Chapter 1
My alarm rang out. Its tone was different from the one I was used to. My eyes shot open, and panic immediately coursed through my body, waking me completely up in the span of a heartbeat. I grabbed my phone and pulled it in front of my face, yanking the charging cable out of the wall from the force. Four fifteen in the morning was what my blurry eyes could make out.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” I snarled.
I tore the charging cable out of the bottom of my phone and shot out of bed. I stepped into the jeans I’d let drop to the floor the night before. Pulling them up, I let out a frustrated grunt. They were backward.
“Get your poop in a group, Calvin,” I muttered.
Stepping out of my pants, I turned them around, put them back on and fastened them to my waist. I tripped over my shoes, hitting the floor of my trailer hard. I ignored the pain in my shoulder. I wrestled with the shoes, putting them on the right feet, first time.
“Score.”
Spinning to my stomach, I scrambled back to my feet and groped in the darkness where my desk chair was. The shirt I’d thrown off in my exhaustion the night before was still draped over its back. I gave it a quick sniff. The twenty-three-hour day before lingered. I threw it on anyway.
As I scrambled out of my bedroom, I grabbed my spray deodorant, gave myself a quick once over and tossed the can back into my room. It clattered to the floor . Using my phone’s screen, I found the latch to my door. With a push, it swung open.
I winced at the flood of light from the Source 4 PAR can lights. As I raised my hand to shield my eyes, a production assistant slid a cup of coffee into my hand.
“They’re waiting for you, Mr. Cooper,” she said.
Rubbing my eyes, I continued to walk, looking down at the cup, I took a drink. Perfect, as always.
“Thank you, Cathy.”
I turned to raise the cup to her. She moved her clipboard into the crook of her elbow before offering me a thumbs-up. I ducked under a set piece, entering a large, circular room with what looked like stone for the floor and walls. A group of actors, ten to fifteen years my junior, sat along the edges of the set. One with long, blond hair and a chin that could cut glass strummed on his guitar.
“Look who’s late for once,” Eric taunted.
“I’m fifteen minutes late because my first four alarms didn’t go off,” I countered, walking over to my camera rig. “Not four hours late because I kept getting rejected by the local barista for the fiftieth time.”
The other actors sniggered at the comeback. Eric stopped strumming and raised his arms in protest. He said nothing. The director walked in. I sat on the rig and inspected the camera setup, running standard warm-up tests on the controls.
“Good to see you’re finally up,” the director teased before looking at my shirt. “Late night?”
I looked down at the barbeque sauce stain from dinner the night before, dried to the camera lens in the center of my “This is my plot armor” shirt.
“I couldn’t quite get the coloration right. It ended up being a lot trickier than I thought with the practical effects,” I replied.
“Well, at least when you’re late, it’s only by a few minutes and for a good reason,” the director said.
Everyone turned toward Eric.
“I’m here on time today. Leave me alone!”
“That’s because the barista wasn’t working today,” Lauren replied.
She tossed her large, chestnut banana curls over one shoulder, turning back to the script she held in her lap.
“Before we start on blocking, I do have some questions about this scene.” She stood up, approaching the director. “I’m a little uncomfortable reading this.”
My fingers twitched against the controls. My camera responded at the end of its boom flawlessly. I cycled through a few settings, getting the coloration of the room to match notes I’d sleepily jotted down on my arm a few hours before.
“No,” the director replied. “There was a change. You and Eric aren’t going to be reading the spell work. We’re swapping you two with the more nervous dispositioned characters.”
“Score!” one of the other cast members replied with a fist pump.
“Thank you,” Lauren replied.
“Oh, come on, I had that incantation down like the back of my hand,” Eric countered.
“Camera good,” I called out, taking another sip of my coffee. “Ready for your direction.”
The director clapped his hands together and pointed at the near occultist symbol in the stone.
“Okay, everyone, places please,” the director called out.
I sat back in my chair, running the camera movements over and over to ensure my route went smoothly. The talent made a circle around the symbol.
“How accurate is this to his original works?” the first assistant director asked.
“Directly from his personal journal, apparently,” the director replied. “Let’s get this scene.”
“Quiet on set!” the first assistant director called out.
Everyone fell silent. My fingers pressed firmly against the controls. I held my breath, hating the quiet before action was called.
“Lights,” the director called out.
They dimmed; the set lighting shifted appropriately.
“Camera!”
I hit record. The second assistant director stepped in front of the camera with the clapper board and snapped it shut.
“Action!” the director called.
All of the actors started to chant the strange language. My eyes stayed locked to my screen. I brought the camera around, giving each one their closeup. I made sure to get a shot of Eric and Lauren, showing their doubt for the ritual the characters were conducting.
I brought the camera over to a ritualistic prop knife. One of the actors grabbed it and drew it across his hand. The fake blood poured from the blade. I lingered on the shot, giving a silent compliment to the props department for how realistic the blood looked.
The actors continued to chant. I focused on the leader of the group, who balled up his bloody hand in a fist. I brought the camera down at a low angle, shooting up at him while droplets of blood zipped right past my lens, splashing onto the stone ground.
I glanced over at the director. He leaned forward, chewing on his thumbnail before pointing at me. My thumb moved from the controls to my stop recording button, hovering over it.
“Cut!” the director called out.
I tapped the button. My little red dot turned off. I leaned back in my chair and picked up my coffee before swiveling to face our director.
“And?” I asked.
“And I think we’re good to move on,” the director replied.
“Oh my gosh, this is real blood,” the actor said, sniffing his hand.
“Did you cut your hand?” the second assistant director asked, approaching the group.
“No,” the actor replied.
I noticed a sneer pull itself across Eric’s face. My lips pursed and eyes widened. I glared at him. After a couple of seconds, he looked at me before mouthing it was just pig’s blood. I shook my head as a hint of frustration swirled to life in me. That quickly died as the set started to shake.
“Earthquake!” the director called out.
“Everybody under a table or into a doorjamb,” the first director added.
I noticed a couple of production assistants run underneath some of the set door frames. I pointed at them, shaking my head.
“Real ones; those could fall o—”
The deep cracking sound that tore through the set cut me off. Screams rose from the cast. I whipped around to see a strange, indescribable color fill the emblem that’d been speckled with the pig’s blood. A crack ripped across it.
Before I could register what happened, a swirl of black light and tendrils tore through the crack, accompanied by what sounded like something far larger than jet engines, and a gravitational yank. My gut lurched. I turned and grabbed my chair.
Terror gripped me almost as tightly. I clutched my seat. My legs were yanked out from under me. The pull ripped my shoes and jeans off in the blink of an eye. I bowed my knees to keep my undergarments from joining them in the abyss.
Our director, first and second assistant directors, and the script supervisor were yanked off their feet. Their screams warped as they were pulled into the void. My gut tightened and my mind reeled, trying to reconcile what I was seeing against what I thought I knew was impossible.
The void shifted, the whirrs and zips of servos and metallic grinding rang out. Production assistants slid across the ground, grabbing desperately at the fake flooring that broke up in their hands. They disappeared into the tear in reality.
It shifted once more. The honks of a big city would’ve confused me if I weren’t so distracted by the edges of my seat cutting into my biceps while my grip slowly failed. The craft services table and its three attendees were forced through the foam wall and into the void.
The crack shifted again and sand surged from it before being yanked back in. Cathy’s scream pulled my attention forward. She tumbled through the air, close enough for me to grab. Before I could think, I snatched her forearm. She held me tightly before being jerked to a stop. My arm slipped off my chair.
We both tumbled toward the void. I grabbed onto a cable of my camera’s crane. It cut into my hand. I gritted my teeth, looking down at her.
“Hang on!” I shouted.
The terror that filled her face was the kind that would’ve haunted me forever if so much more wasn’t going on. A sharp pain dragged down my limb, and my grip slipped. Her nails dug trenches into my arm. I hardly felt it from the adrenaline surge that overwhelmed me.
She flew free, being pulled in as well. She vanished, and the warp let out a series of clangs like metal against metal. That was when I noticed the actors who’d chanted stood at the edge of the rift, each of them frozen in place, their eyes completely blacked out but not impacted by the pull.
Eric and Lauren hung on to each other and a pillar. Their legs intertwined to keep hold of one another. The set dressing broke. Both of them tumbled toward the void, holding tightly to each other, their screams drowned out by the destruction of the sound stage.
My cable snapped. I took in a sharp breath, then my stomach lurched into my butt. The gravity well ripped me toward it. My hands managed to catch the handle on my mounted camera. It slowed me for a fraction of a second as Eric and Lauren vanished.
The base snapped. I went tumbling in next, holding my camera close to my chest. Once the darkness consumed me, I flipped violently through a void. In the darkness, I caught glimpses of what looked like tendrils and impossibly large leathery wings.
Between the confusion and fear, I didn’t try to make sense of it. I clenched my eyes shut, curled myself around my camera and prayed whatever would end me would at least be quick.
THUD!
I landed on something hard. The wind was forced from my lungs. A pain shot through my shoulder. I kept my eyes squeezed tightly shut, fighting to take a breath. When my lungs finally expanded, the air I drew in was cool, damp and moldy.
I coughed, uncontrollably at first. Gently releasing my camera, I rolled to my back, ignoring the flicker of light on the other side of my eyelids. I coughed for a few more moments, lying on my back in my floral boxers and stained This is my plot armor shirt.
I opened my eyes; I blinked the room into focus before my blood turned cold. I was entrapped. Stone completely surrounded me, along with what looked like several sarcophagi.
“Oh, I knew it, I died,” I whimpered.
I let my head fall back to the ground. A soft squeak caught my attention. I followed it, expecting to see a rat or a mouse. To my surprise, a small hamster with black and white patterns on its fur climbed into my palm.
“You’re not so bad,” I panted.
It scampered up my arm, sat on my chest and looked me square in the face. My heart sank.
“This is the part where you turn ravenous and try to eat through my chest, isn’t it?”
“No, actually,” the hamster said in a surprisingly deep voice, looking at his paws. “And you’re not dead.”
My eyes widened, and my heart skipped a beat. I backhanded the creature while scrambling to my feet. The noise that left my throat was higher pitched than anything I’d made after puberty. The hamster winced.
“Keep that up, though, and you will be,” he warned.
“I’m in hell!”
“Uh, no, you’re in a crypt. I can help you get out if you want.”
I paused, looking at the creature, unsure if I was hallucinating or just going insane. Either way, there was only one option available to me. Against my better judgment, I nodded.
“Sure, uh, yeah, help me get out.”
The hamster scampered over to me before looking up at me.
“One question. What are you wearing?” ...
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