Unhinged by Sarah Graves

“Trust your life to Mr. Fancy Pants, there.”
    “You all know the drill. We just need the action on film, that’s all. You do your stunt, Samantha. The rest of you follow with each of yours, and . . . we’ll cut. Got it?”
    Nods from the dancers. “Let’s do it,” Roy commanded.
    Samantha was pretty in a peas-in-a-pod way: gelled hair, big eyes, tiny nub of nose, small mouth. Generic-looking, like a successful, interchangeable product of a dance-school cloning experiment.
    “Ready,” the metronome woman announced. The cellar smelled of makeup, hot lights, and wet concrete. The water had now risen to the stairway footings. Somewhere outside a siren sounded distantly.
    “What’s going to happen?” I whispered.
    Harry whispered back: “They dance. No sound—the music gets put in later. If you want to call it music,” he added scathingly.
    “Some choreographer’s brilliant idea of drama, what’s coming now,” he went on, as the technicians took their places. “It’s an electrocution scene. That’s what the whole fake live-wire thing is about.” His voice dripped disgust.
    Roy McCall’s, by contrast, was rich with manufactured confidence; he had a lot riding on this. And at first it was okay: metronome clicking slowly, but the dancers performing moves that if I hadn’t seen, I wouldn’t have believed could be done so fast.
    A sort of peace began spreading on McCall’s face: This was gonna work. But on the metronome’s fifth click, I noticed Harry’s gaze was locked on the rafter from which the fake live wire was set to fall.
    I spotted the dangling end of it, fastened I imagined by a nail in the darkness where I couldn’t see. The lights, clamped to cross beams, had been positioned well away from any possible contact with the water.
    But Harry’s eyes widened as the metronome clicked on.
Six, seven:
he turned in slow motion, his mouth opening.
    Eight:
Samantha’s hand reaching gracefully, wire pulled by a technician yanking a length of invisible filament tied to it, the wire swinging down on cue.
    “No!” Bellowing, Harry launched himself as Samantha’s head jerked back, her body convulsing. McCall got there first, slammed into her, carrying her away with her hand still hard on the wire. There was a
snap!
and the hot sizzling smell of a short circuit.
    From outside: the sound of an engine starting, roaring away as Samantha toppled. She landed with a splash and the sort of sick thump I knew meant she hadn’t tried to break her fall, Roy on top of her. The metronome kept clicking.
    “Turn it off!” Roy shouted, shoving Harry aside. They were struggling, almost as if to gain possession of her, amidst cries for an ambulance and for someone who knew CPR, shoving, and shouts to make sure all the power was
disconnected,
damn it!
    The lights were off but the water was still rising; when I saw none of the people in it were being electrocuted, I waded in, too, found the main valve on the cellar wall, and cranked it shut. I’d done it at home enough times to know how; the gush of rushing water slowed to a trickle, stopped. Then I peered up at the place where the wire had been fastened, looking for a nail or hook.
    I found it, too, screwed into a cross beam. But no wire hung from it. Instead a tiny, fresh-looking hole pierced the old wooden ceiling. It was unnoticeable unless you looked hard. Then I followed Ellie upstairs.
    Outside, the dancers were all crying. The metronome woman had her arms around some of them, murmuring and scolding. Harry and Roy had Samantha out, too, depositing her on the lawn. She was breathing, her thin little bird-ribs moving jerkily under the leotard top. “Where’s the ambulance?” McCall implored.
    My heart sank. The siren we’d heard earlier meant that the nearest ambulance was out on another emergency. Backup would kick in and the second would get here in a couple of minutes, cold comfort if you were the one waiting. But this wasn’t the big city with safety nets