She had her phone in her pocket and let her hand linger over it as she edged closer to the screen. The staticky hiss, though soft, was playing across her nerves, stringing them tight. She slowly lowered herself into a crouch as she looked for a way to turn it off. Then she fell still, the harsh light playing across her hands as she looked down.

A tape protruded from the VCR player beneath the screen. Two words had been written across the label in heavy red ink: Margot’s Tape.

It felt like a bad kind of invitation, like a fortune-teller asking if you wanted to know when you were going to die. An invitation like that boded only harm and fear.

But she couldn’t turn away. Not from her own name, written in a hand she didn’t recognize, on a tape she never remembered seeing.

Her fingers trembled as she touched the yellowed, peeling label. She pushed, and the tape shuddered into the inner mechanisms of the player, swallowed up among the gears and spindles like into a beast’s gnawing mouth.

The equipment was so old that she half expected it to be broken. But then the static cut out and the screen jumped to life.

The image was grainy and poorly lit. Static still corrupted it, distinct lines traveling up the image in loops. The tape had been damaged. Possibly through time or possibly from being played too often.

The image showed coils of red fabric, like stage curtains. They twitched, then pulled backward in stiff tugs, revealing a painted cardboard backdrop. It depicted a house on one side and trees on the other, both on top of a grassy field. The images were kept simple—almost cartoonish—but had been painted with reasonable skill. It held the atmosphere of low-budget children’s programming from the eighties or nineties.

This has to be from some kind of kid’s show. Margot, on her knees, face almost uncomfortably close to the screen, stared into the image’s details. They held a disjointed, uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. As though she’d once known this tape very, very well.

A woman’s voice spoke. “There once was a little girl.”

The volume was low. Margot scrambled for the buttons on the television’s front, and green bars flashed across the screen as she increased the audio.

A hand puppet appeared on-screen, walking in front of the house. It wore a smock dress and had brown wool for hair. Two marks from a felt-tip pen had been used for its eyes, but to Margot’s discomfort, no one had given it a mouth. It stared out of the screen, the eyes wide set and blank.

“The girl lived in a house with her parents,” the voice continued. It had become distorted along with the tape, the words stretching and burbling and growing thick like molasses. “All day, she played in the yard around the house.”