“Just place her on her spot like a department store mannequin and hope this rookie knows how to hold as still as a corpse and say her lines when the finger of God the director points at her to come to life.”

This time I was escorted onto the soundstage itself. My pulses spiked. Cables on the floor connecting lights and cameras were passé now. The set was a highly lit centerpiece glittering with stainless steel like Grisly Bahr’s real autopsy chamber.

I was guided into position behind the autopsy table with a stunning view of the main event: a naked male corpse minus legs and hands. I fought the prurient urge to see just how high up the torso had been truncated. Three other gowned actors shuffled beside me, knowing their places and taking them, unlike me.

I turned away, using the heels of my hands to shove up the Plexiglas shield. I started to claw at my eyelids with the flats of my fingertips and finally expelled each contact lens. I didn’t care where they landed. Contacts nowadays are cheaper by the dozen.

Luckily, actors are pretty self-absorbed, especially just before a director calls “Action.” Everyone else was fussing with their hair and wardrobe too. I pulled down the shield and turned back to face the corpse.

“ACTION!” ORDERED A commanding male voice from the darkness beyond.

I jumped like a nervous racehorse, then froze. I was a media pro, dammit, at least on camera, if not as an actor. And I’d already learned some fascinating facts about the links between CSI V and corpses.

All I had to do was follow the other actors’ actions with my blue eyes under glass. My lines didn’t come until “Special Effect #1” happened: Corpse is cut.

That’s when I was supposed to jump (and I bet I really would), look at my wristwatch, and mutter Hector’s gibberish I’d memorized. Frankly, I thought the Orson Welles of Sunset Road was losing it.

I watched the surgeon’s scalpel press hard into the legless corpse’s shoulder to draw the left arm of the Y incision.

“Cut!” another voice from the dark shouted.

I jumped again, rank amateur that I was, but I was sure the camera was in loving corpse close-up by this time anyway.

The “surgeon” quickly stepped aside to be replaced by a costumed “double,” the actor playing the surgeon.

“My God,” he began, “the skin is heaving…”

Special Effect # 2 spewed out a spray of what I took for cauliflower florets.

“I hate it when that happens,” the actor-surgeon sputtered with disgust.

I recognized my cue from the script and glanced at my wrist, absent a watch but sporting the world’s ugliest orchid.

Oh, and it also hosted one slick pale macaroni of a Lone Maggot glued to a salmon-and-purple spotted orchid petal. I sensed the camera lens bearing down on me.

Are glorified extras on CSI V sets supposed to heave on camera? I thought not, and began regurgitating my previously meaningless lines, suddenly understanding the cockeyed genius of Hector Nightwine, if not fully appreciating it.

This would be a truly over-the-top unforgettable moment for me and Lilith and little Maggie, who also had a glorified extra role on CSI. Thus spoke Lillian, Tech # 2:

“Our jobs are sad and gruesome to some, yet even the hardest soul can find some guarantee of the goodness of Providence. It rests in the flowers. All our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence, but this simple blossom embellishes life. Only goodness gives extras.

“It’s all right, Doctor,” I said, finishing my interminable monologue, “this small ejected creature you see here is an ‘extra,’ one of death’s tiny unborn messengers sprouting new life from old. Our highest proof of an ultimate Providence lies born of decay on this exotic floral altar of a flower. Our mortal needs and desires make death the worm in the rose, but that which we call a rose is only nature, and the worm within its lovely folds is the future that makes even death smell as sweet.”

I now recognized phrases from everything from Shakespeare to Sherlock Holmes to Madison Avenue admixed in the monologue. I almost ad-libbed my own ending. Heck, I would, combining poet Gertrude Stein with Matthew in the New Testament.

“A rose is a rose is a rose,” I intoned gravely, “when it is not the least of these, a maggot.”

And an ex-TV reporter is an ex-TV reporter, when she is not a ham.

A shocked silence held.

“Cut!” the invisible voice from the dark yelled again.

The general soundstage lighting amped up sunrise bright.

Blinking, I was pushed away from the corpse and rapidly guided off the set. Still blinking, I stopped, only to feel the gown and visor ripped off. Next I heard my false fingernails in expert succession pinging into the steel tray like hail, leaving a gummy residue for me to pick off at home.

“Here’s your top,” Erlene said. We were in the wardrobe room. I grabbed and donned my stretchy knit top, again blinding myself for a few seconds. When I pulled it down and my hair was free, she was propping my blond-banged scarf on one displaying hand.

“Better wear this and haul ass outta here. Your bit created a sensation even on set. That agent on speed-dial should be one happy fella, Lillian.”

“The orchid,” I said vaguely, “the maggot.” She misunderstood me.

“Pros don’t ask for souvenirs, even of signature scenes. The flower stays in Wardrobe and the maggot will be recycled to Living Props for use in another shot… if it doesn’t get too old and grow too big and is destroyed.”

Alas, poor Maggie…

I did as she said and left. The busy crew and cast didn’t even notice a blue-eyed blond ingénue on an exit run. I knew Hector Nightwine had his money shot: an azure-eyed resurrection of Lilith, complete with her single trademark maggot.

And did I know if Lilith was alive or dead? No, but I’d seen that the autopsy scene process could be manipulated, by anyone, even Lilith.

It wasn’t until I got home to the Enchanted Cottage and checked myself in the bathroom mirror that I spotted the tiny blue topaz nostril jewel Erlene had slapped on my nose while slamming on my autopsy shield. She could obey a clipboard instruction sheet like crazy.

That touch made me Lilith down to this betraying trademark I’d worn in Kansas and ditched weeks ago when I realized the Lilith CSI V corpse had sported it too.

Hector Nightwine, the Demon Director of Sunset Road, didn’t miss a thing.

BY 3:00 P.M. the next day I’d put in a long shift watching over Ric and returned to the Enchanted Cottage, where the estate internal phone line was blinking a message. Nightwine was old-fashioned that way.

A jubilant-sounding Hector was summoning me to his palatial office to view “outtakes” on the giant screen hidden behind his expensive wood paneling. I was curious enough to go straight to his office in the main house for the peep show.

I don’t know if he was behind the camera himself but the sequence was… exquisite. My Lilith features were glimpsed through the thin Lexan shield like a fugitive reflection in a moving car window. The high-tech medical spatter guard seemed almost a modern knight’s visored helmet. I resembled a pale somber Joan of Arc behind it.

As I spoke the nonsensical lines the camera angles switched between the cuts into the corpse’s wan skin welling whip lines of blood to my converging face and hand. Closer and closer the camera came… to my vivid mouth and eyes behind the semi-obscuring plastic… to my pale hands with their bloody perfect false fingernails holding the orchid, which in close-up could be seen to tremble as if the petals breathed… to the wet, pulsing fetal curl of the modern Worm Ouroboros, the lowly maggot.

I held my breath at the morbid beauty of it and heard my own voice-over as some mystical unintelligible poem.

“Maggie lives!” Hector crowed as the segment ended.