It's like a movie, one of the shit ones on Netflix. Kelly clutched her knees to her chest and heaved stuttering, sob-filled breaths into the cold air. She sat in the middle of a strange room, empty and dark. She wore clothes that were not her own, which seemed to be like a kind of uniform: plain, slightly loose fitting gray shorts with an elastic band, and a plain gray tank top with thin straps, also loose fitting, but covering her, if nothing else. She was thin and blonde, attractive even as she cried in fear. She had woken up only an hour ago, here, alone, feeling like maybe she was already dead and this was some kind of fucked up limbo no one told you about. Might as well have been, at any rate.
After a moment the room began to hum and something clicked on and bathed Kelly in a sudden, yellow light. She gulped and stopped crying almost immediately as the light broke the darkness and brought the center of the room into view. The room was white and spacious, but the light was only making the smallest space visible to her now, shrouding the rest in a darkness somehow darker than before—black only in the absence of this new knowledge flickering on above her. She looked up into the light. It came from a single overhead fixture that was recessed into the ceiling and covered with a thick, fogged plastic shell—lighting the room in a cone. Kelly leaned in, scooting just that much more into herself and into the center of the room—holding herself directly beneath the light. It was too far away to be warm. She could see no wires, no switches; the walls themselves still hidden from view.
She had spent an hour in the room, awake, before the light came. But to Kelly, everything was timeless. She had been in the room for centuries, thinking that she couldn't remember anything before it as much as she tried. It was just where her story started; she had nothing else to go on. Then again, she could have been there for a minute or two—a moment stretching and shrinking with no way to mark it.
Whether true monsters lurked just on the shadows of her vision, or it was a product of her now increasing paranoia, the edges of the room suddenly appeared to move and creep all around her. At once something was behind her, and then it flashed in the periphery. New and terrifying possibilities emerged from the unknown. Kelly whimpered, buried her chin into her knees and shook—a tortured please rising up from her stomach, like acid, only to die on her tongue.
“We can't see her tits very well when she holds her knees like that,” Brad took a sip of his latte and leaned back in the folding chair just on the edge of the set. It was the kind of lawn chair that old men carried around for Fourth of July parades; nothing close to a director's chair, green and plastic and fraying. And it was a vanilla latte, with extra vanilla to make it kill-you-slowly sweet. And everyone in existence rolled their eyes at him.
“Seriously, dude.” A common complaint.
“Seriously,” Brad mocked. “This is a horror flick, we gotta see tits.”
“It's like, the first scene, and anyway, this is a serious film.” A pause, and sensing that it wasn't enough to shush him, “Kelly is a serious actress.”
Kelly was sitting cross-legged in the middle of her padded cell, bent over her ankles and picking at a scab. She snuffled up a gloppy sounding chunk of snot and rubbed her nose on her upper arm—still fixated on the scab.
“Yeah. Super Serious,” Brad grimaced slightly, sipping on his latte, continuing to watch Kelly snot and sniffle her way back from the sobbing.
“She's alone and she's confused. She can't control anything, let alone see and start to understand. And she's too paralyzed by fear to explore, to even try to get out of wherever she is. And she's certain that she's dead already, and the only thing she's got is this hope in her heart that he's going to pull through for her. It's a tragedy and a comedy. It could be her wedding at the end, if only he'd come for her...” Levi had gotten into one of his moments. He had pulled off his glasses in the middle of the speech and started walking aimlessly towards the set, eyes unfocused, with his left hand running through his thick, curly, giant mess of black hair atop his otherwise small head. The lanyard around his neck ended with a flash drive (that flash drive was his life) and held no less than three blue pens. The first half of the draft of their script was folded and tucked into the back pocket of his jeans. He looked like a visionary—a five foot two, hundred pound visionary.
“Yeah but,”
Levi stopped, put his glasses on slowly and turned to face Brad again. Kelly had since stopped picking at her scab, or rather, had accomplished making it a fresh and oozing wound, and was watching Levi's back as he slumped and waited for Brad to make his point.
“Well, I mean, like it doesn't really matter if we can't see her tits. No one's gonna watch past five minutes if you can't see how cold it is in there, am I right?” another sip of latte, as if this were a serious conversation at the coffee shop on some busy but beautiful downtown street corner, instead of the same arguments over taste level they'd been having for the last two years. Kelly looked down and tugged her tank top down, inching out the tiniest bit of cleavage with a shrug.
“You want a metaphor...” Pathik mumbled from the other end of the set where he was setting up the fog machines for the shadow monster's grand entrance.
“...you gotta make it bouncy.” Brad finished, shimmying his shoulders forward like a burlesque dancer with a teasing feather boa. Pathik rolled his eyes; this is why he usually stayed silent. You start down the artsy path with the wrong people and there's no getting out. Brad was a tick you didn't notice until you got Lyme, and then you can kill it, sure, but what's the point? It's already, like, infected your brain. He clicked on the fog machine. It kicked out puffs of smoke in two, three spurts and then rolled a steady stream, billowing onto the set. The set was just a handful of old pallets re-purposed and dressed up with old pillows, foam, bed sheets, and some kind of half-assed electrical in a half-empty warehouse at Brad's dad's place.
They had rented the fog machine from the karaoke place on Fifth. Maggie was in charge of sound and cameras and lighting and everything else movies technically needed. Brad had the only chair. Pathik never knew what purpose exactly he had, but Levi liked to have him there. Kelly signed a contract for a small percentage of the profits, if they got profits. Levi was in it for the art.
It was a budget movie. They were all relatively new college graduates with something to prove and not a job offer between them. Fog machines and Brad's dad's place were the most of what they had to make something out of it all: the world, relationships, grand ideas about life after death—that we all start somewhere being the moral of the story.
“Mmmm, bouncy,” Maggie patted Levi on the head, her hand burying inside his tight curls. It wasn't a difficult reach, in fact, it wasn't even a reach. Maggie was at least a foot taller than Levi without her wedges, and she always wore her wedges. “Give the people what they want,” Maggie whispered to him, nudging him in the side with a wink.
“If she's a virgin sacrifice will that shut you up?” Levi pulled the script from his back pocket and started furiously flipping through it's pages as if he could see the answer for it all deep down somewhere in the words. But they were just their words, his and Brad's, so if he didn't know the truth already he wasn't going to find it there.
“What, you never heard of a virgin with tits?”
Obviously, Levi thought, turning the last page of the script and flipping back to the front again. It wasn't finished and they'd already started shooting. This was not the way you made a serious film. And besides, Levi knew exactly nothing about tits.
“So, retake?” Kelly's voice floated out from behind the thick fog now surrounding her and the majority of the set. Levi ignored her and wandered back away from the set, eyes burrowed in the draft of their script, muttering to himself about sacrifices and shadows.
Brad rose from his lawn chair and sauntered over to the voice in the fog. Maggie reset the lighting, casting much of the set back into shadow, and walked over to where Pathik was sitting next to the fog machine, his elbow up on it, his head resting on his closed fist—incredible boredom settling in on his face. She kicked him lightly in the shin and turned the machine off with a flick of her red acrylic nails.
“Those got a name, right?” Pathik gestured to her manicure, “like stiletto or something fresh like that?”
“Coffin,” Maggie smirked and turned back to the set. Pathik looked down at his own nail beds, digging his thumb-nail into his cuticles and pushing them each back in turn.
Darkness washed over their side of the warehouse. Levi looked up from his script.
“Mags...”
“It ain't me.”
“All you gotta do is tug at the bottom of it, you know, like you're scared or something and, like; it's a nervous habit. Then it'll look natural, then they're just there. Maybe bend your knees more when you walk, dip low, bounce back up. You're doing great, by the way. I pushed for you. Levi, he's a words man, he doesn't know what to look for in a leading chick, ya know.”
“Yeah, look, I got a...”
“Well, can you fix it?”
“Can you?”
“...a girlfriend...”
“I don't know where the lights are to this place. They on a timer?”
“Brad.”
“That don't matter honey, not in Hollywood, I spent a summer in Hollywood you know, I stayed with...”
“Brad!”
“a guy, this celeb, ya know, I ain't gonna name drop, but he was big...”
“By the door to the front office, I saw a whole load of...”
“Like, no homo or anything, he just let me crash in his spare room while he was shooting this flick.”
“Seriously, dude,”
“Let him go, I wanna know what he did with the guy in the spare room for the flick.”
“Like I was saying, if you ever needed any tips, or anything...”
“I'm good.”
“Yeah.”
“Yo, like why is it so dark? I can't see Kelly's pretty face.”
“I thought the character's name was Kelly.”
“They're both named Kelly.”
“That's so weird.”
“I don't know, Levi said he wanted a good white girl name.”
“Kelly.”
“Kelly.”
“Hey Braaaaad?”
“What?”
“...stop it...”
“You wanna help Mags out on the light situation?”
“...don't touch me...”
“The door leading to the front office...”
Brad was cut off by a thud and a subsequent sloshing sound hitting the padded pallets they stood on. The lights down every row of the warehouse clicked on and, in an instant, drowned the place in white florescents. Kelly screamed.
Brad still had both of his hands on Kelly's shoulders when she pulled viciously back, away from him, from the thing that had landed at their feet.
“Jesus--” He looked down and jumped clear out of his thick, regularly tanned and oiled skin.
“Some fucking joke!” Brad shouted, his arms dropping back to his side as he tried to calm himself down quick. He turned to lay into who ever had set up the prank.
But everyone else was just as afraid, or they hadn't yet looked up to see.
Kelly heaved, hands clutching at her waist as she stared at the head and arms and entrails and hips and feet of a body all in pieces that now lay smattered on the floor of the set.
The rest of the crew started forward.
“I didn't! Who?” Levi stammered out, his sneakers dipping into the pool of what looked like blood now dripping off the edge of the set stage and onto the warehouse floor. “It's ruined the set,” he said under his breath.
“It looks so real.”
“Gross.”
“Fuck,” someone gagged.
“It is real!” Maggie pulled Levi back by the shoulders, her nails digging into his clavicle.
“Pat?!”
“Fuck, you think I did this,” Pathik started to gag. “I fucking hate gore, I told you before we started making this shit...”
“Mags...” Levi's voice whimpered out and the crew formed a tighter circle around the person before them. There couldn't be enough body here to make a whole man, but it was unmistakably human.
“Who is that?”
Levi, Brad, and Kelly leaned over the pieces jumbled in a grotesque mess in the middle of their padded cell. The reds and pinks and blacks vibrant against the old bed sheets and foam padding.
“That's...” Levi swallowed, just now realizing his sneakers were covered in blood. “That's our Gary Stu,” he pulled back, his face stricken and mouth dry. “I hired him yesterday.” Levi's voice sounded louder than it usually did, its meekness now beating through them, the words final and absurd.
Kelly moved quickly off the set and leaned into Maggie's tall frame as if sheltering herself from the possibility of more falling viscera. Looking down at her legs she saw that the fluids that had splashed on landing painted her all the way up to her knees, a few drops soaked into the gray shorts, the hem of the tank top. Somehow, the feeling of blood and guts dripping off of her skin hadn't registered. Brad and Pathik stood back glancing at each other and then back at the body. It was impossible to look away even through the smell. Maggie wrapped an arm around Kelly and pulled her into her chest as Kelly started to sob, real sobs, ugly now, and unending. They all stood still, for a moment, silent and nervous. A mounting ringing that no one could shake was overtaking the sound of their own beating hearts.
“Seriously. What the fuck?!”
And the lights flickered off, again.
To be continued...here.
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