The Hungry Garden

Chapter One: A New Beginning

OK, so here's where we're at. Think of this as the "Previously on the Mortal Masquerade" bit. Imagine reading this in that voice they always use, if it helps.

Previously on the Mortal Masquerade... well, it's actually a little complicated. I met my love and my soulmate, and we started play-killing each other over and over, then we found this awesome club where I ended up working with a cute tech guy who it turned out used to wear my skirt home from school so I didn't have to. We found out we'd all actually died and it was horrible, but then we undied or something and this guy who ran the club was not-God-or-the-Devil-but-something-else and...

Look, if you want to know just read the first book. I go through a car crusher in it, twice.

I am Lexie, a gender non-conforming horror geek, a dreamer with a deathwish. I get play-killed a lot as part of my job.

Maise is my lover, my other half. She is a fashion and cosplay queen, a roleplay genius who can blow your mind with sexual psychology.

Chris is like our kid sister, even though he's the same age as us. He's a tech wiz harbouring a glam princess.

We're all together in some kind of afterlife scenario centred around The Mortal Masquerade, a secret club where members roleplay as masked avatars to take part in spectacular mock deathplays. We go to a lot of trouble to make these deathplays as intense and realistic as possible while in fact being safe, or at least survivable. Since we're all dead already this might seem strange, but it makes sense in a perverse way that we'll come to later. We are watched over by Uncle Morbid, who we knew as a movie SFX guy but who it turns out is one of the custodians of this plane of existence.

When I left you at the end of the first book, Maise had surprised me with a replica of my old school uniform. I knew what she had in mind – our first kiss had been after school in an empty foundation shaft at a building site and we'd both had recurring dreams recounting that kiss, only in the dreams the shaft was filling with cement around us. This was partly inspired by the French film Jeux D'Enfants (Love Me If You Dare, to give it its English title), which climaxed with the two protagonists enjoying a final kiss as they were buried together in just such a foundation shaft.

This is something we're actually equipped to recreate at the Mortal Masquerade – we have a large industrial concrete mixer that dispenses a special formula of cement that sets around you but doesn't fuck you up like real cement would (drowning aside). It's sort of like a gritty, sloppy plaster of Paris and really does look like something old movie gangsters would use to get their victims sleeping with the fishes. I'd seen Maise buried in the stuff the first time she'd shown me film of the Masquerade, what with that and the simultaneous dreams I'd always known we'd end up under that cement mixer eventually. There were discreet breathing tubes hanging in the tank that you were meant to put in your mouth just before being covered over, because once the cement set you were stuck there until they broke you out.

"If you hadn't guessed, this is a bit more than just a regular deathplay," said Uncle Morbid when he showed me the tank set up beneath the concrete mixer in hangar 2, built to the exact specifications I remembered from that day long ago on the building site at Lampew Meadows. "You can see it as your Awareness Initiation, a new beginning, the moment when you and Maise will remember the lives you lived before and commit to your time together now. As for who chose this scenario, call it a joint decision between the two of you and the universe."

We set up the scene as a special event for a weekday afternoon, inviting a select group of friends to witness and support us. Of course Chris would be there – as he was a part of the original incident that led to our first kiss we decided he should also dress in his old school uniform. At the time I'd often traded my school skirt, which I hated, for his trousers on the way home. Though we hadn't switched on that particular occasion, I decided to wear the trousers for this scene and give him my grey pleated skirt – he always looked more comfortable in girls' uniform anyway. Then we realised that even though he hadn't been in the chamber for our original kiss or subsequent dreams, he was such a part of our life together that we couldn't dress him up and leave him out, so we asked for him to join us in the tank to be buried with us. The idea we settled on was for Chris to sit on the floor of the tank with Maise and I stood behind him. That way, he would be covered over by the time the cement reached our waists, leaving us to have our kiss together as the tank filled up the rest of the way.