While I looked away, Mandy had risen to her feet and put her arm around me as we both sobbed horribly and looked down at the floor.

“She loved you more than you even knew,” Mandy said to me.

Mandy said those words to me as we consoled each at my mom’s grave less than a week before I watched the tape.

I reached over to stop the VCR, but stopped when I noticed something in the window behind the two of us in the old playroom.

I wasn’t going to waste time with a call now. I got back into my truck and drove straight to Mandy’s house on the other end of town.

Much like my parents, Mandy lived down a long, muddy private driveway which snaked off the highway and led up to a large, but worn-down and rustic house at the top of a steep hill. A pack of filthy dogs announced my arrival when I pulled into her gravel driveway and looked up at her house as a thick stream of smoke billowed out the chimney and into the tall trees.

The dogs nipped at the dirty cuffs of my jeans when I walked up to the porch and noticed there didn’t seem to be a light on anywhere on the property despite the fading sunset and near darkness of the wooded world around the home. The only light I was able to see came from a candle lit in the window of the living room which sat next to the front door.

I knocked softly on the wooden front door with my eyes stuck on the living room window. I noticed a breeze walk by the lit wick of the candle a few moments after my knock. I held my breath as I listened to footsteps approach the door on the other side.

I was shocked by what greeted me when the door opened. I recognized Mandy, but it looked as if she was wearing some kind of Hollywood special effect makeup which made her look like a real life witch. Wrinkled and just slightly hued yellow, her skin looked like that of an 80-year-old dying woman’s, not that of a woman just in her early-30s. Her eyes were sunken in her skull like a shrunken head and her hair was a tangled rat’s nest on the edge of dreadlocking.

I feared I visibly winced.