"This is a bale crusher, its job is to reduce scrap cars to cubes of metal. Someone asked if they could get put in one, and the answer was of course not. These machines crush cars as small as they can go, it's what they're for. But then we thought, what if we broke it, so it only did half a job?"

As he spoke, Scott showed me all the way around the huge, foreboding structure.

"We took apart the plates and completely reset them, so now when this thing crushes a car it just compresses it a bit. You still wouldn't want to be in there, though. So let me show you the second part of the equation."

He took us over to one of the scrap cars and motioned me to look inside. There were thick steel bars inside forming a cage around a single front seat. Sitting in the seat was a crash test dummy with a goofy face drawn on.

"The cage will buckle up under pressure, but because we know where the force is coming from we can somewhat control how it will bend. Hopefully the cage will buckle into a round structure which is much smaller than what we started with, but not crushed flat. We took the engines, steering columns and windows out of the cars so these are just the shell and chassis. If our calculations are right we can crush the car without completely crushing Johnny here."

He motioned towards the crash test dummy sat in the car, who was apparently named Johnny.

"Ready to try it, Chris?"

Chris made his way to the crusher controls, while Scott got back in the loader. He manoeuvred the car onto the top plate of the trailer and reversed back. The car sat between the two crushing plates with Johnny's cartoon grin visible inside.

Scott climbed out of the cab and beckoned me over to the table.

"We mounted a dashboard cam facing inwards to see what's happening in there. Check it out."

Sure enough, Johnny the dummy stared back at me from one of the TV monitors. The other displayed a wide angle shot from a nearby camera on a tripod.

"OK, Chris, let her rip!"

Chris engaged the mechanism and came over to the table to watch the experiment unfold.

The metal wings rose up and enveloped the car, revealing the huge piston arms pushing them up and round. The wings folded inwards, hugging the car with a cacophonous sound of twisting metal. The pistons at either end of the trailer began to engage. Though they weren't visible, I knew the steel walls were closing in, compressing the car into a cube with our hapless test dummy sat right in the middle.

Throughout it all the camera image of Johnny the dummy swayed and tottered about, but remained intact.

The process reversed, revealing a large cube of twisted metal sat on the top plate. Chris shut down the crusher and climbed up to the cube. Scott brought in the loader, between them they carefully secured the cube to the fork and lifted it gently down to ground level.

"Now for the moment of truth," said Scott. He picked up an angle grinder and began sawing at the cube of metal. After a few carefully placed cuts he picked up some jaws of life. Eventually he got the front off, revealing Johnny squashed tight into a small enclosed space, but otherwise intact. Scott and Chris carefully removed the dummy from the chunk of metal, laid him on the ground and inspected for damage. Aside from a few scratches, he'd come out pretty well.

The two men turned to face me like a pair of kids trick or treating.

Scott spoke first.

"So now we want to move on to human trials, but we need to start with someone small."

Chris smiled at me.

"Lexie, how would you like to be put in a car crusher?"

The whole idea was absolutely insane and ridiculously dangerous. So of course I agreed. How could I not?

—

An hour later I was sat inside the cage in the other car, still wearing my office clothes – apparently coveralls never occurred to anyone during all their planning sessions. They gave me a panic button on a transmitter unit which I held in my lap.

"Do up your seatbelt and try to relax," said Scott. "We'll be watching the dashcam throughout, if we see you're in trouble or get the panic signal we'll immediately stop the machine and get you out of there."

"Question," I said. "How many crash dummies did you get through before today?"

Scott and Chris looked at each other uneasily.

"They died so you could live," said Chris.

Suggestion plus willingness, I thought. I reached for the seatbelt and snapped it in place.

Clunk, click, every trip.

Scott climbed into the loader and started the engine. This was by far the stupidest and most awesome thing I'd ever done. And it was only my first day.

Thrill test – check.

Scott lifted up the car with me inside and moved towards the crusher. I looked down at the huge hydraulic plates waiting to consume me. Just as the car was set in place I became aware of another figure standing at the monitoring table. It was Uncle Morbid, watching with interest.

The car shook as the crusher's engines started up. I saw Chris looking up at me from the controls. I gave him a little wave.

He pressed a button and with a loud hiss the metal wings began rising up, blocking out the light around me.

The metal walls closed in and made contact with the sides of the car, there was no going back now. I curled up in my seat as the car creaked and groaned and the cage began to buckle around me. As my seat was pushed back and forth around the centre of the chamber, I noticed the tiny red light and lens of the dashboard cam looking up at me like a little companion, itself bobbing and moving sideways as the dashboard it sat on was crushed from the sides. I remembered my audience watching from the monitoring table and gave them a nervous smile.

The noise was overwhelming, the chamber in which I sat was compressing rapidly and the air pressure eddied, whooshed and pulsated as the structure around me buckled. Then, with my thighs pressed tight together and my arms wrapped around my chest, the noise stopped with a jerk and the panic switch unit tumbled from my lap into the mangled footwell.

I never would have pressed that button anyway. I hoped it didn't press itself by accident.

There was a sudden hiss and the noise started again, this time from the front and rear. I pulled my knees up to my chest and curled into a ball, sat upright in the car seat. After a short while I felt the dashboard pressing lightly against my legs, for a moment I thought I was actually going to get pressed flat. But then the noise stopped and the chamber stopped vibrating.

With a creak the front and back walls began to settle, as the pressure on them from outside was eased. I could hear the wing plates being run back to their original starting point. It was dark and I was curled up in a narrow space, but I knew that I was now stuck in the centre of a crushed car turned into a cube.

I could vaguely hear voices outside, but couldn't make out what they were saying. I was at their mercy, no matter what. I could hear someone moving about outside the cube and felt myself being lifted up in the air and set gently down on the ground. Then came the sound of the angle grinder on the metal outside the cube, some sparks flashing through the buckled steel. Then the jaws of life bit their way into the chamber and Scott slowly appeared, tearing away the front of the metal cube away. I gave him a wave.

It took about half an hour to get me out of the cube. I had cramp in my legs and shoulders but was otherwise unharmed.

"You did great!" said Chris. "How does it feel to get put through a car crusher and survive?"

"Strange," was all I could come up with.

Uncle Morbid came over.

"Well done, Lexie, I knew you'd do us proud. Come over to the table, I have something for you."

They played me back some of the footage. They had compiled the internal and external shots into a split screen playback file which was put onto a memory stick.

"Give this to Maise," he said. "I'm sure she'll enjoy watching you get crushed. And this one's for you, to keep this time."

The other memory stick had "Steve" written on the label.

I smiled and thanked him.

"Why are your clothes all crumpled?" asked Maise when she came to pick me up.

"They put me through a car crusher."

"Cool. I'd like to see that."

I gave her the memory stick. She slipped it into her jacket pocket.

"That's tonight's viewing sorted, then," she said.

"Maise, did you know I was going to get crushed today?"

Maise just smiled and started the engine.

We played back the footage later that night. I looked sweet and vulnerable being loaded into the crusher in my office clothes, I realised it was deliberate that they hadn't given me coveralls, they wanted me looking as human as possible. It was weird watching the car I was sat in being obliterated next to the shot from the internal camera, which somehow survived right to the end.

"It's great that it works," said Maise when it was over. "It must have been a hell of a thrill ride. How did it feel?"

I thought about Maise's reaction. I was pretty sure she'd had a hand in setting this up, but for her own reasons she wasn't owning up to it yet. Now, having watched me being crunched by extreme industrial machinery, she was acting like I'd just stepped off of a mediocre fairground ride while she was holding my coat. It was nothing like the intensity of our other deathplays.

I answered her question.

"Well, obviously it was tight and intense and the air pressure in there does weird things. But honestly, the best part was when I was getting lowered into the crusher, the anticipation."

I paused.

"Was it what you hoped for?"

Maise looked at me, silently acknowledging my suspicions.

"No," she said. "You were as amazing as ever, but then it just kind of happened."

We both sat silently for a minute, trying to figure out how something so incredible had managed to underwhelm us.

"I think I know what's missing," I said.

The next day I went to Uncle Morbid's office with the memory stick.
"Good work yesterday," said Uncle Morbid. "Did Maise enjoy it?"

"We have some notes," I answered. "If I'm not speaking out of place, that is."

"I'm all ears."

"First of all, when you do this thing at the Masquerade you need to get that internal camera up on a big screen," I began.

"We had thought of that, but thank-you," said Uncle Morbid. "What else?"

"Could you play the video, please? There's something I need to show you."

We watched the sequence all the way through. When it got to the point where the vertical plates closed in on the cube and I was pulled into a ball, I asked him to pause.

"Right there. That's when we should have died."

"Who's 'we'?" asked Uncle Morbid.

"Me and Winky," I replied.