A sample from
One Star
The thing about a temperamental fire door is that it only ever misbehaves when someone is watching. Alone, it swung sweet as anything. Give it an audience — a punter, an inspector, a best mate reading out the funeral notices for your business — and it stuck fast at the exact angle designed to make Immy Callahan look like a woman who could not operate a door.
She was on her knees in the loading bay of The Cogsworth Vault, half-inside the frame, wielding a can of WD-40 like it owed her money. The door was the original warehouse thing, cast iron and heavier than sin, retrofitted with a brass-and-cog escutcheon she'd bolted on herself to make it match the steampunk fantasy on the other side of the wall. It was a good bit of set dressing. It was also, if she was honest — and she tried very hard, most days, not to be — a bit dodgy. The bottom hinge had a personality. She kept meaning to get someone in to sort it. She kept, instead, spraying it and swearing at it, which was cheaper and more emotionally satisfying.
"That's another one," said Chrissie, from the front desk. She had her feet up on the reclaimed-luggage-trunk counter and the booking tablet balanced on her knees, and she read out cancellations in the flat, doomy voice of a woman announcing rail replacement services. "The Hendersons. Party of six. Saturday the fourteenth. Gone."
"Refund or reschedule?"
"Refund." A pause. Chrissie had the decency to sound apologetic about it. "They quoted the review in the notes box, babe. There's a little sad face."
"There's a little sad face."
"There's a little sad face."
Immy pressed her forehead against the cool iron of the door and breathed. The WD-40 hissed against her palm. Somewhere behind her, deep in the belly of the Vault, the room's ambient soundscape kicked into its idle loop — a low, brassy hum of pistons and distant steam, punctuated once a minute by a single ominous clunk that she had programmed herself, at two in the morning, thinking it was atmospheric. It now sounded exactly like the noise a business makes going under.
"How many's that this week?"
"You don't want to know."
"I really don't, but I'm going to make you tell me anyway, because I'm a masochist and I built an entire career out of it."
"Eleven." Chrissie swung her feet down. She was wearing the fingerless gloves again, the ones that made her look like a Dickensian pickpocket, because Immy refused on principle to heat a warehouse for a woman who worked four hours a day and drank all the tea. "Eleven since Tuesday. Immy. That's — that's most of the fortnight, gone."
Eleven. Immy did the sum she'd been not-doing all morning, the one where she put the eleven next to the rent, and the rent next to the bank balance, and watched the whole arrangement fail to add up in any direction that let her keep the lights on past February. She gave the hinge one last vindictive spray. The door, sensing weakness, swung open with buttery ease, perfectly balanced, absolutely fine, a total liar.
"See," she told it. "Now you're just showing off."
It was the review, obviously. It was always the review now. Eight weeks ago a person she had never met, who reviewed "immersive experiences" for an audience of forty thousand followers under the handle The Proscenium — because of course he did, because nothing said trust my opinion like naming yourself after the arch a stage hides behind — had booked a Tuesday-night slot at The Cogsworth Vault under a fake name, walked her rooms for ninety minutes, and then written eight hundred words that Immy could now recite in her sleep and frequently did.
A handsomely built museum of its own cleverness, he'd called it. The Cogsworth Vault mistakes decoration for design and difficulty for depth. One admires the joinery while waiting, in vain, to be moved. The final act — meant, one assumes, to land like a revelation — arrives instead like a bus you have already watched leave. And then the line. The one that had done the damage, the one that had been screenshotted and quote-tweeted and stitched into a video by a man with two hundred thousand followers who made content about "experiences that let you down." It is, The Proscenium had written, a beautiful room built by someone with nothing to say.
One star. A single, elegant, surgical star.
The horrible thing — the thing Immy would not say to Chrissie, would not say to anyone, would barely say to the fire door — was that she could forgive bad. Bad she could rage at. Bad was a man who didn't get it, and there was a clean, hot, uncomplicated joy in hating a man who didn't get it. What she couldn't forgive was that he wrote like he did get it. Like he'd stood in her final chamber, at the mechanism she'd never quite trusted, the one she'd told herself was fine, and he'd seen the exact seam where the whole thing didn't hold. The prickle down her spine when she read it hadn't been fury. Fury came later, loyal and useful. The first thing, the thing underneath, had been the cold flat drop of oh — you saw it too.
She'd told no one that. She would take it to the grave, or to the liquidators, whichever arrived first.
"Right." She hauled herself up off the concrete, knees complaining, wiped her hands on the boiler suit she wore because it was practical and because it made her feel like someone who fixed things rather than someone whose things were breaking. "So we do the thing. We do a flash sale, we do a Chorlton hen-do discount, we get some drama teacher to bring her sixth form in on the cheap and post about it—"
"Immy."
"—we ride it out, is what we do, it's a review, people forget, next week some poor sod'll open a worse escape room in Ancoats and we'll be old news—"
"Immy." Chrissie had stood up. She had her Serious Face on, the one she used maybe twice a year, and she was holding the tablet the way people hold a thing they're not sure they should show you. "He's DM'd."
The idle loop clunked. Once. Ominously.
"Who's DM'd."
"You know who." Chrissie turned the tablet round. On the Vault's own account — the account Chrissie ran, the account that had gained nine hundred followers this month for all the worst reasons — sat a message. The little avatar was a black square. Of course it was. The handle sat above it, tasteful sans-serif, insufferable. The Proscenium.
Immy did not take the tablet. Taking the tablet felt like consenting to something. "Read it."
"You sure?"
"Read it before I set fire to the door on purpose."
Chrissie cleared her throat, and read, and to her enormous credit she did it straight, no funny voice, which was how Immy knew it was bad. "I gather my review has had consequences beyond its scope. That was not the intention. I run a private consultancy now — I advise venues on immersive design. I'd be willing to do a full after-hours run-through of the Vault, off the record, no fee, and publish a considered reassessment. One session. You, me, the room. If a second look changes my mind, it changes in public, where the first one did the harm. If you'd rather never hear from me again, ignore this and I'll understand."
Silence. Even the soundscape had the grace to hold its clunk.
"He wants to come back," Immy said, slowly, the way you'd say there's a wasp in the car. "The man who did this. He wants to come back, at night, and let me perform my own room for him like a — like a dancing bear auditioning for the person who shot the last bear."
"That's very vivid."
"I'm a vivid person, Chrissie, it's on my Hinge profile." She was pacing now, which she did instead of crying, a full circuit of the lobby, past the Edison bulbs and the pressure-gauge clock she'd wired herself and the framed opening-night photo where she was grinning like an idiot who thought the hard part was over. "No. Absolutely not. Do you know what it is, when a man ruins you and then offers to un-ruin you if you'll just lie down nicely one more time? It's got a name. It's called a — a—"
"Business opportunity," said Chrissie.
Immy stopped pacing.
"Don't."
"I've got the spreadsheet up, love. I'm not saying it because I'm cruel. I'm saying it because I've got the actual spreadsheet up on the actual screen and I can see the actual number and it is the only number this month with a plus sign anywhere near it." Chrissie's voice had gone gentle, which was worse than doom. She came round the desk. In the fingerless gloves, in the freezing warehouse, under all that ridiculous brass, she looked, for a second, like exactly what she was: a woman who'd worked for tea and love for eighteen months and did not want to be reading out cancellations either. "Forty thousand followers watched him bury us. He's offering to dig us back up in front of the same forty thousand. For free. And you'd be doing it anyway — you'd be in that room after hours, on your own, staring at the final act, telling yourself it's fine. Only this time somebody's paying attention when it stops being fine."
"He already told me it stops being fine."
"So make him say the opposite. In public. Where the first one did the harm." Chrissie shrugged, one shoulder. "His words, that. Not mine. I'd have used shorter ones."
Immy looked at the black-square avatar. She thought about the rent. She thought about the opening-night photo, and the two years, and the redundancy money she'd poured into a warehouse because she'd wanted, just once, to build something no one could take away from her, and the specific and unbearable irony that the thing no one could take away was currently being repossessed by the free market. She thought — she couldn't help it — about that one cold sentence. Someone with nothing to say. And underneath the fury, quiet and patient, the thing that wouldn't leave: prove it. Make him take it back. Not for the money. Make him stand in your room and take it back.
That was the dangerous thought. That was the one that had her already halfway to yes. Not desperation, though desperation had opened the door. Something worse. She wanted him to be wrong so badly she was prepared to be trapped in a room with him to find out.
"He doesn't know it's a person," she said, out loud, testing it. "To him it's just — a booking. A venue. He's never seen my face. Doesn't know my name. To him I'm 'the Vault.'"
"Is that better or worse?"
"Dunno yet." She held her hand out for the tablet. Chrissie gave it to her, warily, the way you hand over the last match. "It means I get to decide what he sees when he walks in. Which is more than he gave me."
She typed with her thumbs, standing under the pressure clock that ran forty seconds fast because she'd never fixed it either, because apparently that was the whole personality now, a woman surrounded by things she kept meaning to fix. She kept it short. She kept it, she thought, quite dignified, given the circumstances.
One session. After hours. You, me, the room. Bring an open mind — you'll need somewhere to put it back afterward.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.