“There’s a part in the movie

where you can see right through the acting,

where you can tell that I’m about to burst into tears,

right before I burst into tears.”

—Richard Siken, “Dirty Valentine”

Valentini doesn’t flinch when the purple-bellied storm shakes the house, heedless of the film being shot within its derelict husk. Scene fifteen, take three. The Hollow Places crew rushes to stop the windows’ skeletal rattling before the atmospheric pressure breaks into a deluge. It’s not lightning yet that fulminates, but the many sweltering spotlights placed at strategic intervals around the vestibule.

It rained that day, too—the one they’re trying to capture in film reel. Her iron-tanged blood had mingled with the old-cellar stench of petrichor. Valentini drifts past the director’s omnipresent reprimands, toward the makeshift hair-and-makeup nook, where vats of corn-syrup blood lie in wait. For all the gazes of the crew members poking at her, everyone’s quick to look away. As if being caught staring might pass on some ineffable curse. They’ll all watch the finished product soon enough anyway. Everyone knows you can look and look without fear if there’s a screen separating object from subject—voyeurism made safe through distance and stage lights.

“Where are you going?” director and producer Fotiou barks, skipping pyretic to Valentini’s side. This time, it’s harder not to flinch, but practice makes perfect. “This rain is a godsend. Once we secure the windows, we can shoot the scene just like it happened to you.”

Valentini allows herself to be led back to the vestibule, where her co-star awaits, flirting with one of the younger crew members. They flew in Yiorgos Blake, the Greek-American acting legend, specifically for this role. He might play Manolis while the cameras roll, but he will never be him, not least because Manolis is in the worm-riddled ground, his neck snapped nearly clean in half. She doesn’t bother telling the director that nothing they shoot here is how it really happened. Setting the record straight is not why she’s returned to the place of her almost-murder, despite public speculation.

Valentini stays quiet. It’s probably a good thing director Fotiou intercepted her before she could wander too far into the guts of Hunchback’s Hollow. Her footsteps, without her assent, had been ambling down the hall to the hidden staircase. The one that leads ever upward to the padlocked attic, where Mother’s ghost wails about lies and fictions.

Valentini is the only one left alive to hear the siren call.

Valentini’s memory palace is sometimes an abandoned movie theater. Inside the echoing chamber, her seat’s bloodred upholstery sticks in torn strips to her bare thighs. She watches herself, Yianna, and Manolis of the past, while the screen’s glow flickers its muted granularity over her tearstained cheeks. The memories of the games they used to play in their haunted house—the place generations of lost children had named Hunchback’s Hollow—unravel like a film reel in her head.

Their parents (some of them overbearing, others absent, others gone) would never understand what the three teenagers do after school. Why Valentini, Manolis, and Yianna, Best Fucking Friends Forever, like to duck under the hazard tape and climb through the wire-fence gap into Hunchback’s Hollow: the empty house on the empty street matching the emptiness within.

How could they ever explain the rituals of pain and relief? The unwitting summoning of the house’s latent ghosts?

Valentini, Yianna, and Manolis sit on the dusty, tarp-covered floor like a three-pointed star. Only a cheap candle flickers in the middle of the attic, pushing back the encroaching shadows.

Their ritual is simple. Their ritual is everything.

“What shall we sacrifice today?” Valentini always asks, big and dramatic. A theater kid down to the bone, dreaming of one day starring in a show of her own.

Yianna produces a piece of paper from her backpack, plain black except for its rainbow pins. Their geometry test that the teacher returned earlier today, marked with red pen all over—red as a sign of danger.

“My mother doesn’t need another reminder that I’m not the perfect daughter she raised,” Yianna says, embittered, and allows the fire to lick the incriminating paper into ashen non-existence.

Valentini squeezes Yianna’s hand from one side, Manolis’s from the other.

“A strip off my soccer shirt,” Manolis says next, letting the fire blacken the tatter in its amber grasp. The #1 printed across the fabric curls and chars under the stinking flame. “I like playing, but the boys in the team see things in me I’d rather keep hidden. Things they’d rather just crush under their heels.”

For as long as the three have known each other, Manolis has never spoken the words—genderfluid, sometimes-girl, never-boy—not even to himself. Valentini and Yianna squeeze his hands in tacit reassurance anyway.

Valentini’s turn, last of three—the three Fates, the teachers at school call them, not affectionately. She thinks about what to sacrifice to the guttering candle flame. Baby-pink lipstick, a symbol of her mother’s hopes that Valentini—slut-red lipstick and obstinate celibacy—will one day become interested in boys and subtle, girlish things? A tattered playbook, to exorcise her pipe dream of becoming an actress?

Or, whatever flaw nestles inside her, making her feel like a ravenous lacuna that eats every good feeling and spits out only noxious smoke, even when she’s surrounded by her best friends, misfit among misfits?

Valentini lets go of her friends’ hands. She reaches for the open flame and lets it scorch her fingertips. Wishes the fire could wash her smooth and clean—brand-fucking-new.

Cue the familiar laugh track, slinking disembodied from the shadow-mantled wings. It is meant to convey not humor, but tragic irony. The invisible audience knows something these three foolish kids do not. Monochrome granularity gives flailing birth to glorious technicolor. Cue the charnel-house smell of burned popcorn, curdled butter, sugar sticking sickly all over adult-Valentini’s too-tight skin.

While Yianna and Manolis try to pull younger-Valentini back from the candle flame, another presence in the house urges her on. Yes, little child, Mother’s ghost croons from her attic hideaway, awakened by this sacrifice, this pound of burned flesh. Little child, welcome home.

The film reel unspools, a broken string of fate whipping in the wind. From the vacant velvet seats, Valentini cries on.

The house on Hunchback’s Hill—perched haphazardly atop a steep incline at the end of the last street in town—is the farthest thing from an optimal filming location. But director Fotiou wanted au-then-tic-i-ty. So he got the murder house, and the final girl. Hunchback’s Hollow, and Valentini. Simple as a goddamn nursery rhyme.

Where Valentini’s blood once stained the scuffed hardwood, now the makeup artists set up their overflowing trolleys; the techs arrange their spotlights and camera stands; the director, his signature chair. Where once there was the conflux of laughter and cathartic tears after school, then screams and pleading that day, now there are only the Hollow Places crew members calling the shots and scenes; director Fotiou shouting frenetic instructions after a bump of cocaine.

Where once there was Yianna, third of the Fates, now not even an actress stands in her place. Her role erased from history just like her life was snuffed out in a blink. Places! Action! But Yianna’s ghost has yet to enter stage left, no matter how many surreptitious cues Valentini leaves her like breadcrumbs dropped by a lost child around Hunchback’s Hollow. Is Valentini’s guilt not thunderous enough to summon her dead best friend to her side? She suspects Yianna lingers still, cradled in the suffocating folds of Mother’s musty old gown. Mother, keeping herself and her captive ghost children sequestered in the attic, where the fallen beams and lack of structural integrity render the space safe from any spirit-catching cameras.

And where there was Manolis, now Blake roams Hunchback’s Hollow. Several years older than him, several shades lighter. An arrogant scowl, whereas Manolis only dealt in shy or mischievous smiles—jewel-bright when there was shoplifted lipstick involved. Manolis was all bleached-blond hair hugging the acne-scar constellations of his chin. He was limbs long and gangling. Like the Vitruvian man, Valentini and Yianna used to joke, but Manolis never laughed. It was the man part that bothered him, they would later figure out. Blake has dark hair, ice-chip eyes, muscle definition and a five o’clock shadow. His voice, a suggestive contrabasso.

In the process of removing Yianna from the picture, the director has turned the horror film into a love story. Or, more accurately, a hate story. Love, hate, director Fotiou likes to say. Aren’t they one and the same?

They are not, Valentini thinks. But perhaps they should be. Because then life and death could be two sides of the same coin, too. Her mission to find Yianna’s ghost wouldn’t be for nothing, then.

(Manolis’s ghost is not here. When his neck—and Mother’s spectral marionette strings that held it upright—snapped, he was just outside the boundary of the property. He died knowing he could never save Yianna from the fate he had unknowingly condemned her to. He could never save Valentini either. Perhaps it’s best he’s not here to watch Valentini star in this second-rate exploitation film. Yes, perhaps it’s for the best.)

The ghost of Mother lingers, but Valentini isn’t naive enough to think it’s doing anything like sleeping.

While the Hollow Places crew fights with the windowpanes and the errant puddles of rainwater pooling on the swollen floorboards, Valentini grasps at the excuse for a smoke.

Blake corners her on the rickety porch while the storm rages out beyond the weather-worn awning. “Hey, partner,” he drawls. He doesn’t act with an American accent, but when talking to her off camera, his consonants are thicker, vowels elongated like a ligament that stretches taut but just won’t snap.

Valentini levels her eyeliner-smudged gaze at Blake. She doesn’t see Manolis in him. Only a rich, famous actor slumming it in a B-movie falsely advertised as true crime. And in his eyes, beyond the coruscating charm: the bottomless hunger.

“Why are you here?” she demands. Playacting has gotten old fast. Before that day, all she ever wanted was to wear new and shiny skins on stages across the country, the world. She wanted to be Blake. But now that she’s here, it’s like there are two people crammed inside of herself. The face everyone sees, and the needful shadows within Valentini given humanoid form.

It was the same neediness that cost her her friends.

“Fotiou was getting on my last nerve. I needed a break,” Blake replies with a dazzling smile as he leans against the house’s ancient pillars and regards Valentini in return. Water cascades around them in a nearly unbreakable flow.

“No,” Valentini says. She stares out into the rain-haze. Wonders what it would take to disappear completely between the darkness of night and the subtle luminescence of the raindrops. If she stepped off the steep incline of the last house on the last street of her small town amid a downpour, where would she land? “Why are you in this movie? You could be anywhere in the world right now.”

Uninvited, Blake sits down on the door stoop next to Valentini. He smells of cigarette smoke and musky sandalwood cologne, pungent even through the petrichor coating her nostrils. There is a scene in their film, one they have yet to shoot. In it, Blake catches Valentini’s retreating form, holds her down, breaches her with his knife in the same spot Manolis’s blade once did. A wet, pink, gaping side wound. A phallic stabbing, a pseudo-vaginal lesion, all in the name of au-then-tic-i-ty. Valentini shudders, but Blake doesn’t move away.

“That’s easy. I wanted to meet you,” he says. “You’re infamous, little one. Sole survivor of the Hunchback Homicide. Nothing to make you feel alive like a final girl, eh?”

He laughs, that award-winning, red-carpet laughter, but Valentini doesn’t join him. She pretended to have a crush on him in high school, when she wanted her parents off her back. A ready-made answer to the ubiquitous question of “who do you like?” Valentini is glad she’s torn his poster down from her bedroom wall since then. Blake’s face had been a tangle of printed tatters at her feet, each of his handsome features made grotesque in their disjointedness, like an exquisite corpse. She puffs and puffs on her cigarette, watches the tip blaze, imagines it is the whole world that’s aflame in her incandescent rage.

“And you?” Blake says eventually, discomfited by her silence. “Why come back here? Is it exposure therapy?”

That’s a nice way of putting it, she’ll give him that. The newspapers have used headlines like “pain slut,” “trauma porn,” “asking for the dead to finish what they started.” The press has painted her as someone who is fetishizing her own experiences. Someone who would do or relive anything for a meager paycheck and fifteen minutes of fame.

Valentini smiles. Not a starlet’s smile, but a grotesque’s grin.

And she says: “I’m trying to kill a ghost.”

Valentini’s memory palace changes at its own inscrutable will. The abandoned cinema turns into an old-fashioned theater, curtains moth-eaten and dust-suffused. On its vast stage, a scaled-down miniature; a puppet play, commencing. This time, she watches the memory unfold from the wings. Valentini uses the ruined curtains as handkerchiefs to dry her perpetual tears.

Upon the stained floorboards, two kidskin puppets waltz with wild abandon, while a third leathern form, silhouetted in shadow, watches some distance away from them. Music drifts oneiric from the orchestra pit. In reality, the song they played back then was probably some illegally downloaded MP3; but here, memory contorts to match aesthetic, and the music becomes an old carnival tune performed by automata circus animals. The puppet bearing Valentini’s likeness is stuffed with hawthorn and sawdust, sewed with a pale burlap thread and auburn-leaf hair. Manolis is stitched out of a beautiful tan hide, with long, floppy blond straw for hair.

What was Yianna doing back then? Even in her memory palace, Valentini cannot remember. Cannot stop erasing her friend from the scene, as if that’d ever be enough to rid Valentini of her guilt. Puppet-Yianna’s face is a grimace of anxiety shrouded in shadow, her arms tucked close and protective around her frail cotton-stuffed body.

Valentini and Manolis kiss dramatically mid-dance, then laugh into each other’s mouths; Manolis because he doesn’t like girls, Valentini because she doesn’t like anyone at all. (In that point in time, she is beginning to roll the word asexual in her mouth like a rain-drenched pebble. But to utter it out loud is to kiss her dreams of film acting goodbye. Who ever heard of a star like that? Attractive but never attracted to others, yet still craving admiration—adoration—so she won’t have to deal with her own self alone.)

When, still laughing, Valentini and Manolis go to kiss Yianna next, she pushes both puppets away.

“Be serious,” Yianna hisses angrily. “Can’t you see what’s happening here? What this place is doing to you?”

Yianna with the mommy issues, the mommy scars, the sixth sense for mommy danger, who has been begging her friends to stop visiting Hunchback’s Hollow ever since Mother’s ghost appeared. If only they’d listened to her.

If only Valentini hadn’t told Yianna—

“You’re just jealous because we know how to have fun and Mother likes us best. You’re used to getting all your mommy’s attention, but what do Manolis and I ever get, e?”

Parents who are always absent, negligent, eager to ignore the parts of their children they disapprove of—all the parts that make a disappointing, invisible whole.

Yianna’s puppet shakes at the seams. “You know what my mother’s like.” Constantly keeping Yianna home from school on a whim, never letting her out of her sight, telling her she wishes she’d never given birth to her one second, then the next insisting she’d kill herself if Yianna ever abandoned her. Valentini has been to Yianna’s house. “Which is why I’m telling you, Ntini, there’s something wrong with—”

Mother’s ghost enters the stage, suspended from a contraption of wooden stilts and jaundiced craft paper; an animated shadow. The puppets of Manolis and Valentini look up, smiling with loose-thread mouths, rejoicing in their spectral deus ex machina. They don’t know yet that they should be fleeing from the play’s antagonist.

The ghost of Mother lilts, “No more fighting now, children. I’m here. Mother’s here and won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

Between one blink and the next, the puppet that is Yianna has her lips wired shut. Her eyes bulge wide open, but the other puppets cannot bear to look into her irises’ yawning pain. Left to her own devices, Yianna takes to inspecting the shadows around the stage, trying to anticipate Mother’s next move. She is tense like a cornered animal and yet she stays, unwilling to abandon her friends to Mother’s machinations.

Onstage, Manolis and Valentini are now playing dress up, the garments old and ornate, exquisitely woven despite the yellowing of time. They must cost a fortune, these clothes, but in the forgotten attic, everything belongs to them—Mother likes to give her children all the gifts. Manolis wraps himself in an evening gown, dripping with jewels outshined by his rare full smile. Valentini chooses a three-piece suit, the material whispering secret desires over her needful skin.

The puppets can’t feel, but Valentini remembers. The sensation of rightness, of completion. All her life she’d been told her looks would only ever allow her to play the femme fatale, the damsel in distress. But to her, acting was alchemy. It was transmutation. And sometimes it was the only time she was allowed to cry or scream, to wear dapper suits. To be Valentini, whoever that ended up being that day.

She and Manolis look into the mirror of each other’s eyes, unspoken selves reflected infinite between them. They sway around the attic, Valentini dipping Manolis like she’s a gentleman, the two of them laughing in coordinated crescendo. Their shared truth resonates right through their stilts and straw as the puppet waltz twirls on.

They forget about Yianna and her discomfort. Or, more accurately, they ignore the last part of their coven. The third Fate.

Flesh-Valentini’s gaze wanders across the miniature stage, until it meets the vacant eyes of Mother’s ghost huddling in the opposite wing. This ghost is no memory. No miniature, but a spreading miasma whose spindly fingers try to grasp Valentini: the one who got away.

A shock jostles through Valentini’s body, electricity raising her hair like she’s caught in the swells and swoops of a storm.

She blinks and the stage dismantles itself. The puppets unravel into cloth and kidskin, the shadows disperse, and Valentini is left alone with her echoes.

“There is a beast inside you,” director Fotiou tells Blake, rubbing his shoulders as though he were a wrestler ready to enter the fighting ring.

Valentini sits in her makeup chair, while the young crew member Blake had been flirting with earlier applies rouge to her cheeks. She can feel each tiny brush-bristle burning across her skin, the redness of her cheeks emerging from irritation as much as from the rouge’s pigment. For a second, Valentini glances at the coin-brightness of the mirror and sees Yianna staring back at her, silent and terrified. Trapped, when all she ever wanted was to be free from under everyone’s thumb. Valentini’s mouth drops open, painted lips already shaping a ferrous-tasting apology. (Petrichor, blood, burned popcorn, guilt.) But when she blinks again, it’s only her own reflection framed by the mirror, dolled up and wild-eyed.

“You okay there?” the makeup girl asks, not unkindly.

Valentini shrugs.

“There is a beast inside you and it’s angry. It wants out,” director Fotiou continues from the vestibule, coked-up and circling Blake like a proud father figure.

If Blake is the beast, then Valentini is his beauty, yes—but also his small, scared prey animal. But she knew this from the script already, a bad imitation of the ’70s giallo. The truth is, there is no beast in this house, only a spectral force that no parent, therapist, or journalist believes is real. A delusion, they all called her memory of Mother, conjured up by a young girl’s mind in a frantic attempt to excuse her almost-murderer. Her ex-best friend.

Poor Manolis, she thinks, wishing for a cigarette, a match, a bonfire blaze to swallow the whole world. Poor Yianna.

Valentini is not sure she can extend the same sympathy toward her own self. Call it survivor’s guilt. Call it my best friends are dead and it’s all my fucking fault.

“It’s time,” director Fotiou exclaims. “The climax.” The white of his eyes burns fever-bright, as if he’s not only referring to the scene of the attempted murder. If love and hate are one and the same to him, perhaps so are sex and violence.

Valentini doesn’t flinch. There will be time for that later. She can call it acting, but only she will know the truth. How there’s a scream lodged in her throat, has been for a while now. There is a beast inside her, too. This, she has always known. And when the cameras roll, and the thunder booms from all directions, she will let it out.

“Go!” the director shouts, and Blake takes his cue to stalk through the crumbling halls of Hunchback’s Hollow.

On his cocky stride and mean-edged smile—his caricature of a million horror villains and splatterpunk monsters—Valentini’s mind superimposes Manolis’s gentle sway of hips, his anxious, pretty grin. She runs away from Blake, as is the script. He catches her, of course, script or no script. His grip bruising, possessive. Valentini remembers hugging Manolis openly in the schoolyard once, their classmates calling them the fag and his hag. And later, in the privacy of Hunchback’s Hollow, Manolis, Yianna, and Valentini embracing again and not letting go for what felt like hours.

Perhaps it wasn’t only the psychic imprint of their pain that summoned Mother’s ghost to her and her friends’ sides. Perhaps it was their love, also.

It’s hard to run in these heeled shoes, the long gauzy dress—spectral white, virginal white. Blake tackles Valentini to the ground. She screams from the diaphragm, the heart. Outside, the torrential rain matches her, throat to raw throat. She calls out Manolis’s name, not with scripted fear but with all the grief and desperation bundled up inside her, born of that day. Valentini was expected to mourn and miss Yianna—the innocent, if forgettable, girl canonized as the victim of the Hunchback Homicide—but not Manolis. Never Manolis. When she used to cry out his name in her sleep, everyone assumed she was having nightmares about her abuser. She learned to smother her pain in pillows and sleeping pills, not wanting to spoil his memory further.

No one believes the final girl. Isn’t that what all the movies say? So she gathers every hollow, aching part of herself, and screams until she’s heard over the raging storm.

The fake knife prop looks disturbingly real, suspended above her as lightning illuminates both the blade and Blake’s stony face in stark chiaroscuro. Valentini sees double, one image a jagged palimpsest over the other. With another scream, and with tears streaming as refulgent raindrops down her cheeks, she sinks into her mind just as the knife descends.

Valentini’s memory palace puts on another theater production, this time a grand guignol. The ghost of Mother, all pale flesh and crepuscular shadows, sings to Manolis, Yianna, and Valentini from where they sit on dusty floor pillows, docile at her incorporeal feet. Little ducklings, little darlings, she says, stroking their hair with fingers like rain metastasized into icicles. I see the scars in you. The world keeps hurting you, doesn’t it? But if you stayed here with me, you would know peace forever. You would be safe, and valued, like all the rest of Mother’s children. There’s only one tiny thing you need to do …

Yianna cries out, small, almost inaudible. As if she knows, already, that the end is near. That everything she has been trying to warn Valentini of is coming true.

A whisper of displaced air raises the little hairs on Valentini’s arms as sharp as splinters. Manolis’s relaxed fingers are suddenly curled around a knife, materializing out of the ether. Grand guignol—the theater of fear. From the cheap seats, Valentini-as-an-adult floods the derelict theater with her tears. Mouths apologies to those who can no longer hear them.

A sacrifice, Mother coos, to make your stay here eternal.

“No,” Manolis says, trying to drop the knife. It sticks like it’s tar-pasted to his palm.

“No,” Yianna says, wearing the resigned expression of a prophet gone unheeded, a dreamer who already knows how this nightmare is going to end.

Valentini, tongue tied to the ridges of her palate, says:

Says:

She says nothing.

Yes, my loves, Mother replies, smiling bright and beatific. You, Manoli mou, will extinguish your friends like little candle flames, then your own self. A simple slash across the throat will do. Yianna mou, Valentini mou, you two will have to bear the briefest pain. A small price to pay for your forever happiness, don’t you think?

“No,” Manolis repeats. Gentle, anxious Manolis. Wielder of the knife. “I won’t do it!”

Won’t you? Mother asks. Her voice is colored with a curious lilt, as if speaking to a small, petulant child who is refusing their bath or dinner.

Yianna’s eyes, spooked to full-moon whiteness, plead with Valentini. Hasn’t she been begging her friends to stop visiting this haunted house before it was too late? Didn’t she stay regardless to keep them safe? Yianna’s blown eyes narrow in judgment, in blame, before falling forever shut. Manolis gasps as his knife hand comes back wet and crimsoned with Yianna’s blood.

Valentini scrambles to her feet, then away, vision clouded red as a warning, as regret.

A wave of Mother’s hand has spiderweb-silver threads extending over the stage—the attic—and moving to her tune. Manolis, a stringed marionette himself, raises the arm holding the knife, this time aimed toward Valentini.

She cannot scream.

She flinches.

Valentini runs, leaping over Yianna’s lifeless body, and the body that used to belong to Manolis chases her across the stage. They run circles in vain—terror caught in puppet absurdity—then abandon the stage altogether to enter the haunted house proper.

Valentini, in her frantic dash, manages to fly down the rickety attic stairs and across the hallway to the vestibule, reaching the house’s front door. She wraps her hand around the doorknob, a relieved cry dying like roadkill in her throat. Her fingers slacken at the flesh-deep burn of the knife sinking through her side. From above, Manolis calls a litany of apologies. Valentini slumps, wanting to fall, but pulling herself up anyway. If Manolis is compelled to chase her, then she’s going to run and not stop until she’s brought them both away from Mother’s influence, stab wound or not, blood dripping poppies on the ground or not.

It’s too late for Yianna—your fault your fault your fault—but Valentini can still save Manolis.

How was Valentini to know what would happen next? That, the moment they left the house’s grounds, Manolis would drop like a puppet with his strings cut off? It rained that day, too. Thick sheets of water turning the ground slippery with mud and debris. Generations of children had secretly buried their pets around Hunchback’s Hollow, so cat, dog, rat, and bunny bones emerged like driftwood in the deluge. It all conspired to make a gangling teen who had suddenly regained control of his possessed muscles go down easier than anything.

Manolis breaks his neck like the bone is made of flimsy wood.

He doesn’t get up again even when Valentini screams and bleeds above him, begging him to wake up. Trying to drag him back to the house so that he can at least be a ghost like Yianna, but failing at both.

Failing them both.

Curtain call. Lack of applause. From the audience of one, Valentini stares rain-faced at the stage.

Then, beyond the bloodstained wooden boards, her eyes scour the theater’s shadows writhing like static come alive. Mother has been listening and lurking from the attic, but she’s never once revealed herself since filming began. Never relinquished Yianna’s ghost sewn into the folds of her gown, either, no matter how Valentini hoped for an encounter with her dead best friend. Mother remains a haunting in Valentini’s head, where past and present—fiction and reality—so often coalesce.

“Show yourself!” Valentini calls out, her bitten lips stinging with the salt of her eyes. She is Alice, flooding the world with her tears. “I awakened you once. But you couldn’t possess me then, and you can’t now.” Manolis had been the saddest link, the gentlest of the three Fates. But nobody can accuse Valentini of gentleness, can they? “You don’t own me, you piece of shit—”

The theater dissolves, the rain coming down harder. Valentini emerges from her head like flotsam after a saltwater deluge.

“Cut!”

Blake takes his sweet time lifting his sprawled body weight off Valentini. He scoffs to telegraph his impatience, handsome features crinkled into a mask he can’t quite uncrease in time.

“What now?”

“Look at her! She keeps mumbling off-script.”

Valentini, still on the floor, tries to imagine how she must look to an outsider: lying crumpled and motionless, nearly catatonic, talking nonsense to someone only she can see.

Blake grumbles something, all consonants. “You don’t think she’s going into shock, do you? Because of reliving all the trauma?”

Valentini can picture director Fotiou’s erratic grin followed by staccato orders. “Cameras, on her, close-up, right the fuck now. We can use these shots later even if our little star goes out.”

Somewhere inside, in the churning darkness where every regret she’s ever had plays out in real time, Valentini laughs. But on the outside, her lips keep mumbling while Mother looms over her, all spectral shadows and a gown of trapped child souls.

Yianna’s screaming face emerges from between the voluminous brocade folds, trying to warn Valentini in death as she had in life. Tutting, Mother reaches out a skeletal hand, tenderly tucks Yianna back between the death-shroud seams of her gown.

Duckling, little love, Valentini mou. Aren’t you tired of fighting? Look what happened to our poor Manolis, how they’ve marred his name.

Mother reaches out to caress her cheek, the way she used to. Valentini flinches.

And look what they’ve done to you, those vultures. I can make them go away for you. You will be pure again, safe. There’s time still to join our fold. Yianna awaits you.

Valentini pulls herself up with effort, pushes the cyclopean cameras away from her face. Pushes down the grief at seeing Yianna only for her to be snatched away again.

“Pure,” she mocks, retrieving her cigarette pack from the hidden mic pocket of her dress, the bridal lace torn where Blake-as-Manolis was supposed to enter her. Valentini strikes a match. “Safe.”

She takes a long drag, then examines the red cherry of her cigarette while every eye in the house—alive, undead, unblinking camera—fixates on her. Despite everything, she’s still, deep down, a theater kid with a flair for the dramatic.

“No.”

It’s a single word, one that hasn’t crossed the threshold of Valentini’s lips since Manolis died, when she spoke that word over his broken-doll body so many times it lost all meaning. She didn’t say no when director Fotiou approached her about starring in Hollow Places, because she knew it would grant her the access she coveted to Hunchback’s Hollow and the ghosts trapped within. Didn’t say no when Blake cornered her again and again, because she needed to remain on the cast until Mother showed herself. Until Valentini could do what she came here to accomplish.

She tosses her lit cigarette onto the vestibule’s ancient, rotting-wood chest of drawers, just as a fork of lightning strikes outside. The cigarette catches on a yellowed lace doily, slender flames rising like twisted tongues. She knows it’s not enough for the whole structure to ignite, even as the panicked techs rush to stomp out the small fire. This, more than anything, is dramaturgy. The art of decoy. The theater of fear. Cameras still rolling, Valentini stalks over to one of the mounted spotlights. Everyone is too stunned to stop her when she topples the spotlight over. She watches with a slight smile as even more sparks fly.

Valentini remembers the warning signs nailed to the torn wire fence around Hunchback’s Hollow, the ones she, Yianna, and Manolis always ignored. Caution: Fire Hazard. The house might as well have been made of tinder with the way the new flames catch and spread.

“What are you doing?” Blake shouts while director Fotiou rushes over to his supply station—to save the film reel, most likely. “I knew you had a taste for suicide, but this is too much even for you.”

“I told you.” Valentini can’t stop smirking. “I’m here to kill a ghost.”

She just might exorcise several ghosts in the process.

She cannot kill Mother—as long as there are desperate, mistreated, outcast children, a fragment of Mother will always exist in every haunted house in the world. But she can free the child-souls trapped in the folds of Mother’s heavy gown and oppressive care. She can save Yianna, even though the Valentini of the past didn’t heed her friend’s warnings, and look where that got them.

Now for the atonement, the denouement, killing the dead for good.

When Blake goes to grab her—not a scripted act, but bruising-force reality—Mother’s ghost gets there first, pushing him back with a gust of incandescent wind.

She’s mine! Mother shrilly hollers. A possessive caretaker to the end.

“No,” Valentini speaks into the rippling inferno while camera techs and makeup interns run screaming for the door.

It’s like, now that she has uttered the word into the ether, no is all she knows how to say, over and over again like she’s running lines for a play of her own.

“No,” Valentini barks at Mother. “My pain brought you here from whatever dormant oblivion you inhabited. Now it’s time to send you back.”

There won’t be a house left for Mother to haunt, at least not here. Hunchback’s Hollow will burn, and even if the fire brigade puts out the flames in time to rescue part of the skeleton, the structure will still be demolished, the way the municipality had been postponing for years. Neither Manolis nor Yianna will ever grow up to meet their free, authentic selves beyond the false safety of this house. Valentini can never tell Manolis how sorry she is, how much he meant to her. But Yianna will be free of motherly obsession if Valentini has a say in it.

Now, for the final act: Lightning strikes closer than ever, turning everything red-hot and scorching. Its luminescent forks climb through the house’s cracks and crevices to shed light on the house’s inner workings. To lay flaming waste to its inner demons.

It rained that day, when Mother-as-Manolis killed Yianna and made a final girl out of Valentini.

It rains now, too. She’d like to believe there is a bit of Manolis woven through the thunder and lightning, ozone and stardust. He and Valentini, together, are making it up to Yianna for not listening to her.

For erasing her long before the film ever did.

“No,” Valentini says again, smiling dopily. She doesn’t know what the word means anymore, only that she must keep speaking it, lest she forget.

Someone, one of the makeup interns who had been kind to her earlier, grabs Valentini by the hand and tries to pull her along like deadweight.

“Girl,” the intern snaps, “I know you’re not right in the head, but we need to go before we burn to crisps. Now.”

Valentini walks as if through a dream sequence. Her memory palace is merging with reality. It is now a black-and-white picture, unfolding frame by monochromatic frame as she follows the poor intern. A silent film, too. Title cards saying in frilly cursive, “falling beams,” “sizzling fire,” “crackling, choking air.” Valentini stares at her high-heeled feet. On the ground, where her blood once dripped—once red and real, then corn-syrup fake and sticky—now only grayscale flames dance. Ash twirls merrily, as it all burns down.

Bracketed by the front door of Hunchback’s Hollow, Valentini swivels around to face the inferno. Somewhere between tongues of fire, she catches Blake, still lying motionless where Mother pushed him. The title card above his head only shows three stunted white dots over a chalkboard-black background.

Mother’s ghost rages. Her mouth is an unhinged puppet maw, spitting weakened shadows. But whether it’s threats or promises that fall from her lips, Valentini doesn’t know. The title card only reads: “screaming.”

Screaming.

And through the inferno, free and frayed, Yianna’s ghost emerges at last.

I’m sorry, Valentini tries to say, but the apology won’t come, not in words nor in title cards. I’m so sorry. I—

Yianna throws her head back and laughs with a child’s glee. “I know,” she says, and the color bleeds back into their scene. “Film’s over. Was a bit shit, truth be told. No artistic vision.” Her laugh gentles, washing over Valentini. “But thank you for coming back for me.”

Credits roll. It’s not closure, but the closest thing to it.

Yianna vanishes. Yianna is gone for good.

Valentini sits on the curb with the Hollow Places crew and watches the world burn. Director and producer Fotiou makes it out, smoke-coughing and charred. His film reels don’t, and neither does Yiorgos Blake. Someone spreads a blanket over her shoulder, although Valentini isn’t cold.

She thinks about saying no again, but the thought is fleeting. With Yianna gone, so is the spite that had kept Valentini going. The fire brigade comes, followed by the police.

“You know, the footage is lost,” the makeup girl who dragged her out alive tells Valentini. “We really couldn’t tell, in the chaos, how the fire started. We hate Fotiou and Blake too, you know. The crew has your back.”

“Right,” Valentini says, her extremities too numb for the tingle of relief. “Freak weather.”

Yet the sky is clear now, the gravid purple clouds vanished, the storm having run its course. She doesn’t know if people will really lie to save her hide, but she supposes nothing is more intoxicating, or more comforting, than the final girl making it out alive and triumphant not once, but twice.

Mother is too powerful to be really gone, but Valentini hopes her ghost is weakened, mother turned into a lost child instead. She hopes that somewhere, somehow, Yianna is proud of her. That Manolis is twirling in a sparkly dress, laughing.

Valentini collapses on her back, her dress a scorched and ruined halo around her. She looks up at the sky’s constellatory cabaret and smiles through a film of tears.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors