Ren Mackenzie pushed open her workroom door and froze. A purple ghost-faced jersey lay shredded on the floor, sharp rips running through the fabric like claw marks. A small Blenheim cavapoo sat in the middle of the mess, tail wagging. The bottom of her shop door had a puppy-sized hole chewed clean through it. Ren wanted to be angry. Her one big goal — getting her horror jerseys onto a certain scream-queen actress — already felt heavy enough without this. "Josie," Ren sighed, recognizing her neighbor's puppy. Josie trotted over and dropped a scrap at her feet. The torn cloth hung in long, jagged strips. Ren picked it up to throw away. Then she stopped. The rips looked exactly like a slasher's claw slash across fresh fabric. She sat down hard on the floor next to Josie. The ruined jersey wasn't ruined. It was a new line. Ripped. Clawed. Survived. Each tear told a story a slasher film would love. Ren laughed and scratched Josie behind the ears. "You little monster. You just designed for me." She looked at the chewed door and grinned. A new door was coming — and it would be hers. Painted bloody. Carved with claw marks. A horror gate for her workshop, a love letter to the actress whose films taught her what good looks like. Customers would see it and know exactly who they were dealing with. Ren gathered the scraps into a careful pile beside her bright rainbow press. Josie curled against her knee. For the first time in a month, the fear in her chest felt smaller than the idea in her hands. She would finish the ripped line. Then she would finally send the email.

Morning light hit the rainbow press as Ren fed another blank jersey under its plate. By noon, a small army of ripped horror shirts hung drying on hooks. She stepped back, proud — then her stomach dropped. She had product, but no way to show it. Who would back a designer with no real photos? Her pitch email would die on arrival. Ren grabbed her tools. She sketched fast and built faster. By dusk, a headless male form stood in the corner, lean and dark with red accents along the ribs. Beside it, a sharper female shape took shape under her hands, all gothic curves and bloodied detail. She wheeled out a heavy clothes rack next, hammering ornate hangers along its bar. Red paint dripped down the black iron like fresh wounds. The torn ghost-face jersey went on first. It looked alive on the form. It looked like a product. Then she frowned. The light was wrong. Flat. Cheap. No scream-queen would look twice at a flash-bleached snapshot. Ren dragged scrap wood into the center of the room and built a tall frame. She clamped a roll of seamless paper across it and bolted gothic spikes along the top edge. She rigged two clip lamps to the frame's arms and angled them down. The jersey on the mannequin caught the light just right — shadows deep in every claw rip, the ghost face glowing cold. Ren laughed out loud. The set looked like a movie still. She lifted her phone, then lowered it. Her own hands shook too much. The shot had to be perfect. Ren needed a photographer — someone steady, someone real. The studio was ready. The line was ready. Now she just had to find the eye behind the lens.

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.