Opening

Where better to open a breach in reality than the Cannes Film Festival? Who would even notice?

The bellhop threw open the shutters to reveal a partial view of the sparkling Mediterranean. Not the stunning panorama that Timur the producer had promised, but a mere strip of blue at the end of a busy boulevard, with buildings crowding in to right and left of the frame.

"They promised us a view of the sea." Orlanda had made a solemn vow not to pout petulantly more than a dozen times a day, but she clearly felt that this disappointment merited a full-bore whine in old-school footstamping style.

Jemima watched her while throwing herself onto the great sofa and kicking off her shoes. Her co-star could be an enormous pain, but her little tantrums were very occasionally a suitable distraction from your everyday woes.

"Alors, ma'm'oiselle, regardez la mer - here there is the sea."
"We were promised the best suite in the hotel, not this crappy corner room." In for a penny. Orlanda was now burning through her petulance allowance pretty fast.

"Au contraire ma'm'oiselle, this is the very suite Brigitte Bardot stayed in when they opened Le Mèpris here, back in 1962." The bellhop gestured through the open double doors to the master bedroom. "Legend has it that BB conceded her body to Jean-Luc Godard at this time, and that Anna Karina burst in to catch them in flagrante, right here in this very room. A traumatic event which went some way to ending their famously troubled marriage". Pronounced marry-aage.

"In that very bed?" The bellhop was good. Orlanda was now totally sidetracked from her pouty excursion, wide-eyed with wonder. She wasn't a half-bad faker herself, pretending to know who Godard and Karina even were. But she was genuinely starstruck by 1960s Brigitte Bardot, and modelled herself on the French sexbombkitten in every way she knew how.

"Non, ma'm'oiselle. Not that very bed. That was more than sixty years ago. We renovate our furnitures somewhat more frequently than that."

Burn. But Orlanda wasn't perceptive enough to notice that she'd even been singed. Instead she vamped herself up BB-style and sashayed toward the bed in question - no, quite explicitly not the bed in question. She was clearly calling dibs on the master bedroom. Jemima edged sideways to check out the side bedroom, fairly magnificent in itself, and decided not to press the issue in a territorial pissing match with her co-star. More than enough time to piss later.

The bellhop, having earned €20 for his scene-setting efforts, duly retired from this sequence. No doubt he had his own movie to attend to, one in which he was starring, perhaps a psych-thriller where he was simultaneously a failing actor and a despairing college professor. In any case, he withdraws gracefully from Jemima's story and should be rewarded with a soft smattering of applause along with the crisp blue bill in his pocket. Would that all walk-on players performed their task with such simple grace.

The principal ladies regrouped in the salon area, its creamy upholstery and marble just-so coffeetable pulsing softly with the kind of class neither of these two up-and-comers had ever encountered up close before. Jemima sat on the enlightenment-era chaise longue, trying out Europe for size. She decided that it suited her.

Orlanda drifted in from the master bedroom with a clutch of minibar miniatures. She unscrewed and slammed a Stoly, and tossed a Smirnoff Blue to Jemima.

"No glass? No ice and lemon?" Jemima unscrewed the top and chugged the tiny bottle regardless.
"We're not workin’ now, just gettin’ tanked", stated Orlanda. "Work later. Then we do the sophisticated stuff, like with mixers an’ shit."
"Isn't it a bit early to get tanked?" asked Jemima, with a raised eyebrow. Despite her nominal reticence, she was already reaching for a second miniature on the coffeetable.
"Early my ass," said Orlanda. "It's late back home. Always six p.m. somewhere in the world."

The cast of the indie-horror comedy-drama The Calling were making their way to the gala Cannes Film Festival opening in two separate detachments. These were the film’s two leading ladies: Jemima St John, who played the the heroine and final girl, Nina Kokanina; and Orlanda Spence, who played her best friend Suzy Creamcheese, the loose-livin' floozy who gets skewered real good in the next-to-last sequence of the movie.

The Calling was a tongue-in-cheek homage to established horror conventions, and so the slut-shaming implications of Orlanda's role in the narrative could obviously be enjoyed ironically, along with some fine postmodern takes of her tits n’ ass. Talking points to this effect had already been prepared and rehearsed thoroughly for the press junkets to come.

The girls had just flown in on the red-eye to Nice International and then been chauffered to their hotel in Cannes. Meanwhile leading man Cuddy McGilchrist, playing hunk-dumbnuts Hank Drumlin - who subversively dies early on in the flick and is resuscitated as a gorgeous but brainless member of the cultic undead - was coming in by yacht along with director Kyle Spevens, who was also Cuddy's current lover.

The yacht was owned by the film's Tajik producer and money-channeler Timur Balgarov, who was bankrolling the whole project on behalf of a murky cartel of Eastern oligarchs based in Malta. Thanks to a complex arrangment of EU cultural grants, Irish-Luxemburgian-Sandwich tax-shimmies, and offshore cut-outs in Gibraltar and Sark, the project had already realized an enormous profit even before opening, and all while incurring a massive nominal front-end loss. The accounting behind all this boggled Jemima's mind, but she was content enough just to get her slice of the spooky bottom-line. She’d settled for eight points net in lieu of an upfront fee, and it was already looking like the right call.

Soon the ladies were well on their way to getting good n' tanked, and discussing what they were going to do later that afternoon and evening. The boys' yacht was due to arrive early next morning. Once the producer, director and chunk-o-hunk male star disembarked from the boat, the opening event was on. The cast program was full of junkets and galas from that point on, but for now, this afternoon, it was wide open and the leading ladies were free agents.

"We just have to get out of here! Girl, I didn't come all this way just to get slammed in my hotel suite." Orlanda could hold her own like a champ, up to a critical point, and was seemingly none the worse for wear despite the scattering of minibar bottles all around her on the sofa and coffeetable.

"We could go catch a movie. There's quite a few playin', I hear."
"Are you fuckin' kidding me? I hate movies!"
"Hate movies? But you’re in the movies, girl! Why d'you have to always be such a basic bitch?" Jemima's snarling tone was partly - to an unknowable extent - in jest, but ambivalent enough to pass the banter test.
"Bitch, why you have to be so passive-aggressive anyhow?" Orlanda ditto.
"My dear, I prefer to start passive-aggressive, and then work my way up to aggressive-aggressive in my own good time."

They laughed together pleasantly enough at the heady buzz that was building in the room. It was shaping up to be a classic day-drunk with an epic night to follow.

Orlanda swept the miniatures off the counch and started to video herself for her Insta and TikTok followers. "Well, here we are in glamorous Cannes on the lovely Coasta Azzura, just gettin' ready for a girls' night out - "

Just then there was an abrupt knock on the door. She paused her videomaking.
"I didn' order no room service, did you Jemmi?"

Then Jemima remembered the text that director Kyle Spevens had sent her just before their plane landed. The goddamn interview. Some last-minute journalist thing.

"So the movie is a really fun tongue-in-cheek homage to horror conventions. There's really nothing wrong with having some ironic fun with the idea that Suzy Creamcheese is getting punished for being a slut, or that I'm the virtuous quote-unquote 'final girl'. It's satirical in intent."

"Nothin wrong with gettin' an eyeful of my knockers either," added Orlanda. "Ironically, I mean. All part of the fun."

The guy was in fact doing just that. Getting some side-eye at some side-boob while he stroked his recording device. Though ostensibly there was nothing wrong with it as a theoretical pursuit, in practice, up close and personal in the form of a clammy mouth-breathing creep, it was actually kind of offputting.

He said his name was [unpronouncable]. Something Eastern European, thought Jemima. She asked him to repeat it, and the best she got was Andreyesh Ghremansshknnm. It wasn’t clear if he was mumbling his name, or he was just drunk and slurring his words, or whether it was supposed to be said that way.

"Don't you think this American obsession with always being smart and sassy and ironical and hip actually is an obstacle to authentic experience of film as true art form?" said Andreyesh or whatever.

In fact it turned out that his accent was crisp and incisive like a secret policeman in an old spy thriller. He didn’t slur in any way. His demeanor too was creepy enough for him to be one of those leather coat-wearing Gestapo guys in the black-and-whites, his complexion sallow and unclean, his pate unconvincingly combed-over. He was somewhere between 25 and 45 years old, guessed Jemima. Did they use the term 'incel' in Europe?

"If you wanna talk film theory, you need to catch up to our director Kyle Speven when his boat gets in tomorrow," said Orlanda. "We just actors, you know, we like doin' fun stuff and we like doin' serious stuff as well. Nothin' wrong with a lil' diversion between all them sombre dramas, get me? Hard-workin’ people need a bit of entertainment at the end of a hard day, you know?"

It was a solid enough answer, thought Jemima. Its implicit challenge even made him stop ogling Orlanda's body and look her right in the eye.

"Fucking slick American spectacle, taking over the whole fucking world," he growl-whined nasally at her. "Just some more Yankee colonialism in a different form. Where your bombs don't reach, that's where your streaming platforms invade."

"OK, we're done here." Jemima stood up and gestured to the door. "Thank you so much for your time, but right now we've got to get ready for a gala event." It was either the door, or else Orlanda would tear out his heart and feed it to the seagulls cawing outside on the balcony.

Orlanda also stood and squared up to the creepoid. No longer kitten Bardot, she was now more like a tough action star, out to kick ass and chew gum.

"And I'm all out of gum," said Orlanda, catching Jemima’s eye. Amazing how she could read your mind like that.

The film journo was quite unfazed. He put his recording device and his notebook calmly away in his coat pockets, stood up slowly, and made one of those weird old-world bows - almost but not quite clicking his heels - before ambling toward the door.

"Suzy Creamcheese, this is the voice of your subconscious mind," he said. "Whatchusaymuffucker?" snapped Orlanda. It looked like the petulant pout threshold was about to get another pounding, or worse.

He said nothing, making another slight bow and opening the door.

"Ladies, I hope to see you again soon."
"Not if I see you first, bitch." Orlanda was going to need several more slugs of minibar booze before being restored to her previous easygoing and placid self.

Jemima edged him out into the hallway with her right hand and swung the door shut with her left. They paused and looked at each other, then let out a combination shudder-laugh that said Fuck, that was weird.

"We're gonna need more booze", said Jemima.
"On it," said Orlanda, heading for the room-service phone.

They were just putting paid to the room-service bottle of gin, imbibed along with tonic, ice cubes and sliced lemon, and were debating when actually, finally, they should go out into the evening boulevard hum, when there was another knock on the door.

"Did you order more room service?" asked Jemima.
"Was thinkin' real hard about it, does that count?" Orlanda was pretty far gone by now and really didn't need any more room service, except perhaps some coffee.

The knock again.

"You get it," said Orlanda. "I'm gonna powder my nose." She got up and walked weavingly toward the bathroom. Previous Orlanda form suggested she would be in there for quite a while, if earlier all-day benders were anything to go by.

Jemima went to the door and opened it. It took her a long moment to register who it was. Of course she should have known - we did, didn't we? But to be fair to her, she was quite a bit hammered from her first French day-drunk ever, and the guy was dressed somewhat differently from the first time he'd been in their room. Instead of the Gestapo-chic black leather overcoat and the forlorn combover, he was wearing a strange robe sewn with runic patches and had an honest-to-god headdress on, a kind of crown or diadem set with seashells and coral.

Oh, and he had a huge kitchen knife in his left hand as well as a coil of rope hanging on his right arm.

"Silence!" he commanded as he pushed her inward. Jemima had a vague sense that she should be doing something right now instead of backstepping into the salon area. Scream? But he seemed dead serious about the knife and its close connection with her ongoing co-operation.

She knew if Orlanda were here, she wouldn't take none of this shit. Or would she?

It was the naked blade so close to her flesh and the way the sharp steel had that one jagged nick on it, stained with something dark crimson red.

It was the brash confidence that the hesitant geek from before now manifested, his blank-eyed stare like he expected everything to go just exactly the way he wanted. Like a film director, in fact.

It was her professional habit of taking direction. She always did what the director asked her to do, first take.

It was fear. Not horror-movie-horror, actual horror. It congealed her mind and froze her will.

He snatched up her cellphone and Orlanda's from the coffeetable as he pushed her towards the sofa, and stuffed them into a hidden pocket in his sigil-patched robe.

"Where's the mouth-big bitch?" he demanded. He glanced quickly to the corners of the room and then back to her face. She was still moving backwards.
"B-bathroom," she blurted.
"Open your mouth."

Was this much automatic obedience a normal response? Or was it final-girl timidity, that wide-eyed paralysis that made her the perfect victim until the deus ex machina snatched up her fated ass still living from the monstrous maw of her foredestined end?

He stuffed in a wad of cloth and snatched a ready-cut swath of duct tape from where it stuck to his right forearm. Slammed it over mouth. Now, paradoxically, she felt the urge to scream. It was the uninvited intimacy. The force of it. Brought back blurred memories from somewhere. Desper-

He pushed her onto the sofa and tied her hands with expert deftness. Looped up the bonds and sliced through the rope to tie off the knot. Ankles done in a jiffy. Now she was hogtied and gagged. All in less than a minute.

Would he have found it so easy if both women had been in the room? No, of course not. How then did he get so lucky as to catch Jemima all alone with her final-girl readiness to be dominated and victimized by a strong-willed slasher?

Who said luck had anything to do with it? Other forces were in play that evening, other fates were entwined with these rope bindings tied on behalf of an Old One dreaming in the sea. This man, this faithful servant, was merely an instrument of those forces, his confidence and his bold skill borrowed from a master who slept deep where the jellyfish pulsed.

Turned out that Orlanda was much less trouble than she'd threatened to be. She was somewhat groggy with her head halfway in the toilet bowl. Journo-slasher guy just wordlessly offered to help her up and carry her to her room. Didn't even need the knife, which she never even noticed stuffed in his rope-sash. Never noticed the robe, either, nor the weird crown. Never so much as wondered what the guy she'd cussed out of the suite just a short time ago was doing back in her personal space.

So Orlanda was playing to type as well. Just as final girl had succumbed to wide-eyed terror and been unable to resist in shocked paralysis, so the loose-living easy chick had fallen victim to her vulnerability by overindulgence in her vices. Seemed like in Cannes all the movie magic, however clichéd, could simply come true without any need for sorcerous invocation. The journo-slasher left her on her bed, letting her slumber a bit deeper before getting down to the inevitable hogtie task and all the rest.

The next stage of the drama kicked off around nightfall. Fireworks went off spectacularly around la Croisette, the seafront promenade. Stormclouds gathered and raced up all the sky, way out to sea, off to the south. Forks of lightning flashed silent there, followed by soft rumbling that pushed in over land a minute or two later.

The journo-slasher, Andreyesh or whatever, had carried in Orlanda, bound and gagged and wide-eyed, and planted her next to Jemima on the big sofa so they were both facing the view that Orlanda had so complained about. For all its narrowness, it was still quite something, with fireworks and lightning adding their modest highlights to the melancholic mass of black cloud accumulating far to the south.

While they watched, he opened up their cellphones, took out the batteries and the chips, then tossed them over the balcony out into the hectic night of partygoers and fireworks. He dropped the phones on the floor and faced them. When he spoke it was with a weird stentorian baritone, like Charlton Heston or some other dead guy. The mid-or-east-European accent disappeared beneath this powerful new American voice:

"Every year thousands gather at this picturesque Mediterranean resort for the festival. Stars and directors walk the streets, journalists and photographers swarm in to report on their every act. Soon the streets are filled with movie stars, moviemakers, moviegoers and movie critics. Tourists and paparazzi vie with each other to get the best picture. Excitement fills the air. "

Now he sat down on the chaise-longue. His normal voice returned.

"Of course this is the Hollywood glamor version of what happens here. There are other versions, going back through time to before history. You want to hear older story of this festival? Full of the black truth? The chernukha we call it, the grimy black. In my country we like films that show the dark side of life, films that are made like brak: rough, with all the edges showing. Raw, they call it in your country. I made my doctoral thesis on this films: the New Grimalism, I called it. This films don't get no showing here no more. All that dark truth got pushed out by your Hollywood stuff, that Netflix stuff. So smart, so smooth. No edges. Well, I like the brak. You want to hear the brak story, the chernukha from before time? Course you do."

He stood up, and now his voice was like a smooth British gentleman, resonant and rich. Christopher Lee, Alec Guinness, Jeremy Irons, like that. Again his own voice and accent sank beneath the assumed persona:

"Every year for thousands of years the tribes gather at this revered site on the shoreline for the solstice sacrifice. A sacrificial king and queen are chosen and driven to delirium by drugs and drums and dervishing dances. At the height of their frenzy they copulate ritually, and then in the throes of passion are thrown to the priests and flayed alive beneath the full moon. Congregants, recognizing the magic contained in their act of love, rush forward to dip their fingers in the spilled blood and tear swatches of their skin from the curing-racks. The sacrificial victims continue to shriek and groan and gibber where they are laid together and mated in a union that is a torment to their open nerves. Finally the wailing royal couple, mere raw muscle and tendon by now, are ritually crowned with shark's teeth and antlers. Then the final mercy: their skulls are beaten in by priests with whalebone clubs."

He raised his arms wide, standing before the open door to the balcony. The night scene collaborated with him, some unseen director out at sea raising the stakes with expensive-looking effects of lightning and thunder, whining winds, and billowing black apocalypse.

"Each year for thousands of years there were hundreds of young supplicants eager to become the sacrificial king and queen. They had to fight to be chosen for their role in the sacrifice. A gold-coloured palm branch was given to each of the chosen pair as they were led to their deaths, and they wove it into a crown to mark their honor... Praise Spica!"

When the winds rose up to howling gales and the rain lashed down in sheets over the town, he loosened their gags and let them speak. Nobody could hear even if they screamed their loudest. And anyway, nobody would care to find out what was happening even if they heard them scream.

Everybody out there was trying to seek shelter and secure whatever they could from the sudden storm. He even closed the louvered doors to the balcony, not that it reduced the howling very much. The shutters rattled as if frustrated specters were seeking urgent ingress to somewhere out of the lashing rain. Rainwater covered the floor.

By now it was midnight. It was now Spica's day, he told them. He was back to his normal voice, though he had to raise it over the gale and the rattling shutters:

"Jellyfish spawn stinging on this night under the full moon. If the moon is not full, there will be no jellyfish to sting bathers on the beach for the rest of summer.

He stood up and started to pace back and forth in front of the shuttered door to the balcony, long knife in his left hand.

“This day in 1962 was also the Starfish Prime test. Same day when King Godard was fucking Queen Bardot right here in this room. The United States exploded a 1.4 megaton hydrogen bomb in outer space. The flash was visible a thousand kilometers away. Scientists discovered the destructive effects of the first electromagnetic pulse. A surge of electrons burned out streetlights, blew fuses everywhere, disrupted communications. A jellyfish of radiation and humming electrons burst out from that happy orbital egg."

He laughed.

"You don't understand at all. How could you understand? But you going to see soon."
"When our director gets here -" blurted out Orlanda, but Jemima shushed her quickly.
"What when your director gets here?" said the psycho.

Smiling, intrigued. His teeth were a particular gray-yellow that Jemima had never seen before. Or maybe it was too familiar, pus and putresence from a time forgotten…

"Nothing." Orlanda had thought better of her impulsive blurt and was now playing it cagey. Jemima knew it was so difficult for Orlanda to keep at least one card close to her chest. She respected her so much for holding her tongue right now. Her boiling terror had died down and was now a steady dread. Not much easier to bear, but it did at least allow her to think. She supposed it was the same for Orlanda.

"You know what happens now?"
"What happens?" asked Jemima. Her new plan was to build up a rapport with him. She'd heard of this Stockholm Syndrome phenomenon: it was where the hostages made friends with the hostage taker and then they made him let them go. That was their current best strategy.

"As the festival continues, it becomes clear that there is a kind of collective karma at work,” said the creep. “The actions of each participant in the festival are experienced by all the others to some degree or other. No individual is individual no more. All share in the collective fate of the festival."
"And how does that work?" asked Orlanda.
"A karmic miasma spreads out from la Croisette, misting all of us in the collective soup of our good and bad actions, clouding our days and glowing through our nights as Spica the Night Mother looks up from her seadeep orbit and laughs in indifference to the calculus of fates so intertwined."

His robe bleeped. He reached in to pull out his cellphone. He looked at it and grinned broadly, the yellow-gray ruin of a mouth illumined by joy.

"It's time. You know what happens now?"
"What happens?" asked Jemima.
"Look!"

He opened the shutters to the balcony. The wind was howling still, but the stormclouds had by now dispersed. Lightning flashed over the sea, the forks of it nearer now. In the sliver of water visible to them off the seafront promenade was a boat, lit by coloured red bulbs strung up and down her three masts.

"It's the yacht we were waiting for. The good ship Earthly Glory, out of Valetta, Malta. All the dire wan sailors that sail the jelly sea will hornpipe and jig when gathered at her blooded bows.”

He sat down again on the chaise-longue of enlightenment reason and crossed his legs complacently.

“On board: Kyle Spevens, Cuddy McGilchrist, Timur Balgarov. My brothers in Spica: Kyle and Cuddy. My father: Timur. They want me to do something for them. No, not for them. For the Jellyfish Mother."

He walked over to the sofa, picked up Jemima and placed her delicately on the solid marble coffeetable. Jemima was shocked at how much strength this scrawny character possessed.

He stood over her and started to chant in a powerful voice not hitherto his own:

Egg-dark companion, Mother of Night and Fury:
Call jellyfish to us, summon your amoeba sons.
Airbursts of neverlight settle on sooted bulbs,
Snuff our nights to solder, puff out the flame.
Mother draped in jelly cloak, in tentacle fringe,
you find us naked and bereft in the crook of night.
So union be true, flay off all false skins.
So your world be now, turn all tomorrows tonight.

It seemed like he was going to repeat his incantation. He appeared to gather in breath for another repetition.

But instead he took his long kitchen knife, knicked and jagged and marked with crusted blood, and forced it hard into Jemima's chest.

She burbled and called out weak appeals as he twisted the blade round in her ribcage, to be quite sure.

Orlanda struggled to her feet, screaming. She found the binding at her ankles had come loose and she kicked it off. While the man was bent over, engaged in the extinction of Jemima's little life, she planted a swinging kick on his face.

He reeled back and dropped the knife. Screaming with fury and fear, Orlanda picked it up in her bound-together hands and slashed it once, twice, three times across his face and throat.

Then all was still in the room.

Darkest heartflow spilled off the coffeetable and mixed with the rainwater on the floor. The man rolled over sighing, and added his own flow to the dead woman's spilled lifeblood.

Orlanda continued screaming, now herself become the final girl, and one in dire need of a deus ex machina.

As she stepped out onto the balcony to scream out into the flooded streets for help, she saw the huge figure rising over the sea.

Great tsunamis lapped around its torso as it rose, massive beyond thought. The waves displaced pushed ashore and spilled catastrophically onto the boulevards.

A cephalopod silhouette ascended massive over all the sea, pseudopods stinging through the night and sparking lightning and bruised thunder from the troubled sky.

The jellyfish shadow gradually bent itself over the ruby-lit three-masted yacht which bobbed wildly on the sea just off the swamped promenade of la Croisette.

It turned its lightning-struck unthinkable face inland and slowly stretched out a limitless tentacle toward Orlanda as she stood tiny and screaming on the balcony.