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Roanoke is the same. It's the same and I have changed. I don't belong here anymore. _________ Joshua Fox

Roanoke was once a strange, dark place. It was not always this way: this land of salt licks and underground springs and cathedralic caverns, this valley encircled by the Blue Ridge as though the mountains themselves had laid a cunning snare - it had been an unremarkable link in the great chain of railroad stops, a charming little place. But great shovels and spades of progress in the 1970s and 80s - Magic City, the glitter of neon reflected in the sparkle of sequins and echoed from the ruffle of taffeta before Crossroads Mall became the haunted hellhole it now is, those simpler, those more elegant times - upturned all manner of radiant shadows that splattered the city, the county, the outlying areas that cast their weary eyes to the neon star atop Mill Mountain with lightless nightmare. With the years, now some many decades later, it is harder and harder to find, as Roanoke - Big Lick - is dragged relentlessly into its droolingly comatose state of sanitized New South cosmopolitanism. The old places, with their old owners, have died, and their heirs have sold out and sold off and left - the replacing architecture has become sharp and angular and glassy, grotesquely modern to shake off anything that a Roanoker might attest to be part of his civil heritage. For the young now aged, every inch of what seem to the outsider becomes laden with memories, dim half-shades of days, nights, gone, all gone. Do you ever know when you're living in the good times? Or do you have to wait - wait interminably - to have that painful recollection at the dying shopping center, or see the necromantic way the light hits the dashboard one day going to the grocery store...or until you have to take chemo, because it's spread to your lymph nodes? A world has been lost. But we were all young once. Who remembers the eccentric neighbors eating at The Library at Piccadilly Square with its gawky lion mascot every Friday, but were always back home in time before Dallas? Who remembers the kid whose dad took him to Gold & Silver to get his first lapdance at eighteen? In the silly, heady days of anime and Pokémon in the middle of the Bush Decade, who remembers the cute gay boys that used to eat for free at Hooters because the girls were so relieved not to have customers that tried to grope them? What happened to the Fifth Quarter Party at Cave Spring Baptist? The fretful looks by high school girls in the floor-length mirrors of Leggett and Hecht's? Or the awkward but earnest dates of the Hidden Valley kids at Tanglewood Mall that began at Applebee's, moved to the Carmike 10, and ended with a sweet, slow-motion kiss in front of the Barnes & Noble? Time kills all it cannot grow - and the physical presence of memories, the ability to touch what once was there, seems to be the first to die. Yet, less, we grow too rosy - yet, indeed, lest we smile at the old days, when we were beautiful, then - one must remember the ugliness aneath the mask, the horror of the lights going out, the front doors closing, the window shades going down, all the beautiful houses of Hunting Hills and Canterbury Park becoming hiding their quotidian malevolence behind tasteful shutters and hedges of boxwood. Perhaps it is Roanoke's age and location and stature that makes it so strange: it is not a capital like Charleston, it does not have storied history like Richmond, and the college towns of the New River Valley, Radford and Blacksburg, depend on it for money and for infrastructure. So Roanoke, then, becomes a kind of crossroads - hence the name of the mall, really - and like all crossroads there is mystery, like all crossroads there are secrets...like Botetourt, like Smith Mountain Lake, but with a different, altogether malignant quality. If you know half the story, you'll get a shudder - but if you know the full story, you'll see how terrible things truly are, if only you knew where to look, and who to ask. Whether a cheating spouse out on Starkey Road on up to a vile carnivorous beast that stalks Mount Chestnut, Roanoke teems with these sorts of tales. In this awful modern age, everyone trapped in a somnambulant purgatory under the hard glimmer of this digital dystopia, it is impossible to reimagine the darklit world of the past, when a man could roam the back alleys of Williamson Road and Colonial Avenue and find all sorts of deliciously horrible things to bring him terror, delight, or both - these were the years of near-strangers meeting in parking lots to exchange bootleg Grateful Dead and Doobie Brothers cassettes and then driving away, never to see each other again, or gay men hooking up at the Trade Winds or in the gravel lot of The Park...those convulsive passions, some anonymous and some trueborn, all afire with pounding pulses and the stickiness of human stain, only the silent sentries of the streetlights bearing witness. Anonymity, that precious quality, is nearly now gone - extinct like so much else of Nature, they are all victims of the modern age. But one could be anonymous, still, not too long ago...and do terrible anonymous things. Like rent a movie from Moonlight Films. It used to be, many years ago, that there were far more - shall we say establishments that provided videos of a less than savory manner around Roanoke: the Lee Theater, that store across from Lewis-Gale, the secret rooms of King Video...there was once a healthy (or unhealthy, depending on one's bias) list. There were actually less streetlights and therefore less light pollution, so that, prowling the roads in Datsuns and Oldsmobiles, the very word underworld felt literal. At any rate, supposedly, these places would have a business card. And the business card would, in plain, typewritten letters have a name - Moonlight Films - and a number. Now, like rumors of that strange book that was supposedly dreadfully cursed that was kept somewhere in the library Downtown, people years ago who had heard the whispers would ask for it as a prank, or a legend-trip for the eighteen-plus crowd - but the results would vary wildly from place to place. When Blockbuster opened on Electric Road - eventually putting several local video places out of business before it, too, succumbed to a changing world and became a thing of ephemeral nostalgia - every employee on up to the manager expressed bafflement and confusion as to what it was. Many thought then, and many still do, that Moonlight Films was a strange rumor and nothing more. Yet it had to be real. Something was. The lady who used to run MovieTime Video, out on Brambleton, got so upset at some senior from Cave Spring that she chased him out of the store and banned him from ever coming back. A young woman in Salem was so rattled by a video she saw on a dare with her friends that she leapt out of a building, but whatever video she watched was never found. And of course there is the clichéd truism about all legends being based in truth - but what truth? There are enough details one can piece together, whispers and hearsay spread amongst the people who think their uncle or their dad saw it, thought they heard someone say they saw it, vaguely remember someone saying that they overheard someone at their church make mention of a guy they knew who saw it - and so on - that a narrative starts to form. It all begins if, and when, the proprietor of whatever video store you want to actually agrees to show you the business card - it seems it was distributed many years ago by someone who knew they would get away with it. Some places will have it locked in a drawer or a vault, and some places will deny its existence, or, like the woman who owned MovieTime, react angrily. But sometimes they show the card to those who'd ask - never giving it, just showing. Write down the number - a 703 area code, but sometime after 1998 it became 540 - or memorize it, and then dial. If you do, someone would answer, and on the other end you'd hear a guttural, heavy breathing, as though whomever answered the phones was fat and asthmatic. There will be exactly thirty seconds of silence - wait patiently, however, and you will be served. The greasy, sweaty voice would ask, in a dry monotone, a question: "Is the road from life_to _death - light? Or dark?" The answer - unobvious, opaque, not a little theatrical, utterly counterintuitive, but the answer all the same - was: "It is moonlit." If you got the answer wrong, the person on the other end would hang up...and, people would say with a sudden grimness, you should never try calling the number again. But, if you answered correctly, the voice on the other end would take a deep, slobbery breath, and spout off an address somewhere in the city - it seems to have been different for every person. The address is always an apartment that has been unrented and had no occupant for years and years, even in comparatively nice places - it's true that if you go to these very real places you'll find the door locked and the blinds closed, with no way to see or enter. But, if you have already made the proper arrangements, by calling the number and answering the question, the door would be unlocked, as though waiting for you to arrive. Walking in, the décor has not been changed, apparently, since sometime in the early 70s: the carpet would be filthy and a hideous ochre green, the wallpaper wrinkled and flaking and, worse, a glaring tangerine orange...the whole room reeking of stale nicotine and mildew, with no furniture at all, save for a single, splotchily-stained old coffee table, upon which will be a paper bag. On the bag will be your full name, written in red Sharpie. Open it, and you would find a single unlabeled video tape. You would be instructed to take the tape, but leave the bag, and put exactly $10.99 inside - and then depart promptly. What was on the tape? Here's where things get interesting: it's a snuff film. Or, rather, that's what one would normally call it, because it does result in a filmed death, but it's actually worse - far worse. For forty-two brutal, soul-destroying minutes do we see, grainy but unmistakable, a masked woman, naked save a butcher's apron pitilessly torture an identically masked man bound to a chair - in a painstaking process, all his flesh from his upper torso, but not his face, is removed, piece by piece, and then crafted into a lampshade. His arm is sawed off at the shoulder with a hacksaw, and the film jumps ahead the to the flesh and muscle and sinew stripped down so that only the bone is left. The second arm is cut off the same way - the man mercifully bleeds out at this stage - and now the legs starting at the pelvis to craft, quelle bonne idée! A comfortable chair to sit in, with the flesh from the arms and the legs not wasted at all, but made to bind the cushion. We see the man direct in front of us, but behind him are various objects which are revealed to be other furniture made from human remains. The very wall itself seems to be papered anthropodermically, which is to say with meter after meter of tanned human flesh. The identity of the male masked victim, the murderess, where and how it was filmed - none of these have ever been found or revealed. Reports to the police are routinely ignored, and people who have tried to do the right thing and turn the tape over to the authorities are unheard of...perhaps because whoever made it would get to them first. Of note: small details about hair color, stature, and even the race seem to indicate whovever's on the tape are two different people each and every time. One week is the rental term for the tape, which must be returned on the seventh day to the apartment that it was procured from. A sharp bit of advice follows this: never try to go back to the apartment after this, or to wherever you got the business card from, and_definitely_ never call that number again. What does it all mean? Is this all some kind of excessively morbid practical joke to get people to embarrass themselves at smutshops, asking for horrible things that don't actually exist to make the person look like an asshole? Or did someone - Moonlight Films - put this all together to make sure that they could do it once, and that they could do it again, and that they'd never, ever get caught? For the tape is, in fact, very real - not that you'd ever see it again. And as for the point, the object of this whole thing: the summation, the thrill of the chase, this dangerous snipehunt that has no real, obvious reward - is simply to be a part of the secret, a part of the rumor, the knowing glance amongst friends as the shadows pour into the room over drinks at Billy's or Montano's or some other elegant place where the nauseating and the morbid have no place and yet, being in Roanoke, bubble putrescently somewhere under the surface. Whoever made it, whoever set this up - they got away with it. They know they've gotten away with it, and there is no way to catch them. Too many years have passed, and too many curtains drawn over the truth - so, now, they will never get caught, and they will always get away with it. Behold then the average suburban neighborhood, all the quaint houses of Penn Forest with the streets named after birds, or the stately built-to-suit residences of Hunting Hills - behold these lovely places to live by daylight, that drown in darkness come the nighttime...behold them all, and tremble before the quintessence of horror: that which you cannot see, that which you can never know. Now that Happy's and Magic City Video have closed - really, now that every video store in Roanoke has closed - the business card, the phone number, the desolate apartments, and above all the ability to watch and do whatever one wanted without consequences have all disappeared. But that does not mean it is gone for good. After all - evil never dies. It scuttles, like vermin, when light is thrown onto it, back to the hideous twilit places where it lives, squirms, and waits. And no matter how much of old Roanoke, unique Roanoke, the Roanoke of some kind of halcyon epoch that only the sad and the lonely still recall vanishes...it will come back. Moonlight Films is still out there, somewhere. You'll never know if a dedicated search will turn up a lucky business card, and a fateful phone number - with all of those stores closing and the buildings completely emptied, there's always a chance one will turn up amongst a dead relative's effects, having been kept safe and forgotten for decades in a sock-drawer in the bedroom of one of those lovely houses in Roanoke's more expensive neighborhoods. Maybe one will fall out of a DVD case secondhand, found in a flea market. It's hard to say. Perhaps you, too, can dial it, remembering always that this life - that all lives, drenched in nostalgia and dread - are walked alone, neither light nor dark, but moonlit. But remember: there are different people on the tape, each and every time. Clearly, what you'd be dealing with here is no ordinary video rental - one that wouldn't be satisfied with a mere late fee. And you know - a good home can never have enough new accessories.