Ren Mackenzie's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Ren stood in her workshop the next morning and stared at the two blank mannequins. They held the jerseys well enough, but the set looked dead. No tilt of a hip. No hand on a weapon. A scream-queen would scroll past this in a second. She needed bodies. She needed faces. She had no models and no budget to hire any. She pulled up her contacts and scrolled until her thumb stopped on one name: Violet Morrow. Violet ran a medium practice out of a rented clearing in the Indigo Woods. Ren had met her once at a flea market and remembered the carousel at the entrance to her lot, the purple canopy over her séance platform, the way Violet posed for photos like she already knew the angle. Ren wrote the message before she could talk herself out of it. She asked Violet to model the line. She offered a free jersey and credit in the pitch deck. Violet wrote back in ten minutes. She said yes, but only if they shot at her place. She had a structure on the lot she'd been fixing up — an old carnival funhouse with warped mirrors and peeling clown panels — and she wanted footage of it for her own work. She also had a prop she thought Ren would like: a built room she used for séance theatrics, a bloodstained hospital bed beside a wooden electric chair, the back wall cracked and green. Ren read the message twice and laughed. The set she couldn't build was sitting in the woods already. She loaded the truck before noon. Jerseys, lamps, the seamless paper, the rack. She wedged one of her mannequins in last — the lean skeleton-faced one, jaw fixed in a grin, joint pins still showing at the elbows. Violet had said she'd bring a friend to fill the second jersey. Two bodies, one mannequin, one built ward room, one funhouse facade. Ren counted it out loud on the drive and the number held. The clearing smelled like pine and old paint. Violet met her at the carousel in a torn white slip, hair already done, and waved her toward the funhouse. They hung the ghost-face jersey on Violet first. They propped the skeleton mannequin in the electric chair and dressed it in the ripped purple one. Violet's friend took the bed, restraints loose at her wrists, a third jersey pulled tight. Ren raised her phone. Her hands were still. She shot for an hour and didn't stop to check the screen. When she finally did, the first frame stopped her cold. It looked like a still from a film she wished she'd seen. She had her photos. Now the email had nowhere left to hide.