Christopher O’Halloran (he/him) is a milk-slinging Canadian actor-turned-author with work published or forthcoming in Kaleidotrope, No Sleep Podcast, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Hellbound Books, and others. He is the editor of the anthology Howls from the Wreckage.
Is American dust composed of different stuff than Italian dust? In the warm glow of the spotlight, motes float, sparkling like Lindsey’s future. Skin cells, shed hair, the essence of Italy and her people. People nourished by bread, meat, cheese, wine. The dust tickles Lindsey’s nose until she lets slip the tiniest, most inoffensive sneeze she can manage.
A bigger sneeze would have released the butterflies in her stomach.
Lindsey shades her eyes and looks out into the shadows of the theater. Anything can be hiding in those shadows.
“Is the mic stand high enough?” asks Lorenzo. He lounges halfway up the expansive rows of plush seats. A slender leg in tight slacks rests on the seat in front of him, the rich, brown loafer bobbing in the air like a gondola at rest.
The mic stand isn’t high enough, but Lindsey can hunch. She won’t touch it. What if she knocks it over? What if she breaks it?
“Mhm,” she grunts into the mesh, quiet voice blasting through the theater. A lock of blonde hair falls in front of her eyes, and Lindsey brushes it behind her ear.
How much older is Lorenzo? A year? Two? Not enough to be dangerous, she told herself when he approached her by the fountain. Especially not when his mom lurks behind the glass of the control booth.
If Lindsey’s parents knew she had ditched her class to audition to be this strange, handsome boy’s singing partner, they would flip. But that would require them to notice anything she did.
“It feels so weird to do this without a guitar or a piano.” Lindsey titters. Her laugh is an anxious rattle like the squealing engines of cars driven by the seniors back home. That’ll be her next year.
Next year? Try a couple months. In a couple months, she’ll have to decide what college to attend. What to do with the rest of her life. What to wear to prom, what courses to take her final year, what to tell Max when he finally gets the guts to ask her out.
But now, she’s on stage across the world from home, a microphone before her. She’s going to be on Italian television in front of millions of eyes. Italy’s Got Talent, or whatever they call it here. Finally, Lindsey will get what she deserves. What she’s been so afraid to ask for.
“The instrument is protection,” says Lorenzo, slipping his leg off the seat and leaning forward so he can rest his arms on his knees. So he can give Lindsey his full attention. “I want vulnerability, bella.”
Lindsey’s eyes burn under his attention. They fall to the ground before she can fall into his charming caramels, the dark curls cascading around the olive-skinned face of an angel.
Her face burns. Must be as pink as the rosé her principal downs by the bottle while pretending to chaperone this trip.
There’s nothing to be done about it. He can see it. He wants vulnerable? Well, there it is.
“Acapella, bella.” Lorenzo sits back again. The loafer appears once more over the seat in front of him.
Lindsey hunches, her spine pressing against her blouse, pointy shoulder blades jutting out like the elbows of a chicken. She closes her eyes and pretends she’s in her bedroom.
When she opens her mouth, she’s surprised at the song that rolls out. It’s something by Miley Cyrus, something from a movie she saw as a little girl. A song about reaching the summit of a great mountain. Pushing yourself to your furthest limits. Risking it all.
Here she is, risking it all. Singing like she’s done so many times in the shower. In front of her Harry Styles poster. Into water bottles and hairbrushes masquerading as microphones.
“Is this where you want me?” asks Ashley, stumbling onstage in heels that blow up her height beyond her usual staggering figure.
Talk about climbing mountains.
The song dies in Lindsey’s throat. She’s no longer in her bedroom. She’s in a strange country on a summer trip with her class, ‘sick in bed’ according to her hungover principal.
What the hell is Ashley doing here? How did she give their principal the slip?
“Ciao, Ashley!” Lorenzo stands, arms outstretched as if to hug her from thirty yards away. “Just in time. So glad you could make it.”
Ashley shoots Lindsey a look, smiling her fake, lip-gloss-slathered smile. Perfect teeth pulled into place by expensive braces years ago.
“You did great, Lindsey.” Lorenzo smiles at her, ignoring Ashley for the time being. Something that never happens. “I think if you move more, loosen up, it’ll unlock that star power hiding in you.”
Lindsey tries not to listen to the giggle Ashley lets out.
“Thank you,” she says into the microphone, again brushing hair behind her ears.
“Ashley.” Lorenzo extends a hand. “If you might give us a sample.”
“With pleasure.” Ashley struts forward, her presence repelling Lindsey from the mic stand like reverse magnetism. Her heels rattle loose boards beneath their feet. When she reaches the stand, she twists the collar like she’s breaking its neck and yanks it to the proper height. As if she’s done it a hundred times.
Lindsey shuffles away. Should she leave the stage? Nobody is looking at her. She’s out of the spotlight.
Before she has the chance to so much as duck behind a curtain, Ashley springs into a dance number that makes Lady Gaga look like Lady and the Tramp.
Lorenzo hoots from his seat, clapping his hands to an imaginary beat.
Ashley’s heels stomp and her knees pop, arms flexing and hands constantly on her body. Heat radiates off her. Hair flies in circles, back and forth, side to side. Her hips mesmerize and repulse Lindsey.
By the time Ashley approaches the microphone again, she’s out of breath. She belts out something Lindsey can’t recognize. The words feel familiar, but the tune isn’t there. It’s a tone-deaf drone that shakes the ceiling.
Lorenzo winces. Ashley can’t see it, blinded by the spotlight, but Lindsey does. Sees it and smiles. She feels bad about it, but smiles nonetheless.
Ashley can stand to be taken down a peg. She’s got about forty pegs on Lindsey. All the confidence in the world, not a struggle in her life. Perfect, bitchy Ashley.
“Thank you,” Lorenzo says at the end of what might be a chorus, clapping politely. He takes a deep breath, hands tented in thought. “Can you two stand together?”
Lindsey shuffles back over to Ashley. The microphone is no longer aimed at her clavicle but rather her forehead. She’ll have to jump to be heard.
“Lindsey, your voice is unlike any other. You capture such sweetness, an, uh uh uh, innocence that shines through in every word.”
“Thank you,” Lindsey says to the stage.
“Ashley,” coughs Lorenzo, the sound making Lindsey jump. “You command the stage. You own it. I have never met a, uh, presence like yours.”
“And to think,” she says into the mic, “I don’t even have my full wardrobe.”
Lorenzo smiles. “If I could only pick both of you.”
There’s a click, and the voice of God spools out of the ceiling, feminine and deep. Italian words spoken like a spell.
“I can?” Lorenzo looks to the control booth where his mom leans into her own microphone, thin as the leg of a centipede. “Grazie, Mama.”
He claps his hands, and the floor beneath the girls falls away.
They drop a short distance, barely time to shriek before sharp angles jab the air out of their lungs. Lindsey covers her face and rolls down the mound of what feels like broken couches. Alternating hard and soft, wood and cushion.
When she stops, it’s on concrete, something long and thin laying across her face. A branch? A broomstick? It stinks like the room of her little brother. Sweat and bodily fluids she’d rather not identify.
Lindsey pushes it away and laces her fingers through those of another person.
She screams, rolling away from the arm. It slaps against the ground. The sound reverberates in the stone chamber.
Lindsey’s back slams against a hard wall, the air whooshing out of her lungs. Her scream chokes off, and in the dark she clutches her chest.
Breathe, she tells herself. Just breathe.
Her eyes start to adjust. She can see the pile. Not furniture. Not wood and fabric.
Bodies. Girls her age, starved and broken. They form a twitching mound, existing in a state of suspended animation. Alive—somehow—but as much as zombies are. A mountain of teenaged ghouls.
Ashley’s on the other side of the pile, shouting at the trapdoor. “Let us out, you asshole!” She takes a few running steps, but her heel catches on something. A yelp slips out of her, and she collapses.
With every second spent in the dark, Lindsey sees more and more.
The writhing girls stacked on top of each other. A broken neck jutting out between an armpit and the top of a blonde scalp. Fingers caressing skin, weakly gripping for purchase. A shuffling mass of defeated spirits that reminds Lindsey of the crab tanks at the Chinese restaurant her dad loves. Claws in tender areas. Points in joints
Repulsion fights with pity. She can’t bear to look at them anymore.
Lindsey shuffles around the pile to get to Ashley, on the ground, ankle in her hand.
She’s crying. The tough girl. The queen of confidence has cracked her facade.
Lindsey wishes she could find some iota of pleasure in her misery, but she’s dry. Despite every barb Ashley’s leveled at Lindsey, she’s still just a kid. They both are. She deserves this no more than Lindsey.
“You okay?” she asks.
Ashley sniffles, wiping at her face with the back of a hand. Just a shadow among blackness, the only light coming through the seams of the trapdoor.
“Leave me alone.”
“Let me see,” says Lindsey, reaching for Ashley’s ankle. She slips the giant shoe off and drops it on the hard ground.
Ashley lets her, looking off into the blackness.
“Does this hurt?” Lindsey moves the foot gently left, then right.
“Ow!” Ashley draws back, hissing air through her teeth.
Lindsey removes her hand. “Just a sprain.”
“I didn’t know you were a doctor.”
No, that’s her dad. The GP with more time for his patients than his kids. Lindsey thinks of him back home, of her lawyer mom and her idiot brother whose chief goal is to ruin her life at any possible moment.
Against all odds, she misses them.
Tears fill her eyes, and she quickly wipes them away.
“Do you hear him?” asks Ashley.
Lindsey listens for a moment. “No.” Her voice quivers, the short word becoming two syllables.
“Are you crying?”
“Shut up!” Lindsey slides a foot away. “You were crying, too.”
“From pain,” protests Ashley. “That’s different.” She breathes for a second, eyes turned up to the trapdoor. “You can’t afford to be scared.”
What is she saying? There’s no way out of this. If there was, they wouldn’t be keeping company with a pile of misled and cast-aside girls. The collection of a freak mother and son. A breathing mountain of flesh.
Why are they in a pile, anyway? Why aren’t they fighting to escape? Did they give up and decide to spend their final moments together? How much comfort could participation in the heap bring?
There’s only one way to find out. Lindsey can already feel the pull of the pile. The dejection gnawing at her spirit.
“There’s nothing we can do,” says Lindsey. She lifts her knees and wraps her arms around her legs. Scooches away from the other girls. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Jesus.” Ashley groans. “You are so hopeless, you know that? Just letting things happen around you. What kind of life is that?”
Lindsey can’t believe what she’s hearing. She’s hours—days?—from death or worse, and she’s getting bullied. At the bottom of a pit, she’s getting bullied. She can’t believe it.
“I—”
“Max knows where we are,” Ashley says, not letting Lindsey even begin to explain herself. “I sent him a text before taking the stage. Told him if we’re not back in half an hour to send in the policia.”
“Max?” He is in love with Lindsey. He’s a good friend, something she doesn’t want to take advantage of. He’ll send for help. “Why’d you tell Max?”
“He actually wanted to follow you,” says Ashley, rubbing her ankle. “Saw you leaving with that creepo’s mom and didn’t like the look of them. I said I’d keep you company, thinking there was no way they could kidnap both of us.” She laughed. “Didn’t see the vanishing floor trick coming.”
“Wait,” says Lindsey. “You auditioned too so I wouldn’t be alone?”
Ashley looks at Lindsey, her face blank in the darkness.
“No,” she says, laughing. “I wanted to be a star. I knew you didn’t have it in you.”
Of course. No way Ashley would do anything so selfless.
“Your voice is nice, though.”
Lindsey is speechless. She holds her legs tighter.
The mass of girls shifts. One of them moans.
Max is sending help.
“Hello?”
Lindsey jumps. She’s been leaning against the wall. Must have fallen asleep at some point. Drool leaks out the corner of her mouth.
Ashley lifts her head off Lindsey’s shoulder.
“What?”
“Shhh.” Lindsey looks up at the wooden roof. The thin square outline of light in the trapdoor.
“Linds?”
Oh my God. The dummy came on his own.
“Is that—”
Lindsey shushes Ashley again. If Lorenzo finds Max there, he might leave him alone. But if he sees that Max knows she and Ashley are down here…
The girls get to their feet. What do they do? How can they get a signal to Max?
“Lindsey? Ashley?”
“Excuse me…” Lorenzo. Acting like the director of this fucked-up play. “You can’t be here. This is a private property.”
“I’m looking for my friends.”
The boards above their heads creak. Dust falls from the cracks. It gets into Lindsey’s eyes, and she has to blink the irritation away.
“Max,” Ashley whispers.
“Sh!” says Lindsey, eyes burning.
“Max,” Ashley says, louder.
Lindsey claps her hand over Ashley’s mouth.
“What was that?” Max asks.
This close, Lindsey can see Ashley’s wide eyes glowing white in the gloom. Moisture forms on the palm pressed against her mouth.
The boards bounce, footsteps rushing across them. Max grunts as Lorenzo makes contact, and the floor shakes with the weight of them both.
“Max!” Lindsey yells. She needs to help him. He’s not big, not strong. He’s not a fighter. She doesn’t know why he’s here, but he is and she needs to be there for him.
Before she knows it, she’s climbing the bodies of the teen girls, putting her feet against them like they’re solely for her ascension.
Hands reach up, lethargic fingers clawing at her. One hooks in her waistband, but she brushes it away.
Lindsey grabs a shoulder. It rotates, the girl she’s using as a handhold rolling with a groan. Up near the trapdoor, enough light falls on her face for Lindsey to get a good look at her.
The girl has gray skin, teeth rotted away to nubs. Her hair lays limp and stringy against her skull, bare in patches.
How long has she been down here?
She falls against Lindsey, but something steadies her from behind.
“Push!” Ashley has her back, shoving her upward. “Come on!”
She climbs higher with Ashley’s help, the bodies no longer holding her back. They solidify beneath her weight, the ascent becoming easier.
At the peak of this mountain of suffering is a girl with head and legs swallowed by the surrounding flesh so that only her broad back is visible. The perfect surface to stand upon.
With a whispered sorry, Lindsey takes her place with a foot on each shoulder blade. She pushes against the trapdoor, but it won’t budge.
“Max!” She places her mouth to the crack and cries his name. “The control booth!”
A hunk of shadowed metal bolts the trapdoor shut. Her fingers fumble at the catch, but it’s too firm. She can’t get it unlocked.
“I need something hard…”
“Here.” Ashley thrusts something firm against her arm.
Lindsey grabs it. Ashley’s heel. The long stiletto hard as a pool cue.
She turns back to the trapdoor and pries open the locking mechanism.
The door flaps open, thick and heavy.
Lindsey ducks aside, but the swinging panel catches Ashley on the forehead with a hollow thunk.
“Ashley!”
Ashley tumbles down the pile, landing in a heap at the bottom. Her bloody face rotates toward Lindsey. Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. She points a dazed finger at the trapdoor and mouths one word.
Go.
Lindsey looks up. She stretches, but the edge of the stage is just out of reach. Her fingers scrape at the edges of the square hole but can’t find purchase.
Beneath her, the pile writhes. One wrong move, and down she’ll go, just like Ashley.
She’s come right to the end, only to fail. If Ashley had made it up instead of Lindsey, she’d get out easily. It wouldn’t be an issue for the tall girl.
“Help,” Max grunts. He’s struggling against Lorenzo up there. He needs her.
Lindsey takes a deep breath. She crouches, steadying herself on the bodies beneath her.
Her legs uncoil. She uses the girls who have suffered before her as a springboard. With all her strength, she leaps to the edge of the opening.
Lindsey slams her ribcage against the stage. Her legs dangle above the writhing pile of girls. They seem more active now, more aware of their surroundings. Lindsey pulls her feet out of reach of them and swings her body onto solid ground.
Lorenzo straddles Max. He’s bigger than her friend and he’s pushing a knife slowly into Max’s stomach.
Max struggles to hold Lorenzo back as the knife slides into his guts. Blood pools around it. The blade goes in and in and in. Long, ceremonial.
He coughs. Blood spatters Lorenzo’s face.
Lorenzo spins, wiping at his eyes.
Lindsey needs a weapon, but the stage is bare. The only object is the mic stand, her head banging against it as she rolls away from the oubliette.
Lorenzo sees her.
“You.”
He stands, knife left in Max’s stomach. “Get back in your hole.” With a growl, he charges Lindsey.
She picks up the heavy mic stand. She only has one shot.
He lunges for her, but she swings the stand in an arc that spins her in a circle.
It sweeps around him, smacking Lorenzo in the back of the head as he grabs for her. He stumbles, coming to the edge of the pit.
With one final shove, Lindsey connects the wide legs of the stand between his shoulder blades.
“Mama!” Lorenzo cries out, falling into the dark pit.
The bodies are moving. Converging on the boy. They crawl over one another to get to him. Hands grasping shirts, pulling their spider-like, emaciated figures closer and closer, hissing and spitting.
His screams rise out of the darkness, then grow muted as the mountain of girls collapses on him.
Lindsey only hopes Ashley isn’t caught in the middle of it all.
Max groans. His foot rises in the air, kicks against the stage. His features twist in agony.
Lindsey rushes to her friend. You’re not supposed to take a knife out of a wound, but it looks so painful. She doesn’t know what to do. If her dad were here…
“I’m going to get help.”
Dark blood seeps from the corners of Max’s mouth. He winces in pain, his teeth stained red.
“Help!” She screams it out. Doesn’t know who’s going to hear but screams it anyway.
A woman appears at the top of the seats, rushing in from outside. She stops in her tracks.
It’s Lorenzo’s mom. His agent. His enabler.
Lindsey wants to make the woman pay. She wants to throw her into the pit with her son. Let the girls dole out the justice they deserve.
Lorenzo’s mom looks past Lindsey, her mouth hanging open.
Behind Lindsey, something crawls out of the pit.
The girls are coming, limbs looped together, arms to legs. They drag themselves up, one continuous creature. Their eyes are milky, the dark having blinded them. Once on stage, they curl themselves together, forming a great, spider-like being. Giant legs building up into segmented, crooked things. A thick body the size of a sedan, rising. Rising.
An odor thick and primordial fills the room. A scent that strips away modern problems, contemporary concerns of status and vanity.
The creature is completely made of discarded girls, and atop them sits Ashley, face stoic.
Lindsey rises to meet them. She lifts her hand, and Ashley grasps it. She climbs the bodies once more, taking her seat beside her old enemy.
She feels the will of the girls become her own. Together, she and Ashley control this creature.
It scurries forward. One leg wraps around Max, picking him up. Cradles him in tight, keeping him safe.
Lorenzo’s mom shrieks. She turns and runs, the door to the theater slamming shut.
She won’t get far; the girls are fast, the girls are strong, and the girls have been in the pit for far too long.
