Tv Manual: Elfunk

Three times.

He found the manual wedged behind the fuse box. It was a thin, stained booklet, the size of a passport, with a curling plastic spiral binding. On the cover, a crude cartoon elf in a hard hat held a soldering iron like a sword. Above him, in a cheerful, 1970s font, it read: Elfunk: Television & Electronic Repair – Manual No. 7.

Page 44 was missing. In its place, someone had taped a photograph. It was Leo, thirty years younger, standing in front of a gutted TV console. He looked terrified. Scrawled on the back of the photo in Leo’s handwriting: “It works. But I saw myself watching me. Do not use the Elfunk Banshee after midnight.”

The paper burned. The flames were blue. And as the last corner of the cover curled into ash, Arthur heard a faint, clear knock. Elfunk Tv Manual

He put the manual in the fireplace and struck a match.

Page 31: “If the picture rolls backward in time (e.g., showing last Tuesday’s news), reverse the polarity of the horizontal oscillator and do not, under any circumstances, look directly into the screen. The images look back.”

He never turned it on again.

Arthur almost threw it away. But the word “television” snagged a memory. His brother, Leo, had been obsessed with old TVs. In the basement of their childhood home, Leo had built a fortress of cathode-ray tubes. And Leo had loved the strange, failed companies—the ones that made parts for a year and then vanished. Elfunk was one of them.

Arthur Finch did not believe in ghosts, but he did believe in bad wiring. That’s why, at seventy-three, he was flat on his back under the dashboard of a 1978 Winnebago, tasting dust and regret. The RV had been his late brother’s pride, and now it was Arthur’s problem.

The Last Page of the Elfunk Manual

From inside the cold, dead screen of his brother’s Winnebago’s rear-view camera monitor.

That night, alone in his own silent house, Arthur opened the manual.