Silver Nitrate
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The paper was narrowly examined. As Harrington had said, the characters on it were more like runes than anything else, but not decipherable by either man, and both hesitated to copy them, for fear, as they confessed, of perpetuating whatever evil purpose they might conceal.
—m. r. james, “Casting the Runes”
OPENING
TITLE
SEQUENCE
MCMXCIII
1
An engorged, yellow moon painted the sky a sickly amber hue, illuminating a solitary figure. A woman, standing between two sycamore trees.
It had rained, and the earth was slippery as, breathing with difficulty, she ventured toward the cabin. The woods felt awake and dangerous, with the sounds of crickets and rolling thunder in the distance. There was a thin humming. Was that a bird? It was too high-pitched, that noise.
The woman pressed a hand against her lips and stared at the cabin, with its welcoming lights. But that oasis of warmth was distant. A twig snapped, and the woman looked behind her in terror. She began to run.
The noises of the night were now mixed with the patter of her feet. She flew forward, and her hands desperately pulled at the front door—there was a thump, so loud it sounded like a cannon—until she finally managed to burst into the cabin. She immediately shut the door, bolted it, and stepped back, waiting. Her eyes were wide.
The crash of an axe against the wood made the woman jump. Splinters flew. The woman screamed, pressing back farther into the room as a man hacked his way through the door. The scream was an annoying squeal that made the levels jump into the red. The man lingered at the threshold, clutching the axe. He began advancing; his breath was heavy, punctuated with an annoying pop.
“Demon possession again?” Montserrat asked. Her eyes were on the VU meter; on her knee she balanced a notepad.
“Ghosts,” Paco said.
She scribbled in the notepad. “I thought you were into ninjas.”
“We’re still doing the ninjas. Just not now.”
“A ninja moratorium.”
The woman screamed again. Montserrat pressed a button. The image froze on the screen. She spun her chair around.
The padded room smelled faintly of the pine-scented air freshener that the other sound editors liked to spray around to cover up the fact that they were smoking inside. The whole place was a bit of a mess. The editors regularly left pizza boxes and empty bottles of Pepsi around the mixing room, along with the scent of cigarettes. “No food or smoking in the editing room” said a sign half hidden behind the random stickers the editors had pasted on it over the years. In theory, this admonition made sense, especially when you were dealing with film. You didn’t want to smear a workprint with grease. In practice, though, all editors were supposed to eat in front of the monitors. You were constantly working your ass off in post-production, trying to make up for missed deadlines. Montserrat had never been in a facility that was perfectly neat and organized. Editing rooms all looked like war zones unless a client was poking their head around.
Still, she might have tidied up if Paco hadn’t ambushed her. Unfortunately for him, this particular mixing room was small and, unlike the bigger rooms, didn’t have a client area with a couch. Paco was sitting uncomfortably on a chair, by the door, next to a pile of tapes and vinyl records, and from the look of his position he was probably getting a cramp.
“So, what do you think?” Paco asked.
“I think this is the kind of shit you shouldn’t have to be fixing in post-production. Did you shoot these scenes inside a washing machine? The sound is terrible. Those levels are way too hot.”
“I know, I know. But what can you expect with these budgets?”
“It’s going to take me a couple of weeks.”
“I need it to be done in five days.”
Montserrat shot him a skeptical look. “Not likely. Mario will tell you as much.”
“Come on, I’m not asking Mario, I’m asking you.”
“I don’t want to be stuck here from the crack of dawn until midnight because you forgot to hire a person who can hold a boom mike in the right position.”
“Don’t do this to me. I’ve got hundreds of units due at Videocentro and can’t run the duplicates if the master is a mess. Don’t you get overtime for this stuff? Must be a hefty check.”
“I wish,” she said.
Though there was the yearly discretionary bonus. The full-timers got the aguinaldo mandated by the law, but freelancers like Montserrat couldn’t count on that. They had to rely on the gratitude of their employers. At Antares, Mario gave his editors a turkey, a bottle of cheap whiskey, and a Christmas bonus. It was never a generous bonus—it shrank or expanded at whim—this despite the fact she was by far the best sound editor at Antares. She was also the only woman on the Antares team, aside from the receptionist, which was probably why she never became a full-timer, never had the right to an aguinaldo, and instead had to rely on Mario’s mercurial temper: the editing business was a boys’ club. There were a few women working at studios writing the scripts that were used for subtitling and dubbing. There were also female translators, though those were often freelancers who were contracted for single projects. But full-time female sound editors? Those were as rare as unicorns.