“Wish it’d decide already,” she says. “Off or on.”
Con isn’t listening, though. “Just one,” he says, “that’s all I ask. Even a butt, with old-lady lipstick on it … ”
Virginia shakes her head. “There weren’t any ashtrays … ” she says, but Con persists, finds a drawer of files, books, clippings, ketchup packets. It’s out of place enough to warrant a line of dialogue: “Household records in the kitchen?” he says. “With the ketchup?”
“This is the country,” Virginia says back, “according to Nona.”
“Not Marlboro … ” Con adds, mister dissatisfied, and moves on to better pickings in other drawers. We stay close on the files, however. As does Virginia. She thumbs through them, reading one here, one there.
“Well,” Con says, making talk, “Was it Elvis on the grassy knoll, Amelia Earhart’s plane in Roswell,66 what?”
“Not sure,” Virginia says, scanning a piece of paper, “… records … a chart? She paid her groundskeeper in food?”
“No taxes,” Con says, “mail the IRS seven percent of your mashed potatoes and gravy and see what they—”
“A weekly rotation,” Virginia continues. “Jeez, as anal as Hale. Pork chops—”
“Corn,” Con supplies in a flat voice.
“Chicken—”
“Corn.”
“Peanut butter—?”
“Corn.”
Virginia laughs. Con gives up his search, approaches Virginia from behind, runs his hands along her hips. “I’m about to not be responsible for my actions,” he says, talking low, then quoting: “‘In a nicotine fit the debonair paramedic ravaged his tempting co-student-slash-worker … ’” He nuzzles into Virginia’s neck a bit and she buries her chin in her throat, pretends to still be interested in the files.
“I’m not your cigarette,” she says, “and I don’t like you.”
“It’s Halloween. You’re in your PJs. We can pretend.”
“You can pretend.” But still, she’s not resisting. As Con runs his real hands down her real side we modestly pan67 to the walls of creamed corn, settle on the unwavering close-up of an ancient pack of emergency cigarettes tucked up there, overlooked. Con and Virginia’s parting words barely make it through.
Virginia: “We need blankets, remember?”
Con: “Among other things … ”68
A toilet flushes o.s. and Nona emerges from the downstairs bathroom, into the low-ceilinged utility room. She’s flipping through the dated porn mag. Hale is bent over an unbalanced pile of storage boxes, the rear pocket of his jeans overstuffed with candles. Nona tsk-tsks the magazine.
“For the days before silicon,” she says.
Hale notices what she has. “When there was privacy, you mean?” he asks.
“When the field was even,” Nona says, “as in un-augmented.”
“My nature girl … ”
Nona rolls her eyes, sets the magazine aside. Studies the place, Hale studying her.
“Not much of a first date is it?” he says. “After six months of non-dates, I mean.”
“Seven and a half,” Nona corrects. “Unofficially.”
Hale smiles. “Sorry for dragging you out here is what I mean.”
“Into your childhood?” she says back without blinking. “I’m not. ‘A remote, romantic hideaway tucked into the primeval forest … ’”
This is their second time alone for us. They draw nearer, touching, an awkward hug but not shy. As if they already know each other’s bodies.
“And isolation has its perks … ” Nona says around Hale’s lips.
“Speaking of perks … ” Hale says back, his hands well under her shirt, “seven and a half months is a long time to … ”
“Court,” Nona says for him, “as in ‘woo,’” then laughs a muffled laugh, assists with the strange mechanics of her shirt—showing us nothing—and again, as Hale smiles and lowers his head to hers, we’re left with a thematic close-up, this time the porn mag in detail, some Adonis and his Venus pumping away, all their shiny parts hidden by words.
“That a candle in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” Nona whispers, and the sounds of heavy petting carry over to Con and Virginia, on one of the two living room couches, Virginia offering only token resistance.
“We’re not the only ones here,” she says, intoning high at the end.
“Still two hours till your parents get out of the movie … ” Con mumbles, flying strictly on autopilot now, and then there’s some thirty seconds of accelerated petting, where there are some flashes of skin, but not when we want them on-screen anymore, either: heavy footsteps are approaching.
Virginia hears, tries to sit up. “Con,” she says.
“Virginia,” Con says, not slowing down, and then behind the couch a figure takes shape as the footsteps cease, and before the tension can mount too high it’s Seri, larger than usual, as she’s carrying a load of blankets, jackets, an ancient flashlight, etc.
“Viewer discretion ad-vised,” she says, not looking away. “Making some medical advances there, guys?”
“On the edge of a real breakthrough … ” Con says, trying hard to ignore her.
“It’s not what it looks like,” Virginia says, pushing Con’s head away, and Seri laughs, unloads her blankets and jackets over them. Sits down on their legs.
“Of course it’s not,” she says. “You were looking for a contact lens, sewing a button, practicing for a part, studying for a diagnostic. Your hair got caught in his zipper—” but then she stops, sits up suddenly, wiping her backside.
Virginia gets meek, apologetic. “Beer,” she says, “sorry.”
“Beer?” Seri says, rubbing her fingers together, afraid to smell.
“Honest,” Virginia says.
“Speaking of,” Con says, rubbing his eye as if trying to focus the world, “I think I lost a contact on the porch … ” He leads Virginia to the front door, pleading with Seri to be quiet. Seri shakes her head in disapproval, but shrugs agreement.
“Long as I don’t have to watch,” she says, trying to tap the ancient flashlight alive.
Con has to unlock four locks to get out, all the while keeping Virginia from slipping away.
ON the porch the storm is absolutely howling. Con and Virginia are just standing there, looking at the railing. There’s only one six-pack left.
“I thought you got a case back there?” Virginia says, twice, and when Con finally hears he nods, is confused. Holds up his fingers meaning “two,” yes. He steps to the railing, leans over, and, looking out, is in the same position Hale was in when he was being watched from above. And Con’s being watched as well, the same ambiguously elevated POV. Behind him Virginia squats down for body heat, removing herself from the shot, leaving Con slightly off-center, seemingly indifferent to the cold.
His POV sections off the yard beyond the porch, searches it, and for an instant succeeds: a few yards out is a half-buried silver can. The shot reverses onto Con’s smile.
“That bastard,” he says, teeth all together. He holds up a finger to Virginia, meaning wait, and then jogs out into the yard, retrieves the can—which turns out to be the whole six-pack—and dances the victory jig demanded by the genre: eyes shut, feet happy, death approaching at a breakneck pace.
As he returns to the porch he becomes aware of his tracks. He turns to Virginia, and his smile this time is all about trouble. He holds his hand out for her, but she shakes her head no, shivers for him. He steps up, leans down to her.
“Cold,” she says into his ear, and he nods, considers, then leads her back to the front door, inside, where the electricity is evidently off again, or still off, it’s hard to keep up anymore. Seri has the flashlight-as-overhead hanging by its wriststrap from some hidden nail in the ceiling. It gives enough light to see her: she has the remote control in hand, is pointing successively at the VCR, the television set, the lamps, the floor heater. “Play, talk, on, warm—” she says as she gets to each of them, and then
the door opens, spilling snow, Con, and Virginia. Seri points the remote at them, pushes the appropriate button.
“Enter,” she says.
Con and Virginia do, begin layering themselves in the jackets Seri scavenged.
“Snow angels,” Con whispers to Seri, “shhh.”
Seri points the remote at him: “Off.”
Con notices the overhead she’s rigged. “Nice,” he says, tapping it as he and Virginia open the door quietly again—Virginia almost reluctant, as if fooled into all this somehow.
“Be careful,” Seri says to Con, seriously, not pointing the remote at him.
“Careful’s my middle name,” Con says, then, with his back to her, to himself: “I just never use it.”
Behind him the light he tapped swings back and forth on its string. Seri points the remote at it.
“Stay,” she says, but the extended close-up disagrees.
OUTSIDE, Con is already making snow angels, Virginia not too eager to lie down in the cold. There’s the breathing again, o.s. but close. Virginia maybe hears it too—or feels it—gets spooked anyway, keeps looking behind her. But back to Con, from directly above: one angel complete (and impossibly symmetrical, as if pressed with a form), he rolls over onto his front side for the scissor-angel effect, being careful enough not to leave unnecessary marks in the snow that he doesn’t see Virginia, backing away from him at first, then turning instinctively to run. Inserted is a flash of leathery black pursuit, the flapping.
From directly behind and slightly above her, an unsteady POV is approaching fast, but at the last moment before contact she sheds her jackets, stumbles, continues with her swaybacked run. The jacket is tossed aside, never even hitting the ground. At the next last moment she dives, saving herself once more, but this can’t go on. The next last moment is tight on the weave of her no-longer-taut T-shirt, and then, in a rush of flapping and skin tearing and longindying o.s. screams, she’s forced out of the shot.
Con stands up into the blowing snow, brushing himself off. Another aerial insert, the central image of the promo poster: his scissor-angels nearly surrounding him, his small face turned up. Slowly his POV pans three-sixty.
There through the snow is a large, possibly winged FIGURE—there, there.
“Gin?” he says.
And then he’s running.
IN the utility room Hale and Nona are pretty much where we left them—crouched in the darkness, Hale’s head buried in her willing chest, the reflected snowlight through the high window showing them in outline.
“So am I the first girl you’ve taken into cold storage, Agent Muld—” Nona starts to say, but is interrupted by ‡a close-up of the light pooled on the hardwood floor of the living room. The pool intensifies briefly and then the flashlight crashes into the shot, bouncing once, twice, settling into the darkness it just made.
HALE turns his head toward the living room, grubs for a squeeze light.
“What?” Nona asks, covering herself.
“I don’t know.”
“Is it that important?”
Hale looks to her as if for the first time, then backs away.
“Is it me?” Nona asks, but Hale only shakes his head no unconvincingly, leads her by her hand into the living room, making her dress en route. He confronts Seri with the squeeze light; she has the fireplace poker casual under her arm, a weapon. She looks away from the light.
“Where is everybody?” Hale demands.
“Your shirt’s inside out there, Nona,” Seri says. “Guess everybody’s playing X-Files but me.”
“You don’t really have a shirt to lose—” Nona says, not in a hostile way, but gets interrupted again by Hale motioning for silence, trying to hear through the walls to outside.
“Where are they?” he says again.
Seri looks in the direction of the front yard and back to Nona. “You shouldn’t have told them not to.”
“No,” Hale says, racing for the door. Just as he gets there though, it explodes inward, slamming him square in the forehead. He goes limp and Con falls in over him, kicks the door closed, scrambles to lock it. Moments later it’s rammed hard, by something big bad and mean.
Hale’s depocketed candles roll across the floor in all directions. No one reaches for them.
UP in the attic, out of the action, Egan has just arrived at the window, is looking out. He’s carrying an armload of the blankets, etc., Nona wanted. In the yard below are three shed jackets (two of them Con’s), Con’s ring of scissor-angels, and Virginia’s tracks ending midstep. Egan cocks his head and turns around slow, suspicious of something behind him. His POV zeros in on the trunk, the implied shape behind it, and then the shot reverses to catch the attic window over his shoulder, momentarily blotted out as a black leathery something passes outside, moving simply up. Egan looks back out a moment too late, at the angels and jackets and tracks.
“Idiots,” he says.
As he moves back to the opening in the floor, however, the POV is watching him from the dark.
THE next thing is a candle being carefully lit, and as the shot expands, it’s the last of many, arranged randomly in the fireplace by Nona. She shakes the match out and looks to Seri, sitting on the hearth, her knees tight together, the file drawer from the kitchen beside her.
“That enough?” Nona asks, and Seri nods, the shot tagging along with Nona to Hale, more or less unconscious on the couch. In the chair opposite him is Con, shivering in a blanket, and behind him the front door, bulky furniture piled in front of it.
Back to Seri, reading another chart: “Corn, corn, corn … ” She pushes the page into the fireplace, and it flares up for a moment.
“It’s not in there,” Con says. “It’s fucking outside.”
Seri ignores him though, extracts a dog-eared Strange Stories/Amazing Tales/TimeLife–type book,69 hefts it onto her knees. As she reads, Nona counts the four of them.
“Our numbers are still thinning,” she says.
“Still?” Con asks.
“TJ … Virginia,” she explains, counting down on her fingers, “now Egan.”
“Maybe we should all hold hands,” Con offers. “I’m not kidding here.”
Seri stands from the hearth then, uninvolved with their conversation, all involved with her reading, which she takes vocal: “‘… just as perplexing was the 1889 case of eleven-year-old Oliver Larch of South Bend, Indiana, who vanished on his way to a well on Christmas Eve. Moments after the boy set out, the assembled guests heard Oliver yell for help. But they found only his footprints in the newly fallen snow … the trail began at the door and abruptly ended only halfway to the well.’”70
Seri offers the book around as some kind of proof, but there’s no takers, only a close-up of Hale’s face, his eyes twitching violently in accord with the flashback he’s reliving. It’s still nighttime and he’s fourteen all over again, this time standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, an Arthur C. Clarke paperback in his hand, his finger saving the place as if he just saw something. He has: it’s Jenny, in her wheelchair, facing the front door. Though open-eyed, her eyes are dry and she’s absolutely still, not a sign of life. As we move to Hale’s face for his take on this we lose Jenny, have to rely instead on a combination of Hale’s breathless expressions, punctuated by a series of sounds: the front door opening; wind (which lifts Hale’s bangs); dragging footsteps; that same breathing; the wheelchair shifting in relief. Just as fourteen-year-old Hale opens his mouth to breathe or scream or say No mid-to late-twenties Hale sits up fast from the couch, reeling from the intense little gash on his head.
“No sudden movements,” Nona prescribes. “No solid foods. You know the drill.”
“Your pupils are reactive, sir,” Con adds, pretending to examine, “and careful, now, there’s a thermometer up your ass.”
“We don’t want you sleeping for twenty-four hours, either,” Seri says, playing along. “Now if the nausea persists … ” but she can’t maintain the necessary levity
: “Oh God. What’s out there, Hale?”
“Better yet,” Con adds, “how is what’s out there even possible?”
Just then a clipping escapes the Strange Stories book Seri’s still holding. Which is to say it couldn’t be more on cue. She catches it centimeters before the ground, reads it to herself.
“Virginia?” Hale asks weakly, as if he doesn’t really want an answer, and Con shakes his head no. “Egan …?” Hale asks in an even more hesitant voice, but Con only shrugs.
“Your mother?” Nona adds.
“Your … sister?” Seri asks as she’s reading, then continues: “‘Vanishing act. According to her younger brother, ten-year-old Jennifer Sweren, wheelchair-bound since an ATV accident two years hence, stood from that chair after dinner three days ago, and apparently managed to walk halfway across the yard before—’”
“—before she disappeared … ” Nona completes flatly.
“‘… midstep,’” Seri adds. “Or, as her younger brother recounts, ‘was taken from above.’ Shit, Hale.”
“From above?” Nona asks.
Con leans forward to Hale, now with the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes. “That was you?” Con asks. “In the papers?”
“They got it wrong,” Hale says. “I was fourteen. She was the younger one.”
“Why didn’t you tell us any of this?” Seri asks, but Con answers: “Because this is the kind of thing that’s revealed, right? Timing, man. Consider yourself saluted, Haley. Trick or fucking treat.”
Hale tries to stand, has to lean on Nona for support. But Seri’s not through: “People go to hell for revisiting this kind of shit, y’know?”
“Or just die gruesomely,” Con adds.
Nona looks to Hale. “So what’s out there?” she asks. Hale doesn’t reply, though, just indicates Seri’s clipping. Seri is confused, until she turns it over. And then she’s more confused. She passes the clipping to Nona, who shakes her head at it.
“Our own vanishing act,” she says, dismissing it, “the gargoyle.”
“They got it all wrong,” Hale says.
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