Nona crumples the clipping, tosses it to the fireplace candles, where it doesn’t burn but gets an extended close-up as it uncrumples. There in an artist’s hasty rendering is a gargoyle/demon torso all right, very similar to Egan’s costume, but with the hint of folded wings in the b.g., too tall for the small frame the clipping provides.
DIRECTLY below the attic window, Egan, squeeze light in mouth, gargoyle gloves laid aside, is rummaging through some drawers, finding the usual rocks, video adapters, wing nuts, etc., until the bottom drawer: pistol cartridges. Oh yes. He laughs through his teeth, pockets them, then gets his hair blown into his eyes by a sudden gust of wind. In the attic. He doesn’t understand. Without looking away from the dark area on the other side of the floor opening—which would seem to be a wall—he ferrets something from one of the drawers, tosses it lightly, end over end (flat, silvery, can opener–ish), and just as it’s reaching the top of its arc it’s muffled to a stop by a blanket hanging from the ceiling, bisecting the attic.
“Door number one … ” Egan says.
The wind rustles the blanket in invitation, and Egan holds it aside, crosses over, catches himself in the last instant from stepping into the puddle of melting snow. From an unsteady POV behind him he follows the moisture logically up, to the roof, where there are large holes rotted through. But then he cocks his head slightly, in a way that means he has no doubt this time: he’s being watched from behind.
He tries to initiate conversation—“It wasn’t my idea to come out here, y’know”—but, when there’s no reply, he counts on the slammed-to close-up of his hand, fingers falling, one, two, and on three he spins, onto nothing, no one.
“Of course,” he says, but still takes an unwitting step back, into the melted snow, and with only one warning creak the floor gives beneath him, and he has no chance of catching himself.
THE resulting crash is heard in the living room by Con and Hale and Nona and Seri. Seri smiles a nervous smile.
“Like we’re going to go investigate or some shit,” she says. “Right? Right?”
“They can’t get inside,” Hale says, looking up.
Con sneers. “Says who?”
“They can’t,” Hale says again, and then the backfocus71 delineates Seri, open-jawed in Hale’s b.g.
“They?” she asks.
AS the sheetrock’s already wet, there’s no dust from Egan’s fall. Immediately to his left, though (in the meager glow of his squeeze light), is an overly phallic-looking bedpost, uselessly tall. It scrolls down the screen until his POV is at the ragged hole in the ceiling. Egan winces from the close call, touching his backside to indicate what almost happened to him, here.
“Thank you, dungeon master,”72 he says, to the Cadbury tune,73 and then his POV scans this new place, following the beam of light, and it appears to be Hale’s old room—Traci Lords, Nancy Wilson, Shannon Tweed.74 One wall is different, however. A little girl’s wall. On the single bed running along it, too, is a FIGURE under the blankets, motionless, too vague and buried to guess at the actual size.
Egan doesn’t say anything for as long as it takes to establish the absence of regular breathing, and then he says it to himself, for us: “The little sister.”
He’s already standing, flecks of ceiling acoustic on his face and clothes, glittering.
He walks quietly to the bed. The wall above is cluttered with charcoal drawings but he doesn’t stay there long enough for us to distinguish any more than that—that they’re charcoal drawings. He’s intent on the bed, the figure in the blankets.
His arm extends seemingly on its own, his hand the entire, moving shot, and just as it’s about to make contact we cut away, not to the posters on the wall, as expected, but to Hale, studying the fireplace poker, his new weapon. Beside him, Con is way dissatisfied with the fireplace brush he’s got, is displaying its uselessness by using it to dust years off the coffee table.
Seri’s pacing. “So … they can’t get inside?” she asks, gets no answer.
“How long till daylight?” Con asks Nona.
“Three … two and half hours,” she says, unsure, no watch either.
“And then we can leave?” Seri asks, no answer again.
“I’m going up there,” Hale says.
“You’re what?” Seri asks, but Hale only looks to Con, who shakes his head no, smiles.
“I’ve had my close encounter75 of the night, man,” he says. “Anyway, the sidekick tends to get it in the ass, right?”76
Nona enters the dialogue: “He’s right, Hale.”
“About sidekicks?”
“About not going up there.”
“But how do I know it’s not her?” Hale asks.
“Your mother?” Nona asks back.
Hale doesn’t answer, just places his hand on the banister. Nona closes her eyes in exasperation, opens them, and removes the gun, cocks it professionally. “Note for the log,”77 she says, “there are bad ideas and then there are bad ideas … ”
They ascend together, Mulder and Scully, Scully locked and unloaded. Con cups a hand around his mouth, calls behind them: “Maybe these things that can’t get inside’ll be scared of the bullets we don’t have, right?”
By now Hale and Nona are disappeared. Seri scooches closer to Con on the couch and he continues dusting circles in the coffee table, boring into it. The repetition of it, him, them, foregrounds the rest of the living room, and we pan to the only other interesting thing—the video cabinet—linger on the triple row of horror movies, giving Hale and Nona time to have been in the upstairs hall a few moments already. Nona is wary of the poker Hale’s carrying. The attic stairs are still lowered.
Just to their left Hale is talking to himself: “They can’t get inside, they can’t get inside.”
“You keep saying that,” Nona interrupts, “but you only saw one, right? I mean, if you even saw that.”
Hale looks back to her.
“You were fourteen,” she explains.
Hale doesn’t say anything to her, instead skirts the stairs, steps into his mother’s bedroom, reinspecting the bed, dresser, closet, etc. When he gets to the phone he shoulders the receiver again, in ritual—[whispering] “hello, hello”—but the convenience store connection is still there, static and wind.
“She wouldn’t be up here,” Hale says to Nona, as if just realizing it.
“Your mother?” Nona asks, “I thought we established that. She must be in town, right?”
“Anybody,” Hale says, then, “but it’s my FNA78 house, right? My noises?”
In the hall again, he tries the door to his old room, but it’s still locked. He pushes pulls and rattles it, but it doesn’t even begin to give. The only thing left is the attic staircase, still down. His body language is a study of reluctance.
“Virginia,” he says, guilting himself into action, then steps onto the lowest rung, is about to stand up through the opening when Nona stops him, removes Con’s corpse mask from her belt, offers it.
“Always be prepared,” she says with a light touch, guilty smile.
THROUGH the opening in the floor of the attic Con’s corpse mask appears, on Hale’s fireplace poker. A strange enough sight by itself, eyes aglow with ambient squeeze light, but then it looks around, gets joined by Nona’s gun/Hale’s forearm. After making a round each—the gun watching the mask’s back, and vice versa—the head lowers slowly, is replaced by Hale, squeeze light in mouth. It’s all about contrast: his face isn’t dead and rotting. But it is at the same height, so there’s that association to file away.
In the beam of his light there’s snow falling.
Hale leans back, his POV tracking the snow to the large holes in the roof, the sky beyond.
“Shit,” he says around the light, and his head lowers slowly, into a continuous, medium shot of him spitting the light into his hand. He wipes it on his pants, hands it to Nona, then slams the stairs closed.
“Guys?” Seri calls up, moments later.
“Nothin
g,” Nona calls back, then turns on Hale, “right? You were saying … they can’t get inside?”
Hale answers by jamming the fireplace poker up between the attic door and its jamb, effectively locking it. Nona watches, laughs a sick laugh to herself.
“Yeah,” she says, “assure me why don’t you. God, Hale.”
They’re stairward-bound, finally, without incident, when a potential incident presents itself: the brass doorknob of Hale’s bedroom begins turning. Hale and Nona look at each other, but there’s no time for anything like a plan to pass between them. When the door swings open Nona simply presses her back to the wall, the gun between her and whatever, and Hale instinctively dislodges the poker, swings it. Buries its brass hook in the doorframe inches from Egan’s gone-white face.
Egan holds his hands up.
Nona lowers her gun.
Hale muscles the poker free.
“Just me and my bladder,” Egan says, unblinking, and then—instinctively as well—swings the door shut behind him before Hale, reaching, diving, can catch it. The close-up of Hale’s hand trying the knob est. that it’s locked again.
Hale turns his head slow to Egan, and all Egan can do is offer the ammo in mute apology.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Nona says, taking the ammo. As they’re heading downstairs, Hale stops under the attic door, shoves the poker back up between the door and jamb, relocking it. Egan looks to Nona with a question in his eyes about this but Nona only shrugs, directs him on.
LATER, as est. by the diminished candle-height: Con on the living room couch, his mouth candy-stained; Seri lost in the book; Hale forcing shells into the pistol; Nona watching him with both disdain and pity.
“Hale,” she says, “just because you want them to be the right size … ”
Hale forces one more in anyway, then just throws the gun down, onto a cushion. Nona jumps, doesn’t say whatever she’s wanting to about gun safety. She tries to remove the shells but they’re seriously in there, at all the wrong angles. She turns to Egan with a heaviness in her shoulders that suggests she’s really turning back to Egan, picking up again.
“What were you doing then, for half an hour?” she asks.
Con raises his head. “It wasn’t him out there, Noan. I’ll vouch.”
Nona silences Con with a glare, returns to Egan. “You know how in the movie the people always die because they didn’t share information?” she asks, leaving a rhetorical space for Egan not to fill, “how you don’t feel sorry for them because in a sense they brought it on themselves—”
“—by not communicating, yes,” Egan finishes. “Like all those blind men in a room with an elephant, one thinking he’s got a suitcase, the other pretty sure he’s got a trashcan or some shit—”
“Exactly,” Nona says. “They never even try to construct a master narrative, meaning that they get to die by episodes—”
“—which for us add up to the master narrative, the elephant, stepping on these blind guys, who think a suitcase is killing them. It’s called dramatic irony, Nona. A device. It keeps us at the circus.”
“Well,” Nona says, mad now, “your refined sense of dramatic irony isn’t helping us any here, Egan.”
“I didn’t figure it all out, y’know.”
“Well what did you see?”
Egan doesn’t answer, instead does a long look to Hale, who finally looks away.
“Nothing,” Egan finally says. “I was getting blankets and I fell through the ceiling. Not my fault the house is in an advanced state of disrepair … ”
Nona stares at him, not looking away until Con can’t handle it, tries to allay the tension: “You two should take it on the road, y’know. Or just get married … ”
Nona doesn’t even acknowledge this.
Seri speaks for her: “Then we can’t trust you, Egan. Sorry.”
“Ask your boyfriend there, why don’t you?” Egan says to Nona. “Our host. The one who tricked us all out here. Like this was just an innocent house call.”
Hale looks from person to person for a few beats. “In the morning two of us can ride out on my three-wheeler—”
“As bait?” Con interrupts.
“They won’t come in the daytime,” Hale says.
“Like they won’t come inside?” Nona asks.
“We don’t know they have,” Hale says back.
Egan paces, studies Hale. Time passes and finally he asks it: “You mean to say you kept that … that three-wheeler?”
“Egan,” Nona says, a warning.
“But this is interesting,” Egan argues.
“Yes,” Hale answers, interrupting them both. “It’s in the shed.”
“Only two of us?” Seri asks.
“It’s just a one-ten.”
“A mean one-ten,” Egan adds, not so aside.
“Egan,” Nona repeats.
Then Egan has a eureka moment: “Ohhh. Like the bicycle at the end of It,79 right? The cornball little rituals we have to do to escape the cycle of horror … ”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Nona counters.
“In the movies, yes,” Egan says.
Con drapes an arm around Hale, buddying up. “Guess it’ll be you and me then, kimo?”80
Nona smiles. “Thought you’d had your close encounter, Conan.”
“Well then me and Nona,” Seri offers. “It doesn’t have to be the guys that save us. We can save ourselves.”
Con tricks a high-five from Seri for that.
“It’s just … ” Hale says, “I know the way out.”
“And you’re joined at the hip with a certain somebody,” Con says. “Right?”
“Then me and Hale,” Seri says, “to be both gender correct and no favorites?”
Nona rolls her eyes at this combo. “Just like old times …?” she says.
Egan is amused by all this. “The problem,” he says, “is that there’s one raft, one river, two seats, and six people—”
“Five,” Nona corrects, shutting Egan’s logic problem81 down before it can get started.
Con offers some generic pixie sticks around for people to draw; no one does.
“Wired enough, thanks,” Seri says.
“We’ll decide later,” Hale says.
“We,” Con repeats.
Egan has a different angle: “There’s still two hours left, anyway, and, as of now (for Nona, holding his spread-fingered hand out), five of us.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Seri asks.
“Math,” Nona says, and Egan nods.
“Subtraction,” he says, almost hissing, and looks around at the crew.
THE dialogue continues in the downstairs bathroom, Hale and Nona, in the medicine cabinet mirror we don’t initially realize is a reflection. Backing off doubles them, though: Hale sitting on the counter, Nona tending the cut in his temple. She has a thimble, bent needle, and sutures from an opened first-aid kit, so old the white’s gone yellow. Hale pulls away in pain.
“It’s going to scar if I don’t get at least one in there,” she says. “It probably will anyway. Not my fault this is a house without butterflies.” She gives Hale a toothbrush to bite. He does.
“I’ve seen your stitches, though … ” he mumbles, and Nona replies by running one through hard, into the waiting thimble of her other hand.
“Why don’t we have these?” she asks herself, poking the thimble with the needle, and then watches as Hale bites the toothbrush through, retches it into the open toilet, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, still spitting plastic.
“Attractive,” Nona says, but still, as soon as Hale looks back up to her she’s at the stitch with a cottonball, dabbing away the thin blood.
As she ties the stitch off she talks: “So what do you think?”
Hale doesn’t get the question.
“About Egan,” Nona clarifies.
“You think it’s him?” Hale asks, eyes narrowed with doubt.
Nona shrugs. “It’s anybody,
anything. He was right about communication, though. You just told me she disappeared. Your sister.”
“What was I supposed to say?”
“You were supposed to trust me. You can, I mean.”
Done with the facial embroidery, Nona flushes the cottonball, and her POV tracks it swirling down. She laughs a bitter laugh through her nose: “No electricity but the phone and the water stick it out … ”
We pan over to Hale, trimming the stitch in the mirror with a pair of scissors, go close on the reflection: the stitch is similar to the thick, stubby black hairs on Jeff Goldblum’s back in The Fly,82 and the transformation-association carries over. But then the shot reverses, to Hale, and his attention has drifted considerably. He leans back from the mirror, looks to Nona, the toilet. “You’re right,” he says. “The electricity.”
Nona squints, playing mental catch-up: “Meaning either the power was intentionally cut, or someone had the foresight to wrap the pipes …?”
Hale walks out with purpose.
“Or something?” Nona says to herself when he’s gone.
ON the kitchen counter is a pyramid of creamed corn cans, a few candles. It has to have taken a while to set them all up. The shot reverses as if tracking a sound—Con making gun noises as he fastdraws the pistol from his belt, fans the hammer that isn’t there, fake-shooting the cans into oblivion.
“Corn, corn, corn,” he says. Sitting on the counter behind him is Egan, watching the cans not fall, either appreciating the show or just enduring it. Again, it’s hard to tell with him. Seri is just inside the doorway from the living room, as if she doesn’t want to be there with them, but doesn’t want to be alone either.
Hale enters, taking the room in in a glance, not interested in Con’s game. Immediately behind him, though, Nona is. She rips the gun away from Con. “That’ll blow your hand off?” she says, waiting for him to try to argue. “Don’t you know anything?”
Con backs off some instead. “If there’s one thing I don’t know,” he says, “it’s anything.”
Nona levels her gaze on Con, accuses him: “You act like nothing happened out there.”
Con looks away, then back, has to answer a serious answer: “Or like too much happened?”
Demon Theory Page 5
