SIX

Amber could hear her name. So many different voices, adult voices, men and women, all calling out for her. The soft contours of her name echoed in the surrounding trees. Rippling.

Amber…

They had come looking for her. They would find her here. Eventually. She knew that. Hiding in the cemetery. Balled up inside herself among the graves. Like a baby. Like a little—

She had gone where the lights couldn’t touch her. Where the reach of the arc lamps receded into shadows. But the cemetery wasn’t big enough to hide forever. Not if she really wanted to be alone. Away from all of them.

Her back was pressed against a headstone. The very grit of it scraped off her shoulders. The headstones were so old in this corner of the cemetery. Much older than the rest. The names and dates had all faded from the endless weather. She glanced at the inscription written behind her, barely able to read it in the dark. She ran her fingers along the name, the date of their birth, their death, trying hard to read the inscription with her fingertips, as if she were blind.

Amber…

A breeze blew through the tombs, whisking off with her name. She couldn’t make out the distinction between voices anymore. She couldn’t tell if it was a production assistant or her mother or the director or the cast. Whoever was shouting now, or however many, their voices were fading. As if they were heading in the other direction. They were going the wrong way.

Amber…

She knew she shouldn’t cry. She knew she was ruining her makeup. All those hours in the spinning dentist chair…all for nothing. She would have to sit and stare at her reflection for hours again, forced to start from scratch. Hours to take the ruined latex appliances off and hours to glue completely new prosthetics back on. The makeup techs would be polite and say it was no big deal, shit happens, but Amber knew, she knew they would all be mad at her. Fuming on the inside. Furious for all those wasted hours. She was old enough to understand that time is money in this business and there wasn’t nearly enough money to begin with for this cursed production and now she had wasted everyone’s time, hours and hours and Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars, all because she was crying.

Because Amber was nothing but a big crybaby.

I didn’t raise you to be a crybaby, she could hear her mother saying already, scolding her in front of the whole crew. Stop making a fool out of yourself. Pull yourself together.

Amber brought her knees up to her chest and buried her face in the chasm between her legs. Her skin crackled. Peeled. The latex puckered around her cheeks. She could feel the tears worming their way through the nylon, winnowing within the crevices along her face.

It itched. It itched so much.

All Amber wanted to do was tear it all away. Dig her fingers into the fake layer of flesh and rip the makeup off with her own bare hands. Rip it all away, every last layer. Rip away her real skin even. Until there was none left. Until it was all exposed. Her bones. Her own skull.

She looked down at her costume. The ashen dress. What she must have looked like. A crying ghost girl. A crybaby phantom hiding among the graves.

Her tooth fell out.

Amber hadn’t even realized it had torn free, but there it was, resting in her hand. The slightest puddle of bloodied saliva settled into the crevices of her palm.

Her tooth. She closed her hand around it, squeezing her fingers into a fist, until she felt the roots of her tooth dig into her flesh.

If she waited here long enough, the sun would eventually come up. It would be a new day. Perhaps some mourning family member would visit the cemetery to pay their respects to a dearly departed granny and they would stumble upon Amber in costume, her burnt skin in tatters. She could just imagine their reaction. Their screams. They would run. Run from her.

Jessica is back, they’d shout. Jessica Ford is freeeeeeeeeeee…

That would show them, she thought. I’ll show them all.

A sob escaped Amber’s throat. That wasn’t what she wanted. Not at all. She didn’t want anything to do with Jessica.

Amber wasn’t going back. Wasn’t going to star in this stupid, awful movie. They couldn’t make her. They just couldn’t. No matter how much her mother insisted, demanded that she do it. She could spank Amber if she wanted. She could bend her daughter over her knee and give her a good hiding in front of the whole crew. Amber didn’t care. She didn’t care what the contract said or whether she got paid or sued or whatever adults do. She wouldn’t do it.

She just couldn’t. She couldn’t be Jessica.

Amber…

The pinprick of insect legs scuttled across the back of her hand. She yanked her arm away. Whatever bug it was, it was gone now. A beetle or centipede, maybe. They had to be all over her now. She could feel them. All of them. Crawling over her skin. She couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there. They had to be there. So many insects skittering over the earth.

And what about the bodies buried just below her?

This was a cemetery, after all.

A real cemetery.

Why couldn’t they have just made a pretend one? Styrofoam tombstones in a soccer field somewhere back in Los Angeles? Why did they have to come all the way out here? Why this cemetery in particular? What was so special about this place, this graveyard, with all of its dead? All those bodies, their pruned flesh, withered and shriveled and peeling away. Their toothy grins and their dust-covered charnel suits. They must have been so angry at them, at Amber, mad at her for coming here, making light of death by waltzing over their graves.

Jessica…

Someone called out for her. The voice sounded different. Distinct. There was a softness to it. A tenderness. Certainly not her mother.

Jessica…

Whoever it was, their voice drifted along with the wind and winnowed through the tombs, brushing over Amber’s cheek.

Jessica…

It was a woman. A woman, calling out for her.

Jessica…

That’s weird, Amber thought. Why would they call out for her character?

Maybe she was just imagining it.

Jessica…

But no. There it was again. A woman’s voice. The tender lilt to it drifted over the cemetery. For a moment, Amber couldn’t shake the feeling that the voice had started within her own head. Whoever was calling for her had access to her thoughts.

Jessica…

But Amber wasn’t Jessica. She was just dressed like her. Pretending to be her.

This wasn’t real. This was all for show.

Didn’t they know that?

Jessica…

Amber turned herself over until she was kneeling before the headstone. She brought her hands up and grabbed hold of the crumbling sandstone. Pulling herself up, she peered over the edge of the headstone to see if she could spot the person calling out for her.

No one was there.

The cemetery was completely empty. Nothing but headstones. The lamps were still on, casting their shadows farther off. Amber sat within the inky puddle, curled inside the black.

Where had everybody gone? The crew? Shouldn’t they be looking for her now?

Where was her mother? Why wasn’t she looking for Amber?

Why was she alone?

Amber hesitated. Just a few rows ahead, she spotted a grave that looked unlike any of the other surrounding tombs.

This one had a fence. A metal fence that rose about a foot off the soil, sequestering its hallowed ground to prevent anyone from stepping on it.

Amber squinted, unsure of what she was seeing. But yes, yes, the fence was made up of crosses. Dozens and dozens of crucifixes, welded together into a rusted web. The same kinds of crosses she’d seen in the chapel. The larger crosses formed a scaffolding that impaled the ground. Several smaller crosses had been soldered along the arms of the bigger ones. The whole thing was choked with cobwebs and weeds. The ground itself hadn’t been tended to for a long, long time, from the looks of it. The crabgrass rose up from the grave and wove its way through the fence. Amber hadn’t even noticed the headstone. All those weeds were in the way.

Before she knew what she was even doing, before she could stop herself, Amber leaned forward and pressed her tooth into the dirt. She forced it down into the soil as far as her fingers could poke it, as if the tooth itself were a seed that would one day grow to bear wondrous fruit.

Jessica…

The voice was louder now.

Jessica…

Closer.

Jessica…

No—not closer. Not louder. Just…clearer. In her head.

Jessica…

Amber wasn’t ready to be found. Not yet. She couldn’t face anyone. Not from the movie. And certainly not her mother. She didn’t want Mom to see her like this. Crying like a little girl.

She could hide. Hide somewhere else. The woods, maybe?

There was still time to slip through the tree line. She turned to run. Quick. Before anyone spotted her. She could slip through the row of tombs if she hurried. They wouldn’t find her in—

The fence.

She hadn’t remembered the fence at her feet. All those crosses rising up from the ground. The tip of her toes caught a crucifix, snagging her foot and sending her tumbling forward.

She was falling. Falling onto this caged-in grave.

The crumbling headstone filled her vision, coming for her so quickly, until there was nothing else for her to see. The weatherworn slope of it. The brittle edge. The weeds strangling its façade.

Amber’s temple met sandstone. Shards of white-hot stars pierced her field of vision, like light from a projector burning through a snagged filmstrip, bubbling and distorting and chewing through the quivering celluloid until a black hole burst open and swallowed her, leaving behind nothing but darkness.