The Grip

The security guard at the gate barely looked up when I signed in, which I guess made sense at 2 a.m., since nobody in their right mind visits a horror movie set at 2 a.m., least of all a nurse who'd just finished a twelve-hour shift and smelled faintly of hand sanitizer and other people's bad nights. But Nico had texted me at eleven, something cheerful and quick, home by one, promise, and then the text I sent at half past one when I clocked out had gone unanswered, and you spend enough of your twenties committed to the idea of someone and you learn that unanswered means drive over.

So I drove over. The soundstage sat in an industrial suburb where everything was chain link and sodium lights, and the parking lot was nearly empty except for a couple of work trucks and Nico's ancient Honda, which he'd had since he was 22 and broke, and which he was still driving now that he was 27 and slightly less broke. I parked next to it and sat for a minute with the engine ticking, because the building gave off a hum I could feel through the door of my car, a low generator drone like the whole place was breathing in its sleep.

Inside, it was worse. A tunnel system, that's what they'd built, or the suggestion of one, plywood and latex and painted foam, and the work lights were dying one by one overhead, popping off in sequence down the corridor like somebody walking ahead of me flipping switches. The air was dry dust and chemical fog residue, that fake mist they shoot through, and it coated my throat after ten steps. I have walked into rooms where patients were coding and found the whole thing, and I say that calmly, as a professional observation, and this set still made my skin crawl. That's a compliment to the art department, I suppose.

"Nico?" I called, and my voice went flat and dead about fifteen feet out, swallowed by all that foam rock.

Nothing. So I followed the hum. The green room was off the main stage floor, past the prop tables and the dolly track, and the door was half open, and there he was.

Nico, 27 years old, sitting on the green room couch in full costume, some tunnel thing with grime painted on his neck, curled forward with his elbows on his knees and his head down like a man praying, except his hands were folded in his lap instead of up near his face, and his shoulders were shaking. Not crying shaking. Something smaller and more constant, like a wire under current.

"Hey," I said. "Hey, it's me."

His head came up and his face was gray under the makeup, genuinely gray, the color of someone I'd have been checking capillary refill on at work, and he tried to smile and didn't quite get there. "Kace. What are you..."

"You didn't answer. I got worried. Are you sick?"

"No," he said it too fast. "No, I'm fine, I just..."

His hands were locked together in his lap, one fist closed over the other, and I noticed then that his knuckles were white, that his fingers were not resting but gripping, that he'd been gripping for a while by the way the tendons stood out. I sat down next to him on the couch, because that's what you do, and I put my hand over his hands, and that's when I felt it.

Warm. His fist was warm, warmer than a hand should be, and it moved. Not much. A faint pulse, slow, like something under his skin had a heartbeat of its own.

"Nico. What's in your hand?"

"Nothing," he said. "It's nothing, it's..."

"Let me see."

"I can't." His voice cracked on the second word, and he laughed, this awful small laugh. "I mean I physically can't, Kace, I've been trying for an hour. My hand won't open."

I pried at his fingers, which is a thing you learn to do with patients sometimes, and they gave maybe a quarter inch and then locked again, and he made a sound low in his throat that was not pain exactly but was adjacent to it. I stopped. I got my flashlight out of my bag, the little penlight I carry out of occupational habit, and I angled it, and through the gaps in his fingers I saw black. A smooth black stone, fist-sized, or the shape of a fist-sized thing, and as the light hit it, it pulsed. Gently. Once. Twice. In rhythm, I realized after a second, with his pulse. Or maybe with mine. I didn't stop to figure out which, because one of those answers was going to be worse.

"Okay," I said, in my nurse voice, the flat one I use when somebody's relative is crying in a hallway. "Okay. We're going to figure this out. Has anyone else seen this? Where did it come from?"

"I don't know," he said, and now the words were coming fast, tripping over each other. "I wrapped at one, we did the tunnel sequence, and I was walking back and it was just, it was in my hand. I don't remember picking it up. The prop master says it's not from the shoot. He checked the manifest. Kace, he checked the whole manifest and it isn't on it."

"So put it down."

"I told you, I can't." And then, quieter, and this is the part I keep turning over: "And I don't know that I want to. Is that crazy? It's warm. It's been warm the whole time, and it feels like..."

He trailed off, and I finished the sentence for him because I'd felt it too, through his fingers, a kind of leaning, like the thing had an attention and the attention had a direction.

"Like it wants something," I said.

"Yeah," he whispered. "How did you know that?"

Because it had turned toward me, is the answer, but I didn't say that, because saying it made it real. I was still holding his hands, and the pulse under his fist had picked up, and it had picked up in my direction, and I am a grown woman, 23 years old, I have seen things that would make a horror director cry, and my body wanted out of that room with a clean animal certainty I hadn't felt since I was a kid.

The door banged open.

Johan came in first, the director, 52 and built like a fence post, followed by Ariel, the first AD, who at 24 runs a set the way an air traffic controller runs a runway, and neither of them looked calm. Johan had a flashlight of his own and it was shaking.

"There you are," Ariel said. "Nico, thank God, we've been looking everywhere, the van guy quit."

"Quit," Nico said.

"Quit. Walked off at half past midnight, left his keys on the generator housing. He says..." She stopped, looked at me, did the math on whether I was crew, and decided it didn't matter. "He says the prop felt alive. His word. Felt alive. He said when he carried the case to storage his hands went numb and he wasn't going to touch it again, and then he was gone, and then we come looking for the case and the case is empty, and the prop master is going through the manifest twice, and Nico here is missing, and..."

Her eyes dropped to his fist. Johan's did too. The flashlight beams converged.

"Open your hand, Nico," Johan said. It was not a request and it was not loud. It was the voice I imagined he used on set, the one where the whole crew goes quiet.

"I can't," Nico said.

"Try."

"He's been trying," I said. "For over an hour. His fingers won't open. I tried. Maybe don't make him try harder until we know what..."

"Who is this?" Johan asked, but not unkindly, more like filing me under a heading.

"His girlfriend. Kacey. I'm a nurse." Which sounded absurd even as I said it, like my job qualified me for this, like I'd seen a stone with a heartbeat before. "Who's the crew member who quit? What's his name? What exactly did he feel?"

"Adam," Ariel said. "Van driver, two years on the crew, never missed a day, never complained about anything, and he left shaking. He said it was warm through the case. Through the padded case, Kacey. And Nico, Johan is asking you to give it to him because it is two in the morning, we have a company move at six, and whatever this is, it is not from our shoot, and I would very much like it to not be on my set."

"It's not on your set," Nico said, and something in his voice I didn't like at all, something almost fond. "It's on me."

The stone pulsed. All three of our lights caught it at once, and this time the pulse was visible, a slow swell of the black surface, like a breath.

Johan stood slowly by the prop table across from us, and he rubbed his jaw, and he looked at that fist the way he probably looks at footage he knows is good.

"Nico," he said. "I started in horror when I was 25 and I have spent my whole career trying to get something real in front of my camera, and I am telling you, as a director and as a man who is not easily rattled, that I would like you to stop holding that thing. And I would like the young lady, who felt it through your hand from a foot away, to step back from it. Slowly."

The pulse picked up. Nico looked down at his fist, and then he looked at me, and his eyes were wet.

"Kace," he said. "It's not going to hurt me. I know how that sounds. But it's warm, and it's been so cold on this shoot for weeks, and..."

"Nico," Ariel said.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Okay."

He tried to open his hand. The tendons in his forearm stood out like cables, and his fingers moved a millimeter, two, and then the stone turned in his loosening grip, all by itself, a smooth deliberate quarter turn, until its pulse pointed at me like a compass needle finding north.

Nobody said anything for a second. The generator hummed.

"Get it away from her," Ariel said quietly.

"Nico," I said, "can you hear it? Is it making sounds to you?" I kept my voice level, the way I do with patients who are spiraling, the calm nurse voice, because it was that or scream.

He looked at me and I watched his pupils blow wide, the black swallowing the brown until there was almost no color left, and I have seen pupils do that in a code, and I have seen them do it for drugs, and I have never seen them do it slowly, deliberately, like a cat's. "It talks," he said. "Not out loud. It whispers. It's been whispering since Adam left it with me, before that, since the case, it picked me, Kace, it picked me and it wants..."

"It wants what?" Ariel asked, and her flashlight was steady but her voice wasn't.

"To be held. To be known. It's not bad, it's not evil, it's just..." He trailed off and his thumb moved on the stone's surface, a small stroking motion he clearly didn't know he was making. "It's lonely."

"That's a rock," Johan said. "Rocks are not lonely."

"Then why does it have a heartbeat?" I asked, and nobody had an answer, and the stone pulsed again, and I swear on my nursing license the pulse was faster now, quicker, like something excited, and I could see the warmth flicker under the black surface, a faint orange glow moving like a fish under ice.

"Everybody back up," Ariel said. "Kacey, please, back up."

I took one step back. Then, and I am honest about this part because I've replayed it a hundred times since, I took one step forward instead, and I don't fully know why. Maybe it was the nurse in me, the part that walks toward the thing everyone else backs away from. Maybe it was two years of loving this idiot and not liking the look on his face. Maybe it was the stone itself, doing something, pulling. "Kace," Nico said, "don't..."

But my hand was already out, and I touched it.

The world went sideways.

Not like vertigo, not like the floor tilting, but like being turned inside out, like every part of me that was private got flipped to the outside, and something looked at all