The three of them draw back, no longer so quick to panic. The locks hold.
Nona and Egan look to Hale for a decision. Hale looks at the door, holds his head, closes his eyes and opens them back up. Decides—“We don’t know”—but is interrupted again by the door being rammed. The next impact isn’t quite as hard, and the one after that’s just a weak scratching.
Nona looks to Egan. “Did we even lock that utility door?” she asks.
Egan nods.
They stare at the scratching sound.
“We have to wait till daylight,” Hale says.
“Because they’re that smart,” Egan adds, extrapolating, “smart enough to trick us.”
This time it’s Nona who’s looking at Hale with doubt.
TWO beers and four cans of corn later. The living room windows aglow with dawn, Hale and Egan and Nona positioned around the door with—in respective order—the fireplace brush, a crucifix, and a no-joke BBQ spatula. Nona pulls the door open, and once the wind evens out there’s Seri, blue-lipped, X-eyed, and unconscious, SUV keys in hand, a half hour of key marks scratched into the door. Nona steps cleanly over her, walks to the edge of the porch, shields her eyes.
“Look,” she says, “it’s the sun.”
Hale and Egan do, and it is.
BY midday the storm hasn’t let up yet; it’s just brighter. The house is re-est., an ext. shot rushing down again, not through the front door this time but directly to the kitchen, close on the open cabinets, the wall of corn no longer supporting the emergency pack of cigarettes. As soon as that registers we cut to the breathing POV in the upstairs hall. It’s on the move, a Grendel-cam.92 It finds Egan in the doorway of Hale’s mother’s bedroom, his butt jammed into the corner, feet run up the frame. He’s nodding off, ad-libbing medical terms to himself in an effort to stay awake.
Arranged behind him, beyond the door, are Seri, shivering in her sleep, and Nona, tending to her. Just past them is Hale, crumpled by the window, head buried in something like sleep. The POV lingers and lingers on Hale, until Hale looks up, around, bleary-eyed.
“Hunh?” he asks.
Nona answers without looking: “I didn’t say anything.”
Hale gropes to stand, his head still hurting, the room unsteady around him—a FIGURE rising behind Nona, but it’s just Egan, hovering, yawning.
“We should get a temp on her,” Egan says, indicating Seri, “core sample, y’know.”
“Our geologist,” Nona says, then turns to Hale. “So?” she asks.
Hale looks around, still confused.
“A thermometer,” Egan clarifies, “long glass tube with hash marks, mercury? Named after the guy who invented it?”93
Hale glares at Egan, slouches out of the room, and from an occluded place halfway down the stairs the breathing POV watches him make the corner to the upstairs bathroom, where he’s already found a thermometer in the medicine cabinet. He shakes it, wipes it off, runs it under hot water until steam blurs the mirror. He leans close to it. In his POV there’s something reflected there—a FIGURE behind him. Undeniable, just vague enough to tease. He doesn’t turn around.
“Jenny?” he says, as if not wanting an answer.
Still, he’s not turning around. Instead he looks deep into the sink, the steam, the hushed sound of the thermometer snapping in two between his fingers, blood and mercury chasing each other down the drain, another Psycho-nod.
“Water,” Hale says to himself, then with more meaning: “Water.”
The reflection over his shoulder is just steam now.
HE walks into the bedroom with newfound purpose, his index finger wrapped in toilet paper to stop the bleeding.
“We have water,” he says, then explains: “The pipes are wrapped.”
“You’re so ominous,” Egan says with a fake lisp, but Nona’s following.
“Meaning there was a pipe wrapper?” she says.
Hale nods.
“And not your mother?” Nona continues.
Egan laughs, turns dramatically on his heel, a lecture-hall move. “Am I the only one paying attention here?”
Hale and Nona get all soap-opera pensive, waiting, waiting, but it’s not Egan who completes it: from under the bedcovers it’s Seri. “Dick Hallorann,” she says.
They all reevaluate this bedcover lump that should have been sleeping.
Egan’s the first to recover: “Scatman Carothers,” he explains, “Dick Hallorann … quit hollering … the telepathic cook from The Shining.94 Our corn eater. Your mother’s shrub guy, work with me now, c’mon … ”
“Could it be him?” Seri asks, trying to sit up.
“He’s an actor,” Nona says.
“The other him,” Egan says, then to Hale: “Your mother’s caretaker. She hadn’t fed him for two weeks. Maybe he got hungry.”
“Egan,” Nona says, a first warning.
“Just a contribution,” Egan snaps back.
Hale doesn’t break them up, is already somewhere else, playing connect-the-dots: “Maybe he’s the one who took her to town … ”
“Your mother?” Nona asks.
“Along with Virginia and Con,” Egan says before Hale can answer. “Yeah, they’re all in town waiting for us, Hale. By the way, how’s that concussion?”
“Fuck you, Egan.”
Nona tries to redirect: “Maybe the caretaker—”
“Will save us?” Egan interrupts. “Yeah, likely. I’ll take my chances on our getaway vehicle for two, personally.”
By now Hale is removed enough from the conversation that he’s at the window.
“Hale?” Egan says.
Hale catches up mentally. “Yeah,” he says, “okay. Yes. We can get it started.”
Nona begins rearranging the blankets over Seri. “I can play doctor here. Daylight’s burning, gentlemen.”
Hale and Egan leave together, an unlikely pair, and we cut ahead of them to the hall. As Hale passes out of the shot, heading downstairs, he slows, looking up, narrowing his eyes at the missing poker that should be keeping the attic jammed shut. We linger on the raw wood where it was.
“What?” Egan asks.
“Nothing,” Hale says, but still, he closes the door for Nona and Seri, checks it, and then walks downstairs, many possible shadows in the hall behind him.
OUTSIDE, the storm is more mewling than howling, and it’s more grainy too, a trick of scale: we’re close on the SUV’s wan headlight, the snow blowing large before it, passing flake by flake almost. The headlight shines, shines, then gets pulled down as the engine grinds, the battery too weak to turn it all the way over. Whoever’s trying, though, tries again, and then we go from close on the headlight to a high angle of Hale, reaching in the SUV window, turning the key with his whole shoulder. He finally gives up, abandons the keys—which already seems to be some kind of obvious mistake in the making—and positions himself near the gas tank, runs a siphon hose into it. Egan enters the shot lugging a gas can. Hale directs him where to hold it, then takes a big drink of gas, blows it out. Coughs, coughs. No siphon action. He holds his thumb over the hose end, pumping it, doesn’t look at Egan when he speaks.
“No bullshit,” he says. “What’d you see up there, in my room?”
“Your?”
“Our.”
Egan smiles, pretend-reminiscing: “Traci Lords, Shannon Tweed. Angels. And someone sleeping in your sister’s bed.”95
“Sleeping?”
“Or something.” The storm gusts, interrupting him for a moment. “Now,” Egan continues, “no bullshit. Your father. He have some unholy alliance with corn we should know about?”
Just when it seems Hale isn’t going to answer again, he does: “He split for Idaho after … the Jenny thing.”
“‘The Jenny thing,’” Egan repeats. “Now that’s the healthy way to remember it. No annoying details.”
Beat.
“And you’re mixing your vegetables anyway,” Egan says. “Idaho’s potatoes, not corn.”
Hale talks around the hose he’s about to try again. “You’re asking if he was the caretaker, right?”
“Or is, yes.”
“I don’t know, okay?” Hale says. “I didn’t talk to … to her about things.”
“Your mother, you mean?”
Again though—predictably by now—Hale skirts the question, the pronoun issue. Instead he sucks gas, spits, gets the siphon started. Plunges one end of the hose into the tank. It’s a hollow sound.
He wipes his mouth on his sleeve, grimaces. “Unleaded,” he says, one of his est. shots in the trailer, toward character. Taken in context of the scene, though, it’s not a comical moment, but a stall. What is comical, or has potential anyway, is Egan, not very mindful of the gas tank he needs to be holding steady as it gets heavier.
“You haven’t told Nona this, either?” he asks.
“She’s smart,” Hale says. “She knows.”
“Yeah, well. Con was smart too. Didn’t help him much.”
At the last moment before Egan is going to spill their hard-earned gas, Hale catches it, takes over. Egan stands, bored, sweeps the accumulated snow off the SUV’s roof, a motion Nona is watching closely through the window of the upstairs bedroom. Under the snow, the roof of the SUV is suddenly bare. Just punched-in.
The shot reverses, and over Nona’s shoulder Seri is shivering.
“He’s not there, Sare,” Nona says, “Con. He isn’t there.”96
“But he has to be.”
“You should sleep,” Nona says, “fortify. We all should. This day—” but then doesn’t finish, just waves her fingers near her face as if the day is already flitting away. Which it is.
Seri sits up straighter. “Don’t leave me alone, Nona.”
Nona picks up the phone, listens, evidently hearing more of the same. “We do have an intercom system, I guess. If it comes to that.”
She recradles the phone and Seri watches it, trying to understand.
We backfocus past her, the windowpane that’s already been match-cut once. Through it is the storm, and through the storm is the snow-covered concrete mound that defines the cellar, and then we’re in it. It’s dark, dank. That breathing again, and something else: the unmistakable sound of a shovel falling again and again into the dirt floor. Once the shovel blade glints off some stray light but then is buried, fast and hard. Directly above all this is the vent pipe, blue smoke rising to it, moving away from the sound of the shovel blade crunching.
THE sound doesn’t make it through the vent pipe, though. Only the smoke does. It rises for about a finger’s width and then gets flattened out by the wind. In the vent pipe’s b.g. is the outer edge of the shed. Egan’s voice arrives on-screen moments before he does.
“How long’ll it take on that thing?” he asks. “To the highway or wherever?”
He’s standing in the open door of the shed, Hale staring out into the snow. The three-wheeler’s there before them, red, balloon-tired, round headlight tilted toward the front fender.
“Hour and a half,” Hale says, no eye contact.
“If it still runs.”
“It’s a Honda.”
“Cha-ching,” Egan says. “You getting paid for this or what?” He slicks his hair back for the presumed camera.
“Some of us don’t have scholarships,” Hale says.
“That old song,” Egan says back. “It’s a world of better men, you know. And of them winning.”
Hale, already at the three-wheeler, clicking it up into neutral, starts to say something back to Egan but Egan stops him: “I know, I know. ‘Fuck me.’ Twentieth-century Americans are so articulate. The envy of the civilized world.”
Hale begins pushing the three-wheeler out, and Egan leans into it as well. Their heads are close together.
“Don’t cover up that logo, there,” Egan says to Hale, Hale’s hand on the tank, but Hale’s already ignoring him.
The shot moves with the weathered gas-tank decal as they push the three-wheeler out, until Hale’s hand does cover it up.
NEXT is a tight shot of a coffee can half full of gas, Hale’s hand cleaning a spark plug in it, then we pull back to an angle over him and Egan, Egan squatting on his heels, cleaning his surgeon fingernails. By the grease up Hale’s arm and the dirty snow around the three-wheeler it’s clear he’s been at this a while. Egan wets his lips to speak.
“Two on the o’clock, doctor,” he says, and when there’s no response turns and tosses a snowball at the upstairs window (already a few snowball remnants there too). Nona appears, waves down: they’re all right. Egan returns to the three-wheeler as if to help, but is distracted by a loose string on the naked axle. He pulls, it gives, and soon enough he has a recognizable piece of fabric in his hand—the distinctive pattern Jenny was wearing the day of the accident. It didn’t stand out before, or, was there just enough that we know whose it is now, or was.
Egan holds it up.
“This hasn’t been … ridden since you were fourteen?”
“Twelve.”
“Shit.”
He lets the wind have the fabric, his fingers moving the same as they did when he kissed his mask good-bye. He stands, his insulated back to the driving snow.
“We need some clever way to kill these things, you know,” he says. “Hypodermic arrows or homemade tranquilizers or some shit. We are med students, after all.”97
“Hmnh,” Hale says, unimpressed.
Egan continues. “And unless I fell asleep during all the important parts, the Achilles heel usually involves the origin of the thing … or, things.”
This makes Hale crossthread the plug.
“I wish you and Nona didn’t have to see everything in terms of movie cheese,”98 he says. “We’re just going to ride out, end of show.”
“For you and yours, yeah,” Egan says. “For those of us who remain, however, knowing where these things come from might just make the difference. No bullshit, now. Tell me about some hillbilly Moreau,99 about bats and men and menbats.100 Stone gargoyles come to life. Indian curses, disturbed graveyards, buried spaceships, pterodactyl eggs.101 Whole Boy Scout troops lost and forgotten.”
“You just can’t leave it alone,” Hale says, through with repairs.
“Because we’re not alone.”
Hale throws a rag onto the porch in anger. “I made them up, then,” he says. “For the newspapers. That do it for you?”
Egan looks to the house, as if Nona could hear. “Bullshit,” he says. “No way.”
“Way,” Hale says back.
“Seriously?” Egan asks, and Hale nods once, reluctantly. “Does Nona know this?” Egan asks, the “too” implied. Hale shakes his head no. “Well fuck me,” Egan says after a digestive pause. “Then it is the caretaker … your dad. Your father’s world … ”
“It couldn’t—”
“He’s the only one it could be. The improbable possible.102 So he got himself a hang glider and a javelin, an ostrich and a lance.103 T-bars and some guide wire”—gesturing to the suddenly apparent electric/phone wires laced back and forth above them—“poetic, really. Because a father’s supposed to be responsible for the life of his child, his daughter, he became what you blamed for her death. Thought it was his fault, that since it happened on his watch, it must have been him doing it, like. And then to square himself with the world he took care of your mother until … until she quit feeding him?”
“Give me the gas,” Hale says.
Egan does, still talking: “So you’ve been letting us believe … Con. That demons or gargoyles or some shit were out here waiting for us. Was there really even a phone call, Hale? No bullshit, please.”
Hale doesn’t answer. Instead he tops off the three-wheeler’s gas tank, braces himself to pull the cord. He chin-points Egan to the thumb throttle.
“There,” he says, getting them in sync, “with me, now.”
Egan allows himself to be directed, positioned. But he can’t shut up: “I’m one of those riding out, Hale. If this ever—�
�
And then, with Hale’s first pull, it starts, coughing blue smoke, but also startles Egan into letting the throttle go. Hale dives for it too late. He looks hard at Egan.
“Again, please,” he says.
Egan returns to the throttle and Hale pulls, pulls, rips at the cord until the inserted weak section snaps. He falls back and we leave him midair, Egan looking up at the window.
NONA’S there, watching. Shaking her head.
“Looks like surgery’s over,” she says.
From her POV, Hale and Egan are trying to push-start the three-wheeler now, slipping and sliding, jostling each other in anger, jockeying for position.
“Post-op’s something of a bitch, though,” she says. “They need me, Seri. To think for them.”
Seri sits up. “No—”
“We need to get that thing started. You don’t want to try to stick it out another night here, do you? Listen. You’re alive because you waited until daylight. And it’s daylight now.”
“Math, I know.”
“No,” Nona says, “logic.” She sits on the edge of the bed, in consolation mode. “I’ll stretch the living room phone out to the porch.” She plucks the phone from the nightstand, displays it. “Contingency line one, okay?”
But Seri’s far from consoled: “I can sit on the por—”
“No,” Nona says, “you can’t. All hypothermic people must remain indoors.104 We are med students here, after all.”
“Not for long … ” Seri says, already trailing off.
Nona doesn’t disagree, just begins layering herself in jackets. Seri sits up in her lacy black bra, all doe-eyed and helpless.
“But I thought we weren’t going to split up …?” she says weakly.
Nona smiles, almost a derisive laugh. She indicates Seri’s nearly exposed chest. “Your powers are useless against your own kind, Sare.”
Seri realizes what she’s doing, covers up.
“You’ll probably be safer than the rest of us, anyway,” Nona says, looking around the bedroom. “You’ve got a ceiling, walls.” Nevertheless, she hands Seri a marble bookend, points with her head (her hand still buttoning jackets) at the window. “Throw this at that window if we’re … not online, the intercom. I don’t think Hale much cares about resale value at this point.”
Demon Theory Page 7
