I worked at Blockbuster in 2008 – I think I know why most of the stores started shutting down.

More and more often these days – and always without warning – I find myself in our old store. Well, a darker version of it.

It certainly hasn’t aged well. Instead of the small and airy space it once was, it’s now door-less, windowless. Even worse, endless. The actual store itself is long gone, it was torn down sometime in 2010, I believe; a Starbucks was built in the old location. It’s funny, sometimes I swear I can catch the faintest whiff of burnt coffee floating on the air – it’s a nice change from the usual odor of mold, fear, and decay.

In this version, the ceiling tiles show dark water stains, lights hang astray dangling by thin and fraying wires from the ceiling, dimly flashing before leaving entire swaths of the store bathed in darkness. The carpets are faded and often the original patterns are obscured by years' worth of rust-colored stains. Many of the shelves and fixtures have fallen, creating more obstacles in my path, but at least the bodies seem disappear eventually.

Sometimes, I have room enough to run through a wide chamber with no ceiling or walls in sight, but other times it’s so narrow or the ceiling is so low that I have no choice but to waste precious time flattening myself and slowly inching sideways through a 3 foot wide opening, or crawling on already bruised and bleeding knees.

The other thing about those small spaces, besides wondering if you’ll suddenly see him emerge, inching towards in the darkness behind you – or worse, in front out you – is that you’re more at risk of knocking something off the shelves.

The other thing that calls the store home, he doesn’t have ears in the conventional sense, but seems to have excellent hearing. My visits to this other place are shrouded in the dread and knowledge that he will eventually catch me. I saw what happened to Lizzy – she was so tired, one day she simply sat down and refused to get back up. That’s how I learned that he seems to have a taste for eyes.

Maybe starting with the eyes is even a small kindness of sorts, that way you don’t have to witness what happens next.

We call him Benny, because what better name for an unholy and barely describable abomination than the title of the DVD that it emerged from?

At my store, the beginning of the end was on a humid July evening. Lizzy and I were re-shelving returned DVDs when she found one nestled on the rack between the others that clearly didn’t belong. It looked old, its outer plastic layer was a bit battered, the plain white DVD case was yellowing along the spine; it didn’t even have a lock on it. She opened it to reveal an otherwise plain disc with ‘Benny '78’ handwritten on it in loose cursive.

It wasn’t the first home movie someone had tried to sneak onto our shelves (and in our experience, they were seldom of the family friendly variety). We pulled it right away and stuck it behind the counter.

About a week later, minutes within the store opening, a disheveled looking customer began frantically pounding on the front window. He had an air of anxiety, desperation, and something else about him that I couldn’t quite put my finger on but made me grateful for the thick glass acting as a barrier between us.

He demanded to speak to our manager, I gestured that the doors were unlocked, but he refused to so much as set foot inside the store. His eyes were bulging, the skin around them scratched and covered with dried blood, the stains of which still lingered on his fingertips. He stared at me so intensely, only breaking his gaze when his eyes would suddenly dart side to side, as if there was something lurking just beyond his periphery that demanded his immediate and undivided attention.

Although muffled, I could hear him muttering things about hallways, eyes, and hunger. I remember being profoundly relieved that I wasn’t the one that had to deal to him.

Our shift lead went out to talk to him, and eventually came back carrying a DVD case, pristine except for the dried bloody fingerprints. It was one of our new releases from the same section where the plain white box had first shown up, inside was the wrong disk, it was Benny '78.

We were supposed to always verify that the DVD in the case was the right one (and undamaged) before renting it out, but it looked like someone had missed that one.

After that, Benny '78 started showing up in more and more cases belonging to popular titles. At first, we were able to catch them before they went out without too much impact to business.

Within a month, though, we were pulling more movies off the shelf than we were renting out. We didn’t know where they were coming from – some did come in through the return box, but many seemed to change overnight right on the shelves. The cases were locked, meaning if someone was switching them, it would’ve likely been an employee, but the cameras didn’t capture anyone or anything touching them at all.

It got to the point where every single case we opened contained Benny '78. Even for new shipments right off the truck, it seemed like not long after they touched our shelves, they too would contain that telltale disk with the cursive handwriting.

Customers stopped coming in – at first, I thought it was due to a bad experience or our mostly bare shelves, but over time I noticed that some of the teachers and kids from my senior class would miss hours or days at school – they sometimes stopped showing up entirely.

We had no choice but to close. Typically, the standard procedure would have been to mark down and sell the new and the non-damaged rental DVDs, but for us, well, corporate told us that every single movie in the store needed to be burned. So, our entire rental stock went up in flames, leaving nothing but the warped remains of plastic and a long-lingering and acrid black smoke.

We thought we had been so careful, but we made a mistake.

After we destroyed all the rentals, my boyfriend Charlie had nabbed a few marked down DVDs from our new stock, still pristine in their plastic wrap.

I didn’t even think to check the disk in the case before he popped it in – it wasn’t a rental; it had never even been opened. We’d never thought to check, much less burn, the new movies.

At first the screen was as white as the first DVD case had been – we thought it was a bad disk but as Charlie when to turn it off, a black and grey static filled the screen and I found myself so disoriented that I nearly forgot where I was, what I was doing. Then, I felt him seep out of my eyes like painful, forced, oily tears. He spread like black ink, bleeding into the shadows of the room and always just slightly out of my line of sight. I never saw him fully until he started pulling me into his world, that place adjacent to our own.

I remember the exact moment I did see him for the first time, those endless pits of eyes, a dark form not entirely solid. Lizzy told me to leave her and run, but sometimes I still wonder if I could’ve done something to save her.

When he pulls you in, it may be for minutes, hours, or if you’re particularly unlucky, days. And then, just as suddenly as you were in, you’re back home.

Charlie didn’t last very long. I haven’t seen him since 2012, neither in the real world, nor the winding halls of the old store.

I’ve met a few other former employees and customers that came from where the halls leading to other stores converge and I learned the same thing happened in their stores, too. Some – those that looked especially worse for the wear – said they received the initial video as a VHS.

It sounds like the very first copy was a Betamax that just appeared one day on the shelf of the original store back in the late 1980s. It was like a contagion, corrupting everything it touched, they said.

Some of them believe that destroying the original tape will free us from whatever force is imprisoning us; hopefully put an end to Benny himself, too. I don’t know if it’d work, but knowing our eventual fates, any source of hope is worth clinging to.

I thought that maybe we were nearing the end now that nearly every single blockbuster has closed, but I’ve met a few people here who have never been to one, much less rented DVDs there in the early 2000s.

It seems like digital versions have been going around; I’m beginning to suspect that someone ripped one of the old DVDs. I’m not sure why they would do that intentionally – spite? Or maybe because they know that every person you pull into that endless maze of converging hallways means one more life Benny might take before your own?

I wonder how many of you I’ll end up seeing eventually. Maybe you’ll click a link, and then next thing you know, you’ll feel the sensation of Benny coming through your eyes from the inside out.

I’m so tired. I’ve been trying for years, but I’ve only ever made it to the old VHS section – I’ve never even seen a Betamax. Sometimes, wonder if it even exists at all.

I’m sharing this because I don’t think I can do for this much longer. Recently, my time there increases with every 'visit'. I’m worn out, I’m sleep deprived.

I’m not as fast as I used to be.

Something tells me that the next time he pulls me in, I may never come back.

So, if you ever find yourself in the endless winding halls of a Blockbuster Video, I hope you can succeed where we’ve all failed. Please find and destroy the original Betamax video in the white case.

Oh, and remember, be careful what you click on.