems appropriate. Screen Zero can be reached by heading there a set of nondescript double doors by the storeroom, near the visitor entrance to Screen 12. We're heading there right now.

my supervisor and I and a group of three others. It's a quiet one tonight and the only background noise to our joking and low-grade banter is the muffled, general buzz and rumble of the movies playing on the screens

behind the corridor walls. The glowing panel for screen 11 flickers and words as we pass by it. The thing's been on blink for weeks now. We've been waiting on a repair for a while. What do you think is going to show tonight, Finn? Leav asked me.

That's my supervisor, Lev. He's only a couple years older than me. It's going to be a spooky one, I reply, grinning. I can feel it. I hate the scary ones, one of my colleagues mutters behind me as he stuffs a handful of popcorn into his mouth. They give me nightmares. There was a few whispers of Pussy and other such insults,

accompanied by some good-natured josting. I'm not a part of it, however. I don't blame him. It's all fun and games in the light of the day, but at night, at times like this, and especially down there in the dark, screen zero can be seriously unsettling, though that's part of the thrill, I guess. Screen zero is, at first glance, a screen like all the others, 100 or so seats, all in rows like you'd expect. The only light in screen zero, unless the screen comes alive, that is,

is the faint dim glow of the green emergency exit sign. We have looked for a switch or a series of mains for the electrics, but our search has so far been unsuccessful. Nor have we been able to find any way backstage. Screen Zero seems to be triggered into life once everyone in the room has taken a seat. We reached the end of the complex corridor, past the panel for screen 12. We push through the double doors by the storeroom. It opens onto a set of narrow and undecorated stairs,

leading down and around into the darkness below, and the mood shifts as it always does to one of excitement, if rather anxious energy, and we begin our steady descent. The screen, typically once everyone who has chosen to venture down has settled, begins to rumble and quietly roar. In that way, the movie theatres always do before the movie starts to play. The anticipation builds. If you are particularly attuned, you can feel the subtle vibration of the speakers through the seats.

In screen zero, some of the other swear they can feel a soft breeze against their face as the process begins, a stirring of the airs around their skin, though, I have to say, I've never felt this myself. We're not sure how, but once we're quiet and watching, without fail, that's when the screen always begins to play. It cycles through weird and sometimes downright disturbing commercials and trailers, but we never get to see the actual film. The movie. It just never arrives. The anticipation builds and builds and builds.

The commercials and the trailers never stopped coming. The longest I've ever been down in Screen Zero was about an hour. But I know that sometimes the other guys tried for an overnight session one time, around Halloween. I think they made it about three hours before it all became too much and they bailed. There were four of them in total, but three of them don't come down to Screen Zero anymore. Two of them quit the job outright. The fourth was Lev, but even he won't talk to me

about what he saw towards the end of their little viewing party. Just that the movie never played. We reached the bottom of the staircase and head through the lightless corridor that lies ahead and through the heavy doors

at the opposite end. Screen zero awaits. Ten bucks say his dead girl plays tonight, someone mutters. I'll take you up on that, say someone else, amidst the chuckles, and we scoge down the aisle to the seats in the very middle, the best in the house. The commercials and trailers that Screen Zero chooses to play for us are almost always different,

unique in their own right. That's part of what makes it so fascinating, but Dead Girl is one of the screen's rare examples of repetition. It's a trailer that varies subtly in its content, but always features the same titular character, the Dead Girl, for a movie, officially titled, You left her behind and she died. Not the catchies of titles, and one that often draws laughs when reminisce the bout in the lobby upstairs,

but when it appears in simple white text upon the black title card before the trailer, I can never help a terrible sense of sinking dread. I know the others feel it too. I'm hoping we won't be seeing it tonight, but such is never guaranteed. I think about my previous experiences in Screen Zero as I take my seat

and that all too familiar rumble picks up at the edges of the walls. Goose bumps ripple across my skin and I feel the urge to turn around to look behind me and I do so. Behind is nothing but empty seats and shadow. I look back to the screen.

Screen Zero has shown us all sorts of curious and twisted scenes over the course of our many visits. The commercials are typically a little less frightening than the trailers, if still rather unsettling at heart. I remember an ad for something called The Grindr. The screen flashed with blueprints for an enormous cylindrical machine, all that rotated around and around, a picture of linear gears and barbs and crunching metal teeth.

It was calmly discussed, and, I presume, explained by a man off screen, speaking in a language that none of us understood. Sounded vaguely European. The animated blueprints revealed, after a little more discussion, a steady moving conveyor belt, one that led right into the path of the grinder. These animations were lost in favour of a more realistic 3D graphic of a large, clear container filling up with a dark, red-black fluid, affixed to the grinder side as it turned and turned. The man's voice then suddenly cut out, replaced by silence, and, after a few seconds more, the commercial cut out entirely. abruptly ending in black. There was a public safety announcement played on the screen once.

A group of kids, aged around 9 or 10, were talking and playing with a group of Playmobile figures around a barbecue grill in a warm garden. The camera kept panning in real close on one of the figures to the sound of a beating heart, growing steadily louder and louder. The figure was, eventually, carelessly dropped by the kid who was playing with it,

and the camera watched it tumble onto the barbecue grill and fall down past the metal grid onto the coals below. The camera maintained a slow pan as the children's laughter faded away and the figure started to burn and melt. The flames grew brighter and brighter in intensity and not until the little toy had been melted beyond recognition did the screen cut mercifully to black. Fire is not a toy, it said in yellow text.

Keep your children safe from the dangers of fire. Even thinking about it makes me shiver. I remember the screen playing as a commercial for an enormous water park. Indoors, somehow, which I would deem impossible, given the park's supposed its eyes, and the place was entirely empty. The water flowed, the camera panned across a plethora of exciting, and, upon reflection, a great many physically impossible slides, but no people.

It was rainforest-themed, beneath an enormous glass-like dome. Some other sides intersected with each other, the water flowing impossibly down only their predestined tracks, rippling with nothing more than a few bubbles where the streams intersected. The camera dove down great tunnels, tunnels seemingly without end, filled with spiraling colors and flashing lights and cascading water, widening into sizes that made no logical sense,

merging with more of the tunnels and carrying off and away into the unknown. One of the tunnels was pitch black and made me feel very cold as the camera passed by, lingering for a moment on its entrance, and the churning grey-white foam that frothed there. There's something down there, I remember thinking, there's something in the tunnel. One time it just played as footage of an empty screen zero. For three full minutes, just footage of the screen's empty seats in the darkness. That could have well been the creepiest, actually. I was watching through my fingers, ever expecting for something to happen, for something to jump out from the shadows.

But nothing ever did. My thought process is interrupted by Screen Zero's dutiful awakening. I exchanged and nervous but excited glances with the guys. My heart beats with fearful anticipation. Here we go. Screen Zero flickers into life. One of the guys to my left munches quietly on a mouthful of popcorn. The first commercial cuts through the rumbling quiet with such intensity that I jump in fright in my seat.

Welcome, announces a sharp voice, and the screen rolls back to show us a man in a brown suit, walking across a hill of fresh green grass. He grins, revealing a mouth full of bright white teeth. Welcome indeed, friends to be, my pioneers, to a place that defies the limits of the world we know. It's time to re-question your assumptions about, what it means to be alive. He sounds British. He throws out of hand

and the camera pans across the theme park of astronomical complexity. A picture of interlocking rails and whirring animatronics. Dream world salutes you, the man proudly proclaims, and through a series of fades we had taken around the theme park.

We see a fountain covered in robotic little frogs. The yellow orange eyes of a fiberglass dragon flashes bright as it turns on its pedestal in the midst of a roller coaster, one that passes through a cave. The cogs turn beneath a green-gray plastic of its body, and it opens its mouth, almost as if it is about to try and speak. Then the scene transitions to a colossal, animatronic whale,

rising up from a body of water, an electric whale's song pulses out from its form as the water above it is pushed aside. I grimace. This spectacle fills me with a deep and bizarrely primal fear. The whale looks ever so slightly too fake to be real. The movement of his jaw are too robotic.

Its eye looks just a little too painted and the result is an enormous animatronic monstrosity. I dread to think what vicious gears and pistons churn beneath it in the dark water. Harry Lawson's dream world reads the text across the screen

opening three not opening third or opening in three months or three weeks etc just opening three three the screen cuts the black and the commercial is replaced by another the screen fades into an aquarium bathed in a pale icy light I shiver I get the impression that the aquarium is cold and I feel this cold second hand. A series of unusual circles appear, overlaid on the screen and the panning shot of the aquarium beyond. There are three of these circles, some darker than others, and two of them are broken in places. I move my head from side to side and realize that the circle in the

middle seems to be closer than the others, as if it is being pushed out of the screen towards me. It's an optical illusion of some kind, one that makes me feel rather ditty. The circles vanish and the sound of grating stone, like rock being dragged over a sheet of rough granite, is played through the speakers, accompanying an atmospheric bubbling from the various tanks. The camera takes us through the aquarium, though I do not recognize any of the fish. We are shown silvery little creatures with tiny blackbeat eyes, rippling silently through the water of the home. Curious cylindrical crabs with tall, towering shells, ambling and shuffling across the sands

at the bottom of their tank. Eels lined with fur slither grotesquely around and over each other in an exhibit filled with mossy green water. The pupils of their eyes are rectangular, like those of a goat. The ruined and mutilated carcass of some now unrecognizable creature is dumped into the body of dark water and is dragged down into the depths by a great black lobster-like claw, one of horrific size. I squirm in my seat. Something is different tonight. These commercials feel more real than usual.

I hate it, I decide, and I want to leave, but I refuse to be attacked as a posse by the others. I won't be the first to get up. I won't. It doesn't help that to do so, I believe, feels like breaking some kind of twisted spell. And I'm not walking up those creepy-a-stairs in the dark by myself. I remain where I am as beads of sweat begin to bud across my skin.

The commercial continues and shows us a mermaid, beautiful, if a little eerie. She doesn't look like a person in a costume or CGI. She looks real. And she stares at the camera in sad silence, her hair floating about to bare shoulders in the icy water. She's lonely, I decide. The ad cuts out, replaced by another. The walls of screen's ear are rumbled dutifully on. The faint green glow of the emergency exit sign flickers in the darkness.

And, when the screen relights, I feel my stomach lurch in distress. No, someone murmurs in dismay to my right. It's her. It's the dead girl. It's too soon, I think, in curious panic. She's not supposed to appear until the trailers. It's too early. It's way too early for this.

I have to remind myself that I'm just watching a screen. They're just pictures on a screen. I'm not in any danger. We are not in any danger. There is no crunching or rustling in the seats around me now. In death silence we watch, unable to take her eyes from the screen. The trailers and promos for The Dead Girl are always slightly different, but at their base contain the same core element.

The camera begins on the girl's corpse. She is still as death. Eyes wide and lifeless, teeth clenched. She is slumped in the seat of a movie complex, not this similar to her own. The light is cold and blue, as is the shade of her skin. Her eyes are also blue, only paler. She stares at nothing, up towards the ceiling. She has something clasped tight in her hand.

She always does, but, as always, I cannot see what it is. The camera panns slowly back, so terribly, painfully slow. I want to look away, but I can't bring myself to do so. As more of the room is made clear to the audience, the edges of the theatre seats are revealed to be tipped in frost. The sound of wind blowing beyond the walls grow subtly in volume as snow starts to drift into the girl's complex.

My heart thrums in my chest. The camera has begun to rotate. Round it goes, and the broken walls of the complex are made clear. Beyond their edge is only bleak white mist. In another few seconds, the camera will meet the gaze of the dead girl. Her eyes will bore back into mine. The anticipation is torture, and I cringe in discomfort. Any second now, and our eyes meet.

The camera cuts to a close-up shot of the girl's face, then fades the black. You left her behind, reads the text, and she died. The words hang in the void of the screen for a moment more. Then they too disappear. Our row of seats is utterly silent. No one breathes. The great robe of tension upon which the atmosphere is balanced grows tighter and torter, stretched horrifically and unnaturally.

Guys, I want to say, it's time to go. Please, we need to leave. But I cannot bring myself to do it. An irrational fear has taken a hold of me, one that claims that by doing so I will single myself out to screen zero and I might as well draw a target across my face. So I remain motionless, staring, dead girl's pale blue eyes still burned like ice into my mind. The screen lights up with the next commercial. The cycle continues. The camera pans in on a long, low building, well maintained and wildly out of plight.

place, nestled as it is amongst the squalid, run down street of an unfamiliar city. A little jingle plays from the speakers, one which is wholly unremarkable, yet grotesquely upbeat. Had the jingle played on TV in the friendly light of my living room, I doubt I would have even looked up from my phone. But here, played in the darkness of screen zero, following the quiet horror of an unexpected dead girl promo. It's sick. It makes my skin crawl. The camera draws us through the double doors of the building, then the doors beyond, and the place is revealed to be a restaurant of some kind. At first glance, it seems relatively normal. Deep, scarlet decor, wealthy-looking patrons eating their meals at the tables.

The air seems to ripple ever so subtly with heat, and it's as if I can actually smell the sense that the restaurant boasts. Rich pork, fragrant spices and fine meat. But the longer you look, the more you look, the more you're. start to notice. It's all meat for one thing. Every plate is piled with ribs and slabs of steak, sticky and leaking. As the camera travels through the restaurant and passes the patrons by, we hear their snorts and burps of gluttony, their ravenous chomping and munching and grinding teeth.

We see the juices fly from their lips, and the patrons themselves. Their skin, upon closer inspection, is covered in scales, some more flesh-colored, and Some closer to grey. I grip the edges of my seat as one. Only one of the nearest patrons bulging eyes swivels around in its sockets to regard the camera. The other staring at the plate of meat being lowered by the waitress to the table. She has three. The waitress has three eyes.

One of the patrons, to my utter disgust, right near the back, appears to be little more than an enormous, scrabbling beetle. They are lost to sight As the camera pushes through the doors to the kitchen And my stomach twist and turns in bitter revulsion A large woman stands proudly Hands clasped before her Her skin is greyish And her eyes bulge out like all the rest of them

Her neck is lost of rolls Her neck is lost a rolls of several great chins And when she opens her mouth It reveals her rose of broken, sharpened teeth Far sharper than teeth have any right to be She speaks about a grand reopening But I struggle to pay attention to all words I cannot tear my focus away from what I can see behind her

In amongst the chefs The human corpses Many are headless and limbless Sizzling away behind the counter Dripping succulents as they are turned on their spits bubbling and steaming on the grills My mouth fills with pre-vumped saliva And I have to force the sensational way

I watch a chef bring down his blitzers and slice the fingertips from a hand of a severed arm. Only the finest, the woman finishes, farm-raised and locally sourced, and the screen cuts to a card of deep, burnt red. Now hiring, it reads across it in gold, with its turns and conditions in small print along the bottom. There is no time to read it, however, before the commercial ends,

and, as it does so, I can feel the heat of the room leave with it, and we are plunged back into the cool darkness of the theatre. Speak, Finn, speak, say something. I summon from within every ounce of will I can find. Lev, I whispered to my right, in a voice that shakes and is barely audible. Lev, what do we do? He hears me, I know it, but he doesn't respond. His knuckles are white against the armrest.

The next commercial plays It's her again It's dead girl The exact same scene as before The silent and empty movie theatre The cold and staring lifeless eyes The frost-tip seats and the edges of snow In the rising wind

Please I beg silently Please make it stop But the trailer plays on If anything a little slower Than it did before The camera rotates to meet a blind gaze It holds on the close-up of her face, then cuts out once again. You left her behind, and she died, reads the text.

The screen changes. I can't take much more of this. We made a decision coming down here tonight. A real, terrible mistake. This is so much worse than what it's supposed to be. A loud and clown-like laughter burst from the speakers as the pictures on screen light up in a myriad of sickly, artificial enhanced colours.

Wow, says a little girl as the camera zooms in on a face, then down to her hand. We are shown a pair of ancient dice sitting in the centre of a palm and carved from a thick and deep red-brown wood. They are quite obviously out of place in their cartoonish, exaggerated surroundings.

Hey, let me see those, calls a boy, and the girl gleefully throws the dice through the air and the boy catches them in his fist. Another series of zooms and close-ups. There's a whole group of them now, of kids all looking at the dice and dressed in bright primary colours. Hey kids, comes a disemboded voice,

and the children look up the screen, smiles wide. Yeah, they replies one. Are you feeling lucky? They cheer and clap in response as a jaunty xylophone pop tune bubbles away in the background. Make a wish and give them a roll. just keep him close and watch your soul,

sings the voice merrily. I wish for ice cream, says the boy, and he crouches the roll the dice across the ground. The camera follows the movements with exaggerated angles and quick-changing close-ups. The dice land heavily on a four and a three. The camera suddenly swivels and the colours are temporarily blurred.

The focus shifts to the street and an ice cream truck skids to a stop by the front lawn. Hey! calls the driver, adjusting his cap. What do you know? My freezer's just gone and broke. You kids want any of this ice cream before it melts. The camera shifts to a POV of the ice cream man as the cheering kids run the length of the grass for their free cones.

He starts to hand them down to the jumping, bubbly children. All, except for the boy who actually rolled the dice. He is not the camera's focus, but he can be seen in the background, writhing and screaming in the grass. The others have left him behind. He cries out in pain as red cuts and fresh scars that slice in the way across his bare skin,

as if marked by an invisible blade. His screams are lost beneath the music. The camera shows up a close-up of the dice, still in the grass, and a third girl grabs them up. She looks into the camera with a smile, ice cream cones slowly starting to drip into her other hand. I'm so sick of my mom, she exclaims with a grin.

I wish she was dead The laugh track plays And the screen cuts the black The commercial ends Jesus It's so cold in here I think to myself shivering

Since when was screen zero so cold This is hell I'm trapped in a nightmare here We have to go But nobody moves And the watch party continues The screen bathes the seat in front in a soft yellow light.

It shows us yet another movie theatre, one like ours, more or less empty, and occupied by only a handful of guests, sat right in the very centre. For one long, terrible moment, I think that it is us. That screen zero is showing us footage of ourselves.

There's Lev sat in the middle. I tense right up. But no, it isn't us. The people on screen are smiling. They are laughing. I can't hear what they're saying, but they're talking in low voices. I have to examine him closely, but the teenager in the middle is not Lev. Similar for sure, but the bone structure is slightly different.

His hair is lighter. Lev, someone whispers to my right, isn't that your dad? Lev again does not respond. Could it be, I think? Could that be Lev's dad back when he was young? There are five of them in the group, four guys and a girl. The girl alone stops laughing. She quietly disengages with the group and looks slowly up at the camera,

her bright blue eyes glittering a little green in the yellowish light. I swallow a sharp intake of air. It's her, it's the dead girl. But I have no time to process the implications of this realization before the scene cuts out yet again. A white message flashes up in the black. The following trailers are appropriate for the rating of this film. Then it disappears.

The text is replaced by the title card for a movie that does not exist. It's called Broken and Rebels from the Skeleton, Rated, NC17. The day began as any other, whispers the narrative voice of a young woman as the scene fades in. It's fall in New England. She is locking up the front door of a little house and heading down the street. drawing a coat about her shoulders against the breeze. When, without even a word of warning, everything changed. The woman steps into a thin, but wide cluster of orange-red leaves, and she stumbles.

She trips and falls right through. She falls through the leaves as if there were water and disappears from sight. The camera shakes and we see her panicked. She's falling through a shadowy tunnel. The leaves blown all around a body. The leaves fly past the camera. and they were replaced by great webs and hordes of spindly spiders, watching her fall with her hungry green eyes. A close-up is played of a pair of fangs that tear into the back of her hand, ripping off a slither of flesh with bursts of blood.

The woman screams and twists. As she falls through the tunnel, she is caught with a mortal suddenness in the strings of a great web, one which promptly and mercilessly snapped her neck. The camera holds its position. the spiders draw in Leave her alone calls out a voice and a flash of light encompasses the screen

The scene fades in slow And we see the woman in a childhood bedroom Metal bars can be seen protruding from a neck Connecting her head to her shoulders She raises an arm with an accompanying Mechanical Whir And the camera zooms in on the back of her head

Through her hair as she rises to a robotic stand There is the spider hidden in a crevice he is built in the back of a skull, tugging on wires and little metal wheels with his many legs. I will fix you, he whispers, you're safe with me. Dramatic classical music starts to play over the speakers and the audience has granted several wide, panning shots of New England cities and landscapes.

We see the woman being harassed on a bus by a gang of teenagers. We see a loser hand as she tries to brush the teeth with a cluster of bolts and gears. She never reacts Only stares expressionously ahead We see her standing on the side of a bridge on the rain When we see the spider eating its way through a corpse of a rat It cuts abruptly to black with a beat of a drum Coming soon

Darkness Lev I whisper We need to go man We need to go before Before the trailer for the dead girl plays I mean to say Because I know that it will be different this time

It'll be different for the worse But I cannot bring myself To say the words I can't do it The weight of the environment forces me back into strange silence The trailers play on Cornfield

This one is called Rated RATED R And sure enough The opening shot is one of a cornfield Gold and green Shifting and stirring in gentle breeze The camera remains fixed in place as a rumbling rises in the speakers,

reverberating through the seats and the floor and the corn starts to shake a little more violently. The sounds of heavy scuttling and a low grinding and clicking becomes clear amidst the rubble. And just when I can take the growing tension no more, a colossal centipede creeps into view in the distance. Massive and unearthly, it winds his way through the corn, ever scanning for the most rewarding route with its lightless black eyes.

It tears the corn from its stems with its pincers and choose it up as it scuttles up close and right across the view of the camera, shaking it a little as it does so. Release, summer, flashes the text across the cornback drop. There is a date beside it, but the numbers are scrambled. It cuts the black, and the next trail plays. And we are too late. It is time it would seem to pay the price for our inaction.

My heart pounds loud and hard in my chest, as if it is trying to burst free, as if it is trying to escape from this terrible place. You left her behind, and she died, rated NC-17. No, someone murmurs to my left,

but there is nothing we can do now, but watch. We may as well be bound to our seats. It opens on that all-too-familiar theatre complex, the dark rows of seats cast under a cold blue light. I shiver, The temperature drops. The camera movements remain the same, but...

She's not there. The dead girl is nowhere to be seen. Despite the icy chill in the air, the beads of sweat across my neck and shoulders begin to leak down my back. The ground shakes. The wind rises and the snow starts to fall. Whether it falls on screen or in real life, all around us here in Screen Zero,

I could not say. I cannot look away. The seats are tipped with frost. The camera reveals her same wrecked walls That's swirling snowy mist beyond But the dead girl's seat is empty. A sudden and biting fear Terrible beyond word strike hard

And holds me tight in its jaw. She's here In screen zero I realize in panic. She's in one of the seats behind us. She's right behind us. at this exact moment. Does anyone else have this same thought simultaneously?

Is it one that is shared? Because Liv speaks now. His voice low but loud as our hair is whipped back from her head. The wind is ice and it blows with the force of a gale. Don't turn around. He commands as the rushing force of the hurricane blows in my ears. Don't turn around. She isn't here.

She can't be. Hit a screen, nothing more. Just don't turn around. The voice of a girl, impossibly loud and painfully shrill, screams in fury from the speakers, forcing them into crackling and sparking despair. You left her behind. You left her behind in the waist. How could you? How could you leave her behind?

It wasn't me, left shouts in defence. I swear it. You left her behind, screams the response with the force of a barreling storm. you left her behind With the final piercing shriek And a roar that rumm was the foundations of the building We are pressed back into our seats And forced to close her eyes tight shut

Against the burst of the iciest wind so far I can feel the sting of it on my cheeks On my ears I can feel the torrents of snow And sleet against my skin I feel it But when the gust has passed And we are able to open our eyes once again

The screen is just as it was No frost, no snow, no wind. The screen is black. The speakers are quiet. Silence. And something happens next that has never happened before. Not to my knowledge at least. The trailers, to my dismay, come to an end.

This isn't supposed to happen. None of this is supposed to happen. Did we push our look too far? did we push Screen Zero beyond its limits? The director's title card appears. It tells us the name of the film, the name of Screen Zero's exclusive film. It is called The Waste's An Interactive Journey.

Unrated. The sense of dread that overcomes me as the picture fades gradually in from the black is like nothing I've ever experienced, nor have ever experienced since. As it washes over me, I feel as if I'm drowning. I am drowning down here in the dark of screen zero.

A lone violin plays softly and sadly through the speakers, and the camera begins a long, slow pan across the bound field of rock and snow. As far as the eye can see, from grey horizon to grey horizon, is empty space. Ruined columns of stone and vast flat plains of white. A pack of shadowy walls appear from behind a stone.

They pad towards the camera And as they draw closer Their forms become clearer They are headed right for the camera They are looking right through it They are looking right through the screen And to my horror I recognise them

I recognise each and every wolf Because They are us They are the group of guys that sit beside me Myself included Our skin and bodies and faces stretched nightmarishly over the skeletons of wolves. Eyes aglow.

There is me, padding through the snow. Lev is beside me. He pulls back the lips of his twisted human wolf jaw, and snars and snaps. And that's it. That's the end of it. The trigger. Lev, the real Lev, springs up from a seat with a scream.

It is the cataclyism that we so desperately needed, and the dominoes fall as fast as a blink. The entire group is on their feet in an instant in the throes of panic, shouting and swearing and pushing and clattering for the exit. Back we run past the seats and up the aisles in the dark as the wolves snap and snarl at our heels. Back we push through the heavy double doors, back through the corridor and back up those narrow backroom stairs, back into the scarlet corridor of the lobby, with bloodshot eyes and drenched in sweat. And back we stumble round the corners and into the theatre's main lobby. terrified, drained, but safe, safe and alive.

That was one of the worst nights of my life. They've quit the following day and stopped responding to my messages. I'm still an employee. I need the money, but I called out sick and used the great many off days in the following weeks, and I'll be damned if I'm ever heading back down to Screen Zero. Screw that. Never again. because as if all that wasn't bad enough, there's still something I haven't mentioned yet, something we saw at the very end of our experience,

and every time I found myself dwelling in curiosity on the meaning behind the movie, behind the movie titled The Waste's and Interactive Experience, behind the appearance of the Dead Girl, and of supposedly Lev's father and all the rest, I think of what I saw on my way out. As we pushed and shoved the waist through the shadows of screen zero to the exit.

There was something new on the wall. Something changed. Something that could have only been put up by hand by a physical presence in the theatre. It was a poster. A fixed to the wall. One that was not there when we went in. I'm sure of it.

It was a poster for, You left her behind and she died. It was blue and cold and showed, in the lower half, the head and shoulders of the dead. girl, staring out at nothing with those lifeless eyes. Above her, retreating into the distance where a row after row of theatre seats all tipped in frost. And, at the very back, at the very back of the poster, where a chaotic group of human-shaped

shadows, pushing and jostling and sprinting their way through the swelling mists.