Chapter 4: The Board of Directors

Leo arrived at the warehouse the next morning to find the building transformed. Gone were the dim corridors and flickering lights—instead, harsh fluorescents bathed everything in clinical white, and the air carried the antiseptic smell of a hospital. Workers in identical gray uniforms moved through the halls with mechanical precision, wheeling equipment and carrying folders marked with symbols Leo didn't recognize.

"Special day today," Mr. Carruthers announced, appearing at Leo's elbow with his usual unsettling silence. His pale skin looked almost translucent under the new lighting. "The Board of Directors is visiting. They want to meet our newest talent."

Leo's stomach tightened. "Board of Directors?"

"The creative visionaries behind Aethelred Pictures. They're very interested in your work." Mr. Carruthers smiled, but something was wrong with his expression—like he was concentrating too hard on the mechanics of it. "The presentation begins in Conference Room A in one hour."

The editing bay felt different too. The warm, familiar presence of the Steenbeck had been replaced by something sterile and waiting. Leo's dailies from yesterday's domestic violence scene sat on the desk, but he found himself reluctant to look at them. The memory of Elara's bruised face kept surfacing, along with the uncomfortable recollection of how beautiful the footage had looked through his viewfinder.

A soft knock interrupted his thoughts. Elara stood in the doorway, and Leo's breath caught. The bruising on her face had deepened overnight, purple and yellow spreading across her cheek like an abstract painting. But it was her eyes that disturbed him most—they held the same hollow quality he'd seen in Marcus, as if something essential had been drained away.

"I wanted to thank you," she said, her voice carrying a dreamy, distant quality. "For helping me find my truth."

"Elara..." Leo started to stand, but she raised a hand to stop him.

"I understand now what Mr. Carruthers meant about pain being holy. When Frank hit me, I felt something break open inside, something I'd been keeping locked away. It was beautiful." She touched the bruise reverently. "I've never felt so... authentic."

Leo wanted to argue, wanted to shake her and explain that what had happened wasn't art—it was violence. But the words died in his throat as he watched her face transform with a kind of religious ecstasy.

"The Board wants to meet you," she continued. "They're very pleased with your work. They say you have a gift for extracting truth from trauma."

After she left, Leo sat staring at the dailies, his hands trembling slightly. The footage was extraordinary—raw, honest, devastating in its emotional impact. But underneath his professional appreciation was a growing unease, a sense that he'd crossed some invisible line and couldn't find his way back.

The conference room had been reconfigured since his interview. The candlelit atmosphere was gone, replaced by stark white walls and a long metal table that reflected the harsh overhead lights. Workers continued their mechanical preparations, arranging chairs with mathematical precision and testing what looked like recording equipment.

"Mr. Vance." Mr. Carruthers appeared beside him, his movements somehow too fluid, too silent. "Please, take your seat. The Board will be with us momentarily."

Leo sat in the chair indicated, directly across from three empty seats at the head of the table. The other directors were already assembled—about a dozen men and women who looked like they belonged in any Hollywood production office. But their eyes held the same hollow quality Leo had seen in Marcus and Elara, and they all smiled with identical expressions of manufactured warmth.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Mr. Carruthers announced, his voice carrying a formal cadence that sounded almost ritualistic. "The Board of Directors."

The three figures who entered the room made Leo's skin crawl on contact. They moved with perfect synchronization, their steps matching exactly, their breathing audible in the sudden silence. The woman from his interview was there, along with her two male colleagues, but in the harsh light their inhuman qualities were impossible to ignore.

Their skin had a waxy, artificial quality, like expensive mannequins given the semblance of life. Their eyes were too large, too bright, and they never seemed to blink in unison—creating a strobe effect that made Leo's vision blur. But it was their smiles that truly disturbed him—too wide, containing too many teeth, stretching their faces in ways that seemed anatomically impossible.

"Welcome," they said in perfect unison, their voices layered and echoing as if coming from somewhere else entirely. "We are pleased to gather."

The woman—Leo found himself unable to think of her as human—stepped forward slightly. When she spoke, her voice was dubbed, the words not quite matching the movement of her lips. "We have reviewed your work, Leonardo Vance. Your understanding of pain as artistic currency is... evolved."

"Thank you," Leo managed, his voice cracking like a teenager's.

The man to her left tilted his head at an angle that would have broken a normal person's neck. "Your brother's death was... productive. It opened channels in your consciousness that we find most useful."

Leo's hands went to his hair, fingers tangling in the strands. "I don't understand."

"Pain," the third figure said, its voice a whisper that seemed to come from the walls themselves, "is the raw material of authentic expression. Trauma creates fissures in the human psyche through which truth can bleed. You have learned to harvest this bleeding. To transform it into something... nourishing."

The woman stepped closer, and Leo caught a smell like formaldehyde mixed with something sweet and rotten. "Traditional filmmaking is masturbation. Actors pretending to feel emotions they have never experienced. Directors manufacturing drama from imagination. We deal in reality."

"The suffering of our performers is genuine," the second man added, his words slightly out of sync with his mouth movements. "Their pain is real. Their trauma is authentic. This is what gives our films their power."

Leo looked around the table at his fellow directors, expecting to see horror or confusion on their faces. Instead, he found only nodding agreement, as if they were listening to a lecture on basic filmmaking technique.

"I don't understand what you're saying," Leo said, though part of him was beginning to understand all too well.

"You will," the woman said, her smile widening until it seemed to split her face in half. "Each film you create will teach you more about the holy nature of suffering. Each performance will show you how pain can be transformed into something beautiful, something that feeds..."

"Feeds what?"

The three figures exchanged glances, their movements synchronized like a choreographed dance. "Feeds us," they said in unison. "Feeds the work. Feeds the greater purpose of authentic artistic expression."

The man with the broken neck angle leaned forward, his too-large eyes fixed on Leo's face. "Your next project will be particularly... illuminating. We have prepared something special for you. Something drawn from your deepest, most private pain."

Leo's stomach dropped. "What kind of project?"

"A memory," the woman said, her voice taking on the quality of a lullaby. "A moment from your childhood that you have shared with no one. A scene that will require you to direct your own trauma with the same unflinching honesty you brought to your brother's death."

"I never told anyone about my childhood memories."

"You didn't need to," the third figure whispered. "Pain leaves traces. Trauma creates echoes. We are very good at reading these... impressions."

The room seemed to tilt around Leo, the fluorescent lights becoming too bright, too harsh. He realized that everyone was staring at him—the other directors, Mr. Carruthers, the Board members with their inhuman smiles.

"What are you?" he asked, his voice barely audible.

"We are what we have always been," the woman replied. "Collectors of authentic experience. Curators of genuine emotion. Artists who understand that the most profound truth comes from the deepest pain."

"We have existed in various forms throughout history," the second man added. "Sometimes as patrons of the arts, sometimes as directors ourselves. We have guided the creation of the most powerful, most transformative works of human expression."

"And now," the third figure said, its voice like wind through a cemetery, "we guide you."

Leo tried to stand, but his legs wouldn't support him. The room spun around him, and he realized that the other directors were no longer looking at him—they were looking through him, their eyes focused on something he couldn't see.

"The next script will be delivered to your editing bay tomorrow," Mr. Carruthers announced. "It concerns a young boy and his younger brother. A game they played in the woods. A moment of trust that was... violated."

Leo's blood turned to ice. He'd never told anyone about that day, about what had happened between him and Jeremy when they were children, about the game that had gone too far and the secret they'd promised to keep forever.

"How do you know about that?" he whispered.

"We know about everything," the Board said in unison. "Every moment of pain, every instant of trauma, every second of authentic human suffering. This is our specialty. This is our gift."

The woman leaned across the table, her face inches from Leo's. Her breath smelled like decay and old flowers. "You will direct this scene, Leonardo Vance. You will take your most shameful, most private moment and transform it into art. And you will do it willingly, because you understand now what we are offering you."

"What's that?"

"Immortality," she whispered. "Through your work, your pain will live forever. Through our films, your trauma will touch millions of lives. You will become part of something greater than yourself, something that feeds on authentic human experience and transforms it into truth."

Leo looked around the table one more time, seeing the hollow eyes of his fellow directors, the inhuman smiles of the Board members, the mechanical precision of the workers still moving through the halls. He understood now that he hadn't joined a film studio—he'd joined something else entirely. Something that fed on pain and trauma and the raw materials of human suffering.

"What if I refuse?" he asked.

"Then you will leave," the woman said, her smile never wavering. "You will return to your apartment, your debts, your empty life. You will forget about art, about meaning, about the possibility of creating something that matters. You will become ordinary."

"But you won't refuse," the second man added. "Because you have tasted what we offer. You have felt the power of authentic pain transformed into beauty. You have seen what real art can accomplish."

Leo thought of yesterday's footage, of Elara's bruised face, of the raw emotional truth they'd captured. He thought of Marcus dying over and over again in perfect cinematic clarity. He thought of Jeremy's laugh looping endlessly in his memory, and the possibility of finally transforming that pain into something meaningful.

"When do we start?" he heard himself say.

The Board of Directors smiled in unison, their too-wide grins stretching across their waxy faces like wounds. "Tomorrow," they said together. "Tomorrow, you begin your real education."

As the meeting dispersed, Leo found himself walking back to his editing bay in a daze. The harsh fluorescent lights had returned to their previous warm glow, and the building felt almost normal again. But he could still smell that mixture of formaldehyde and flowers, could still hear the synchronized breathing of things that weren't quite human.

The Steenbeck waited for him, its mechanical precision a comfort after the disturbing revelations of the Board meeting. Leo loaded yesterday's footage, watching Elara's performance with new eyes. The pain was real, the trauma authentic, the emotional truth undeniable.

And tomorrow, he would create something even more honest, even more raw. He would take his deepest shame and transform it into art, just as the Board had commanded.

Leo's reflection in the editing machine's glass looked back at him, and for the first time, he noticed how his own smile was beginning to resemble the ones he'd seen in the conference room—too wide, too hungry, too hollow.

Outside, the city hummed with its usual evening energy, but Leo barely heard it. He was already planning his next project, already imagining how he would direct the most shameful moment of his childhood, already anticipating the beautiful agony of authentic artistic expression.

The clicking of film through the Steenbeck filled the silence, steady and hypnotic as a heartbeat, promising that tomorrow would bring new opportunities to bleed for his art.