No Exemption for Actors

By Jackie Myre

Rafe lived his life playing dead. Now that he is dead, the playing's just started in the dark immersive theatre of the Mortal Masquerade.

This novel takes place over the same time period as the first two Mortal Masquerade novels "Love Me to the End" and "The Hungry Garden" and includes alternate perspectives of some of those novels' events, along with a whole load of new characters, settings and events.

Cover image adapted from The Tragic Actor (Rouvière as Hamlet)
Édouard Manet 1866

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jackie Myre
• Release date: Jul 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005925055

Jackie Myre

Habitually weird, cheerily dark and proudly genderfluid (male at birth), the pseudonymous Jackie Myre followed an early obsession with cartoonishly bizarre perils into experiments in stage magic, escapology and messy performance art, usually appearing in drag. When middle aged adulthood caught up, Jackie began transferring his experiences in both online fantasy and the Northern UK goth and fetish scene into the Mortal Masquerade series of novels and novellas.Jackie is married with many cats in central England.

Book preview

The Mortal Masquerade:

No Exemption for Actors

by Jackie Myre

Copyright © 2021 Jackie Myre All rights reserved

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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Warning/Disclaimer

All games and deathplays described in this book are presented entirely as fictional fantasy scenarios, most of which could not be safely carried out in real life. Please do not attempt any of the stunts described and always keep kink and fetish play within the boundaries of Safe, Sane, Consensual. As this series teaches in its own quirky way, fantasizing about death in goofy games where you can get up and do it all again is fun precisely because real death is no fun at all. Real death is final, tragic, messy and painful.

Don't die, choose life!

Best wishes, Jackie Myre

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Chapter 1: An Actor Prepares

I am Rafe, an unashamed luvvie and I don't care if they put that on my tombstone. The theatre was my life, and now it is my afterlife, in a very particular way.

I had a fairly privileged upbringing, enough to pursue a career in the arts with a financial safety net in times of difficulty. I went to a good boys' school with a thriving theatre department which prepped me in what would have been a fine selection of repertory roles, had I been born into a different body. I was mostly given feminine parts - my Desdemona was particularly celebrated by   members of the PTA - so when I trained professionally alongside capable actresses those roles were taken from me for good and I had to learn stage machismo from scratch. This is a pretty good metaphor for my schooling in general. Much of what we are told in school is useful only in school, what makes us is how quickly we learn to dismiss all that nonsense and adapt to the real game of life.

I did the jobbing roles one takes in order to get an equity card with all the professionalism and seriousness my art demanded. My portrayal of Charles Darwin in the Deptford Library Fun Day drew sympathetic reviews from the ten or so children who witnessed it while waiting for the magic show, while I humbly consider my Father Christmas at the Cheltenham branch of Toys 'R' Us to be quite definitive.

I jest, of course. But in all seriousness, you are unlikely to have heard of me, fame was never my calling. Something else was.

I founded the Blemished Theatre Company with a group of actors I trained with at university, our speciality was what came to be known as immersive theatre. Murder mysteries were our bread and butter, with steadily rising body counts over the course of our career. We took some inspiration from the theatre of the Grand Guignol, complete with our very own Paula Maxa in the form of Ellen, a talented actress who openly idolised the Most Assassinated Woman In The World and later became my wife, which she joked was a fate worse than death. At least, I think she was joking. We settled in a country cottage on the hills overlooking the town of Ketherton, a former mill town that offered no status or glamour as a postcode but afforded certain economic advantages - namely that the town was a cultural sinkhole, so we could rent office and workshop space far more cheaply than in the main cities, even after taking into account the travel costs of bringing actors in for rehearsals.

The BTC remained moderately successful for the duration of my life and I hope is still going strong since my passing. We developed bespoke productions for particular locations around the country, especially those rumoured to be haunted in some way. And if a venue had no such rumours beforehand we ensured that there were after we had played there.

One of our tropes was to present a ghostly apparition of some terrible past crime, which could only be exorcised if the crime was solved by our audience members. They proved so creative with the solutions they came up with that we took to deliberately not writing a fixed ending, instead going with whatever we considered the most entertainingly ridiculous audience theory we heard being floated. Of course we didn't tell them that was what we were doing, it was so lovely to watch the winner bragging about their intuitive powers of deduction as they left with their friends, having worked out that the victim had been killed by a poison sesame seed shell discarded by a budgie specially trained as an assassin by a jealous business rival who was also a secret agent. We never got to ask these sleuths how they arrived at the conclusions they did, which was probably for the best as they were clearly insane.

Ellen and I remained the bedrock of the company as the other founding members moved on to bigger things, but we were more than happy with what we were doing. True to her Paula Maxa idolatry she demanded to be killed off in some creative fashion with each production, even if she was not the dedicated murder victim. In one haunted house production she played a ghostly narrator who guests would discover in each room having just committed some form of suicide. Another of her ideas was the Time Limited Witness (TLW), a character guests could interrogate for vital information but only until they succumbed to whatever timed deathtrap peril they were discovered in. A typical one would find Ellen in a glass case next to a bomb with a clock counting down . W hen the timer reached zero she'd be blown up, a splat trigger coated the inside of the case with blood and whatever useful information she might have imparted was lost.

I took on the TLW role myself on a number of occasions, but encountered a particularly inescapable time bomb at the doctor's surgery when the first signs of a brain tumour were discovered. It was a bitter blow for both of us when I was given twelve months, tops, but I resolved to keep going for as long as I could and deliberately wrote more death scenes for myself than ever in a finger salute to the reaper. As it turned out, I lasted just under fifteen months, leaving Ellen as my widow and the sole proprietor of the Blemished Theatre Company.

The other spirits on this plane often talk about how long it took them to reach total recall, from observations it seems to be in proportion to how sudden and violent your death was. Because I'd had fifteen months to prepare   I transitioned into the afterlife pretty smoothly, albeit with some surprise at finding an afterlife. I came to in our cottage, alone in bed - I immediately felt the absence of my wife beside me and understood why she wasn't there. I remembered who I was and the nature of my vocation, even though I had no acting jobs to go to or any notion of whether any even existed. I suppose you could say I was resting in peace.

I was quite proud of that pun when I first thought of it, but on reflection it's not that funny.

Upon leaving the cottage, I took a short walk down the lane and through a meadow to the canal towpath, which went into Ketherton in one direction and meandered off in the other to join the waterways of Britain via a dark tunnel dug beneath the moor. It was a bright and sunny day with the sound of birdsong all around. A red kite circled silently above, playing on the thermals. As I walked along the towpath I exchanged brief pleasantries with a few other people also out enjoying the weather. My new home was not far removed from the one I had departed on the mortal plane, but if this was the afterlife it was much closer to Heaven than the alternative.

The first real difference came as I reached the edge of Ketherton, where the fields gave way to untidy wasteland, industrial yards and old mill buildings which in the mortal plane had been mostly neglected and abandoned ever since the fall of the local textile industry. We'd rented rehearsal space in one of these mills before the council stepped in and condemned the building and frequently had to share the space with wild birds that came in through holes in the roof. Now these buildings appeared to have been completely renovated. The windows were intact instead of broken, with signs of habitation visible through some of them. The walls were clean, some with painted murals, surrounded by managed trees and vegetation unsullied by litter or pollution. Even the canal itself had improved. It actually looked like water now, as opposed to the oily toxic sludge I remembered. 

In the centre of town the canal opened up into a wharf. The red bricked buildings around the wharf now seemed to be inhabited by arts and crafts shops of various kinds. A pair of buskers were performing on a double bass and accordion and were giving a pretty fine account of themselves. And they were being watched by a single spectator, sat on a black iron bench directly facing them.

She looked to be about my age (forty-something, give or take), in a stylish red and white sundress with wide sunglasses and a straw hat. She dipped her sunglasses as she saw me approach and gave me a little wave. With no-one else around to talk to I made my way over and sat on the bench beside her.

Hello, she said. I don't believe we've met, are you new in town?

Not as such, I said. But this spot was very different the last time I was here. What is this, heaven?

The lady laughed. That's up to you. Personally, I doubt heaven would let us have as much fun. So you've already hit recall, then?

I don't know about that, but I am dead. I've played enough murder victims over the years to know the feeling. I'm Rafe, by the way, pleasure to meet you.

The lady offered her hand for me to kiss.

Debs. An actual murder victim, as it happens.

I'm sorry, I had no idea.

Debs shrugged. It happened, I ended up here, no point in dwelling on it. At least I'm free of the shithead that did it.

She looked me up and down. So you're an actor, then?

Actor, writer, director, pretentious hack. At your service.

The busking duo played through a repertoire of nuevo tango, baltic folk and a surprise rendition of Another One Bites The Dust. Debs and I appreciated the gallows humour and took the cue to tip generously before leaving together to continue our discussion over coffee. As we went I felt the need to make a confession.

Debs, in case it gets awkward later, I have to tell you I left a wife behind who I love very much. I don't want you to think of me the wrong way.

Debs digested this information.

I can still show you around though, can't I? she asked sweetly.

I'd like that, I replied.

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Chapter 2: The Intent to Live

Debs told me she ran a dress agency for a living and also supplied costumes for a roleplay group she took part in at weekends. She said it was a rewarding afterlife that brought her into contact with a lot of interesting people.

This plane, she said, seems to attract misfits, artists and creative people. A lot of them find communities and jobs that they never would have on the mortal plane. There are still people doing regular boring jobs, but they   all have   weird and kinky things to do on the side which they keep secret out of habit, even though no-one's actually bothered. It's all harmless and fun, psychos and abusers go somewhere else... let's say I'm not worried about running into Strangler McSmalldick here.

Who?

Sorry, my ex-husband, the one that murdered me. Piece of shit, I don't know if he's dead yet but when he does I'm pretty sure he won't be going anywhere nice.

So there is some kind of divine justice, then?

I don't know about that, but the universe does seem to put you where you're meant to be. Why do you think we ran into each other by the canal today? I just had the feeling to go down there for an afternoon stroll, then along came you. You'll get used to odd coincidences around here. Anyway, tell me about what you did. Would I have seen you in anything?

Probably not, I confessed. "I