Craig and Rebecca's lab was situated at the back of the main house at Morior Studios. At one end was a long worktop, dotted with test jars of various liquids. Around the side walls were metal shelves holding a huge selection of labelled jars, while the back of the room was tiled with a shower and taps built into the wall, drains in the floor and a large tank set in the corner such as you might find in a carnival dunking booth. The tank was filled with a thick dark liquid, almost black. Craig and Rebecca welcomed me, wearing smart casual work attire and white coats.

"It all started with me watching messy gameshows on kids' TV," said Craig. "I was fascinated with all the crazy, colourful gunge they used and wanted to know what it felt like, so I started experimenting, mixing up the things I found in the bathroom or sloppy food from the kitchen. It became an obsession - I'd come home from school, let myself in and mix up buckets of stuff to get covered in before my parents came home. I had to keep it secret, so I learnt to do my own laundry - most of my clothes got gunked and I found out the hard way what clothes and stains I wouldn't be able to wash out or dry easily, but mostly I got away with it. I think my Mum thought I had some kind of obsessive compulsive disorder - hey, maybe I did, I never got tested - but she liked that I was learning domestic skills and cutting down on the amount of laundry she had to do.
I got pretty good at making clown slosh from shaving foam but couldn't recreate the gunge they used on TV, so I started paying attention in chemistry class to see if that helped me figure it out. It turned out the basic recipe was water, some kind of thickener and something to give it colour, food dye or poster paint. The first proper gunge I managed to make used cornflour-based thickening capsules, but by then I'd got a taste for substances in general; how they combined, what textures they had, what would stain, burn or otherwise cause problems - I went down a very messy rabbit hole that became my vocation.
I pursued chemistry all the way through university and ended up working at a food tech lab, where I had access to industrial food thickeners and other chemicals I could use for my gunge experiments. I also found out that I wasn't alone in this particular hobby, there was a fetish community of people online selling pictures and videos of mostly girls getting covered in stuff. I knew I could make better gunge than any of them, but realised no-one wanted to pay to see me getting gunged, so I put out a call for models. And this lady here answered."

Rebecca picked up the story. "I was a school lab technician at the time, so I'd also studied chemistry. I was feeling a bit bored and wanted something daring and interesting to do at weekends, so when I found Craig's call for women willing to get gunged fully dressed, it fit the bill. We were doing mad skits based around mock gameshows where I and some other girls would get drenched in various costumes - we knew there were guys being turned on by it, but mostly it was a fun release, there are certainly worse ways to make a little money on the side. When I saw how Craig approached mixing up the gunge I started making suggestions of my own - like I say, we'd both had similar training - and then we became a team."

"There were other producers doing what we did," said Craig, "but our niche was creating versions of big, crazy messy fantasies no-one else could. For example, when we did a film of Rebecca being tarred and feathered we'd seen other producers do it with molasses or regular black gunge, but we wanted our tar to look like it had been mixed at the roadside. Ours was thick, black, had little lumps of grit (actually tapioca), we even managed to make it steam a little. We had gunge that looked like cow slurry, which Rebecca rolled around in dressed as a milkmaid. Other substances were nicer; we simulated fine pink fondant icing in enough quantity to turn Rebecca into a lifesize cake decoration, wearing a tiered ballgown that set in place as it was coated. While other producers were mostly limited to the same standard gunge in different colours, we were varying texture, weight, consistency and any other aspect we could think of."

"We were gunge artists," added Rebecca with a grin.

"How did you end up doing acid baths and the like?" I asked.

"Our first move towards horror effects came when we were watching a slasher movie one night," said Craig. "The gore effects were laughable, really, really bad, which was hard to ignore when the whole point of the movie was to dispense gallons of blood. It was supposed to be shocking, but it really wasn't. Rebecca said it looked like one of our gunge movies."

"So we made a gunge movie that looked like a slasher," said Rebecca. "I played Jane the Ripper, a serial killer who stalked ladies of the night around dark streets, then instead of stabbing them I'd pour buckets of red gunge all over them while they reacted as if they were being murdered. You know how Bugsy Malone had splat guns to replace bullets? It was like that."

"Then we did a gangster spoof where Rebecca got tied up and buried in cement," said Craig. "It didn't dry like the stuff we have now, really it was just grey coloured gunge with stuff in to make it look gritty. She wanted to get completely submerged so we did that, then we had a bungling policewoman come in and rescue her, getting covered in the stuff in the process. We added a punchline in post where Rebecca realised she'd dropped her keys, went to get them and found the cement had set hard. Of course, we just used the floor for that."

"Still not a death scene, then?"

"No," said Rebecca. "But when we put it out, we got feedback from customers saying they found the danger a turn-on, some said they stopped the movie right after I got covered over so they could imagine I'd actually been buried alive and set in cement. It turned out our customers harboured some dark fantasies - at first I was disturbed by it, but then thought, hey, why not try a little horror. If they want to see me die and come back to do it all again, let's go there."

She leaned forward and smiled, as if to tell me a secret.

"I'll admit, I got a bit of a kick out of it myself, I came to really enjoy dying on camera. The other girls did too - they enjoyed doing over the top deaths for Jane the Ripper and were up for doing more with the concept, so long as we kept it funny rather than creepy. We didn't want to be encouraging psycho killers."

"So that's where the idea for Messy Nightmares came from," said Craig. "It was framed around Rebecca in bed having a series of weird dreams, in each one she and the other girls would get killed in some over the top messy way. The Gladiators fight above the acid pool was one of them, we redid the cement scene with her actually getting buried this time, there was a volcano sacrifice where she got lowered into lava... all way over the top, of course. At the end she woke up to find a giant slug crawling up the bed, covering her in slime. Real or still dreaming, you decide, etcetera etcetera. Messy Nightmares sold well, so we kept the series going with a bunch of sequels, all about killing models in daft messy ways."

"So that's what found its way to Debs' ex," I said. "How did you feel about someone like that watching you?"

"A lot better when I found out he hated it," said Rebecca. "Honestly, though, you can't make adult movies if you're worrying about what weirdo's watching. The best you can do is control the tone and establish boundaries."

Fake death fun, real death not fun, I thought. But I totally got where Rebecca was coming from about doing death scenes.

My first onstage death was when I was smothered in bed as Desdemona. In spite of all the efforts of our English master to drain the scene of any kind of passion, lying prostrate in an Elizabethan nightie to be fatally dominated by a handsome muscular rugby player had an intensity that was hard to deny. I confirmed at university that I was bi (though my heart belonged to Ellen from the night we met), but I didn't know it as a schoolboy. In case you're wondering, Paul was a perfect gentleman and I never assumed anything about him in return.

After my success in Othello I got to play the tragic heroine in other school productions, but as Ellen said they tend to die offstage. Male actors get to ham it up dying in sword fights every now and then, but as Antigone my death by hanging was described in detail while I was sat backstage doing homework, waiting for the curtain call. At one point we began rehearsing a French language play about the revolution which would have had me put to the guillotine as Marie Antoinette, but it was cancelled after a few rehearsals to my great disappointment. In early BTC productions I was routinely poisoned and occasionally shot, but when Ellen started upping the gore and creativity of our killings I looked forward to being murdered just like she did.

"So, do you want to help us with a test?" asked Rebecca sweetly, "We have something we're setting up for the next Masquerade. Of course we try these things ourselves - it's our favourite part of the job - but it helps to get different spirits' perspectives. We can give you some clothes to change into."

"Sure," I said. "What do you want me to do?"

"We're going to boil you in oil," smiled Rebecca.

---

I sat above the testing tank, looking down at the dark slime bubbling and steaming beneath my feet. I had changed into a grey jogging suit with bare feet, my own clothes were hanging up in a changing cubicle in the corner.

"The main difference between what we do now and what we used to do," said Craig, "is that we only had to worry about how substances looked before. Now we're creating full tactile experiences - it has to not only look realistic, but feel plausibly real as well. Now, obviously that boiling oil is neither oil nor boiling. There's a heating element in there that warms it up to the temperature of a hot bath, then we pipe air bubbles through to complete the effect. When they do the game on Saturday they'll be in cages that get lowered into vats in the dungeon set, right now we need you to hop in and put your head under. If you can get into the mindset of it being real so much the better, but we're mostly interested in how it looks as you go in and come out again. Think you can do that?"

I looked down at the swirling goop, it did actually look pretty realistic. With the right atmosphere established in the dungeon, it wouldn't take too much to get the players in the frame of mind to imagine it was real, especially if they were locked in cages waiting to be lowered. I still remembered the panic I'd felt as Hyacinth, looking down at the acid pool, knowing it was only a matter of time. Well, I thought, here goes nothing.

I pushed myself off the bench, immediately sinking to my shoulders in the tank. It did indeed feel like a hot bath, my face was dripping sweat within seconds of entering. That and the bubbles rising around me made it easy to imagine that I was in an actual vat of boiling oil. I took a deep breath out of habit, then ducked my head down beneath the surface. I could feel the hot slime against my face, the bubbles rising around. I stayed under for about a minute, then stood up, wiping my eyes clear as I emerged. There was a mirror on the side wall next to the tank, so I could see myself coated in opaque black tar. If spirits played dead after being pulled back up and out like this, they would resemble charred corpses.

"Thank-you," said Rebecca, making a note on a clipboard which she then set aside. "Now come out and let us have a go."

I climbed up out of the tank and showered off as Craig and Rebecca got in. They removed their white coats but didn't bother changing the rest of their clothes. When they ducked their heads under, they didn't emerge again for a good ten minutes.