Something Completely Different

I wrote a horror short story a ways back, but (and this may SHOCK you) there's not much in the way of a "short fiction" market out there these days. So after some dead ends, I decided to post it here. Hope y'all enjoy.

COUNTER-CROSS

“It’s like Sleep No More, crossed with an arty haunted house.”

“So, it’s just like Sleep No More,” said James.

Terri threw a wadded napkin across the room. Its lack of density caused it to miss her target by fully half, landing in what remained of the chips and salsa.

“James only likes experimental theater because it’s an excuse to take his clothes off.”

He stuck his tongue out, but did not deny it.

“Anyway, my understudy’s got some auto-immune something.” Terri made a halfhearted sad face.  “And I HAVE to fly to London this month. They’re in a bind – but YOU. With your dance background, and my recommendation? You’re a shoo-in.”

“I don’t know…” Clara demurred. “I like footlights between me and the audience. Isn’t everyone surrounding you… nerve wracking?”

Terri’s eyes went dreamy. It was hour six of her going-away party, and the stragglers were die-hards, destined to either tumble from the apartment straight to the nearest bar, or linger with some vague hope things might get sexy... either one-on-one, or – hell, we’re actors! – how ‘bout an orgy?

“I like it. Acting’s becoming, right? Losing that wall makes it seem even more immediate. Like you really get to transform.” She sipped her wine, sliding into her practical pitch. “Also: the money’s solid. You’ve had bad luck finding shows with longevity, but Sleep Forever? Will run forever.”

“That’s its name?” Barbara poked in from the kitchen, with a bottle of tequila on life support. “Kind of derivative.”

Terri rolled her eyes. Barbara worked in investment banking.

“Nickname. In development, Jerry’s original vision was… kinda boring? People want an experience. Get creeped out. Titillated. But Jerry was obsessed with subtext. An ‘indictment of American hegemony’ or something like that. No Sleep No More sizzle. Everyone thought it was gonna be a snooze, so the cast called it ‘Sleep Forever.’ Luckily the backers made him add some sex. But ‘Sleep Forever’ stuck. It’s just an inside joke — not the name.”

Barbara, not blind to Terri’s eye-roll, muttered, “Then how the fuck should I know?”

“Pardon?”

“What’s the real name?” Barbara clarified, louder.

“The Twelve Deaths of Everett Silas Gould.”

“Yeah. Sleep Forever’s better.” Barb killed the tequila and returned to the kitchen.

* * *

Truthfully, Clara was desperate for the part, but she had a process — demurrals and neuroses were necessary prelude to any good fortune. 

Her career had stalled, and 12DeathsESG (as Internet fans awkwardly called it) would be steady work. These new immersive stagings inspired passionate fans, and long, luxurious runs. But she had questions.

“So the theater’s the whole building, right? It’s a found space — some sort of robber baron club back in the day, which Jerry loved, because it fit his theme.” Terri basked in her chance to reveal the show’s mechanics, like a magician’s assistant chatty on cocktails.

“You know the basics, right? No seats. Audience members roam where they please, other than the spaces we’ve marked private. And as they roam they encounter intersecting vignettes. Like, they’ll follow the wicked coachman, or Everett, or the poor consumptive prostitute…” Terri indicated herself, and mimed coughing into a handkerchief, shocked to see blood. 

“They see a scenario, then either they go off somewhere else, follow us to a new scene, or try to follow us but they can’t because we’re going somewhere private for a smoke or whatever.”

Clara nodded. This much, she knew.

“Those pieces are loops. There’s some in the first ‘act,’ — except there’s no traditional ‘acts,’ of course – and a few in the second, before the whole audience quietly gets traffic-directed to the climax.”

She marveled at the engineering. “It’s a lot of intersecting timing, needing so many spreadsheets. Oh, and some loops repeat, to make sure enough people see the story. Linear plays are easy to follow. This?” Terry threw her arms wide, “It’s open world. We need tricks to hold their hands.”

Clara ventured, “What is the whole story?”

Terri shrugged, “Honestly? Focus on the vignettes. I mean, you can find a story if you want. Sorta The Turn of the Screw meets Dracula. Everett’s some supernatural soul sucker, and there’s a governess watching creepy kids who see ghosts, but maybe she’s a ghost, and it’s a metaphor for how the rich feed off the workers, or something. But, frankly?” Terri leaned in, whispering in a way that mostly just made her seem drunker. “It’s vibes. You can’t know the whole story.”

James leapt back in “...Which is fucking genius. Repeat business, baybee!” He mimed stacks of cash. “Addicts coming back for whatever they missed the first time!”

“Remember what I said about not listening to James? He’s a cynic.”

James poked Terri in the ribs, and she mock punched back, and James hoisted her onto his shoulders with a spank, which Clara took to mean (1) this was his bid for a going-away fuck, and (2) she’d get no more info from Terri tonight.

* * *

Whatever wine or sexual hangover followed, Terri was reliable. By midafternoon, Clara got an encouraging invitation to meet the show’s team. And, while Terri’s referral wasn’t a full rubber stamp (someone’s untalented niece needed to be seen first), Clara sailed into the role in an uncharacteristically charmed fashion. 

After was more difficult. A more traditional show would have come with a traditional rehearsal process. Perhaps she’d mostly just study a cast-mate from the wings until her time to understudy, but here, there weren’t even wings from which to watch. 

So Clara studied her loops, and let others handle the sense of the whole. She obsessed over cues – with no dialogue to time her entrances and exits, she relied on the elaborate sound design: the quickening of the score, or shifting melody, or (at the show’s climax) a scream. In this, she found her dancer’s sense of time invaluable.

Clara named her character “Elara” – she’d found it impossible to play “consumptive prostitute” without something to humanize herself, with a plot as simple (“Archetypal,” said Jerry) as advertised.

In her first loop, Elara tempted a man to a brothel bed, before her illness scared him off. Returned to her meager quarters, unpaid, the audience learned she supports her ailing mother and baby (capably played by a swaddled Cabbage Patch doll, and hidden crying tape recorder).

In loop two, Everett Gould’s emissary – a sort of Renfield character – made her an offer. Mother and child would be looked after, following her death, if she’d allow Gould to consume her soul. This was, per Jerry, a direct parallel with her sex work – another way of selling herself – themes communicated via a seductive tango. 

Clara doubted that the intended subtext was entirely delivered by dance, until Hank, her scene partner, whispered the cast’s unofficial slogan: “good enough is good enough.”

After that, she took it easy… until the climax, when specters of Everett’s victims ripped him to shreds (via trap door, mannequin, and long red ribbons) — staging with enough “proletariat consumes the oppressor” frenzy to appease Jerry, and enough grand guignol atmospherics to wake the audience, before ushers steered them into the truly scary dead of lower Manhattan. 

* * *

Despite her fears, the lack of  buffer from the audience bothered Clara… not at all. Occasionally she cursed God for humanity’s lack of spatial awareness. Denying them the whole picture made audiences even hungrier to devour those crumbs available. They would crowd around each vignette, vying for position, up onto her figurative doorstep. At times she tripped over her own massive petticoats to avoid body-checking the crowd. 

Sometimes a lone viewer, unmoored viewer from any clutch, wandered into her flight plan as she plunged toward her scheduled destination, and she’d curse internally, before reminding herself that she was cursing the innovative heart of the show. After all, any herd has its lost stragglers. 

That’s how she regarded them – as a herd – an impression only enhanced by their masks. As part of the experience, each audience member was required to don a hard plastic mask, matte black, evoking a hart. The masks were simple, but the lack of features and tendrils of stag horns growing upwards gave them an otherworldly quality. This was one of their functions: boost the atmosphere by rendering the audience unified, inhuman, and blank.

But that was only half. The masks also marked the border between performer and watcher — the secret, ever-present divider whose seeming absence had fueled Clara’s fears. Once performing, she saw the truth at once. The masks filed everyone into their roles. Outside, unmasked, they were distinct and human. Inside… they were something else. 

And inside, she was the reality. And because she was real, they could not interact with her. They were mute, masked animals — directionless until she, the shepherd, led her congregation to their next pasture.

Clara was shocked to discover that her overwhelming emotion was not anxiety, or fear, but power.

As a minor player, she’d never had the chance to control an audience – bending time to squeeze all laughter from a frozen moment, or going quiet during a pivotal monologue, so the crowd leaned forward, without muttered commentary or the crinkling of cough drops.

Here, the heartbeat of the audience pulsed next to hers. Every move was a disturbance in the air, affecting the temperature of her masked witnesses. She conducted their moods and directed their attentions. And when it was time to move, they followed – her dutiful herd.

Sometimes, the power felt astonishingly direct and electric. The show incorporated some rare vignettes that directly involved an audience member. In hers, she cast a masked follower, momentarily, in the role of potential client. She danced, teasingly, around them, never breaking eye contact, while climbing the set, and rolling on the ground. This brazen forwardness was nothing Clara was comfortable with, but as Elara she freely enjoyed it, as the atmosphere thickened, and her scene partner’s pulse rose. 

She would frequently pick a woman (men tended to to make it weird, though she learned that certain older specimens in khaki shorts were too bashful), and all seemed willing to be seduced. An impressive number of notes began to be left at the box office, reading, “I’ve never done this before, but…” The affirmations added an erotic charge to her power, and those early weeks saw her on-and-(mostly)-off-again boyfriend get an unusually high number of late night booty calls. 

Her character might wither with consumptive fever, but she’d never felt stronger.

* * *

As the motions became automatic, her wandering mind began to project herself into the other side. Into the audience — those living in the half light, able to drift where they liked, but still just observe. 

After her client fled she was supposed to cry into her blood-spotted handkerchief, collect herself, then snatch her scarf and plunge back into the night; but, during one performance, an audience member keen for a good view had leaned against the wall where her scarf hung. Locked into her blocking, Clara swooped in, and the masked viewer twisted away just in time for her to progress uninterrupted. His movement felt like a wisp of cold breath on her arm, and she scurried to her next scene vibrating internally. Perhaps it was mere projection, but for a moment, she imagined the exchange from his angle. From that vantage point, she felt like a lonesome ghost, and reflexively clutched her scarf against the chill.

She grew even more attuned to the audience. She noticed the ways their masks seemed to change them. During college, she’d been compelled to take a masks course, and – like most in her program – she’d logged the credit while privately thinking it was bullshit. When, in the 21st century, would she need this? She was hardly going to make a career in Greek choruses.

Now, she reconsidered. Their masking was transformative, if subtly show — the coverings didn't inspire the crowds to elaborate mimework, and surely some of the effect was just her reaction to their eerie blank sheen. Yet the crowds’ physicality did seem to subconsciously shift beneath the plastic faces. In the chemical fog of their smoke machines the audience movements – quiet, quick, lighting strategically where they could view all – assumed the quality of watchful animals in the morning mist. She occasionally felt like an intruder in her own show, as they cocked their heads, so like a wild creature’s impassive vigilance.

Yet, unlike animals, they would not scatter when she moved, instead splitting and re-forming – a swarm only disrupted for a moment, before returning to its sole focus: her. 

For a period, she found herself unable to shut them out again. She faltered in her movements (to the degree that Jerry, never there, but somehow omnipotent in that director’s way, employed other performers for annoyingly transparent “spontaneous” wellness checks). 

Her power gave way to a constant minor panic – not performer’s fear, but a claustrophobic sense of unreality. More accurately, her world still seemed real, but the presence of an ever-present, untouchable other, began to make her feel unhinged. What finally helped was recalling advice from a former director.

“The audience isn’t your friend. They don’t love you. They might want to love you. But if you don’t sing for your supper, you don’t get supper. It’s transactional. Don’t beg for their love. They’ll feel it, and desperation drives off an audience. At worst, the relationship is antagonistic. At best, it’s tough love. You have to say ‘fuck ‘em.’ It’s the only way.”

She’d taken this with a grain of salt, since it was the sort of thing he said at the bar, four drinks in, following a particularly rough performance… and if he really known what he was talking about, surely they’d have had fewer rough performances? 

Still, she reclaimed his advice as therapy. She began to lean in – literally. No longer solicitous of her phantom audience, her movements grew heedless. She plunged, daring the crowd to make room, playing chicken with the idea that they might collide at any time. If they were truly ghosts, perhaps she would simply pass through. If not? Well, she no longer felt the need to get out of their way. 

When she finally did collide, it was exhilarating. 

At one late-week performance, she finished her devil’s tango and dove through the crowd, toward a room “backstage,” where she would rest until the finale. 

Except, this time she heedlessly plunged straight into the arms of a lone masked stag, too slow to clear her way. A ripple of gasps disturbed the room, but Clara, finally inside the inevitable crash, did not pull away. Instead, she encircled the man and spun with him, as if the smash-up was merely an impromptu coda to her dance. 

She laughed – Elara giddy with abandon, fecklessly having sold her soul for her family’s security, and Clara releasing weeks of built-up tension. She yelped, spinning with the stag. It cocked its head at her curiously, its shadowed eyes meeting her frenzied gaze. The world briefly seemed to warp with their contact, before she ended the moment by spinning back into her original path. Behind her, the crowd swallowed her partner, and the world returned to orbit.

* * *

“Lots of virgins tonight.” 

Carol, their box office manager, had taken to informally tracking who was new versus those she recognized from past performances. James’ suggestion that the show was designed for repeat business may have been cynical, but it wasn’t wrong. Despite the healthy ticket prices, they drew a startling number of returning super-fans, desperate to find more secrets. Some gathered on message boards, trading strategies to maximize their experiences, and posting detailed floor plans with actors’ paths traced in dotted lines, like an oddball Family Circus. Their obsessive nature creeped Clara out just a little, so she was often relieved when the pre-show report tipped toward newbies. 

Clara ducked back in from a window, cracked open for illicit smoke breaks. “Yeah? That’s good – for the show. Can’t all be die-hards.” She exhaled a plume into the cold outside. “I’m still amazed you’re able to clock this stuff.”

Carol tapped her head. “Years in the booth my dear. Tonight we got a few big blocks of newbies – maybe even together, a corporate event, I dunno. But sometimes it’s no trick – like the Lone Ranger.”

“The Lone Ranger?”

“Oh GAWD.” James moaned from the corner. “HIM.”

“Just one of the die-hards. He’s come more than I can count. At some point, he just started showing up in his own mask saved from a previous time. Can’t even remember what he looked like without it by now – can I get a drag off that?”

Clara passed her the cigarette, unnerved. “And that’s the Lone Ranger?”

Carol nodded emphatically, momentarily silenced by her long drag. She exhaled, waggling dramatic jazz hands: “Who WAS that masked man?” Then, seeing Clara’s confused furrow, she clarified, “Sorry. Before your time. Before mine, to be honest, but when I was a kidwe had to watch our parents’ old shit, ‘cause there was nothing else on. He was a cowboy. Never took off his mask. Not sure why he was ‘Lone,’ though. He had this Native American sidekick. Pretty inaccurate name, come to think of it.”

Clara shook her head, as if to dispel the irrelevant flood of context. “They let someone do that? Show up masked?”

She shrugged. “You know how it is. His money folds like anyone else’s. I think the producers figure ‘that’s another few bucks we can save on masks.’” Carol returned the cigarette, brushing her hands absentmindedly on her black polyester pants. “Gotta get back. Good show everyone!” 

And, with a few claps of rote pre-show encouragement, she was gone.

* * *

Clara executed her first loops on auto-pilot. Familiarity with the production had freed room in her brain, in ways not always to her liking, and she was preoccupied the the thought that her off-and-on boyfriend should maybe stay off for good. She’d kept some small fish in her apartment – the sort who did better with multiple small feedings a day than the one-and-done of a goldfish – and she’d trusted him to pick up the slack, while the show occupied her nights. 

However, yesterday (following the mysterious death of some mollies), he’d admitted that he’d skipped several days, in favor of getting drunk with friends. She hadn’t cared so much about the fish (whom she considered a living screensaver more than beloved pets), but the irresponsibility had begun to feel like a pattern.

Thus distracted, it took her several moments at the top of her “streetwalker/client loop” to notice that no client had arrived. The actor playing her john (ironically named John) was simply not there. 

Rattled, she vamped for several minutes, improvising dance moves suggestive of provocative come-ons. Then, exhausted and with no client forthcoming, she clumsily doubled up on her attempted audience seduction – although her rattled energy made her certain there would be no note for her at the box office this evening.

She’d grown so used to counting on John’s rejection as the cue for her next scene that she almost missed the changeover, but clock chimes imbedded in the production’s sound design rescued her. At their mark, she fled to her lodgings, where the presence of Vivian (who played her mother) was a comforting return to normalcy. 

Unable to fill her in on John’s mysterious absence, in front of the silent onlookers, Clara felt a wave of isolation. She bounced the baby at her shoulder, “comforting” the doll, and peered outward – through the audience – unfocusing her eyes to maintain the illusion of separation. After months of performance, she’d learned how to observe the herd even as her gaze stayed soft. As Clara surveyed them, she found herself returning over and over to one man. 

“Why?” she wondered. He was slightly taller than the others. Perhaps bulkier, too, though perhaps that was an illusion created by the silhouette of his long overcoat. Neither justified why her eyes returned to him, again and again.

Then she realized. He never adjusted his mask.

That was very strange, indeed. Their “theater” had been a grand bank in the 20s, reconfigured as a generic business space sometime in the 60’s, abandoned during the covid pandemic, then gutted and restored to something like its former glory for this production. They stood in a building that was historic, lovely, and imposing. But not one built for air conditioning. 

The cast either struggled by as best they could or made subtle cooling alterations to their costumes. The audience, however, had no such costume leeway. The audience had their masks, and a plastic mask, no matter how thin, does not breathe. 

No performance had boasted temperatures so comfortable that the audience could ignore this fact. So they coped as best they could. Removal may not have been allowed, but no rules precluded pawing at one’s mask when sweat pooled beneath it, or pulling it out by the elastic, for momentary blessed relief.  

This man did not touch his mask. 

He stood, head cocked. Comfortable in his stillness. His blankness somehow rapt. Occasionally he leaned in, for a better view.

But he did not touch his face.

* * *

“Judi, do you know what happened to John?”

Clara stood in an alcove by the stairwell, home to that floor’s stage manager. Judi peered up from her binder and squinting through her thick glasses.

“What happened to John?” she parroted back.

Clara sighed, slightly performatively, worried she might miss her next entrance if this conversation didn’t grow productive, fast. “That’s what I’m asking you.” An impatient gap hovered between them, before Clara caved and filled in the blanks, “He wasn’t in my last scene. He just… wasn’t there. I don’t know why.”

“Well that shouldn’t happen.” Judi deadpanned. She picked up her walkie and pressed talk. “Anyone have eyes on John?” Clara fidgeted, as the inaudible response remained trapped within the stage manager's headset. Then Judi continued: “Well if anyone sees him, let me know.” 

Judi turned to Clara and delivered an oversized, theatrical shrug. 

“Could you maybe call Carol, in front? Maybe he had some kind of emergency and had to leave without warning anyone.” 

Judi sighed, to indicate how unlikely she thought that was, but called down – this time leaving the channel open, so Clara could hear the response.

“Carol, this is Judi. John’s AWOL. You didn’t see him leave or anything, did you?”

Carol’s fuzzy voice spit from the speaker. “Naw. Not down here at least. We have had an unusual number of walk-outs. Some folks complained the show was too intense. Weird reaction, honestly.. I mean, everyone does a great job, but, like – if this show is too much, maybe just see Wicked.”

“Roger that. Well, if you see him, you know who to call.” 

Judi refocused on Clara from beneath her Coke-bottle glasses and delivered a second shrug, this one served with distinct overtones of “I did what I could, actor. Now go on. Git.”

* * *

Her mother was not in her room.

When Clara went back to her lodgings, to perform one of the show’s many redundancies, Vivian wasn’t there. She was not there, even though this second version of the scene was slightly different than the first, in the form of a silent, but animated, quarrel between her and Elara. It was the closest thing Vivian had to a “big scene.” 

And she was missing it. Vivian wasn’t there.

So Clara made full use of her remaining scene partner: the doll. She changed and re-swaddled it. She held it and burped it. She danced hysterically around the room, hoping that it read as a devoted mother’s mania – her wild attentions an attempt to obscure her maternal fear of not being able to provide for the child — rather than real, mounting fear.

In the audience, the man who did not adjust his mask stared, fascinated. 

Even beneath the blank plastic, Clara felt the intensity of his interest. Desperately, insistently, she tried to deny her instincts, but she knew this must be the man Carol had mentioned, the one who knew the show as well as she did, and the ferocity of his attention was the watchfulness of someone who knew how the script was supposed to go. But someone had altered the script, shifted the dance, and now that someone delighted in watching her adjust.

“Well,” she thought, “If he knows my blocking, I’ll change the steps,” and she finished the scene by drifting in a wide circle around the room, pulling as many audience members to her as she could. She gathered viewers like the cone in a cotton candy machine attracting threads of spun sugar; and wrapped in a protective layer of onlookers, she flew away at double-speed. 

The swarm followed, but instead of her standard course – toward her devil’s dance with Renfield – Clara ducked into a door for “performers only,” hoping that the crowd’s tide and his familiarity with her usual path would pull him in the opposite direction. 

She sailed through the adjoining door, into an alcove James used for a one-on-one audience interaction scene where he played psychic and read their fortune, and James was there, but most of his face was not.

He lay splayed over scattered tarot cards, blood causing some to adhere to the table. Clara turned to flee, and scream, but she made no noise, because now teeth were in her throat. 

Up close his breath was oppressively hot, and stank like an animal’s. She fell against the table. Clara felt faint, but willed her eyes to focus; and — while the rest of the room snapped back into place — the mask still swam in front of her. At this near distance, the shine from the black stag’s mask looked wet and sticky, and it pulsed and moved organically. Up close, it appeared fused to his face. Up close, she saw the black lips pull back on the mask he’d worn so long it was a part of him. 

The Stag smiled, baring wide, white teeth.  

“I waited as long as I could. Because you were new. I wanted to see everything.”

The Stag reached to stroke her hair, and Clara exploded past him, from the alcove, back into the main space, wrapping her scarf around her bleeding throat. She stumbled downstairs, tripping toward the entrance, and for a moment thought she could see Carol through the swinging doors at the end of the main hall.

Her watchers — those who had earlier provided cover — now swarmed her, eager to learn how this new, bloodied version of Elara fit into the show. She reached out to them, but they felt her need and drew away, maintaining the distance between audience and performer.

“Please. Help.” Clara tried to scream, but her injured throat delivered a whispery rasp. 

The crowd encircled her, and now the Stag was between her and the door. The room seemed impossible to comprehend. Not cloudy or hazy — if anything, the world now seemed as if it was in hyper focus. Her senses flooded her. Everything was stimuli, and her brain could no longer judge what was important. She wondered if she might still push forward to safety, but a sea of masked faces rippled in front of her, and she could no longer discern which was terribly real. 

A scream echoed, and Clara wondered, almost idly, if it was from a new victim or merely the soundtrack cuing the final scene.

The final scene! Perhaps the scream would still signal her castmates to gather for the climax. Perhaps there she‘d find strength in numbers, if numbers remained. She stumbled from the Stag toward the grand ballroom.

It was a gruesome burlesque of the play’s last scene. The actors lay on their marks, desperate to accuse their demonic malefactor, if their ripped-out throats had not robbed them of voices to do so.

Her audience dutifully trailed her, blocking her exit. Clara scrambled onto the long dining table, which concealed a trap door that would normally be used at the show’s apex, to facilitate Everett Gould’s plunge to hell. 

Clara clawed at it, fumbling with the trick latch; and then froze at a collective gasp from the audience. The Stag stood on the table behind her, and the crowd murmured, sounding disconcertingly like the acting school mumbles of “peas and carrots” she’d been taught to mutter, to fake crowd noise. 

One of THEM had joined the climax. One of them had crossed the border.

The Stag leaned in, inches from Clara’s face. He put his hands on her shoulders, pinning her to the table. She felt his humidity. He creaked, as he began to speak, as if the material of his mask could not quite find common ground with the man he had once been. 

“You were with me. Together. You saw me. That’s why I needed you to be last.”

This near, she could sense his keen need to own all of it. Everything about the show. And she whispered the one thing she’d been told belonged to the cast only.

The Stag cocked his head, and Clara wondered if it was in confusion, or if her mangled voice had failed her. She whispered again.

“Sleep forever.”

Then, struck by the particular appropriateness of those words, she began to laugh. No sound came, other than a dry wheeze, but the laughter coursed through her, and her body signaled mirth as deeply and fully as if laughing was part of her dance training, and she only stopped laughing when the Stag ate her heart.

The audience, not knowing what else to do, applauded.

For earlier posts, check out the archive. In my other life, I’m a podcaster. Listen to my show The Flop House, here. In my other other life, I’m an Emmy-winning comedy writer. If you’re looking to staff, get in touch! And if you love the newsletter, you can always consider tipping me, by enrolling in the paid tier!