Page 49 of The Cut
I think he’s on to you. Be careful.
He let the tape run. The jukebox kicked in and the opening bars of Doris Day’s ‘Secret Love’ drifted out as Ben Knot backed away into a throng of bodies at the bar and the shot dissolved to black.
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The Warren House was an old junk yard near Thurcaston Lacey. The overgrown winding country lane led to an industrial building on the site of a disused airfield about three miles outside Barton Mallet. Karine tugged at the rusting chain and padlock wrapped around the wrought-iron gates and texted the farmer who was supposed to meet her there. She was out on a recce of the location for tonight’s shoot. Her phone buzzed in her pocket; it was Dani calling.
‘Hey, how’s it going? I’m at the location, setting up now … just muting you for a second … hold on.’
Karine set a foot into the chain of the gate, hauled herself up to the top, threw a leg over and dropped down on to the other side. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to gain access without permission. She stepped into a courtyard littered with junk, old refrigerators and scrapped cars. She unmuted the call. ‘You still there?’
‘Yeah, I’m here. Listen … there might be a problem.’ Dani sounded nervous.
Karine approached the vast corrugated steel barn and dragged open the rusty door. ‘Problem?’ The smell of dank earth mixed with heady petrol fumes hit her nostrils. She flicked the switch on the wall by the door and the buzz of electricity illuminated a succession of sickly orange strip lights.
‘Yeah, it’s Ben. He wants to pull the plug on the whole thing. Lily did get injured quite badly and I …’ Dani ran out of steam, her voice petered out.194
Karine draped a cable of string lights over an old sign propped up against the wall. ‘Lily seemed fine when she left.’ A pile of dismembered shop mannequins made Karine freeze for a second. ‘Do you think something happened on the way home?’
Dani’s voice lowered to a whisper. ‘I’m not sure … Can we have a quick chat when we get there?’
‘Of course … Are you OK?’
‘Ben doesn’t know we’re coming tonight.’ Dani’s voice was hushed and trembling. ‘I said I was taking them to seeStrangerintheWoods.’
‘OK … look, I’m sorry about all this. Let me speak to Ben. But I’m at the location now and it’s going to be great. There’ll be a couple of others from Nate’s year, just in the background, but how about you stay with us until we’re done? You can be their chaperone.’ Karine moved into an older part of the barn. The cowshed still stank of urine; she covered her nose with her hand.
‘Just text me when you’re ten minutes away. I’ll have everything ready … and don’t worry. You’re going to love this, it’ll be fun.’ Karine ended the call. She glanced to the door where the light was fading and a low mist from the surrounding waterlogged fields was forming.
The location had captured her imagination in the day, but at night it was something else. She jogged back towards the perimeter fence. The farmer who owned the land had unlocked the gate and was glaring at the intruder on his property.
‘Thought we said 8 p.m.?’
Karine smiled sweetly in the face of his scowl. ‘You wouldn’t be able to give me a hand with some heavy lifting, would you?’ She pulled two twenty-pound notes from her jeans pocket.
The farmer snatched them away and grunted. ‘What do you need?’195
Karine busied herself in the van while the farmer removed canvas covers from three old dodgem cars and pushed them into the centre of the space. The handheld rig with a 4K lightweight camera on a gimbal would be perfect for tonight. She walked the route from the door, positioning small LED lamps here and there to create ambience. Under the faded ‘Circus’ sign with the blistering paint and the face of a sad, cackling clown – because there always had to be a clown – was another old hoarding of a fairground ride, ‘The Mouth of Hell’. A gaping scream with peeling painted fangs formed an archway, which she dragged into position over the door to the cowshed.
‘Hey, give me a hand with this.’ Karine beckoned the farmer over as she began to haul naked mannequins from the burn pile. The midden stalls in the cowshed would work well if she positioned the dummies in strategic places. She killed the main overhead lights and set about placing lamps into the shadows, caressing the terrifying limbs of the lifelike figures with light.
Finally, Karine rolled out two heavy metal gas canisters and a coil of rubber tubing from the back of the van and began to run a line into the Mouth of Hell. The festoon string lighting flickered as the fuse strained to hold the voltage, but the scene was set.
She went back to her car and braced herself, waiting in silence for it to get dark, going through the motions in her head of what was about to happen. She jumped as her phone buzzed on the dashboard.
The text from Dani landed.
10 mins away.
She reached across and retrieved a torch from the glove compartment and quietly opened the van door. The night was still and silent; a fresh dampness from the surrounding fields filled her senses. She moved back to the main building, killed the lights and called Dani.196
‘Karine?’
‘How are you getting on?’
