Troublemaker

The sound of the alarm on her phone did not take Anita by surprise. She had spent most of the night awake, too anxious to miss the first day on her new, hard-earned job. She had checked her phone multiple times during the night; the last time, twenty minutes before she was supposed to wake up, she gave up any hope of having a good, relaxing sleep. She just waited, staring at the ceiling.

She had meticulously planned her morning days in advance: she showered taking care not to get her hair wet, not to ruin her hairdresser’s job of the day before; she turned on the espresso machine, already pre-loaded with coffee and water; she dressed with the black shirt and black jeans requested by her employer. An outfit she had a million versions of at home, and yet she had bought a new one, washing it a week in advance to make sure it would dry in time.

Anita knew this was her last chance: she was almost 35 and had worked on movie sets since she had moved to the city, after finishing school; she was well known in the industry as a good, reliable production assistant and she loved her job. Everything was fine. Before she fucked up big time and lost all her hard-earned credibility.

She had tried every phone number in her contact list and asked every former colleague; her screw-up was too big to save her. Anita swallowed her pride and started scouting jobs on porn sets, the only ones willing to take her onboard; she was over-qualified, and the producers were very happy to get such a valuable professional paying as little as they would, leveraging her desperation.

She was not against porn. She actually liked to watch it; but working in porn was absolutely not the same as watching it at home, in her bed.

What broke her heart was the constant lack of professionalism of the environment: she had found herself speaking to actors while they were naked, often with an erection, or straight down getting a blowjob from a fluffer. Just weeks ago Anita had to crawl on the floor (and not a very clean one) to get a glass of water to an actress while she was getting fucked in the ass by a bunch of men taking turns. Anita felt, and rightfully so, that she was doing too much and being paid too little, but she was also on the brink of a financial disaster.

She had just successfully returned the keys of a rented apartment (a place where, the day before, a woman had mopped piss in a bathtub with her hairs) when her phone rang again; for the very first time after “the big fuck up,” she was not the one begging to get hired for a shoot, but someone was actively searching for her, and offering a decent payroll.

The production company was named PWT, and they were some sort of urban legend in the city: a bunch of porn producers that had shifted towards heavier content, shooting extreme scenes that often led to serious injuries to the actresses involved, including full naked hangings that lasted until the actress would pass out from hypoxia.

The word was that, during one of those scenes, the actress suggested hanging her until death, an idea that neither the producers nor the actress’s boyfriend fought. The video was sold and the income was apparently stellar. Surfing the success, they shifted into producing and shooting real snuff films, with real actresses getting murdered on tape.

Anita’s skin was too thick to fall for that story; something was probably true, as it always is, but the whole thing felt too far-fetched to be believable; PWT was offering a regular, monthly payroll that doubled what she had managed to earn on other porn sets; and she needed that money now. So she was determined to at least go there and see for herself.

As she looked in the mirror one last time, she checked that her ponytail was as firm and stiff as possible, checked that her teeth were perfectly clean, and looked herself in the eye: she knew this was her last chance and she was determined not to fuck it up.

“Ask the question, I know you want to ask the question,” the director said after they met in his office. Anita blushed and looked away; she did not believe the vast majority of the legends regarding the place, but something had to be true for it to stand for so many years.

“Do you really kill people here?”

“We don’t use the world “kill.” It’s a snuff movie company, so we do snuff them, for real. But it’s all consensual and no one else gets harmed; we handle it very professionally.”

Anita felt the ground open under her feet.

“And for snuff you mean that people die in front of the camera.”

“Exactly. Some of them do it by themselves, some other times we do it. Sometimes it goes smoothly, sometimes they regret it when it’s too late.”

Anita felt her head spinning. The director leaned towards her.

“I really want to hire you Anita. You are the best we can afford and probably even better; I need you, but I will find someone else if you don’t want to do it. I get it. But if you say yes, I need to know you will do your job professionally and to the end, starting today.”

“How do you find the people… the actresses to do it?”

“They are the ones contacting us. It’s illegal for us to contact them. And trust me, there’s a lot of weirdos in this world.”

“So today… there’s a woman coming here to get murdered?”

“Snuffed.”

“Snuffed, I’m sorry. Snuffed. There’s a woman, coming here willingly, to get snuffed?”

“She’s here already, filling out the paperwork. Her husband is here too.”

“Are you messing with me?”

“I’m not, Anita. I’m not going to sugarcoat it; I told you today we are going to do a shoot and, from now on, every week we will prepare and produce a movie. I need a PA and you are my first choice, but the day has already begun so: are you in?”

Anita was shaking, and squeezed her hands between her thighs to keep them as still as possible. She had already lowered her self-esteem by working in porn. She felt humiliated and she did not make nearly enough money to be self-sufficient, having blown through all her savings. It was either find a completely different job, for which she’d have no skills or experience, or take the money, and at least save herself financially for the next months. She only had to participate in some murd… snuffs. Some snuffs.

“I’m in.”

“Good, let’s go meet the crew,” the director said.

Anita felt her heart beat like never before. It was all real and now she was a part of it.

To call this “the crew” was a massive overstatement. It consisted of Jack himself, the director and main cameraman for every shoot, another guy named Spike, whose job was to operate the second camera and probably did meth regularly, and Jesse, the actor.

Anita shook hands awkwardly with Spike, who did not even have the strength to look her in the eyes. Or he just wanted to look at her tits up close.

His pale skin, very slim body type, and reddish hair screamed “nerd” from every angle. She felt sorry for him; she wondered why he was there in the first place, as it didn’t look like he was particularly interested.

With Jesse, the actor, it was very different from the get-go: Anita was not proud of it, but she had already met a good bunch of porn actors: some were weird, some were nice, some were just regular guys. Jesse, however, was charming as hell: he smiled confidently, looked her in the eye, shook her hand with the right amount of strength, firmly but without hurting her. And he went immediately for a kiss on the cheeks, which gave her the chance to smell his cologne.

Anita felt she was blushing, and hated herself for that, in that particular way where she also felt she would have licked the tyres of his car if only he had asked her to.

“Jesse is also our main executor of snuffs on set,” Jack told Anita, almost waking up from her day dream.

“Nice to meet you,” Anita responded, realizing a few seconds later that she had just said out loud she was happy to meet someone who killed women like her for a living. And, she hated to admit, who nevertheless made her a bit wet just by being in front of her.

No one blinked an eye; for them, this was the routine. And if she wanted to fit in (and she did want to fit in: the bills kept piling up) she should learn to make this her routine as well.

“I’ll show you the set,” Jack said to Anita, while turning a corner to reveal a full bedroom, with weird pink walls and a double bed in the centre.

The entire room felt bigger than a normal room, as often happened on movie sets: the walls were made out of light wood, and it was only built to look acceptable through the camera lens. 

Anita felt at home for the first time in many months: an actual movie set, and not a dirty, rented apartment with clothes and equipment scattered everywhere. The lights and microphones were hanging from the ceiling properly, there were no cables running around on the floor, and everything looked ready to go.

One of the fake doors opened, and a couple walked in: a man in his 30s, wearing a very tight t-shirt to show off his muscles and a fancy haircut, glanced at the bed, and the horrendous pink walls, as though they were seeing a beautiful art piece.

“Oh my God darling, this is exactly it!”

A woman followed through, wearing a light summer dress that floated up her beautiful, firm legs with every step she took. She was not wearing a bra, and her tits moved around with her as she slowly walked onto the set.

“Well it would be weird if it wasn’t exactly it, right?” she smiled, looking at the entire set herself.

“What are these people doing…” Anita whispered, as she started to walk towards the couple to make sure they wouldn’t touch anything on set or, worse, take any pictures. She had dealt with countless uninvited guests on movie sets, wanting to meet the actors, take a picture, or just be part of the magic. She felt someone firmly grabbing her wrist, stopping her from intervening: it was Jesse.

“Let them have it. She is the protagonist, after all.”

Anita realized. The woman in the summer dress was there to die, by the hands of Jesse. Her husband was there to watch, and it looked like they both felt very good about it all.

“Anita, let’s go,” said Jack, signalling to leave Jesse and the couple alone. A part of her, one that she had suppressed very early in her life, protested. She wanted to look at the encounter between the actress and Jesse. She wanted to see her shaking hands with her soon-to-be murderer and how the conversation would pan out. But she was not there to be a creep: she was there to work. Yet the idea of participating in that unique moment felt very appealing: she had repressed herself all through her teenage years, when her sexuality blossomed, but was also very clear that for a lady it was not suitable to search and explore her desires. Those years were long gone, and she had behaved herself pretty well… at least until the big fuckup. As she walked away from the set, she reminded herself that, when aroused, her judgment was not to be trusted: so she followed Jack into the office, trying to focus on the day ahead.

As Jack, Spike and Jesse prepped for the shoot alongside the happy couple, Anita got to work: she instituted a labelling system for the SD cards of the different cameras, to better track each shot; she checked every camera battery in the studio, finding one that was faulty and could potentially lead to trouble on set; she had also made a couple of Excel sheets from scratch to track expenses for each shot and work hours for the crew. 

Anita then turned her attention to the prop room: a small space with no windows and a single light bulb dangling from the ceiling. In clear plastic containers she found a bunch of fake guns, a cowboy hat, and several meters of a thick rope.

In a corner, amassed in a big bucket, she also found a great number of items of women’s clothing. Anita started pulling out everything, realizing it would be useful to sort them by size rather than just throwing everything together. She was overwhelmed with a very peculiar smell: a mix of different perfumes, sweating, and probably other worse bodily fluids. Many of the clothes were ripped or cut; on some, clear blood stains were visible. Anita realized these were the clothes that the women who had shot movies there had been wearing while dying; the smell was what was left of them, and she had it in her hands, now.

Anita held in her hands a shirt with the words “Troublemaker” printed on the front. She got closer with her nose and took a deep breath: a kind of perfume she used herself, back in her teenage years; too sweet, too strong. She had fond memories of putting it on herself: she was young and careless. She would not have worn a shirt with “Troublemaker” printed on it, but she related to the woman who had died in that shirt. She placed the shirt on her shoulder, because she felt she wanted to keep breathing in that smell.

On a shelf she also found a prop that was very unusual: a length of cord, no longer than a meter, with a wooden handle at each end. 

It looked like something you would use to pull something with force; but she could not work out what it was for. The door of the prop room opened abruptly, inundating the space with the light from the set, now fully on and ready.

“Anita, you are amazing,” Jack told her. “The way you prepared everything is just… this is why I wanted you here. And you already found the strangler! Oh I love you already Anita. We are almost ready to shoot.”

Anita realized she was holding the weapon used to strangle women on set. 

“We are about to shoot, Anita, go get the actress please.”

“On my way,” Anita replied, giving Jack an awkward thumbs-up as he left. He did not mention the shirt on her shoulder; no one was in sight. She plunged her nose into the shirt and took another deep breath.