The Night Shoot

Jerome found the turnoff for the old studio lot at dusk, exactly like the directions said, which surprised him because half the roads around that town didn't even have signs. He pulled his van onto the cracked asphalt and just sat there for a minute with the engine ticking.

Fifty-seven years old, and here he was delivering a camera to a haunted movie set. Well, maybe not haunted. He didn't know that yet. All he knew was what the email said: one vintage Arriflex, mint condition, hand it to Mona Kessler at the old Hollis Street studio, signature on delivery.

The gate was chained open, which seemed like a contradiction, but there it was. He grabbed the camera case and stepped out into the quiet.

And God, the quiet. That was the first thing that got to him. No traffic, no dogs, nothing except this low hissing sound coming from the tree line past the fences. Cicadas, he figured. Or wind. Except there wasn't any wind.

The whole backlot was falling apart. Fake storefronts with their fronts rotted off. A water tower leaning like it was drunk. Weeds coming up through the pavement in lines, like the street had decided to unzip itself. But way down at the far end, one soundstage had lights blazing out of its open doors, and he could hear muffled voices and a generator chugging away.

So somebody was still working here. Somebody crazy, working at night in a place like this.

He hauled the case toward the light. The thing weighed about forty pounds and he'd been carrying it since the motel, so by the time he reached the soundstage door his shoulder was killing him and his shirt was stuck to his back.

Inside was chaos. Real, beautiful, low-budget chaos. Cables everywhere. A fog machine chugging away in the corner, pumping out clouds that smelled like somebody had burned a plastic bag. A dozen people under the lights, all of them moving fast and none of them looking happy.

"You're late," said a woman, sweeping toward him in a long black coat even though the place had to be ninety degrees. She had gray hair cut sharp at her jaw and an enormous ring on one finger, and Jerome knew instantly this was Mona.

"Traffic," he said. "Well, no, honestly, I stopped to check the camera twice. This one means a lot to me."

"Check it again, check it a hundred times, as long as it works tonight." She stuck out her hand and shook his like she was pumping a well. "Mona Kessler. You're the camera man. Good. We needed the camera man three hours ago."

"Jerome Vance. I'm actually more of a salesman than a camera man, but I sold and restored cameras for twenty-two years, so I can point it at things and not drop it."

"Better than my last three operators." She turned and bellowed across the stage. "Shae! Come meet the new blood!"

The woman who came over was wiping greasepaint off her forearm with a rag, and she stopped about six feet away and looked Jerome up and down like she was pricing him for scrap. Late twenties, she'd have to be, maybe twenty-nine, built like somebody who did her own stunts, which he'd later learn she did.

"New blood?" she said. "Mona, tell me this isn't another photographer."

"He's the camera delivery," Mona said. "And possibly an operator, if he's not useless."

"I'm the camera delivery," Jerome agreed, holding up the case. "That's it. That's the whole job, and then I drive home."

Shae squinted at him. "You don't look like a salesman."

"Nobody ever says that to me, believe me. I've got the least salesman-looking face in the business. That's why I'm good at it. People trust a man who looks like he should be fixing their furnace."

"Why would Mona hire an operator at nine at night for a delivery?" Shae asked, turning to Mona, not to him. Like he wasn't even there. "We already had a guy. We had a guy yesterday too, and he quit, and now you're hiring strangers off the street?"

"He came recommended by the rental house in Marion," Mona said, waving this off with her ring hand. "And the last guy quit because he was a coward. And the one before that quit because she was a coward. I need somebody who isn't a coward."

"Everybody you hire is a coward within two days," Shae said. "Have you considered that maybe it's not them?"

Jerome decided he liked her. Not in any romantic way yet, mind you, he'd only just met the woman and she was actively glaring at him. But he liked that she talked to her boss as a person rather than as a director.

"Look," he said. "I don't want anybody's job. I sold the camera, I'll set it up, I'll show your operator how the magazine works, because honestly if nobody here has used a spring-wound Arriflex before, whoever's running it is going to lose the whole roll. Then I leave."

Shae's glare lost about a quarter of its heat. "You know spring-wound?"

"I restored this one. It's the only one like it I've ever touched. The studio that owns it now wanted it shot with, not shelved. That's the entire reason I'm standing in your fog."

"Huh," she said, which from her, he'd learn, was practically applause.

"Good, everyone's friends," Mona said, already walking away. "Shae, get him set up on three. We lose the light in forty minutes."

"We never had light," Shae muttered. She looked at Jerome and jerked her thumb toward the back of the stage. "Come on, furnace man. Try to keep up."

They were halfway across the stage when the side door banged open and a big man came in, forty-five or so, built like a filing cabinet, wearing a security jacket with the sleeves torn off at the shoulders. He had a flashlight in his fist and a look on his face that Jerome did not like at all.

"Mona!" the man shouted. "Mona, where is she?"

"Douglas, for the love of God, we're working."

"You need to hear this right now." Douglas planted himself in front of her, then glanced around at the crew, lowering his voice. "Something's been walking the backlot."

"Extras," Mona said. "We hired forty of them."

"Extras don't leave tracks like this." He held up his phone and showed her a picture. Jerome, being nosy and standing right there, looked too. It was a shot of mud, near what looked like the base of a concrete mausoleum, and pressed into the mud was a print as wide as a dinner plate. Three toes, maybe. Three long toes with what looked like claws.

"And there's a smell," Douglas went on. "By the prop cemetery. Musky, like a wet dog times a hundred. Been there since yesterday. Whatever it is, it's been circling the soundstage at night, and I want everybody inside with the doors shut till sunup."

Shae had come back over and was looking at the phone too. "That's a fake, right? Somebody's messing with us?"

"Twelve years I've worked this lot," Douglas said. "I know every crack in every wall and every critter that lives in them. That's no critter I know."

"Is this a bit?" Jerome asked Shae, quietly. "For the movie, I mean. Because it's a very good bit."

"It's not a bit," she said, and she wasn't smiling. "Mona, come on. Last crew that shot here in the nineties, there were stories. People quit mid-shoot. Nobody would ever say why."

"People quit everything mid-shoot," Mona said, but Jerome noticed she didn't laugh, and she looked at the photo a beat longer than a woman would who thought it was a joke. "Post a man at the door, Douglas. Keep the generator running. We are twenty minutes of work away from the best final scene I've ever shot and I am not stopping for a big dog."

"Mona," Douglas said, real quiet. "It's not a dog."

"Then it's a big dog with a publicist. Go."

Douglas stalked off, muttering, and the crew went back to pretending nothing had happened, the way crews do. But Jerome caught Shae looking at the dark open end of the stage, out past the lights where the fog machine couldn't reach, and he caught her hugging her own arms for just a second before she shook it off.

"So," he said. "The mausoleum. That's a real one? Not a prop?"

"Prop. Built in 1951 for a picture nobody remembers." She picked up his camera case before he could protest and started carrying it. "You want to hear something funny, though? They built it over an old well. Douglas told me the first week. Says the whole lot's got tunnels under it, from when the studio was a cannery before that. Crew passes, service tunnels, the works. Half of them are flooded."

"And half aren't," Jerome said.

"And half aren't," she agreed. "Come on. You've got forty minutes to teach my operator not to destroy your precious camera, and then you can watch me get strangled by a man in a rubber suit. That is the entirety of the show. One scene, all night, Mona's masterpiece."

"And you do your own stunts, I'm guessing."

"Everything but the insurance forms." She grinned at him for the first time, and it changed her whole face. "Careful, furnace man. Stick around long enough, you'll end up in one."

Out in the dark, past the fences, the hissing stopped.

Then it started again, closer.

Neither of them noticed. Not yet.

The setup spot was stage three, which was less a stage than a roof held up by habit. Mona's gaffer had taped marks on the floor in yellow, and a young operator named Pell was waiting with his hands jammed in his pockets, looking as though he had already been yelled at twice that night.

"This is the mark?" Jerome set the case down and popped the latches. "The floor moves when I walk on it."

"The floor moves when everybody walks on it," Shae said. "Welcome to show business."

He lifted the Arriflex out and started checking the magazine, and that was where the trouble started, because Pell reached for the winding crank without asking.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Jerome put his whole hand flat over the crank. "You don't wind it like a Bolex. This is a spring-wound magazine, and if you crank it past the stop you shear a gear, and then your whole movie is shot on a phone."

"It's got a stop marker," Pell said.

"It's got a stop marker that's worn down to a suggestion. I restored this thing. I know what it sounds like when it's happy and that sound you just made isn't it."

"Oh, here we go." Shae dropped onto an apple box and watched him with her arms crossed. "He loves it more than we do."

"I sold and restored cameras for twenty-two years. Yes, I love them. That's the whole reason you're renting mine instead of shooting on a phone."

"It's not your camera. It's Mona's rental."

"It's my camera until Friday, actually, which is when the check clears."

"Unbelievable." She stood up. "You've been here ten minutes and you're already doing the thing. The thing where the new guy acts like the movie belongs to him."

"The thing? What thing? I'm protecting the instrument you need for your big scene."

"My big scene that I'm doing my own stunts on, in the dark, with a fog machine that smells like a house fire, and the camera guy wants to argue about gears." She threw her hands up. "You know what, fine. Wind your little crank. I'm going to go check my marks before your precious camera weighs the floor down."

"Shae," Pell started.

"Don't."

She stomped off toward the dark end of the stage, the end past the lights where the set pieces became shadows and the shadows became the open doors and the doors became the night. Jerome watched her go, annoyed in a way he couldn't quite file properly, and went back to the magazine.

"You two always like this?" Pell asked.

"We met an hour ago."

"Great. Can't wait for the next hour."

He got the magazine seated and threaded, and he was just feeling pleased with himself when he heard Shae yell, a short angry sound, then a scuffing sound, then nothing, which was worse.

He was up before he decided to be. The dark end of the stage had an old water trapdoor for the cannery days, right where the floor met the loading door, and it had been left open for a cable run. She'd found it with her boot.

"Shae."

"Here." Her voice came from low and to the left, and it was not hurt, it was furious, which he would learn was her default setting. "I'm fine. My foot caught the edge. The floor just ends, did you know that? The floor just ends."

"Hold on." He got down on his knees at the edge. Below him, half visible, she was straddling the opening with one leg down in the black and both hands gripping the rim, and under her boots was a drop he couldn't judge, maybe four feet, maybe forty.

"Don't look down, okay, don't look down, just take my wrist."

"I don't need your wrist."

"Shae, for God's sake, it's a hole. Take the wrist."

There was a pause, the pause of a proud woman doing arithmetic. Then her hand came up out of the dark and grabbed his forearm, and he braced against the floor and hauled, and she came up over the rim in one graceless scramble and ended up on her back on the boards, breathing hard.

Silence. Then she started laughing, a real laugh this time, and it