The next few months were uneventful. Once again I felt like I had hit a dead end. I took a break from the mission and focused on life obligations. I had just managed to comfortably put the Lost Episode search on the backburner and feel contented when I received an email with the subject “What You’ve Been Looking For.”
I hesitated a good few minutes before opening the message. “Hello. If you want answers, meet me at this address and time.”
My heart raced. This email wasn’t from any of the addresses I had messaged. I instinctively felt I was about to finally get closure, and was suddenly terrified. Perhaps even more terrified than I had been at any point before in this journey, more than when I was run off the road, more than when I was hypnotized by a cartoon lion, more than when I had been threatened through the TV in a motel room. My hands were shaking so much I could hardly use the keyboard to navigate to a new tab and look up the address.
It was an empty lot from an abandoned building that had been razed years ago. The Google Maps street view looked somewhat foreboding, but it was within comfortable driving distance of my apartment, which terrified me even more to realize the sender knew what city I lived in. Still, I asked off work for the specified date (and was racked with dread until it arrived, barely able to concentrate on my job) and drove to the lot three hours ahead of time, parking my car in the street as was typical for the neighborhood.
It was a sunny spring day, and the wind made me uncomfortable despite the warm weather. Each passing car made me apprehensive, particularly the ones that appeared to slow down. I had an overwhelming urge to drive away as the appointed time drew near.
When the car stopped at the lot exactly at the time, I was surprised to see a woman get out. She had cropped red hair and appeared to be in her early 40s. She was wearing a black leather jacket and walked right up to me.
She smiled slightly. “Hi, you can call me Cathy. I’m from the group you’ve been looking for.”
I swallowed and rendered a quiet greeting. She didn’t look threatening. I had trouble imagining what could have possessed her to join an organization like the Lost Media Group, but right now I had other things to be concerned with.
“Don’t worry, this isn’t a setup,” she reassured, reading my apprehension. “If we wanted to do you in, we could have and would have done it already.”
“So then what do you want?” I interjected.
“We want you to stop looking into us,” she stated plainly. “And to that end I managed to convince the higher-ups to let me show you what you’ve been looking for so that you, and we, can put this behind us.”
“You mean the Aristocats video?” I asked. She nodded.
“For security reasons, we obviously can’t just give it to you. The best I could arrange was for you to be allowed to see it, under supervision, at one of the abandoned movie theaters we use to give private viewings of our works for select patrons. We’re about to leave that location anyway, and needless you say, you shouldn’t even think about telling people we were ever there.”
I nodded and grunted. If it meant finally getting answers, I was willing to put up with a little more bullshit.
“I hope you have the whole day free, because the theater is several hours away.”
I nodded again, suspecting that she already knew the answer. We got in her car and were off.
We drove in silence for the first hour or so. Then I asked her why the group made lost episodes.
She waited a few moments before answering. “Well, I guess you could say we aim to challenge the status quo of programming, and give animators a chance to really test their limits. That’s why I joined when the organization invited me.”
“And why do you leak them to the public if you want to keep them secret?” I prodded.
“We don’t leak them. Sometimes they just get out and people who weren’t intended to see them do. I don’t know how you ended up seeing one of our works as a kid, but it wasn’t supposed to be.”
“And what about the Kabetogama Broadcast?”
“Some member of our organization was messing around when he wasn’t supposed to, or maybe it was a TV broadcast only intended to be seen by members back when we were a little more lax about security. Look, I said we’d show you what you’ve been looking for. Beyond that, I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to satisfy your curiosity about our inner-workings.”
I was silent for a few more minutes. Her answers were suspect. The Lost Media Group seemed like the type of group that would find pleasure in shocking and traumatizing random people with their twisted “works”, and I didn’t quite buy that all exposure to non-insiders was unintentional. I thought back to the FBI report. I also wondered if she was completely happy with the choice she had made to join the organization.
“Well, I’ve already seen part of your Aristocats edit recently,” I finally said.
Cathy pursed her lips, and I could see in her eyes that she was briefly considering whether it was worth trying to pretend she didn’t know what I was talking about. She decided against it.
“Yeah, sorry about that I guess, but I guess they figured if we gave you a good scare you might give up and leave us alone.”
I was annoyed at her choice of words, as if they were the ones who only wanted to be left at peace all that time. I could only wonder if it had been her idea. I also wondered if she knew I had seen several of their other projects as well.
“When you visited Strobl’s old studio, that was when we decided it was time to make a peace offering to get you off our back.”
The theater appeared to be one of those many theaters that had been opened during the 90s blockbuster boom and then abandoned during the 2000s. It was along the interstate, isolated from any other buildings. We entered through a side door Cathy had a key for.
The lobby was unlit except for the sun outside. I could see a ticket counter, a concessions area, and posters for old blockbusters on the wall. Covering the floor was carpeting of a faded colorful pattern. Adjacent to the small food court was an empty room that I guessed used to be the video arcade.
Cathy told me to give her my phone, which I did. She then escorted me down the gallery hallway, to the last gallery.
She asked me if I was sure I wanted to see this. I answered yes, and she said I could sit anywhere I wanted. I chose a seat near the back while she went up to run the projector.
I began feeling scared. Sitting there in the dark abandoned gallery was very reminiscent of sitting in the dark watching The Aristocats all those years ago, except that all the extra space made it even more ominous.
When the feature started, I could tell immediately that the audio was off. It sounded shrieky and low-quality. Otherwise, the movie was normal up until the point when the butler decided to get rid of the cats. Instead of drugging them and leaving them abandoned like in the normal movie, he drowned them in the river. It went downhill from there. Suddenly I was a five-year-old boy again, watching in horror as characters were mutilated, decapitated, and burned, all while strange visual and audio effects were applied.
One particularly shocking scene featured real footage of cats attacking and killing a man. In real time, lines were drawn over the scene, covering it in sketchwork until it had become a completely animated version of itself. It was done with such absolute perfection of technique that I was sure Strobl must have done that bit himself.
I eventually got a grip and was able to sit through the rest of the thing calmly. It wasn’t pleasant, but I was at least relieved to finally be getting it over with.
When it was over, I think I had tears in my eyes. “Cathy” drove me back to the empty lot, and it was dark by the time we arrived.
Before I got out, she spoke to me one last time. “Now listen to me, you’ve found what you were looking for. And now that you have, you need to let it go. I took a big risk even pushing to let you in behind the scenes for that brief moment. If you continue pursuing information about our organization, we will have to take more drastic measures.”
We exchanged goodbyes, and she drove off. For years I kept my end of the agreement to never speak a word about our encounter to anyone. However, recently I have been reconsidering the bargain. A few days ago, someone reached out to me on the Web asking me for information on Lost Episodes. They claim to have seen one as a child and are hoping to find closure for their experience.
I’m debating with myself whether it’s worth letting them in on the secret, or if it would be better for their own sake if I convinced them they imagined the whole thing.