FEMME (a horror short story)
A tour guide who makes up salacious rumors about a recently-deceased estate owner finds herself on the tour of a lifetime when her tour goes off script.
FEMME by Carlyn Greenwald
Evermore is nothing without death.
History would beg to differ. It would say that people cared about Gina Hastings’s Holmby Hills estate long before death joined the party—that the house had magic built into it as far back as the first plank of Spanish wood was placed in the spires of the two-story princess tower. That the bougainvillea wrapped itself around the outside of the home to protect Gina from the paparazzi that climbed over the wrought iron fences for decades. They would say that the house was charmed, that it spoke to Gina, and that there was just something special between them.
“Welcome to Evermore. I bought the Evermore Estate in 1950, ten years before the premiere of my masterpiece, the film Femme, an Oscar darling. Evermore was the first home I ever owned on my own. With house managers coming and going throughout the next two decades, I faced a sobering reality: it wasn’t enough to have the money to buy a lavish estate, I had to sustain the income needed to maintain such a property. And that would not be easy.”
Gina Hastings’s introductory recording sounds from a little, yellow device that would look more at home hanging around a child’s neck than an adult’s. But I listen as I sit in the office built into one of the three studies in Evermore Estate. The one with the least windows, the most faded wooden floor, and desks and chairs that were pulled from the garage. Only one piece of décor graces the walls—a black and white photograph of Gina Hastings with an arm around her best friend Carla, both decked out in classic Hollywood elegance, out in the estate’s garden. But I’m focusing on the audio right now. It’s the one business decision this place made that I always thought was smart—having Gina narrate the audio tour. It makes people feel welcomed in as guests, makes it seem like she really cares about the dry facts someone wrote for her to recite.
It helps that she’s got a hot voice, the kind with deep tones that trail like a jazz song. Documentary narrator voice, Disney villain voice, porn star voice. Gina Hastings is beautiful, sure, what actress who made it as a teen in the 40s isn’t? But I know it was her voice that made her.
Right now, though, it makes me want to go to sleep.
November sun bleeds through the slats in the shades, but I might as well be doused in every spotlight in Hollywood, it’s so bright in my hungover brain. I’ve tried to be chipper after rejections, but this last one was too much. As soon as I got off the phone with my agent, I stepped outside and took the first pills I could get my hands on, drowning them in the nearly-empty bottle of whiskey I had in my kitchen.
I came to this town young, thinking I had all the time in the world. But the casting directors started saying those dreadful words when I lose out on auditions—you’re getting a little too old. I never thought it would happen at twenty-five, but it’s become a pattern I can’t ignore.
And when you’re too old in Hollywood, there’s nowhere to go but the dark corners.
My advanced age may prohibit me from playing Waitress #2, but not from attending the sleazy parties in Laurel Canyon. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky and some gross old man will want to put me in a movie after a drunken fuck in the host’s guestroom. If that never happens, the drugs will at least make the end a soft landing. Maybe they’ll take me before my rent that I can’t pay in two months is due and they throw me out on the streets.
I’ve tried every substance manufactured for a good time and nothing dulls the edge of my failure here. Just as no amount of ibuprofen will stave off the headache currently pounding between my ears.
“After numerous discussions with my team at the end of the 70s, I ultimately made the decision to open my estate up to the public.”
Ten minutes until my next tour. All I can feel is a twisting ball of nausea, some mix of the hangover and taking those painkillers on an empty stomach. The nerves have shot my appetite for weeks now. All I want to do is sink into this stained office chair until the tour starts, but if Robb catches me off my game, that last audition won’t be the worst thing to happen to me this week. I open my compact to check my shoddy makeup—
—and yank my finger back, a smear of blood left behind on a jagged crack in the mirror. Right. I threw it against the wall after getting the news about the audition last night. Muttering words that would make Gina Hastings’s fans clutch their pearls, I search for the dusty, first aid kit I was told exists. I ball my fingertip into my fist, containing the bright red in this dangerously beige room as best I can.
“I never considered it a real option. I wouldn’t have attempted it if not for Oliver’s encouragement in the years leading up to his tragic passing. I remember thinking: ‘what would possibly interest people about my house?’”
A question I ask myself every day that I have been working here for the last two years. Something I ask myself right now as I rifle through this useless fucking office full of empty drawers. The blood seeps from between my knuckles like I’m squeezing a package of strawberry jelly. For a moment, I consider if it’d help to try to lick it away, but the thought turns my already sensitive stomach.
Robb walks in right then. “What the hell happened to you?”
Robb’s in his late fifties and is supposedly best friends with one of Gina Hastings’s former managers. Something where he met Gina several times. He has like five photos of him and Gina on a bulletin board in this office, so despite him saying he was so close to Gina, I assume that line-up represents every thirty-second interaction he’s ever had with the woman. Me? I never met Gina. A fact Robb likes to remind me of, on average, every third shift.
I hold up my bloody hand in faux innocence. “Compact cut me.”
Robb watches as a trickle of my blood runs down the meat of my palm and slithers down my arm into the crook of my elbow. “You need to get a grip, Jamie. I know you think this job is a joke, but it’s not. There are dozens of Gina Hastings fans lined up to take this position.”
I don’t have any doubt that there actually are dozens of Gina Hastings fans ready to take my place. Key word: dozens. Groups of twelve among the 3.2 million people who live in Los Angeles as of the year of our lord 1988.
Still, there only needs to be one for me to lose this job.
“I’m not messing around,” I say. “I—”
“You’re the most complained about of all our tour guides. Our sales have gone up by two hundred percent since Gina passed away last year. It should be the easiest job in the world to take bereaved fans around her last home and share some of her life and legacy with them. Yet you can’t even do that.”
“I’m not—”
A glob of blood breaks free from my arm and drops onto the wood.
“I won’t disrespect Gina’s legacy by having a lackluster guide in her home. She will rest easy knowing the members of this staff are trustworthy stewards of her legacy. Do I make myself clear?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. He jerks his body over to one of the desk drawers, removes a first aid kit, and slams it onto the nearest desk. “Keep it interesting. And clean that up. These floors are over one hundred years old.”
Once Robb leaves, I take the first aid kit and duck into the employee bathroom. I clean and bandage my hand, eyes on the decor. The bottom half of the walls and the shower are lined in pale-pink tiles, the upper half made up of flamingo print wallpaper. The design looks amazing in photographs, but gives me vertigo if I stare at it too long. There’s a chip in the golden mirror above my head, a flaw that I can’t imagine the perfect Gina Hastings or a control freak like Robb allowing. I run my finger along it, little golden flecks transferring to my skin.
It’s unbelievable. I live my miserable little life here while the legendary woman who bought these outrageous pink tiles rots in a garden in the backyard.
When I return to the office, I don’t clean up the stain on the office floor. The house can have my blood. It isn’t the first it’s taken.
Interesting, Robb said.
Yeah, sure, I’ll give an interesting tour. No problem.
The truth is I didn’t know much about Gina Hastings before getting this job. I lied my way around the facts and sunk into the one piece of our relationship that’s true: I discovered I liked women while sitting in a friend’s apartment watching a VHS of Gina’s only box office bomb at the end of her career, a gritty thriller after a lifetime of critically and commercially successful comedies. I was eighteen and away from my oppressive parents for the first time in my life. It all came together in a fucked-up way, if I’m looking back on it. She spends the movie kidnapped, thrashing as rope rubs away at her skin, blood pooling out of her mouth from nearly cleaving her tongue in half, sobbing, vomiting, writhing like a distressed animal. The kind of performance people call harrowing, difficult to watch.
It gave me butterflies.
Back then, it was a confirmation—if I could crush on a woman in an objectively terrible and disgusting movie, that must mean I really was gay. And while perhaps Robb would’ve related to me saying I jerked off to Gina Hastings movies, I told him she inspired me to act. I got the job.
Now, I wear my crisp, khaki skirt and a pink, polo shirt that reads EVERMORE TOURS, my hair in a bun and makeup, “respectful,” as I provide the 1 PM clump of fans with the most mundane facts about this woman. The house is huge, but more maze-like than any of the McMansions I go to for Hollywood parties. The rooms are all divided with arched doorways accented in different colored tile leading from hallway to staircase to wing and back again.
There are two ways to take the tour: an audio-only version completely narrated by Gina and an enhanced one with a human guide. Robb said it increased revenue to have both options since some guests want to go at their own pace. The guides are advertised as superfans, a living, breathing person who is supposed to offer extra insights into Gina’s life that the script can’t provide. But every tour has a bit of Gina’s voice, as she insisted upon in her favorite rooms (such as the foyer), a snippet read by her over the guests’ headphones before we speak and elaborate.
As always, I begin the tour at the foyer. It’s a simple, airy room, with big windows facing the front yard. Always-pristine, bright-colored flowers knock against the glass when there’s a gentle breeze. The only furniture in here is a tufted, bright-pink Chesterfield with golden florals woven into it and a bone-white grand piano with the music always open to Mahler’s “Adagietto.” There’s a massive portrait, rendered in oil paint, of Gina in her teens hanging above us, a piece I’ll talk about once Gina gives her introductory spiel.
I smile at my guests and instruct them to press button number one, containing the same script that will be heard by the audio tour guests.
“Welcome to Evermore,” the tour begins in Gina’s lilt. “I bought the Evermore Estate in 1950, ten years before the premiere of my masterpiece, the film Femme, an Oscar darling. Evermore was the first home I had ever owned on my own…”
I tune it all out, waiting for the last line to signal when my spiel really begins.
“In the foyer, you’ll see the couch where my love Oliver first proposed to me.”
The guests swoon. I swallow down bile.
There we go. I clear my throat and begin reciting my script.
“Gina was passionate about preservation,” I say to my sad group of people in their forties and fifties. People who grew up with her are her main demographic. They saw her mature from a fresh-faced kid in movies about beloved animals, to the bright, young bride in a screwball comedy about the difficulties of getting married, and finally to the icon who wrote, produced, and starred in an Oscar darling about a playwright who travels to Italy and reconnects with an estranged best friend when she attempts to write her magnum opus about their childhoods, Femme. Sometimes I’ll spot younger men with a single earring blending into the crowds, but it’s rarer given what AIDS and Reagan has done to the community. But the ones who do come really do love Gina Hastings and all that her style, kind demeanor, and laugh-out-loud films did to bring joy into their lives. “While her contemporaries would’ve taken rooms like this and broken down the walls to create more space, Gina liked the delineation of rooms the older style offered. She aimed to make each room bring about a different feeling. So she could leave the living room in a bad mood and enter the kitchen in a good one.”
God, how incredibly dull. I don’t know how anyone could stay awake through all of this. I usher the group down a narrow hallway, explaining the layout of the house as we walk, how this hallway shoots off into a line of rooms, all leading back to the kitchen that presses up against the massive backyard and pool.
Everyone wants to see the pool since Gina died.
“This is the living room,” I say as we come to the threshold.
The space is bright, but I wouldn’t exactly say airy. Gold-foil wallpaper covers the accent wall—the one with the fireplace. I’ve never gotten close enough to see the pattern, but it’s so dense that it sort of hurts my eyes to look at. It’s in that art deco style, where every piece is shiny and in a geometric shape that can’t be defined. Other than that, there’s the seashell chair, church pew-red couch, flower-shaped side table, and statues of golden jaguars on the mantel. All flash, all luxury.
But still, there’s a shitter in the bathroom, you know? This is a house. Everyone has one, yet somehow, just because the human being who owned this particular one was famous, everyone wants to know where their goddess did her little human actions. And they don’t even get to go up to the main living quarters, the part where Gina actually lived right up until her death. It’s cordoned off with a black, velvet rope. We have to catch people who try to slip by it about once a month. Not that they get far—they’re always weirdly surprised when they find the rooms are all sealed shut.
“As the legend goes, Gina met Oliver at a party when she was eighteen years old, sitting on this exact seashell chair,” I say, following the script to a T. “After she and Oliver had gone on two dates, she phoned the homeowner and asked to add the chair to her future home’s collection. She knew then that Oliver would be the one.”
The tourists swoon and I do everything in my power to not curl my mouth in disgust. Gina might’ve had her face on screen since the 40s, but men ten years older dating teenagers can’t have been cool—not even back then. Talent manager Oliver Wells died in 1975 from a heart attack, long before I ever had to think about him. A blessing, in many ways. I don’t think I would’ve been able to stand the sight of him.
Through my speech, a floorboard creaks, the sound barely audible unless you’re listening. It’s one of the room’s quirks, but right now it sounds like the house groaning along with me.
This script is so boring. And Robb acts like it’s my fault my tour sucks.
This woman spent her life generating so much tabloid fodder. YOUNG STAR MARRIES INDUSTRY TITAN – BUT WILL IT LAST? TROUBLE IN PARADISE? FEMME ACTRESS’S HUSBAND SEEN VACATIONING WITH ANOTHER WOMAN. FEMME ACTRESS ALLEGEDY THROWS WEDDING RING INTO OCEAN ON FIFTH ANNIVERSARY TO MANAGER HUSBAND. I bet I could make anything up about her and the fans here would eat it up.
I bet it’d help me get through this tour.
“But it’s not the only thing that happened in this living room,” I say. My heartbeat picks up as the words spill out of my mouth. “As it is widely known, Oliver stepped out on his marriage on more than one occasion. His womanizing ways and string of lovers were concealed in the interest of keeping up appearances. But he isn’t the only one who was unfaithful.” I pause. “No record survives, but Gina had a lover who is shrouded in mystery.”
And all at once, the tourists’s eyes are all on me like moths to light.
Okay, now what? What kind of affair would truly knock these people’s socks off?
“In fact, if folks had learned the truth, it might’ve spelled Gina’s end long before financial ruin hit her in the late 70s,” I say, leading with a tour-sanctioned fact as I lead into my made-up one. “In the early 50s, shortly after her engagement to Oliver, she started having an affair with…” What about a woman? “…Carla Davis.”
Oh, the way some of those middle-aged women gasp. “Her best friend?” one of them breathes.
My mouth twitches, desperate to smile and break the facade. “Yes. Her best friend.”
God would never bless lesbians enough to have Gina Hastings eat pussy, but these idiots lap it up. “It was a pretty remarkable affair,” I say. “It started in their writing, in scripts that never saw the light of day. They wrote a romance about two childhood flames on a whirlwind vacation together. Named the characters Avery and Casey, started switching Casey’s pronouns from he to she. They’d mime out blocking,” I mime my own story, walking through the living room, running my fingers along the velvet couch. “One night, they mimed out the kiss.” My eyes fall to the couch cushions. This is still so tame. “Gina lay on this very couch, opened her legs, and told Carla that Oliver never put his mouth on her. She dared Carla to prove she was the better lover right then and there.”
My tour group is bright fucking red and my heart is hammering like I just got off a roller coaster or took a bump of someone’s expensive cocaine. Ecstasy.
“Right where Oliver proposed to her?” one of the guests asks.
A pang of doubt spreads through my chest as I consider my next words. It’s already kind of ghoulish that we lead these tours now that Gina’s dead and can’t contribute to her own narrative. The tour itself preventing her from ever resting.
But at the same time, is that not what celebrity is? Sacrificing your humanity so one day you’ll live beyond your mortal coil?
I shrug. “Passion is passion. Legend has it that Gina stuffed her finest silk panties into the couch cushions afterward, as if daring Oliver to find them.”
We continue on to Gina’s office, my little story swirling in my head as I return to the tour script for a while and talk about Gina’s biggest hit movies.
Is there more I could do with this little story I made up? Carla was Gina’s writing partner, I remember. And sure, it’s nice when two women can have a happy ending, but Gina’s dead. Gina’s dead because she slipped off her balcony and drowned in her own pool. People expect a little tragedy along the way.
“And then there’s the matter of Gina’s affair,” I say as I step behind Gina’s foreboding mahogany desk. From my vantage point, I can see a beautiful photo of her and her husband when they were older. A perfect wine and cheese pairing, it matched with how they aged. “It didn’t last long. Gina and Carla fought over what scripts to develop. Carla came up with a brilliant idea and Gina suddenly decided she wanted to be a one-woman writing act. She developed the idea separately from Carla and presented it to Warner Brothers alone. It eventually became Femme.”
More gasps. My veins sing. I’m flying the way I used to when I performed on stage in high school, back when I thought this was a feeling worth chasing. A feeling worth throwing away my life.
I’m on a high, using mostly the basic tour script but throwing in a few more embellishments along the way: lying about a bright, abstract painting on the wall leading upstairs being done in Gina’s blood, claiming she kept part of her jewel collection in a hidden compartment in her library, silly things like that.
It’s so, so fun.
Light glints off Gina’s eyes in the portrait, as if she’s winking at me.
But eventually, we make our way to the kitchen, where the story gets interesting again all on its own.
Standing in the kitchen, we have a perfect view out to the pool.
It’s a 20s style lap pool, simple, rectangular design surrounded by cushioned lounge chairs and pale pink and yellow umbrellas. We aren’t supposed to linger there, but rather take guests further out into the garden where Oliver and Gina are buried.
I take my little gaggle outside. I do linger in the garden, but I don’t want to talk about Gina and Oliver anymore.
I go back off script.
“And as we all know, this tranquil spot is where Gina lost her life,” I say.
“Such a tragedy,” one of the guests says.
The story is tragic, yes, but it sits on a line where a different genre could make the death almost seem funny. It was late at night, she was wearing too high of heels, and slipped and fell over the rail of her bedroom balcony into the pool. Hit the bottom at the exact wrong angle to break her neck. No drugs, no alcohol, no murder, no drama.
Not that the magazines haven’t tried to stir some up. For years they suggested suicide, even murder. Her estate sued everyone. The house itself went through a turbulent time I remember—a close call with a wildfire, a collapse of a portion of the basement, a major flood on the grounds.
Then the report was released. LA County sheriff said evidence definitively indicated an accident, and most people agreed the whole thing was settled. They moved on. The house disasters slowed down and finally ceased when Robb hired a new, better maintenance crew.
But was her death settled really?
Suggesting otherwise felt like stirring up some real shit, but why not have a little fun?
“Yeah, tragic,” I say. “More than most people know.”
People turn their whole bodies toward me. Folks who were steering away to take photos shuffle back.
“Don’t tell anyone I told you guys this,” I say. I lower my voice. “But new evidence has come to light. Biographers are investigating it. After Oliver died, Gina was just never the same…”
It wasn’t like people hadn’t already thought it.
“Icons like Gina Hastings don’t leave this earth at fifty-five in boring ways,” I say. “Someday maybe we’ll know how she really died. Maybe someday we’ll know the truth.”
I come in the next morning to Robb grinning at me like a demented clown.
“What?” I say, throwing down the sides I printed out for no reason other than to make myself feel like I really was trying to learn my lines to play some girl who shows her tits and dies five seconds later in the latest low-budget horror movie the studios are trying to churn out.
“You did it, Jamie,” Robb says. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
He claps my back on his way into the office. Once there, he dumps the contents of our suggestion box out onto the countertop and plucks one out. Still grinning, he slides it my way. In perfect cursive penmanship, someone has written:
Best tour I’ve been on in years! Jamie was passionate about Gina and her life and made us feel like we were getting the true inside look into a star’s tragic, beautiful life. I’d take the tour again just to hear what else Jamie has to say. Incredible.
Maybe I’m not so bad at this after all. I just have to repeat the tour.
I step out of the office, barely seeing the floor out of the corner of my eye.
The bloodstain I made looks bigger than I remember.
The sky slams into early-winter darkness before we even hit 5 PM, the last of the visitors still strolling their way out. Three weeks have passed since I started embellishing the tour and I’m almost starting to like this place. I’ve gone from the worst tour guide here to someone who gets requested every day. Robb hasn’t caught on to my lying and I’ve made triple my usual in tips. I have enough money now to weather through the audition drought. It’s a dream come true.
I’ve got an audition over at the Paramount lot in the morning and should be getting home to sleep as quickly as I can, but I find myself brushing dust off the ticket counter, watching as the last of the audio tour listeners toss their devices into the bucket next to me.
“This one’s on the fritz.”
I look up to find a middle-aged woman dropping one of the devices onto the pile.
“I’m so sorry,” I reply. “Would you like a complimentary ticket so you can retake the tour? Our enhanced, guide-led version is a very popular option.”
“I’ve seen enough.”
The moment before she leaves, she scowls at me. And there’s something that bolts down my spine, a recognition I can’t quite place. Like I’ve seen that exact mouth in that exact expression. But as the clicks of her heels disappear into the empty building, I shrug it off. Maybe she reminded me of my mother, who I haven’t seen in years. The one who came to all my high school plays but supported my dad cutting me off when he found out I opened my legs for a camera in a short film.
Plus, it’s the time of year when the sun sinks in the blink of an eye. When you live in a sunny place like LA, darkness—even the everyday reoccurrence of night—feels wrong.
I lock up, blasting hair metal to fill the house with more life than I alone can muster. There’s something about tonight that feels different, liminal, like I’m on the edge of something. The locks on the doors, here since time immemorial, seem flimsier tonight, as if they’re ready to let something in. I do my due diligence, flicking and turning and fiddling to prove they’re going to do their jobs as I finish mine. But ultimately, the view of the last headlights leaving the parking lot doesn’t scare me. The one advantage to a house of this size is that if a burglar did come through, I could weave through the maze of hallways and exit without them even knowing I was here. This place could devour unwanted visitors. I chuckle at the thought. If I’m already inside, though, does that make me safe from horrors or soon to be digested?
I bring the broken audio device’s felt headphones to my ears, curiosity getting the better of me. Sure, the customer could’ve just been bad with technology, and rude, but they usually will say something specific that’s wrong. Static breaks through, it goes silent, it makes some ear-splitting whining sound. The ticket counter sits at the foyer, a little sign encouraging tourists to press number one on their devices.
I push the button, clearing my mind to focus on the track.
“Welcome to Evermore,” the audio tour begins in Gina’s lilt. Nothing wrong. “I bought the Evermore Estate in 1950, ten years before my breakout role in the film Femme, an Oscar darling. Evermore was the first home I had ever owned on my own…”
I roll my eyes. Another old timer who can’t operate a device that only has five buttons.
“If you’ll look around the foyer, you’ll see the couch where Oliver agreed to buy a ring, something he wanted to do the moment he met me as a teenager. He had his way with me long before, but that was private business. Publicly we had to be proper and wait to marry until I was legally an adult. Three months after my eighteenth birthday, we did. It wasn’t long, though, until it was clear that though I was his wife, he still saw me as a child: easily molded, easily manipulated.”
I swear my heart stops.
That’s not a part of the tour.
As my gaze falls on the pink couch, I comb through everything I know about the audio tour. Is there some new anniversary coming up? That would explain Robb adding to the tapes. Surely if Gina recorded enough for this whole tour, there’s more material we haven’t used. This is just that. It has to be. Someone switched out the tapes on this device.
“That’s the thing. No one warned me about successful men,” the audio continues. Gina’s voice takes on a liveliness I’ve never heard before. There’s emotion—fire, even. Like this is an outtake someone deemed too revealing to allow for public consumption. “Successful men love a challenge, and nothing feels as good as breaking a strong woman and using her as a stepping stool to reach new levels of power. He said that I had to have the right talents to land roles with his disgusting friends, studio heads, mostly. Once a week, I’d pleasure him to keep up the skill. Every role I got was his doing, every role I lost was my fault. He demanded I take broader and broader parts, even as my career was wilting because of it. I tried to take back control toward the end of my career with a thriller role where I wasn’t sexy or funny, but strong and heroic—and my audiences and critics hated it. I wasn’t even fifty yet, but there was nowhere left for me to go.”
Jesus. This has to be some lost tape. However it came into this device, I’ve never felt more captivated by what Gina Hastings has to say.
“Please proceed to the living room,” the tape says.
I’ve been in this room dozens of times today, but my feet drag as I enter. My fingers shake at my sides, something heavy is descending with the shadows. Like if I pay attention I’m bound to catch something out of the corner of my eye. Something I don’t want to see.
So I focus my gaze on the device. There aren’t any scratches or signs of tampering. It’s a duplicate of every other device we use.
I linger in the doorway as the audio starts up again. “Welcome to the living room, the place that provided me with solace, and space away from Oliver. The place I first discovered what love really meant—with Carla, my writing partner and best friend.”
I stop dead. No. Fucking. Way.
Normally someone as important and goddamn iconic as Gina Hastings admitting to having a gay affair would have me leaping for joy. But now, my skin crawls. I feel like a voyeur uncovering something secret. Like I slithered my way into the room instead of—what? Guessed correctly? It seems impossible. I can’t actually have—
“Carla and I had no idea what we were doing. We only knew that we felt safe in each other’s arms, satisfied by the depth of conversations we could have passing a cigarette between us in bed afterward. Being with her felt effortless. Where Oliver was dragging me down into the darkness, Carla made me see the world bathed in its light. But what was there to do? Divorcing Oliver would’ve been career suicide. Being with Carla was unfathomable. Even still, she was addicting. She’d recite poetry with her fingers inside me. We’d write each other’s names on our backs with our nails. She’d plunge her head between my legs, and she was voracious, even during my monthly visitor, blood and all.”
An invisible ring tightens around my throat, right as—
Creak!
I practically jump out of my bones to turn to the couch. I know the sound—the groan of the floorboard, but there’s no one here to make it.
I blink, and I swear there’s a flash of pink silk sticking out of the couch cushions. My fingers itch to reach out and touch it.
I twitch my hand, but a pull in my gut holds me back.
“Please proceed to the office.”
I swallow hard and walk briskly out of the room, never daring to look back.
“The writing for Femme started out as a perfect partnership between Carla and me, as was the affair that came before it. We’d stay up working from night until morning, long past the time the streetlights turned off. When we typed out the first draft, it felt like pure magic in our hands. I eagerly took it to the studio and what should’ve been a long shot ended in a better deal than we had in years. But when I returned home to tell Carla, she sat me down in this room and told me she didn’t want us to make the project. I implored her to tell me why. At first she said it was too ambitious, that critics and audiences would laugh, but the studio didn’t think so, so that never made sense. It was over a week before she admitted the truth. She was afraid there was too much of us in it. That our love affair would be exposed. By that time, I didn’t care, but she did. Desperately. And so she was going to let our baby—a symbolic one when fate would never grant us flesh and bone—die.” The audio pauses. “I made a decision. I took it back to the studio and said I’d been the sole writer. We made it and…Carla and I never recovered.”
No. This is the story I told—the story I pulled completely out of my ass. How did I get it all right? And why do I…feel for Carla? Creating something so powerful and being afraid to show it to the world just because people might see who you really…
This isn’t right.
I need to stop listening.
I reach for the headphones, ready to rip them out.
“Please proceed upstairs.”
I straighten. We aren’t allowed upstairs. No part of the tour goes there. No guests. Not even the guides. No one has been up there since…since Gina lived here.
But my muscles move, out the door and up the stairs.
As I ascend, my view of the art in the foyer shifts.
The bright, abstract painting drips red like it really is Gina’s blood.
The impressionist work of a ship in a storming sea hides abstract faces with tortured eyes and horrible grimaces.
The oil portrait of Gina now seems to have sunken eyes, devoid of life.
Death, death, death. I try to suck air into my lungs, but nothing can penetrate the knot in my throat. The velvet rope meant to ward off the curious no longer cordons off the top of the stairs. One end lays haphazardly on the ground.
I glance down the hallway. The doors on either side, closed for years, remain locked tight, except one—Gina’s bedroom.
I walk through the doorway and finally gasp out a breath.
This room is truly untouched, seemingly from the moment Gina last stood here. The massive king bed is unmade, lacy and satin pillows strewn across the room like shrapnel. Fine leather and perfect designer garments lay wilting and crunchy on the floor and across chairs.
And somewhere beyond possibility, I can smell it. Her hazy, rose perfume. I shouldn’t know what Gina ever smelled like, so how is it that I do?
None of this is possible. None of it makes sense. It needs to end. I press the eject button on the device, but it doesn’t open.
I tug at the headphones, but they don’t budge.
My heartbeat speeds into a frantic pace as I tug and tug. Harder, until the pain is unbearable, until I fear ripping my skin. I need to stop this device. And like divinity has intervened, there’s a screwdriver on her nightstand.
“When you’re in the business of entertaining, everyone works to convince you that there is no suffering in your life. That you live the world’s dream life, so stay quiet and smile.” My fingers shake so hard the screwdriver skips on the hole of the tiny screws. Once, twice, until a sting cascades across my skin. I’ve cut myself, a twin mark on my fingertip to match the tiny fading scar on my palm. Not enough to bleed, but enough to get me shaking more. “I never stood a chance, especially after Carla died in a car accident two weeks after Oliver passed. My chance to reconcile was ripped away from me. I broke down completely. Doctors hypnotized me hoping I’d forget.” I get one screw off, the tiny, metal bit flying into the carpeting, likely never to be found again. I work on the second. “When I didn’t forget, show business fed off the pain, encouraged me to farm it for performances.” She sighed. “Or keep it stuffed down with pills.”
The last screw falls off the back, the plastic digging deep under my nails as I flip it off.
There’s no tape in here.
It shouldn’t be working at all.
“Fuck,” I mutter.
“Proceed to the bathroom.”
I find myself in the en suite. All pink tile, that same flamingo wallpaper in the employee bathroom, splendid beneath a layer of dust. The birds flap their wings, blurring the image until it’s just pink. That horrible pink, the color of blood going down a shower drain. Clawfoot tub, cascading rain shower, a vanity that stretches along the entirety of the room. Makeup in gleaming designer names sits on the counter space, waiting for a face.
But color also litters the floor. Pinks, baby blues, yellows, and reds. Pills.
“I relapsed over and over again. It was like dodging raindrops as the world grew worse around me. Carla had left me, Oliver stopped caring about me as a wife and as a client, roles came fewer and farther between. I stayed afloat, hadn’t sunk. But there was always another storm to survive.”
I rip at the headphones again—
—and they finally come loose, the whole device flying to the floor with a soft crash. The glass on the screen shatters on the bathroom floor. I gasp in a breath.
Silence, then—
Riiiinnggg!
My heart nearly stops. What is that?
A phone. Here in the bathroom, a phone is ringing. I whirl around the room, desperate to find the sound and end it. But it’s coming from somewhere wrong: A princess-style rotary, pink with a gleaming, brass dial and receiver.
A phone that has never worked my whole time at this job. A phone that was disconnected when Gina died.
It trills again, and again echoing through the room on an endless loop. I want to leave it be like the panties in the couch, but my arm reaches out despite every instinct screaming for me to stop. My fingers shaking, I grasp the receiver and lift it to my ear.
“Jamie? Jamie, Fred Fields here.”
My agent? It’s like a bad dream, the edges of my perception blurring as I try to connect the dots.
My entire body shivers. “H-how did you—”
“I hope you’re sitting down, babe, because I have some bad news. Horrorween 3. They turned you down. Said they were taking the scene in a different direction.”
I already know this. He told me weeks ago.
Or was that for another movie?
“I know it’s not what you wanted to hear,” he continues. “Maybe take some time off for a while and relax. We can regroup when you’re ready. Sorry, sweetheart. I’ll check in maybe in a couple of weeks.”
Then the voice changes…to Gina’s. “Ciao, darling.”
She’s not in the headphones anymore.
There’s a click and the silence returns.
All at once, my muscles go numb.
“Please proceed to the balcony.” Her voice still sounds filtered through the audio device, but it lays on the floor now.
The world outside the French glass doors is a gaping maw of blackness. The city lights shine like stars, thousands of lightyears away as I turn the knob and step onto the cold stone. The pool lights shine in white just below, the water lapping softly against the sides. Darkness blankets the land around it, as if there’s nothing but the pool and the heavens beyond. The logical part of my brain tells me Gina’s lying in her grave on the south lawn, but I can’t convince myself. She can’t be in the ground because she’s right here, crooning in my ear.
“My death was an accident in a technical sense. I tripped and fell over, was met by only the harsh stone and cold water below. But death was welcome. I knew that night I’d taken too much, enough to know that there was no way out of the pain I was running from. Death was the only way to silence it. You understand that, don’t you? It’s what you would’ve done, too.”
I grip the edge of the balcony, trying to not look. But there’s no looking away.
“And now I’m here again. I thought I could finally rest—but I never will. Not as long as people act like curious little kitties. Not when they won’t let me go.”
Tears stream down my face, hot and salty. I force myself to look down at the backyard. At the edge of the pool closest to the balcony. I see a splatter of brown blood crusted to the edge, a slime dripping red into the clear water. It’s as if Gina tried to jump into the pool and misjudged the distance. As if the edge of the pool smashed her skull in, spilling its insides out.
“You want to know what really killed me, Jamie?”
Gina’s blood covers the edge, but Gina’s there too. Young, gorgeous Gina that you remember from your nights alone as a teenager. The one whose lips you wanted to kiss, whose legs you wanted wrapped around your waist. She’s soaked to the bone in her designer clothing. She turns to face you. That one side remains perfect, but the viscera drips down the smashed side like a tear, staining her chestnut hair red as her scalp wound spits blood.
“One too many failures.”
She smiles up at you, her teeth stained pink.
“Proceed to the pool.”
You climb over the balcony, jump off, and join her.
About the author
Carlyn Greenwald is a YA and Adult Thriller author and screenwriter hailing from Manhattan Beach, California. She graduated from USC with degrees in English, Screenwriting, and Criminology. Greenwald has worked development gigs at companies including Illumination Entertainment, Mandeville Films, Vertigo Entertainment, and 141 Entertainment. She currently works as Lead Content Development Coordinator at Cake Creative/Electric Postcard Entertainment. Her YA Thriller debut, Murder Land, has sold over 15,000 copies in its first six months and has been featured in Forbes, Autostraddle, Horror Fuel, and Daily Dead. Her other books, Sizzle Reel, Director’s Cut, and Time Out, co-written with actor and producer Sean Hayes and producer Todd Milliner, are out now. Her next YA Thriller, What Happened to Those Girls, will be out with Sourcebooks Fire in summer 2026. When not writing, she’s scouring pop culture YouTube, frequenting movie theaters, and hanging with her dogs.
