One August evening, in a mix of grief and hope, Lara Jane Hudson accidentally opens the portal to Hell.

It takes her two and half days to fully realise this has happened: that there is a slightly shimmery, raised-edge circle on the floor of her basement storage room, with a suspicious crust on top like the surface of an apple crumble. It stinks of air freshener, but at least she feels a little less like she’s losing her mind.

FUN FACT: Lara Jane Hudson accidentally opened the portal to Hell via her own bad dancing. She was a professional dancer once upon a time, until her right ankle was crushed under a falling set piece when she was 22 and she opened a children’s dance studio instead. Occasionally, when everyone had gone home, she lingered in the middle of Studio A’s $76,000 floor and danced the best she could.

Aside from the vanilla-and-fresh-laundry portal in amongst her costume racks and spare gym mat, there is an additional consequence of blurring the lines between the realms. That first night, when Lara Jane climbs the stairs to her apartment above the Lara Jane Dance Studio and slips under the bed-covers, she finds a mermaid in her bed.

The mermaid does not receive a warm reception. There is ample screaming, and cursing, and Lara Jane has a loud voice honed by yelling regularly at children. The air smells strongly of oysters. Lara Jane crouches up against her padded headboard, and the mermaid curls lethargically on the crimson sheets like a bleeding fish.

When the mermaid won’t exit of its own accord, Lara Jane pushes it forcibly off the bed with her wooden cane to get a better night’s sleep. Its long hair slides off the mattress like kelp.

It reappears back on the mattress like magic.

More screaming. Lara Jane tries pushing it out of bed again and again. Finally, she drops her human feet to the carpet, and then the mermaid truly vanishes. She feels spent, and like she might cry, which she normally only does once a year when someone dies or she feels especially humiliated.

Lara Jane slumps back onto her sweaty pillow. Instantly, the mermaid is back beside her… And the real troubleshooting begins.

FUN FACT: Over that first week, Lara Jane Hudson tested several methods to banish the creatures from her bed. She tried sleeping on the floor, sleeping upright, sleeping with no bedding, sleeping in hotels, sleeping in a single bed–none of these worked, and the last seemed particularly cramped and frightening. Whenever she exhibited the intention to sleep, something strange and otherworldly would appear nearby.

Eventually, she creates an enormous bed of gym mats in Studio A and lets her eyes slip shut.

The mermaid comes every Monday.

On the second Monday, Lara Jane Hudson can share a large bed of gym mats with the mermaid without screaming, cursing or sweating profusely. There have been six other creatures to visit her, and frankly the mermaid now seems safe and wholesome by comparison.

Lara Jane has not been sleeping well. Lara Jane has been taking involuntary micro-sleeps in her children’s dance classes and on the toilet, and waking seconds later with her chin smooshed against the toilet paper. Lara Jane has been considering taking a mental health day, and Lara Jane never takes mental health days. Lara Jane is royally pissed off.

She glares at the mermaid, and the mermaid stares straight back at her with its blue-black eyes. She says, “Hello, my name is Lara Jane, and you are in my dance studio,” and the mermaid says, “Hello,” and this feels like the most progress since she opened that damned portal to Hell in the first place.

The faun comes every Tuesday.

At least, Lara Jane suspects that he’s a faun. There are a couple of antlers growing out of his head, but a blanket’s always covered his lower half, thank God, because a lot of the creatures seem to turn up naked. Point is, she doesn’t know for sure what’s going on past his waist, and she doesn’t really care for confirmation, either.

It’s the second Tuesday. Now that she’s no longer trying to threaten him out of bed with a butter knife, he’s nestled crossed-legged in a wad of blankets and harassing her for cigarettes.

Lara Jane laughs sharply under the dimmed fluorescent lights. “Does it look like I carry cigarettes?”

The faun grips his antlers in frustration, pulling them apart like he’s about to break over-sized wishbones. “Come on, come on,” he drawls. “Don’t send me back there with nothing. Have a bit of compassion.”

Compassion is not usually well-stocked in Lara Jane’s inventory. The nearest poster declares WINNING IS THE ONLY OPTION with a picture of a tutu-clad child leaping for her life over a ravine.

“Where’s ‘there’?” she asks. “Where do you go when you’re not here?”

“Ah.” The faun taps the side of his nose with a slightly-furred finger. “Cigarettes, my darling, cigarettes. Then you’ll find out.”

The golem comes every Wednesday.

Lara Jane has the beginnings of a migraine. Her entire elite squad must have shot up with pixie sticks or red cordial or something before class, because this evening’s lesson was shockingly unfocused. Regardless, she’s in no mood to lug half a dozen gym mats and blankets into position in Studio A, and she thinks she knows who (or what) to expect beside her tonight, so she consents to the luxury of her proper, four-wooden-legs queen-sized bed.

When Lara Jane collapses under the doona, Wednesday’s visitor is slumped forward like a dying battery. Lara Jane thought it was a robot the first week, because every inch of it seemed made of silver metal. But the only seam in its casing is a small square panel in its lower back, and robots don’t move like this thing does–fluidly, the way real human flesh and muscle would move, despite the silver.

It turns its solemn face on Lara Jane, and two tiny candles seem to burn inside its eye sockets.

“Go to sleep,” croaks Lara Jane, and so they do.

FUN FACT: Shortly after opening the portal to Hell, Lara Jane Hudson performed several hours of internet research on magical gateways, ‘mythical’ creatures and the afterlife. She found it comforting to learn the approximate terms for many of her night-time visitors, even if their anatomy and behaviour did not match identically with her readings. Lara Jane also attempted a few do-it-yourself exorcisms and disenchantments involving salt, chalk, holy water, a small amount of blood and some more questionable dancing. These only made her bedroom and basement storage room messier. The portal remained.

Upon her alarm, Lara Jane rolls out of bed immediately, a habit she’s developed to minimize the amount of waking hours she has to spend with her bedmates. There is a scrap of paper on the bed, torn from the notebook she keeps on the bedside table.

On one side, written in big block letters: PLEASE LET ME STAY.

Lara Jane turns it over. OR HELP ME TO DIE.

The gumby comes every Thursday.

Lara Jane calls it a gumby because of that kids’ show that was on twenty years ago, with the green plasticine man who could stretch himself into an infinite number of shapes, and, she suspects, could split himself into pieces with no harm done.

The gumby that comes to visit is not green. S/he lies naked on Lara Jane’s gym mats and pulls off two breasts, one penis and a ponytail’s worth of strawberry-blonde hair, stacking them in a pile beside her/him. Each piece peels away neatly with a slight sucking/sealing sound, like closing up a zip-lock bag. There is only flawless skin underneath: no wounds, no scars.

“I hope you don’t mind,” says the gumby. S/he smiles warmly at Lara Jane. “I find it easier to sleep this way.”

It is unnerving to have so much blatant nudity in her ‘bed,’ even if the gumby is sprawled a few gym mats away and is currently approaching the non-existent sexuality of a Kewpie doll. Lara Jane is used to thinking of herself as something similar.

FUN FACT: Lara Jane Hudson was always adamant that she would share the appearance of the portal and its accompanying ’emissaries’ with no-one. She had been single since her twenties, an only child with a deceased father and a mother in care for dementia. Her closest relationships were with the children she taught, and her reputation meant absolutely everything. Not even the portal to Hell could make her put it at risk.

The gumby’s androgynous voice reaches her from across the room: “If you could make sure I’ve reattached everything before you leave the bed in the morning, I’d appreciate it. I wouldn’t want to risk losing a part.”

“Sure,” says Lara Jane, considering the gravity of the situation. “I promise.”

The tentacles come every Friday.

They are, of course, attached to a man. His torso twists like a screw-top and out fold the tentacles, all six of them.

It’s the second Friday evening, and Lara Jane is still horrified by last week’s visit. Friday is not a bedroom night, or even a gym mats night–Lara Jane plans to sit in the Dance Centre’s kitchenette and plot the choreography, set, and costume for next fortnight’s competition entry in extreme detail until she falls asleep, unintentionally, drooling on the notepaper. Mugs and mugs of hot chocolate. Phone alarm in her bra set to wake her for Saturday’s competition.

She hopes to avoid the tentacles almost completely.

And the new dance for her elite team is stunning; monsters emerging from the shadows of a child’s bedroom. Six children covered with fur, horns, scales, glitter. One child on an artificially shortened bed–a nine-year-old, Lara Jane’s best little actress. The monsters want to devour her. The girl outwits them, out-monsters them; they make her their queen. Then something goes terribly wrong, and they tear the child to pieces anyway.

Glorious.

Lara Jane knows it’s a winning number.

She sees only the slightest blur of tentacles before she passes out.

The starmist comes every Saturday.

In a neighbouring state the hotel bed is sterile and fluffy, and Lara Jane is deeply pleased that one of her girls won first place with a solo today, and less pleased that both their group dance and the duet she choreographed only took second in their categories. The group number was something clean, feminine and glossy, and loosely based on the fairy tale The Twelve Dancing Princesses. In hindsight, rehearsing that dance had kept Lara Jane from driving a screwdriver into her neck the first week.

The starmist floats sedately beside her, a few inches off the bed-covers, and for once Lara Jane barely minds the company.

“Why do you think you’re here?” she asks.

Her visitor resembles an almost-transparent teenager who swallowed the night sky.

“So you can help me,” breathes the starmist.

And Lara Jane was afraid of that.

FUN FACT: This is where the starmist was, when she wasn’t with Lara Jane Hudson:

A pine forest. Hunters, in hazmat suits and flamethrowers. It was night, and she was almost invisible. She’d watched her mother, father and brothers immolate into trickles of ash and plumes of smoke, and she should’ve been soaring away, far above the treetops where no flames could reach her. But her sister was down there.

A frantic search, weaving through fiery trees and umpteen hunters, and she found her sister inside a glass cage on a folding card-table. Her sister’s small dark hands were pressed against the front panel. There was a Tupperware container in the dirt nearby, half-filled with water, and with a silver key at the bottom. The key to the cage.

They knew that starmists could barely interact with physical matter, if at all.

Still, she reached inside the container and tried to grasp the key, again and again. She swore the water trembled in response to her hand. She could almost feel the metal against her fingers, she was concentrating so hard. And the forest fires crept closer and closer; she was shimmering in the heat like the air above a campfire. She was starting to burn.

Finally, ecstatically, her fingers closed properly around the key. And then she heard the hunters behind her, and the whir-hiss of the flamethrower, and then there was the total immersion in fire when she caught alight.

This was where the starmist went, always, again and again.

Lara Jane does not feel qualified to help.

Lara Jane does not feel qualified to do anything but teach dancing.

Una comes every Sunday.

Lara Jane doesn’t know what to call this one, except for her name, and Una doesn’t have any other answers. Just curls on the bed like there are weights in her wrists and rocks in her torso.

It’s the second Sunday, and Lara Jane is back home and early to bed, because she’s not the kind of woman to shy away from a challenge.

Thankfully, she’s also had enough forethought to bring supplies. Lara Jane wraps Una’s shoulders in a knitted blanket, since Una’s arms are too heavy and sore to lift into a t-shirt. They sit silently on the bed and eat red liquorice and watch a DVD of the studio’s annual concert.

When the last child finishes their dancing, Lara Jane closes her laptop and attempts to start gently. “You look just like me,” she says, “but all of my visitors are a little different. Can you tell me–or show me–what makes you different? Maybe then I can try to help you.”

This earns her a short bout of acidic laughter. Very slowly, Una turns her naked back on Lara Jane, and drags aside her long brown hair.

A thick bronze zip runs down her spine.

FUN FACT: In preparation for Week Three, Lara Jane Hudson performed several hours of online shopping in her official trademarked Lara Jane Dance Studio fuzzy slippers. Purchases included: 1 blow-up swimming pool, child-size; 2 packets of low-end cigarettes, 12/pack; 2 fresh notebooks with waterproof-ink pens; 1 metal tub, 1.5 feet long; 1 anti-rape device (essentially a female condom with teeth); 6 silver prop keys; 3 bags of red liquorice.

The mermaid barely says a word, but still coils up inside the plastic swimming pool like a sleepy river snake. Lara Jane has propped the pool in the middle of the bed and stripped most of the bedclothes to minimise any impact from the four inches of water. It hasn’t sloshed over so far. And as Lara Jane watches over her notebook, the mermaid’s green-blonde hair grows longer and longer until the mermaid can completely wrap itself in the hair like a cocoon, until only its nose and mouth are visible between thick spirals of hair.

Over the next week, Lara Jane has regular, amusing visions of grabbing the end of the mermaid’s hair and tugging so it unfurls like a yo-yo string. Eventually, this morphs into a kinder, more inspiring idea wherein Lara Jane installs three dozen metal loops across the walls of her bedroom, and when the fourth Monday rolls around she explains her plan to the mermaid with gestures and sketches.

So Lara Jane balances on the mattress and threads the mermaid’s hair through the metal loops, and the mermaid grows it almost as fast as Lara Jane can thread it. When they finish, the room is criss-crossed with an intricate web of thick, rope-strong hair, and Lara Jane ties it off so nothing will pull on the mermaid’s scalp.

Lara Jane steps up into the web with her good foot, grabs a higher green-blonde rope and lowers herself so she’s sitting in a cradle of hair. She grins at the mermaid, whose scaly tail is still dipped inside the children’s swimming pool. “Come and play.”

FUN FACT: The mermaid’s name was Scalion, back when the world was wet and did her bidding, and she was one of the finest jewellers in her city. The city bloomed deep, deep in a lake in the middle of a flowering desert. But this is not where the mermaid went when she wasn’t with Lara Jane Hudson.

In Scalion’s 29th year, the water level started dropping rapidly. Unnaturally rapidly. There began a mass exodus from the city, slow at first and then exponentially faster. Scalion was much too content to admit that anything was wrong. She grew her hair to her knees and braided pearls and sapphires and emeralds to every second strand. Her knuckles were covered in diamonds and jewels like a queen. And then there were only two hundred mermaids left in the city.

One day, Scalion woke to bone-dry, sun-warmed sand beneath her back. No more water in sight. The lone survivor in a deep, dead pit with the skeletal remains of her ghost city. Her gradually cooking body, and the dizzying stench of rotting fish.

This is where the mermaid was, when she wasn’t with Lara Jane. Barely breathing and choking on sunlight.

Later that day, Scalion grew her hair into a rope and threw it over the sign for her jewellery shop. Wrapped it around her neck, pearls and sapphires and emeralds digging into her windpipe. And hanged herself amongst the bones of her happiness.

Lara Jane watches the mermaid pull herself through the ropes of hair, sinking down through the gaps and slithering in slow, vertical circles like a needle through calico. She watches the joy of it creep up on the mermaid’s face. The movements become quicker and wilder, half-eel and half-gymnastics, until Scalion runs out of hair slack and she’s forced to pause and grow more.

“It’s like swimming,” says the mermaid, smiling and panting.

Lara Jane experimentally pokes her own head through a gap in the ropes. The hair is taut and flexible, smooth and slippery. Lara Jane hasn’t felt this excited about exercising since she was 22 and performing front-aerials on Broadway. She climbs and slides and hangs from her knees and twists herself around. And laughs. Her weak ankle, which she can always walk on carefully but never flex, barely makes a difference here. It’s not at all like dancing on a stage, but it’s almost like dancing.

Lara Jane perches at the top of the web while the mermaid plays. She’s there for almost half an hour while Scalion revels in the almost-swimming, and then she notices the mermaid stop in the centre of the ropes. A few tears drip into the blow-up pool. And everything vanishes–the mermaid, the metres and metres of hair, the ropes that Lara Jane is sitting on.

Lara Jane falls six feet and crashes awkwardly onto the bed, bouncing three times and splashing the water from the pool high into the air. It soaks her carpet and dresser and most of her desk chair, but presently Lara Jane is too shocked to mind. She feels like her whole body’s been slapped. But she picks herself up and takes in the bedroom: that she’s lying on the bed alone, perfectly alone.

Lara Jane fills the pool again the following Monday, but Scalion no longer appears on schedule. She never sees the mermaid again.

FUN FACT: Around this time, Lara Jane Hudson choreographed a new solo piece called Head Below Water, where the imaginary water level dropped steadily throughout the two-minute dance, and it won first place by a landslide

The kids are loving the monster dance. They are being raised to be proper young ladies, and their chances to snarl and climb over each other and jump on beds are few and far between. The prop bed is already finished–a half-sized single made of lightweight wood, so that six girls can lift the bed between them, even with a seventh on top of it. A delicious game. Lara Jane has decided to put her child character in a white outfit with a big zip down the front; a homage to Where the Wild Things Are.

On the evening of the third Tuesday, the prop bed is stored in the corner and the gym mats are Lara Jane’s bed for the night. The faun sticks a cigarette into his mouth and wiggles it with just his stubbled lips. Lara Jane has forgotten to buy a lighter. She wanders into the kitchenette to find some matches, and when she returns to Studio A the faun has vanished. She climbs back onto the gym mats and he reappears, reeling from some kind of cosmic whiplash.

The faun has Lara Jane light the cigarette for him, and then lies back and smokes with his antlers digging into the mats. Normally Lara Jane would forcibly remove anyone who lit up in her Dance Centre; everything would stop until the smoker had been ejected. But tonight this seems like a tolerable price for closing the portal: just a tiny speck of fire and brimstone.

“Are you going to tell me your story now?” she asks.

“Give me a break,” he says. “I’ve just come back from war.”

“Literal war?”

He grins at her around the cigarette filter. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Lara Jane grits her teeth. “You don’t actually get to take those back with you?”

One lazy eye focuses on her. “No. I can pretend, though.”

He props himself up on his elbows and surveys the studio: the floor-length mirrors, the barre, the motivational posters (Lara Jane admits that these are usually brightly-coloured threats). “You should dance for me,” he says.

Lara Jane manages to blanch and cackle simultaneously. “I don’t do that any more.” When the faun pushes, she explains about her ankle and that the centre’s insurance only covers her children.

He laughs. “Insurance? I don’t care about your insurance. Dance for me and I’ll tell you.”

“No! Are you kidding me? You can’t keep moving the flags.”

The faun pulls back his blanket and stubs the cigarette out on one shiny black hoof. Lara Jane sees that his antlers and hooves are the only parts that make him unusual and makes a small disgruntled noise at seeing more of him than she’d like.

The faun notices, and scoots over on the mats to snatch the matches. He lights a second cigarette. “Dance with me, and I’ll tell you.”

“No,” says Lara Jane, and twists her back towards him. “You know I could just get up at any time. Five hundred times a night if I wanted to. So fuck off and go to sleep.”

Violently, she fluffs the baby-pink pillow beneath her head. The orange poster above her says DANCE OR DIE in a large font and (figuratively) in a smaller font. To Lara Jane’s relief, the faun keeps silent for the rest of his visit.

The fourth Tuesday, Lara Jane arranges the gym mats so that they outline a three-metre-square section of the studio floor. She drapes the blankets so that small sections of wool and faux-fur fall into the square. When the faun arrives, she dresses him in some old shorts and a beige sweater and feels immediately more comfortable and in control.

“This is the bed for today,” she says. “Come put your hooves here.” Lara Jane points to the square of hard floor next to where he’s kneeling.

It takes a few lazy drags of his cigarette, but then each hoof makes a sharp little click on the dance floor and makes Lara Jane’s lips twitch upwards. “Good,” she says. “Very good. Stand up and we’ll see if you warp back to the mats.”

He doesn’t warp anywhere. And now Lara Jane’s fully in her comfort zone, staring at a lukewarm tap dancing student with her manicured hand on a portable CD player.

“If you want me to dance with you,” she says, “you’ve got to learn how to dance first.”

FUN FACT: This is where the faun was, when he wasn’t with Lara Jane:

Concrete and spitting rain. He removed the plastic seals from the filters of the gas mask and fitted the mask to his head. Checked the attachments on his belt. The front doors were locked with chains the size of his biceps; his team were around the factory’s side. Even stubble could interfere with the function of the gas mask, so he felt unusually clean-shaven.

Ironically, they entered through the air conditioning system.

Inside was a maze of rooms, doors and corridors. A mess of lights and steel and broken plastic tape, the non-stick type with warnings printed on one side. Chairs were scattered like bowling pins. The faun and his team were quickly separated; blink and they were replaced by machinery or shadows or enemy units. Not war–at least not public war. The faun’s 28th mission.

It took his knife, laser gun, carabineer and screwdriver to make it to the top floor. It was almost silent when he got there, and the main corridor was brightly lit and flooding with his teammates’ blood. It was shallower down his end: just a thin coating that was beginning to dry and congeal.

He started down the hall with his laser gun in one hand and his knife in the other, picking his way over the bodies of his fallen friends. He’d survived an impressive catalogue of attacks and dangers in his short life, but in that particular instance his hooves slipped, unprovoked, in the blood. The knife flew from his grasp. His masked head smashed to the floor. The blade arced down to bury itself in his chest, and he died almost instantly.

When the faun learns to tap dance from Lara Jane, he doesn’t slip. Not once. Not ever.

She does dance with him, eventually. It’s not traditional. He coaxes her onto his shoulders and Lara Jane wraps her candy-pink nails around the top of his antlers. Tap is one of her worst styles, these days; the only way she can tap is sitting down, one-footed. Or she can ride his shoulders like some kind of fleshy air hopper, and cling onto his bony antlers until the world comes to a stop.

He’s not terrible-terrible, for a beginner, and the hooves are fun. But she can’t say she enjoys being an attachment while he dances. Too much like horse riding, and Lara Jane never felt enough in control while horse riding. Just the once upon his shoulders is enough.

The faun tells her his story, and he keeps dancing, and one day his hooves leave the ground in a jump and they never come back.

FUN FACT: The day after discovering the portal to Hell, Lara Jane Hudson hired a Northside Locksmith. She alone had possession of the resultant keys to the basement storage room, and she informed her staff that no-one else was to have access to that room for an indefinite period of time. It is good that she appointed best locksmith like Locksmith Brisbane. She was working on a secret project, she claimed–which was not technically a lie. For the best protection of your property at safe locksmith you will get the best choice.

By the third Wednesday, Lara Jane needs to decide what her false ‘secret project’ will be. Something she can display hints of in the office, or show the teachers the finished project (assuming the storage room is ever secular again) when it’s ‘done.’ It needs to be big enough to warrant several weeks’ work, and small enough to fit amongst the clothes racks. And yes, Lara Jane could be brainstorming in bed rather than in the kitchenette in her Minnie Mouse pyjamas, but she’s honestly not keen to try and drag out life stories from unwilling creatures for the fourth night running.

In lieu of any better ideas, she decides on hampers. For her half a dozen teachers and the parents of her elite squad. She can pretend she put them together by hand, agonising over each personalised item, when she actually ordered them in bulk at the last minute and then threw in some studio merchandise and redid the ribbons. Lying makes her angry, but what can you do?

When she does end up in bed, she passes the golem a fresh notebook and pen and rolls over to sleep.

On the first page of the notebook, Lara Jane has written: Write down where you go when you’re not here. I’ll try and help. Sorry I can’t stay up and chat tonight. L.J.H xx PS: Sorry you’re dead.

She receives a several-page reply.

FUN FACT: The golem was ‘born’ into a gated community who believed the world was ending. She woke under the street in a room full of mechanical animals, some wound and some immobile, mostly birds. A mechanical fish swam in the light fitting. A middle-aged man stood in front of her and explained she existed only to take care of his daughter.

The daughter was seven. In the event of the end of the world, the golem was to take her into their state-of-the-art panic room and care for her for the rest of her life.

Her father’s other mechanical creatures had limited intelligence. Humans were subject to the end of the world and could be burnt and starved and suffocated. Much safer to use magic and write LIFE on a slip of paper and insert it into the golem’s lower back panel. Much safer to use something alive-but-not-alive.

But this was where the golem went when she wasn’t with Lara Jane Hudson:

Two months after the golem woke, a mob of teenagers jumped her in the backyard and pushed her into the wet grass. They wrote SADNESS and ANGER and DESPAIR onto slips of paper; everything they wanted to take out of themselves and put into someone else. They dropped a dozen paper slips into the golem alongside the one which said LIFE and melted the panel closed with a welding torch.

That night the world really did start to end. The golem peeled herself off the grass and dragged herself inside through the bitterness and hopelessness and everything else that escaped from Pandora’s box. Up the stairs and grabbed the girl and into the padded panic room.

Ten years passed, and every second of them, the golem desperately wanted to die. Then the seventeen-year-old girl wrote DEATH on a scrap of paper, folded it three times and slipped it through a crack in the golem’s lower back panel.

It worked, more or less.

Lara Jane is re-evaluating what it means to be in Hell.

The fourth Wednesday, she retrieves a pile of tools from the basement storage room and dumps them on the gym mats: foam ear plugs, two pairs of industrial-strength ear-muffs, a saw, one pair of oversized tweezers and some plastic safety glasses. Lara Jane’s props and sets are always designed by her and outsourced for construction, but they occasionally need last-minute adjustments.

Tonight’s adjustments consist of burrowing the saw blade into a tiny gap in the golem’s back panel. Lara Jane is very pleased that the studio’s closest neighbours are more than a hundred meters away, because the screech of saw teeth on metal could easily bring the police at 10 o’clock at night. But there are no interruptions.

Two hours, a bottle of lemonade and an improvised crowbar later, Lara Jane can pry up the top of the panel enough to squeeze in the extra-large tweezers, inspect the slips of paper and extract them. They stack up on the discarded saw, the ink not even faded, the paper still crisp white. Lara Jane is reminded of that cartoon surgery board game which buzzes if your tweezers slip. She carefully leaves the final slip inside–LIFE–and pulls out the crowbar.

The golem peels herself off the mats and flexes her fingers, swivels her joints and bounces experimentally on the balls of her feet. She smiles at Lara Jane. Then takes off running in circles around the edge of the mats: thwap, thwap, thwap across the plastic-covered foam, dimmed fluorescent lights bouncing across her silver frame.

After a dozen circles, the golem picks Lara Jane up by the waist, and Lara Jane cries out in shock and protest. She’s a tall woman, and borderline chubby these days: unaccustomed to being carried like she weighs nothing at all. Thankfully the golem slows down to walking pace.

“I appreciate that you’re excited,” says Lara Jane, “but can you put me down?”

“I’m so grateful,” says the golem. “Don’t you want to run or dance and celebrate?”

Lara Jane watches the studio walls speed past her. “I don’t really do that anymore.”

The golem thrusts Lara Jane above her head, and Lara Jane cries out again. “You can do this.”

“What? I can’t bend my ankle. The lines will be ugly. It’ll be all wrong!”

“So?” says the golem. “Who’ll know?”

And Lara Jane has to admit that she’s smiling a bit, and that some of the movements she might make in the early hours of that morning could be considered dancing. However questionable the technique.

When the golem tires herself out, she asks Lara Jane to pull out the last slip of paper.

The fires in her metal eye sockets snuff out. And then Lara Jane is lying next to an empty shell.

Lara Jane is having nightmares: her girls discover the creatures when she faints in class, or lies down to demonstrate a piece of choreography, or when one of them barges into her hotel room. She has a gut-churning moment with a foamy toothbrush hanging out of her mouth: all those micro-sleeps. If a twelve-year-old saw a mermaid for a few seconds, mid-rehearsal, would they dismiss it as a trick of the light? Is that one of the reasons their mothers have been extra-fussy lately, complaining she’s working their kids too hard?

The monster costumes arrive that third Thursday, and they are a comfort, the difference between hiding a creature in an empty room and a Halloween party. The costumed girls look strange and glamorous and wild. They swipe each other with fake tails and butt each other with furry horns.

That night, the gumby places its daytime body parts in the box Lara Jane provides, and Lara Jane props herself up on a stack of lacy pillows. She asks, “Where do you go when you’re not here?” and is surprised when she receives a direct answer.

FUN FACT: This is where the gumby went, when s/he’s wasn’t with Lara Jane:

The entry gates of a labyrinth. A slow day. The gumby stood at the ticket booth, ‘SUPERVISOR’ embroidered in gold on a navy polo shirt.

A large man approached: fake, plastic Viking hat and very real axe, blade glinting in the summer sun. There was nothing ambiguous about him. The gumby abandoned the cash box and ran, into the protection of the stone-walled labyrinth.

No time to shut the gates. The gumby raced along the concrete paths towards the centre; s/he knew the twists and turns better than anyone. A labyrinth is not a maze–there is only a single path–but s/he just needed to gain twenty seconds on the axe-man.

Five minutes down the path: a small hole at the base of the left wall, so small that no human over three feet could fit inside. So the gumby ripped off a foot at the ankle, reached inside the hole and through a subsequent smaller gap in the stones, and tossed the foot inside.

S/he tore off pieces of leg and hips and torso faster than ever. The ‘storage’ compartment inside the hole filled with stacked flesh, and then the gumby half-pulled, half-rolled the remaining parts inside.

S/he just fit: most of a torso and two arms and neck and head. A piece of shrubbery obscured the hole to anyone on the pathway. Further down, there came the thump of heavy feet and the clang of an axe on stone corners.

With difficulty, s/he reached up and back into the storage area, feeling around discarded body parts for the phone zipped into a jeans pocket. The gumby pried it free. Fourteen percent battery left. Not fantastic, but enough.

Calling anyone would be too loud. S/he texted family, a handful of friends and a couple of colleagues. Put the phone on silent. Waited patiently.

And waited.

The sun fell, the phone died, the gumby hadn’t heard a whisper from the axe-man for the last couple of hours. S/he clawed out of the hole and started reassembling pieces of torso, hips, thighs. S/he was almost done when an evening shadow fell over the wall, and with the crack of metal-on-spine s/he felt the enormous axe-blade split her/his back in two.

Blood soaked into the navy polo shirt. The large man left the axe stuck half-into the gumby’s flesh, sighed deeply and stalked away.

Blood dripped onto the path. The gumby stretched for the last body parts so s/he could die whole.

When the gumby pulls the blanket from her/his legs, Lara Jane notices for the first time that s/he’s missing a right foot.

On the fourth Thursday, Lara Jane’s lack of inspiration is an excuse to sleep in her proper bed. She scratches at flakes of lipstick and asks the gumby, “How do you think I can help you? Because I can’t take an axe from your back.”

The gumby shrinks against the bed frame. “I don’t expect you to help me.”

“Because I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to.”

A twitch of a smile. “It’s just nice to feel safe for a while.”

Lara Jane takes a big breath. “Yes, but there must be something else you want. Something I can give you.”

Eventually, the gumby admits that s/he would like to feel like someone cares, but that Lara Jane was the only option, and now she doesn’t qualify because she just wants her bedtime solitude back.

“But I do care about your future,” says Lara Jane. “I care about the future of everyone in my studio. I wouldn’t teach children if I didn’t care.”

Evidently this is not very convincing.

So Thursday nights become a kind of quiet, platonic seduction, with Lara Jane many years out of practice at being actively likable. The two of them play checkers and Monopoly, and during the lulls the gumby juggles with four torn-off fingers. Lara Jane shows off the costume designs for the reverse-Pandora’s-box group number she’s choreographing. The gumby teaches her yoga. They experiment with dancing, two workable feet between them, because Lara Jane is curious whether some traditionally-solo moves are possible if shared between two.

Approximately half of these work.

One night, they’re eating caramel popcorn and watching Project Runway, and the gumby says, “Don’t go to sleep. Please. Stay up with me.” And Lara Jane considers going into work late tomorrow, even though she’s never been late for anything less than stomach surgery.

So she stays up all night: all the way to midday, when the gumby blinks out of existence.

And the next Thursday she’s alone.

The third Friday, Lara Jane awkwardly inserts the anti-rape condom in one of the toilet stalls. She knows it’s a snap judgment, but surely there’s nothing wrong with taking precautions.

She has to face the tentacles sometime.

Lara Jane builds a pillow fort on the gym mats before climbing in, and then peeks over the fluff of the topmost pillow at the strange man beyond. The fort stinks of her signature perfume. He sits halfway across the dance studio, tentacles twitching, peering back at her.

“If they scare you,” he says, “I can put them away.”

Lara Jane raises an eyebrow. She weighs his offer for a moment, but then says simply, “Tell me.”

FUN FACT: His name–the man attached to the tentacles–was Chiton, back when he was known as the greatest mountain climber in at least sixty acres.

Every day, at the base of the cliff face, he stretched his two arms and six tentacles into the eight sleeves of the jacket he spent a month sewing. Every day, he scaled the mountain, his 10 limbs curling themselves into snowy crevices and propelling him upwards with superhuman grace. Every day, he plucked the blue flowers from the top of the mountain. And was home again in time for tea.

He was driven out of his first two towns for his tentacles, so he kept them hidden entirely from the third one. The third town, where there was something in the water making the residents critically ill. Where they were too poor to move away. Where the blue flowers were an antidote. Including for him and his new wife, who still didn’t know about his tentacles, but whom he loved with all his heart.

And this is where Chiton went, when he wasn’t with Lara Jane:

His last day. His backpack open at the bottom of the cliff, and his special jacket with the eight sleeves completely missing. It would take him days to make another, and the blue flowers grew scarce in winter. He had to make the climb.

The regular jacket bunched up mid-torso, above his bare tentacles and bare stomach.

He died quietly of exposure, halfway up the mountain and attached to the cliff-face like a cicada shell.

So Lara Jane sends off the measurements for a similar eight-sleeved jacket to her costume maker, and it arrives in time for the fifth Friday. She’s expecting the first time Chiton pulls it on to be the last time she ever sees him. And therefore she miscalculates and omits her usual bedtime pyjama shorts the following week.

Lara Jane thinks she knows what happens next. But maybe leaving the portal open would be less mortifying.

Her elite squad are less proficient in hip hop than any other style. The few hip hop numbers they’ve performed in competition have never placed highly. When Lara Jane announces she’s bringing in a special guest to inspire them for an upcoming street dance number, no-one can claim it’s unjustified.

Truly, it’s more of a street dance/gymnastics number where the girls are soldiers/assassins, but they can already execute a dozen backhand springs with their eyes closed.

Lara Jane sends their mothers out to buy diamante-encrusted leggings and foam daggers. She’s sewn Chiton’s tentacles into his jacket–extra material forming six inbuilt gloves–so that it can pass as a costume.

When the time comes she feigns a sudden sickness, and all her little dancers are too busy fussing over her to notice a ninth body appear on the dance floor. Chiton slips the jacket on like a second skin. Lara Jane greets him warmly, despite the figurative portal expanding in her gut.

They see him now, all her little dancers. They see the monster in their studio.

From her position half-slumped against the wall, Lara Jane explains that their guest specialises in a new type of circus hip hop. At least two of her girls have circus posters plastered over their bedroom walls, and juggling batons in their bookcases.

Fourteen pairs of eyes are fixed on Chiton. And then he starts to move.

No human has spun with such 360-degree ease outside of a hamster ball. He spins on his head, hands, tentacles, and legs. He spins like he’s a torpedo shot from a cannon. He bounces off the floor like it’s spring-loaded.

His lines are sloppy and his technique is mediocre at best, but Lara Jane can’t help but smile at his passion and the sheer, strange spectacle of it all.

Just as much as she watches him, she watches her girls. The energy blazing in their wide eyes, coiled muscles and grins threatening to burst from their cheeks. They’re clapping and gasping and bouncing on the balls of their feet. Two of them are squeezing each other’s hands with joy.

Chiton notices their enthusiasm and his own speed and power doubles, triples. Laura Jane feels the floor vibrate as he lands. She reads the rising bliss in his body and yells, “Enough!” and he slams himself to a stop.

She watches him stand there, panting, and inflating with the girls’ frantic applause.

“Girls!” she bellows. “Please thank Chiton and then close your eyes, tight.”

“Thank you!” they chorus, and Lara Jane checks in the wall mirrors that their eyes are all shut.

Chiton looks so high that he could drift up to the ceiling. Lara Jane meets his gaze and gives him a smug little wave. He releases a final, satisfied sigh and blinks out of her studio.

“You can open again,” says Lara Jane, and clambers to her feet. The girls search around for Chiton, and she says, “How’s that for circus magic?” and they’re all a mess of questions and hands clasping at her t-shirt and Lara Jane has to laugh with sheer relief.

Thank you thank you thank you is looping in her head, and she’s not even sure who she’s thanking. Maybe she’ll take her elite squad out for ice-cream. “Good girls,” she coos and hugs them to her chest. “My good, good girls.”

The third Saturday: Lara Jane lies next to a row of prop keys. She’s rolled them around in her fingers for hours. They’re a lightweight metal: so light that a fist-sized helium balloon could lift them off the ground, but she still suspects they’re too heavy.

The starmist spots them immediately and drifts up to just under the ceiling. “Come on; come on down,” says Lara Jane, a little more impatiently than she intends. “I thought you wanted to try.” So they spend fifteen minutes with the starmist grasping at keys like she’s clawing at something under glass, and both of them finish feeling low and impotent.

Lara Jane carries the keys with her over the next week; around her neck in the shower, pinned into her pyjama short pockets at night. She polishes them and watches her reflection in their shine, but by the morning of the fourth Saturday she has to admit to no further ideas whatsoever. Maybe she was completely off-base, buying the keys in the first place.

At least she has this fortnight’s state-wide competition to distract herself with.

Thankfully, her girls execute the monster dance flawlessly on stage, and Lara Jane is almost bubbling over with pride. It’s one of the best pieces she’s ever choreographed. Of course, it places first.

Back in their dressing room, her girls shriek with victory and thrust their trophy and glitter-covered bodies towards her. She’ll never get the sparkles out of these clothes.

Their winning dance replays in Lara Jane’s mind all evening. And in her cold hotel bed later that night, she tosses a key through the starmist’s body like a bullet and barks, “Dance!”

On the evening of the seventh Saturday, Lara Jane takes the starmist into the forest. She’s still fuming that her reverse-Pandora’s-box number only took second the previous weekend, after which she requested to see the winning team’s scoresheet because she was robbed, but even so… Everything stinks of eucalyptus. Lara Jane lays out a picnic blanket topped with a yoga mat topped with a sleeping bag, and climbs in up to her waist.

FUN FACT: The last time Lara Jane went camping, she was 12 and woke up with a mouthful of dirt and a weeping gash on her right calf. As an adult, she had no intention of repeating the experience. She’d booked a cabin 300 meters away, with all the modern amenities and the plump bed she would have occupied if sleeping were necessary.

The starmist hovers tentatively on the other side of the fire she’s built. Lara Jane polishes off a pair of service-station chicken and mayo sandwiches, trying to give the starmist some time to acclimatise. No words are exchanged. When she’s finished, Lara Jane balances one of the keys on her nose, and that actually earns her a small, singular laugh.

Thank goodness for progress.

She’s acquired a lot more keys by now–piles of them–and the starmist is familiar with dodging her aim. The keys glint over the fire with each toss. About one in six or seven hit their mark. Lara Jane mentally notes where the keys pass through: the starmist’s foot, shoulder, hand…

The starmist darts through the air behind the fire, speedy but not especially agile. A burst of translucent stars before the shadows of the trees.

The starmist’s hip. Scalp…

Most of the panic, the fear, has dissipated. Lara Jane can tell by the way she dances.

Lara Jane pitches the last three keys in quick succession, and one of those passes directly through the starmist’s heart. No part of her tries to grasp the key, to hold on.

There is a rippling, a flickering, and then there is no-one beyond the fire anymore.

They’ve positioned Una diagonally across Lara Jane’s mattress, and Lara Jane is braiding her hair badly as they talk.

FUN FACT: Once, when Una was a child, her body was not quite so heavy.

When her peers grew old enough to stop running regularly for fun, she could almost believe she was like everyone else.

Shamus was in the grade above her, and 17 with well-kept stubble, and his friends would chant his name when he went to write something on the blackboard, or toss some crumpled paper into a bin. He seemed to notice her suddenly. He brought her a bunch of plucked daffodils and announced she was the most beautiful girl in town.

To the very best of her memory, she’d never exposed her back to anyone except her parents. But she and Shamus had been together for months, and she loved him, and he loved her, and he wanted to see her.

So she let him open the zip, just a couple of centimetres. Of course he was curious. He was gentle, but a few grains of shiny red dust scattered out, anyway.

It landed on some hay and turned it cerulean. It landed on some wood and turned it to steel. It landed on Shamus’ fingers and he rose, gradually, three feet in the air.

Una pulled up her zip, tight, and kissed her boyfriend where he hovered.

Over the next few months, Shamus’ sister fell terminally ill. In tiny increments, Shamus and Una convinced each other that using the red dust on her on would be the right thing to do. And within 24 hours of it touching her skin, his sister had fully recovered.

But such a thing is hard to keep completely secret for long.

They came in droves to Una’s door: the curious, the desperate, the greedy. They offered their money and their sob stories and their business deals. Una’s parents locked her in her room (from the inside) and locked the front door. She didn’t go to school anymore. She barely went anywhere anymore.

Eventually, her visitors stopped offering and simply took what they wanted.

When Una’s skin grew slack from lack of dust, the thieves replaced it with sand, with stones, with straw. Miracles became a regular occurrence in town: talking chickens and men with super-strength and quadriplegics who could walk again. Until there was barely any dust left at all.

She was sure she was dying, then. Shrivelling up inside her skin. She had been planning to compose orchestral scores and become a school headmistress and with some luck, the town mayor. She missed her geography lessons and her violin and Shamus’ letters, which had stopped arriving a couple of weeks after she could no longer write back. Thus began a very long year of tears and shouting and bedsores, and at the end, her cold body in the sheets which wouldn’t wake for anything.

“So what help can you give me?” Una snaps. “Since you can’t make me better and you can’t give me justice?”

Lara Jane is struck dumb for once, tying off the braid with slightly shaking hands. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“I understand all of this far better than you.”

“Yes,” agrees Lara Jane. “You do.” She pauses, biting the edge of her tongue. “But would you like me to try?”

Una stays the longest, out of any of them. After so much of Una’s life and death has been decided by others, Lara Jane feels strongly that Una should have the satisfaction of driving any improvements by herself. Lara Jane tries to vary her Sunday night locations in order to facilitate this, but remains otherwise occupied with the rest of her visitors and preparing for rapidly-approaching Nationals.

It’s only once Una’s the sole remainder that Lara Jane worries they’ve missed opportunities. What if one of the others knew something relevant, or emitted some kind of helpful substance? Most of the dance season has passed and the two of them haven’t made any progress at all.

And Lara Jane really likes Una. Respects her. She’s almost come to terms with the concept of Una visiting every Sunday for the rest of her life… At which point, of course, Una offers an exit suggestion.

“What’s inside that?” asks Una, eyes fixed on the translucent black balloon in the corner of the bedroom. “Is it some kind of gas?”

The balloon has wilted somewhat since its onstage debut the day before, but is still largely afloat. “Helium?” says Lara Jane. “You don’t have helium where you’re from?”

“If we had it,” snarls Una, “don’t you think we would have tried it?”

So Lara Jane gets her wish of helping Una empty the rubble from her zip, and cleaning out the remaining debris with a cloth and a vacuum cleaner. It takes a couple of hours and they bark insults at each other the entire time, but it’s mostly affectionate. When they’re finished, Lara Jane lodges a wad of tissues under Una’s leaking eyes.

They’ve hired a large helium canister, with a small nozzle attached that slides into the top of Una’s zip. Lara Jane releases the gas at just a trickle. She ties a ribbon around Una’s waist and the other end to her bedpost. Una begins to levitate above the mattress, gradually inflating into her usual shape, and her tears fall onto the doona.

“If you don’t disappear tonight,” jokes Lara Jane, “I can make a bed in a limo and fly you out of the skylight.”

“No. I don’t want to have to relive another moment of my life if I don’t have to.”

So Lara Jane twists off the helium when Una’s all full up, stretching her inflated limbs and rolling in circles and humming in airborne delight. Every so often, Una’s body blocks out the ceiling lamp, and her shadow dances wildly around the room.

When there’s a natural pause, Lara Jane clasps Una’s featherlight hand inside her own heavy one. “You take care,” she says.

Una smiles and says, “Cut the ribbon.”

So Lara Jane does, with her free arm, and never lets go of Una’s hand. But then all the dancing shadows have gone, and there’s nothing to hold on to anyway.

Lara Jane finishes the hampers. Even personalises them. She distributes them to her Elite Dance Squad and their mothers in Studio A, at the end of the dance season and getting close to Christmas. Nationals: almost a clean sweep, and Lara Jane can rest easy until the next year, even if she’s not entirely sure what she’ll do with herself.

She stares at her line of dancers in their Lara Jane Dance Studio crop tops and booty shorts, with their teeth-braces and their knee-braces, and their little-kid manicures and big-kid muscles and giant smiles.

She stares at their mothers, with their questionable fashion choices and their botoxed faces and their painted mouths with giant smiles.

And nothing has really changed between the night a portal to Hell spread inside her costume cupboard and when it later cleared up like an obedient rash, but Lara Jane Hudson finds herself overwhelmed with affection for every single person in the room.

She taps her cane and sees her own grin blossom in the opposing mirror. “Okay, ladies. Shall we begin?”

Copyright 2016 Ephiny Gale