After the Credits End

What begins as an innocent movie night with friends that hadn't seen each other in a long time, ends in eternal horror

Movie night finally happened after weeks of delays, and Jessie was ecstatic. He'd finally cleared out his old office room and made space for a large sofa, and his roommate had to tell him to stop gushing over the projector he'd gotten from a garage sale the other day 'for a steal!', because "If you tell me one more time about how you talked him down to an unreasonable price--YES, I said unreasonable--get over it, I will walk out into traffic."

The movie of choice had come down to the classic that he and his friends had only seen on their TV's, or the new box office hit that everyone couldn't stop talking about. Naturally he landed on the classic. He'd just finished getting the last snacks and drinks in order when he heard a knock at the door--his friends had arrived.

The night passed in a blur as they chatted about the setup and how life was treating them, and before long, they were all sat on the comfortable velvet sofa, that other than a couple claw marks on the back, was in pristine shape. Jessie turned off the lights, and they quieted down as the opening credits began.

It was a wave of nostalgia as the movie progressed between the high highs, the low lows, and everywhere in between, bringing the emotion of not only the story itself to life, but also the memories of times long past, before the complexities of that which we call life. Jessie laughed, he cried, and he cried from laughter, getting lost in the euphoria being in such a charged atmosphere among his favorite people in the world. Those same people that he once spent almost every day with, hadn't been around him much in years--in fact, it was a miracle that one of them was even here, since they'd completely lost contact if not for the person that now sat beside him that mentioned they could invite her.

The movie quickly came to its climax, and as the credits began rolling, that feeling that sometimes happens when a particularly vexing movie comes to an end--the kind where you're unsure of where you are for just that single moment, a moment of eternity perhaps, washed over Jessie like a tide rolling in. The bright white text over the pitch black rose, and rose, and before long, the final logo ascended beyond the screen, leaving a darkness blacker than black, and it jolted Jessie back to himself.

"Had the projector turned off?" He thought to himself. Then, as he looked to his friends, he realized he could not see them at all. "Jenn? Trey? John?" No reply. "Ha-ha, very funny. Seriously, can anyone find a light switch?" He went to get up, but noticed that he wasn't carrying his snacks anymore. In fact, he couldn't even feel his own body, and the same voice he'd just spoken with was eerily missing as well. He tried to laugh, then yell, then scream, but no sound came out. As he looked anywhere in the endless void, he saw--or rather he didn't see--that it was simply that. An endless void.

What became of his home, his room, his friends, and even his self, there was no answer to. His entire being reduced to a pho-consciousness--an unending purgatory, built with purpose perhaps for his sins, or perhaps for no purpose at all. There he would stay, in but a moment of eternity.

"That's why I'm scared of ending the movie credits, I even had nightmares in the childhood of that, like I was alone in a dark room with movie credit scene and it finished and I was alone in a dark room." -Kitulous, the inspiration for this short story.