The Final Cut

by Bark, Jasper

  “She moved in some rather strange circles and kept some pretty wild company. There was talk of her getting caught up in some underworld drug war. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. I heard she was kidnapped and tortured along with two other men, all very distasteful. There was even talk about them being in a snuff film.”

  “A snuff film?”

  “Yes, surely you know what one of those is, in your line of work?”

  “I know what a snuff film is. Everyone knows what a snuff film is. But I mean . . . it’s never been proven that they actually exist.”

  “And there’s no proof that this film actually exists. Like I said it’s just a nasty rumour. There were a lot of rumours attached to her disappearance. She was that sort of girl.”

  “This isn’t making any sense, if she disappeared, if she was . . . killed or something, how could I have seen her, spoken to her?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “She didn’t have a sister or anything did she? I mean like a twin or something?”

  “She had a sister, but not a twin so far as I’m aware. In fact, that reminds me. The family got in touch with me several times. I should give you their number. If Melissa really has turned up again, you should let them know.”

  Janice pulled out her phone and wrote the number on a sticky note. James stood and went to the door in a daze. “Listen,” he said. “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “I’m not sure I was of any help to you, but good luck with finding Melissa. If it is Melissa you’re looking for. She was always a bit of a lost cause that one. A regular damsel in distress if you catch my meaning.”

  “Erm, right.”

  Jimmy left the office and made his way back down to the little side street. Night was drawing in and the shop fronts and cafe windows of Soho took on a garish and unreal cast. The shadows seemed too sharp and the streetlights threw down an unnatural glow.

  Things were starting to make less and less sense. Was this snuff film Janice mentioned the footage he and Sam had? Had Melissa somehow survived it? Jimmy hadn’t actually watched the part where she was killed yet. He’d had his eyes closed in the lock up. Was Melissa massively scarred under her clothes? Was that why she wouldn’t let anyone else on set?

  Jimmy shuddered when he thought about her turning up to star in a film that contained scenes of her actual torture. How had she found out? Was it the people who’d killed Ashkan and his crew? Had they sent her? Was she trying to escape them, was that why she wanted him to come find her? He should probably try at the very least. He owed her that much.

  Jimmy felt as though he’d stepped over some unseen threshold into a world that was entirely outside his understanding.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sam stood up, closed his eyes and massaged his temples. He wondered if the work would be any easier if he were stoned, or did a couple of lines? Probably not, it might even make him worse.

  Only H, or crippling amounts of alcohol, could make him numb enough him to deal with the footage, and he didn’t like either of those highs;, certainly couldn’t work on them. It wasn’t just the extreme images that were getting to him, it was also his Mac. It kept playing up.

  As he’d promised Jimmy, Sam was using the dead time to edit the footage, taking out the worst bits and preparing clips to splice into the film. He was working in the studio space. They’d already rented it and he might as well put it to some use. Plus he was reluctant to work on the footage in his home. As stupid as it sounded, he was afraid it might taint his apartment.

  It had actually taken him a while to build up the courage to go through the footage. Every time he viewed it he was back in the lock up, taped to a chair, powerless. Sam hated feeling powerless; he boiled with rage every time he thought about it. How dare they do that to him. Then he thought about what had been done to them, their blood congealing on the concrete floor, and he hated himself for letting any of it happen.

  Finally, he was so sick of swinging between anger and self-loathing, he sat down at his Mac.

  “Fuck you,” he told the footage. “Fuck you, you do not get the better of me. I’m in control now, you are my bitch!”

  Of course the footage had other ideas. For a start his Mac kept playing up. He couldn’t seem to get an accurate cut of any clip he wanted. No matter how careful he was with the tracking, when he saved a clip and played it back, it showed something else. It either started a minute late, or it showed some detail he hadn’t seen before. It felt like a big digital maggot, pinned to a slide, that kept squirming every time he tried to cut it, making it impossible to dissect.

  Sam’s eyes hurt and there was a painful little knot right between his shoulder blades. He was tired, not just from lack of sleep, but from fighting to keep the film afloat when he should have let it sink days ago. Costs were spiralling, cast members were awol and they had no workable script, or even an ending. Too many things were just going wrong on this film.

  Sometimes you have to cut your losses before you find yourself in over your head. Working on the footage reminded him it was real people on those operating tables. Real people suffering unbelievable pain and violation. He and Jimmy were planning on exploiting them for commercial gain. What sort of person makes money out of other people’s murder?

  He and Jimmy apparently.

  It had seemed really edgy and intense when they’d first come up with the plan, but now it seemed kind of desperate and seedy. Sam might well have been one of those victims himself. If Ashkan hadn’t been killed, it could have been Sam strapped to one of those tables, screaming and begging for his life.

  He wondered how he might feel, if he knew in those last moments that people would be paying to watch him die. Getting a cheap thrill out of seeing him at his most powerless and vulnerable, as everything that made him human was slowly stripped away from him. He shuddered as he pictured this, then he hung his head and nearly wept from the deep shame he felt. There was no way he could work another minute on this project.

  Perhaps it wasn’t just the project he needed to abandon. Maybe Sam needed to pull out of Indie Horror altogether. He wasn’t thinking about putting on a suit and tie and becoming a stock broker, but there were other things he could do in film.

  The thought surprised him. He’d always gone all out for horror and considered himself a ‘lifer’ in the business. There’d been a time when horror had saved his life, or it had felt like it at least.

  He’d been very anxious as a kid. It hadn’t helped that his parents shipped him off to boarding school as soon as he was old enough. He’d started wetting the bed at prep school and suffered recurrent panic attacks. He wasn’t good at sports, and hated the long hours he was forced to spend on muddy playing fields, so he had nowhere to put all his nervous energy. For a while he even developed a few tics, which made him a target for bullying.

  In his last year of prep school he’d been walking through the local town, when a group of boys jumped out at him from a shop doorway. It was the town’s only second hand bookshop. The boys, from the year below him, were holding horror books in front of their faces. One showed a green looking mummy’s head, another had a werewolf on it, and the third had a photo of a human skull peering out of a semi melted snowman.

  The boys came at him roaring and howling as children do when they pretend to be monsters. Sam stood still and stared at them, bemused and slightly embarrassed by their behaviour. When they saw that their little prank had failed to scare Sam they threw the paperbacks at his head and ran off.

  The owner of the shop, a tall, bald man who wore a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, burst out of the door and shouted after them, but the boys just laughed and gave him the finger. Sam was still standing in front of the shop so the owner rounded on him.

  “What do you think you’re playing at you bloody little savages?” said the owner. Sam couldn’t think of a single things to say; he just stared nervously at the man.

  “Well you’re paying for those books,�
� the owner said. “And any other damage you’ve done.”

  Sam picked the ancient, battered paperbacks off the pavement and saw, for the first time, they were part of the Pan Book of Horror Stories series. He was an obedient child, so he dutifully got out his weekly allowance, but he couldn’t believe how much the owner was asking for them.

  “They’re collectors’ items now,” the man said. “Go and check on your interweb thingy if you don’t believe me.”

  Sam put the books into his bag and slunk back to school. With no money left to spend, he didn’t feel like hanging around in town.

  He felt extremely furtive when he snuck back into his tiny, windowless room with the books. A month before, three boys had been suspended for keeping porn mags in their room. Sam was a timid boy, and he wondered what his housemaster would do if he found Sam with these gruesome looking books. He imagined the look of shame and disappointment on his mother’s face if he were to be suspended. Sam slipped all three books into the gap between the back of his wardrobe and the wall, hoping no one would think to look there until he could get rid of them.

  A week later Sam was confined to his room with a severe chest infection. He couldn’t go to lessons and he wasn’t even allowed into the common room to watch TV in case he infected someone. All he could do was finish his schoolwork and stare at the walls. After two days of high temperatures and intense boredom, he remembered the three books.

  Sam pulled out the one with the Mummy on the cover, because it looked the most innocuous. It was entitled the Ninth Pan Book of Horror Stories. He wasn’t the least bit prepared for what he found inside. The first three stories involved emasculation, murder and burning at the stake. In his fevered state Sam felt he was not only watching the characters’ suffering, he was experiencing it along with them. He flung the book at the wall and then hid it again, wishing he could burn it like Jinnot, the young girl in the third story who was burned alive.

  Something about the plight of the innocent girl had affected Sam though. He identified with her on a deeper level and that released some of the nervous tension he kept bottled up. Later that night he dug the book out again and finished it by torch light. Before he recovered he’d read all three books twice over and had become an irredeemable horror fan.

  After that, Sam spent every penny he had on DVDs, novels, and back issues of Fangoria, the more extreme the better. Horror gave him a place to put all his anxieties and fears, as well as a way to control and exorcise them. He lost his nervous tics, stopped getting bullied and took up running when he moved to his senior school. He never joined the popular crowd, but he managed to survive boarding school, and whenever things got a bit much, there was always horror.

  It was horror that toughened him up and helped him cope with his problems, not team sports or cold showers. People often spoke disparagingly about the way horror desensitises people to violence and atrocities. Sam thought they were completely missing the point. That’s what horror was supposed to do.

  The world, as he saw it, was a very violent and atrocious place, and horror was his way of inoculating himself against that. By exposing himself to controlled doses of violence and psychological fear, he was able to build up a greater tolerance to it. It was the emotional equivalent of a vaccine, or snake charmers taking small sips of snake venom till they’re immune.

  The natural conclusion to this was to start creating his own horror, to find a place to put all his personal demons, and that’s what he and Jimmy had done for the past three years. Now it was time to stop.

  Sam had witnessed genuine torture and had very nearly suffered it himself. In the face of that, horror didn’t seem so exciting anymore. The idea of covering some actor in fake blood, and filming them scream with a pain they’d never actually known, all seemed rather pathetic.

  Maybe that’s why he’d liked Jimmy’s idea of pushing the envelope with real footage, but the implications were too terrible to contemplate. Sam felt like he’d just stepped back from a huge abyss. He knew, with a sudden certainty, that he would not have been able to live with himself if they’d completed this film.

  He had no idea how he was going to break this to Jimmy. He was effectively dissolving the partnership with his best friend. It needed to be done though, otherwise he’d grow to hate the medium that had done so much for him.

  A huge knot of tension slipped from the muscles between Sam’s shoulders. This was an important decision and a necessary one. He let out a deep breath, surprised by how emotional he felt.

  Sam bent over his laptop, quit Final Cut Pro X and dragged the files he’d edited out of their folder to bin them. He was about to do the same with the footage when something stopped him. He let the little icon hover over the trashcan and then he pulled it away. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t ready to get rid of it yet.

  Strangely, he still wanted to watch it to the end. In fact, the idea suddenly excited him. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe he wanted to see how desensitised he’d actually become, to test the limits of his endurance. Or it could be the fact that he finally had a choice about watching it. He wasn’t obliged to view it because of work, or forced to watch it by some homicidal loan shark. He could regain control of how he felt about the whole thing.

  He was tremendously relieved about letting go of the project and he fancied a little thrill, to watch it for the sheer experience. It was also a way of empowering himself. Sam had been feeling powerless a lot lately, in the face of his treatment by Ashkan and his inability to keep the film on track. Maybe this footage was just the thing he needed.

  Sam liked all kinds of horror, but he did have a bit of a thing for extreme slashers and torture porn. If he was honest, he always identified with the tormentor, not the victims. Leatherface, Jigsaw and Michael Myers were gods. Who wouldn’t want to have naked teens cowering at their feet. The thought made Sam feel powerful and it also kinda turned him on.

  The footage was like the ultimate torture porn. It would be his final indulgence, his good bye to the genre. Going so far into the dark stuff that he’d never want to go back.

  Sam sat down, opened the file and set it to full screen. It seemed to start slightly differently. There were details he’d over looked before. He was probably viewing it with a clearer mind, he told himself, the trauma had blotted those things out.

  He was wondering about pausing the footage and getting a beer when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He swung round to chew Jimmy out for sneaking up on him, when he looked up into two pale blue eyes. Eyes that contained equal amounts of suffering and sensuality.

  “Melissa,” Sam said getting to his feet. “What are you doing here?”

  “I thought I was starring in your film.”

  “So did we, until you disappeared.”

  “I’m sorry.” Melissa dropped her chin and looked up with a penitent pout. She put a finger lightly on his chest and traced his collarbone. “Are you very cross with me?”

  Sam pulled away, sighing heavily. “I was, up until about ten minutes ago. Then I realised this whole project was a mistake. We shouldn’t have started it in the first place. I’ll pay you for today and the other day you worked, and maybe one more day, but that’s all I can afford to be honest.”

  Melissa continued to regard him with those pale blue eyes. Sam found it hard to read her expression.

  “I’m sorry if that’s a let-down,” he said. “I didn’t think you were coming back. Thought you’d found a better project or something.”

  “You haven’t let me down. I need you and Jimmy. I can’t tell you how, just yet, but I do. Where would I find a better project than this?”

  “Just about anywhere. The pay isn’t great, the hours are long and what we had planned . . . ” Sam let his head drop with sudden embarrassment. “I don’t even want to tell you what we had planned.”

  Melissa put her hands under Sam’s chin and tilted his head up so he was looking her in the face. “You know how you make God laugh don’t you?”

  “No?”
<
br />   “Tell him what you had planned.”

  Sam laughed. Why was she trying to cheer him up when he’d just fired her?

  He found himself looking at her mouth. Her lips were full and moist and quite perfectly pink. They parted in a subtle pout, as if they were reaching out for him. Sam wanted to know what it would be like to feel those lips brush his, to have them touch his skin and part to receive his . . . No, he really mustn’t go there. He was just torturing himself.

  “The only thing I’m really going to regret,” Melissa said, leaning in closer. “Is not spending more time with you. Just the two of us, alone together here.”

  Melissa was so close Sam could smell her scent, sandalwood and fresh broken sweat. Was she really coming on to him? That was impossible wasn’t it? Girls as hot as Melissa didn’t come on to guys like him. He’d worked with some good looking girls and they were occasionally flirty, but that was just part of the job. They never meant anything by it.

  Melissa leaned in to him. Her stomach pressed against his and he could feel her nipples hard against his chest. Oh God, maybe she was coming on to him, but why?

  Should he really be worrying about that right now? This was a once in a lifetime opportunity, did he really want to mess it up?

  Oh God what if he couldn’t perform. She was so gorgeous it was intimidating. If he failed to rise to the occasion Sam didn’t think he could stand the humiliation.

  Melissa put her hands on Sam’s shoulders and tilted her pelvis so it was pressed against his crotch. That’s when Sam realised he would have no problem rising to the occasion. He was so hard he was about to pop the stitches of his 501s.

  Sam put his hands on the small of Melissa’s back, feeling clumsy and hesitant, but so desperate for her he was shaking. Melissa pressed her cheek to his and ran her fingers along his shoulders.

  Sam’s breathing quickened, he was swaying and stoned on his desire for Melissa. He wanted so badly to kiss her but he didn’t want blunder into it. Was she waiting for him to make the move? How could he do it without making an idiot of himself.