Casting Trouble edited by John Drake

1

  There was complete and total darkness, an abyss where any horror could dwell then a faint click that seemed to echo like the banging of an ominous drum and an electric spark, a faint but foreboding sound. 
  The light slowly grew in the room and dimly, a single old bulb came on and grew more and more powerful. It slowly revealed the room but still left ominous twisted shadows in every corner. 
  The room could truly be considered a torture chamber. There was a rack that seemed to have been built from an exercise bench and a hand cranked winch of some sort. There were tools neatly arranged on racks on the walls most of them looked like DIY tools that had been modified for a sinister purpose the blood stains on their tips and the notches on the handles a foreboding portent of what was to come. 
  An unlit brazier stood in the centre of the room. Currently it offered no light but there was charring and scorching from many uses. The room looked as if it was used, lived in but it had fallen to a certain level of disrepair. It could be a basement or utility room anywhere. It had a cruel, palpably evil feel. The dark torture room contained bits of the bodies of previous victims cut and sliced and pealed like vegetables-some reduced to mere picked bones gnawed with inhuman teeth marks in them. 

  In the centre of the room one current victim struggled against a heavy wooden chair. It was bolted into the floor with a large number of brackets and bolts. The victim was wearing a straitjacket that looked like it was stained with copious amounts of blood from the previous victims and dried to a dull red brown. 
  Her curly blond hair had fallen, halfway covering her youthful face. One terrified blond eye looked across the room. She tried to flick her hair out of her other eye. The girl had a mouth full of cloth with a wide piece of duct tape plastered over her lips. Her face belied her youth. She must have been eighteen, nineteen at the most but the jacket contained her struggling body easily. A leather strap was clinched tightly around her waist holding her to the chair and coarse hemp rope was wrapped around her ankles. 
  Her strong legs did her no good against the coarse rope. She wore pink socks, trainers and thrashed and pulled in her shorts for all she was worth but was not going anywhere. She would not be alone for long...   
  Her ears pricked up. There was a rattling, jangling noise and her eyes filled with fear. She backed involuntarily into the chair shaking pulling with renewed effort against the restraints in dread.

  There was the click and scrape of something heavy moving and something being dragged. It was slowly moving into the room. A large lumbering misshapen ball of leather and rubber entered. 
  The creature was more terrifying than anything the woman had ever seen before. It had a wide leather belt, dark brown and approximately five inches thick. This held and anchored its waist together. Pieces of black cloth and rubber formed a sort of robe around its legs-if they were legs...
 Additional chains and straps hung down from the belt, clanking and jangling as it moved. A chest piece that seemed to be a flack jacket was covered by a leather apron. On the right shoulder it had a large piece of rusted and curved metal over it and the left shoulder had a piece of tire that looked like it was riveted onto the creature’s very flesh. 
  Its hood was made of sack cloth. It had a mask from which malformed teeth protruded with twisted gray lips showing a snarl. The mask was made from a diagonal band of metal with black rubber to the right hand side and stained leather to the left. The creature had a large bulbous hump covered in metal and leather. It wore a pair of large, heavy gloves. The tips of the left hand ended in what looked like jagged bits of metal tied onto the gloves. A pair of worn boots could just be seen below the creature’s shredded robes. All over its form twisted and maligned grey flesh peaked out. It would have been over six foot tall and walked with a miss-shaped limp. Its left leg was higher than its right and it seemed to only be able to drag its left leg with a scraping sound while the right leg came down with a metallic click.  
  It might have been human at one point, it might not have been. It spoke in a voice that sounded dry like powdered charcoal;
    “Pretty-pretty come to my home, tried to run. You are mine.” It was pure malevolence, pure evil it’s every gesture and shuffle a horrifying twitch of pain. Whether it was some demon from hell taken human form or a man or beast twisted into an abomination no one could tell. It thought, it planned and what it planned was to feed;
    “Pretty-pretty do you have any last words before I cut out your whore’s tongue?” The creature lumbered forwards and with a surprising turn of speed it was over the other side of the room looming over the terrified girl. It gripped the edge of the tape. The woman recoiled from the touch of its cold, twisted hands. The creature extracted the bundle of cloth. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to maintain control over her composure. She paused for a second what would she say, what would probably be the final words she spoke? The monster had dozens of fiendish implements hanging from his belt. He removed a cleaver of sorts and held it up. Her eyes kind of crossed 
  The woman started to giggle uncontrollably. The monster threw the cleaver to the ground where it bounced with a rubbery movement. 

  All the lights came on and someone in a chair yelled;
    “Cut! One line, you have just one line! Oh God please don’t kill me and then you get hit by a rubber knife and die! How could any no-talent hack keep screwing this up?” 
  Tammy looked at him, choking back her giggles;
    “Aw that’s mean. You shouldn’t talk to me like that!” 
  The director thought about saying something else but Tammy’s boyfriend was the Producer, the man actually bankrolling this movie with his own money. Granted, the man had a lot of money but he was still losing more than he could really afford with every scene that Tammy screwed up and the longer she was around, the more she was talking to her boyfriend about getting a longer scene in the movie and the more nervous the director, Alfred Ronalds was becoming that this was going to go down the drain!
  The monster grabbed its own misshapen head and twisted backwards and forwards. There was a pop as the rubber came away to reveal a very thin middle aged man inside a very large and uncomfortable rubber suit. He looked at the director;
    “Ten times, I can’t work with these amateurs! I was a classically trained Shakespearian actor I played King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Prospero-” Tammy looked at him;
    “That Shakespeare guy hasn’t written anything recently-I don’t even think he’s on Facebook!” The actor in the suit looked at the director and pointed at Tammy;
    “If I can spend two hours in make up and lumber around in this rubber suit for eight hours a day for a week then she can at least say one line without giggling her head off!” 
  Ronalds looked at him;
    “Jack you know that Tammy was part of the package when it came to the funding for this little movie.” The actor looked very pissed off;
    “You said she didn’t have a speaking part!” 
  Tammy looked at him;
    “I might not be the hero in … in this picture but I am going to get more lines!” The director looked at her;
    “Tammy you have to take this role seriously!” She looked back;
    “I am totally serious!” Tammy stormed off to get a coffee, the costume straitjacket easily being pulled off. The director turned to his head of costume Paula. Tammy was out of earshot. He spoke in a very frustrated voice;
    “She is screwing the producer...” He put his hands up to his head. Paula nodded;
    “Yes, the amount of money it costs to keep re-shooting this scene is starting to be ridiculous!” The director shook his head;
 “No. I mean she is the producer’s girlfriend so I can’t get rid of her!” Tammy came back. She was carrying a coffee;
    “This coffee is terrible, I want to make a complaint!” the director looked at her;
    “Tammy I think we can call it a day for today-just go, do something else.” Tammy stormed off while the rest of the crew slowly packed away and extracted Jack from his costume. The director started to look for his pack of cigarettes-anything to calm his nerves.
 
  Paula looked at the director;
    “We’re not going to get rid of her are we?” The director looked at her with desperation in his eyes;
    “No, we’re stuck with her.” The director thought about it for a second or two then an idea popped into his head. “Paula, can you upgrade little Miss pain-in-the-ass’s costume so that she can’t be so much a pain in the ass?” Paula thought about it for a second or two;
    “We have the costume straitjacket at the moment-it’s not very convincing, I mean it took her all of two seconds to pull it off! I could get a real one, maybe a second hand one and some chains. Bound-up in that lot she might stop giggling...” Alfred Ronalds grinned, looking much happier and pulled out his lighter;
    “That would work. She was meant to be gagged in the original version of the script. Do you still have that Hannibal Lector muzzle thing?” Paula smiled as she plotted out Tammy’s new costume;
    “Oh yes, I got that out of the prop warehouse! I could add a nice large ball on the inside I don’t think she could mess up her lines if we gag her tightly enough.” The director grinned;
    “We record the gagged version then I have a shot in the can to make the movie the way I want to make it.” Paula patted him on the shoulder;
    “-Yeah, no lines to mess up. Perfect!” The director nodded to Paula she knew what she had to do. He had to find a little spot to have a quiet cigarette.

  Paula went home having picked up various things on her way. She’d collected a standard institutional straitjacket called a Guardian. It was a thick, intimidating piece of canvas with six wide heavy back straps, a double crotch strap and a front loop. All the straps worked with heavy friction buckles. 
  Paula worked it over to make it look a bit more worn. She added a patch of rough leather, hand-sewn onto one shoulder and distressed the leather, first using a nail to scratch it up and a hole punch to put the holes into it for the stitching. Working with her usual flair, she used some black shoe polish on a cloth, gently rubbing it over the jacket to give it a worn grimy quality then she used some brown shoe polish to do the same, adding a patina of grime making it look almost oily. Paula took some fine sawdust that was a by-product of another prop and sprayed the jacket with a little spray-on glue. She rubbed the sawdust in to make it really look dirty and grimy. 
  Getting some of the fake blood mix that they used in the movie, she used a lot of brown to make it look like it had dried then worked the paint into the jacket, staining the collar. It was mostly done to look like someone had their neck cut, bleeding all over the jacket. 
  She added various random splotches of fake blood and used a hair dryer to get it to look right. The jacket looked like it was ready to go the distance like it had been used for decades by some fiend!
  Paula worked on the chain. She got a large length of heavy gauge, twenty yards long and rolled it all up. She put it on top of a lit gas barbecue, smothering it with grease and left it for two minutes. After that, the chain looked dirty and worn-she painted it with more of the fake blood.
  It was now the sort of accessory that a butcher would keep in an abattoir for dragging corpses around. She had two dozen padlocks that she got form a yard sale. They looked old and beaten, perfect for the job. 
  The wardrobe mistress had a pair of ‘Irish 8’ handcuffs-they looked brand new but she used acids and various chemicals to rough them up giving them a worn aged patina. They were coated in a spattering of black and brown paint to look greasy and grimy. A large heavy dog collar was treated to a bit of sandpaper and a little rubbing. It soon looked worn with use, distressed would be the word of choice.
  Paula worked on the muzzle. She cut a few extra holes in the straps so she could really get it tight. She got the largest red ball that she could find in the pet shop and slowly drilled a hole in it. She then got the muzzle and cut a hole using a washer to support a large bolt running it through the centre of the gag. 
  Taking some epoxy glue, Paula smeared it around a nut and she pushed the nut into the centre of the ball followed by a second then she left it to set. When it was, she screwed the two halves together to make a very effective gag. She had a cold beer to celebrate; she had Tammy’s new costume ready for her!

2

  Tammy was wearing a white crop top, tight red shorts and a pair of pink socks and trainers. She looked at her new costume apprehensively;
    “I liked the look of the old costume better.” Paula knew how to get her into it;
    “Tammy I spent a lot of effort making this for you. Why don’t you at least try it on?” 
  Reluctantly, Tammy held her hands out for the jacket. Paula smiled, this was like a form of stress relief bundling the blond nitwit into the jacket. The costume designer would have even paid a little for the privilege of doing this, instead she was being paid to do it-possibly the best day of filming!
  The blond smiled nervously almost biting her lip. Paula fed her into the jacket, moving it around so that her fingers disappeared into the sleeves. Paula moved behind her to start getting the jacket closed before she changed her mind. Soon it would be too late. She quickly pulled her bottle-blond hair out of the way so it would not catch in the straps. Paula’s fingers almost trembled as she quickly grabbed hold of the end of the top strap and fed it through the friction buckle before drawing it tight. Then giving it an extra hard pull to make sure it was done up. When Paula had gotten it as tight as she could she folded the end through the buckle and then through a holder on the back of the jacket. The next strap was far easier as the jacket was firmly in place with everything lined up. It was a quick pull to make it as tight as possible, leaving no slack for poor Tammy. 
  Tammy was starting to realise how tight and secure her costume was as the straps down the back were secured. She hardly had any wiggle room. Slowly she started to suspect that this was not a prop.

  Paula checked to make sure that the first strap was okay, that there was no slack. She could already see the straps pulling the canvas in around Tammy’s body. A few seconds later and she had the third strap done up half way to the point of no return. The fourth buckle was tangled in the jacket, a little tug and it was free-a few more tugs and manoeuvres and the fourth buckle was done up! 
  The jacket was starting to pinch Tammy’s waist in. The fifth buckle was quickly pulled tight and Paula made sure that there was no slack, nothing that Tammy could get to and use to get out. Paula almost twisted the last strap. She had to pull it out then feed it back in again before pulling the last strap on the back of the garment tight. Paula went back to the top of the jacket and worked her way down-pulling everything a lot tighter, it wasn’t tight enough unless Tammy grunted in discomfort. Before Tammy knew what was going on Paula had the first crotch strap buckled pulling it tight, fast causing Tammy to jump at the sensation. 
  Ten seconds later the second strap was just as tightly applied to her bottom. The front loop of the jacket was large and easily allowed Paula to pass Tammy’s arms through it then easily through the side loops. A few seconds later Tammy found her arms very firmly bound in heavy canvas. Paula pulled and pulled until Tammy really had very little room to manoeuvre. Paula went back over the costume and pulled each strap taunt until it deformed her flesh around them until Tammy was practically squealing in discomfort. 

  Tammy looked at Paula;
    “Well at least that is over!” Paula shook her head;
    “I haven’t even gotten you in half your costume yet.”
  Paula bent down and grabbed Tammy’s ankles, pushing them tightly together. The pair of Irish eight cuffs quickly locked her ankles together hobbling her. Tammy tried to shuffle around but the cuffs were real and solid and very tight if she tried to fight against them it cut painfully into her ankles she didn’t like this one bit. 
  The wardrobe mistress stood up and buckled the dog collar tightly around her neck. Paula got the length of chain and started to work around Tammy’s waist crushing it. She created a very solid crotch strap then proceeded to tightly bind Tammy’s thighs and calves with the remainder of the chain making each loop of steel as tight as possible. Tammy ineffectually squirmed in her bonds;
    “This is too tight, like super tight!” Paula dismissed her;
    “It’s called method acting dear. It’s meant to get you in the mood.” Tammy shook her head and tried to stamp her foot;
    “You’re just mean. Get me out of this now!” Paula picked up the gag. Tammy took one look at it as Paula explained;
    “Now we decided that you don’t have a speaking part after all.” Tammy’s brain put two and two together;
    “No, please don’t!” She managed to say before the gag was wedged in her mouth. The ball was huge and forced her mouth open wide. It really packed her cheeks and stopped all coherent protests. Paula did every strap up as tightly as possible leaving Tammy wide eyed and frightened. She put Tammy on a hand cart and attached her with two, lugged straps.

  The director had a very happy morning. Tammy looked absolutely terrified and distracted throughout the scene. No complaining no demands-just the desperate look of a frightened woman unsure if she would ever be released-perfect. 
  The director had to admit she even did a convincing job of dying when she was stabbed by the actor with the rubber knife. Well, after one bad take on the second try she actually looked like she was paying attention and following direction correctly but then she was sure that she would remain in costume until they did it right so that was a substantial incentive though Paula had given her a little pep talk after the first take and a good take was now in the can. Alfred Ronalds had to admit he didn’t really want to know what Paula had said to Tammy, whatever it was, it was effective at motivating her-she looked scared stiff for real! 

  Tammy expected them to take the gag off and let her re-shoot the scene with her speaking part now. She was puzzled when Paula released her from the chair. Paula checked over her costume somehow making it even tighter, but instead of releasing her gag, Paula simply strapped her to the hand cart again. Tammy made various distressed noises as she was led away. Paula took her to the costume store. She had a dog cage at the back of the room. Tammy noticed it and shrieked into her gag. Paula stroked the side of her gagged face;
    “I know you behaved but I ‘m going to do it anyway!” 
  Tammy struggled against her bindings as tight as they were but she was not getting anywhere. Paula un-strapped her from the hand cart and laid her out on the floor. She undid the padlock that held the crotch chain in place, cruelly pulling it two inches deeper into Tammy’s flesh before relocking it. Paula rolled Tammy over and went to work tightening every single strap down the back of the jacket until they creaked in protest. Tammy was panting and gasping for each breath due to her crushed waist. 
  Paula pulled Tammy’s shoes and socks off. She got a large zip tie and tightly tied Tammy’s toes together. Running her fingers over the soles of Tammy’s feet her prisoner started to giggle uncontrollably into her gag. Paula slapped her on the bottom;
    “I told you no giggling.” She tightened every strap on the muzzle one or two notches tighter, forcing the mass of the gag deeper into Tammy’s mouth and silencing her further. Paula finished with a padded blindfold over Tammy’s face before getting a stretchy bandage and wrapping it around and around Tammy’s head so that there was no chance of the blindfold slipping. She grabbed two ratchet luggage straps and started to force Tammy into a tight little ball with her legs strapped to her chest she would just fit into the cage.   

  The director looked relieved but he was puzzled that he was not being bombarded by Tammy requesting that they re-shoot the second version of the scene the one with her speaking part. He noticed Paula walking by. Had she gotten Tammy out of her costume, had she stormed off after being released? 
  He joked;
    “Now we need to lose the bimbo for about two weeks for the rest of the film.” 
  Paula gave him a knowing look and gestured for him to follow her. When they were in the car park at the back Paula spoke up, grinning;
    “I’m already one step ahead of you.” Paula pointed to her truck. The director looked and in the back was a dog cage if you forced a woman into a very tight ball you might just fit her into it. There appeared to be a bundle of something vaguely feminine forced mercilessly into the cage.
  The director looked silently he took a shallow breath and whispered;
    “Is that her in the dog cage?”
  Paula grinned;
    “Oh yes. Tammy will be occupied for a while-she might even learn a thing or two.” 
  Ronalds looked at Paula;
    “Where is our dear little pain in the ass staying?” Paula grinned;
    “A friend of mine runs a little club called the disciplinarian. Tammy might end up being whipped into shape.” The director decided the less he knew the better and walked away whistling to himself.

  The shooting for the day was over. As they set up for the next couple of scenes, Paula slammed the back of the van as Tammy protested into her tight gag;
    “Don’t worry dear. Some friends and I are going to give you some lessons on how to act, maybe not the acting your used to which as far as I can tell is only acting up.” A terrified Tammy squirmed against her bonds and mewed into her gag as the cage containing her was slowly driven away for a two week re-educational program.d unsteadily from the bath room before the computer could