Elizabeth Sims [Sims - The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

I screamed.

I filled my lungs with the stale, coffee-smelling air of the dungeon and let out a ragged howl that ricocheted off the cold walls. I closed my eyes and screamed again as every cell in my body writhed in a futile attempt to deny the horror that was being inflicted on me by the guy in glasses holding a small cardboard box that said Death.

The guy, who had introduced himself as Ned, stood to the side and brandished the box in his freckled hands. I decided to scream once more, this one a sharp, convulsive type of cry.

OK, said the casting director, a thin black woman named Mkenge, with expressive hands. OK, Rita, please do it again, onlyshe cupped her hands as if to suppress a flower growingthis time dont shrink down. Get all taut and tall, like youre going to break out of your skin. Upward release of hands.

I did so. I stood at attention, remembering I was supposed to be tied to a pole, put my hands behind my backbehind my butt, actually, which looks more like natural bondage because your shoulders arent all hiked upand arched my neck like Joan of Arc at the stake. Ned shook the box at me and I screamed.

When you take a breath to do a scream, you dont just grab a gulp of air and let go. You need to take the time to load your lungs all the way to the bottom. You need to pull all the slack from your diaphragm like youd pull a bowstring in archery, and then and only then do you unleash that scream to its target, which is the red beating heart of every human within four miles.

I screamed, and it felt good. I was screaming well today. I ululated in the middle of this onenothing fancy, just another jolt of emotion, just another ripple in the violent fabric of my horror. Id warmed up carefully.

This was a job I wanted. A job I needed. This was Evan Granger Jacksons new teensploitation movie, Fingershredder II, sequel to Fingershredder, the low-budget instant-cult terror film youve doubtless heard about or seen. If youre a male age thirteen through seventeen, youve seen it three times.

The role I was trying for was Student Teacher Who Gets Her Fingers Shredded Halfway Through the Script by the Evil But Understandably So Because of Childhood Abuse Sadistic Killer. The fingershredder.

So I screamed. I screamed my ass off, discharging the screams through relaxed vocal cords but tight external throat muscles as Sam Wojczyk had taught me in his acting class at UCLA.

I was lucky to have Ned standing there holding the cardboard box, because at least he was human. In case youve never auditioned for pictures like this in Hollywood, you often dont have anybody playing opposite you. Youre just there all alone in front of the casting director, maybe possibly a producer, an assistant with a clipboard who might also be running the video camera, and the empty coffee cups and scone wrappers of the day.

The cardboard box was a stand-in for the fingershredder device audiences came to know and love so well in the original. See, the fingershredding guy figures out pretty early in his career that paper shredders dont work well on fingers: they jam quickly, even the heavy-duty, government models. Plus he likes to shred other body parts too, then eventually the victim bleeds to death in terrible pain. So he invents this gadget using parts from a vacuum cleaner, a Cuisinart, and a walkie-talkie. Works great on the screen. A fiendish device, of course youve seen stills of it in People and Teen and such. Im surprised they didnt license miniatures of it for inclusion in Happy Meals.

OK, stop, said Mkenge. I had not met Mkenge before todays audition, but Id carefully learned her name because thats what a professional actress does. I feel unusual names are more critical to remember than ordinary names, because people with unusual names have a bigger burden in life than the rest of us, in a small but important to them way.

An unusual name practically invites you to forget it. Mkenge pronounced her name Em-ken-gay. On the page Mkenge looks as if it might be pronounced Ma-keng-ee, which would make it sound Scots, which her parents surely could not have intended.

So Mkenge said stop. I looked at her attentively. She blew a breath down at the tabletop, then ran two fingers along the side of her skull as if trying to unzip a headache and let it out. Her head was one of those beautiful short-cropped African heritage ones, large smooth cranium, narrow jaw. She did not bother to smile. She was looking at me with intensity and thrilling dissatisfaction. Thrilling because she clearly wanted to help me get it right.

I so wanted to get it right.

Rita, can you do it again, this time full-face to me. I know in this scene youre supposed to be watching your student Melissas fingers getting shredded, and then her tongue and all that, but now Id like you to scream as if your fingers were getting shredded. You were given pages for that scene, so lets try it, just the screaming part. She clenched one hand on her stomach and reached skyward with the other. Bring it up from your gut, but not totally from there. Give me some highness, I guess what Im trying to say is can you make it more piercing?

Piercing.

Yes, I said, my heart singing because she didnt say, Thank you, next! If they ask you to do it different ways, they think you might be able to deliver exactly what they want.

Make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Yes.

I thought of the most horrifying thing in the world to me right then, which was getting my credit card declined again at the grocery store, which would mean I would have to sell Gramma Gladyss diamond brooch to buy cereal and juice boxes for Petey and to prevent the landlord from evicting us.

So I imagined walking into Adils Pawn America with that diamond-and-sapphire brooch, and all that it meant, and I felt not only frightened but angry, and I set my heels into the carpet of the soundproof audition room which was doubling today as a bloody dungeon, and I screamed and screamed again.

Plus usually for a film role youre doing it in somebodys office, not a casting studio, the studios being the cattle chutes between the herd of actors out there and the yearned-for slaughterhouse of TV commercials. The company that made the Fingershredder movies, Half Fast Pictures, however, rented studio space for these auditions because everybody in the offices would have gone insane listening to people screaming for days on end. Evan Granger Jackson liked to have lots of first audition tapes to look at.

We had already done an earlier scene with dialogue in it, not that there was lots in those movies. Which is what makes horror movies so much like pornos. Theres not that much difference between Please dont! Stop! and Please dont stop! The scripts are interchangeable, its only the action thats different. Really, just listen sometime.