“Demons. Fallen angels. You.”
Stan shakes his head no.
Hale continues, weaker, as if fourteen again: “How could you do that, even? To her legs?”
“Her legs didn’t have any feeling. They hadn’t had feeling for—”
“But she was ten years old … ” Hale says, his voice breaking up.
“I couldn’t let your mother see her … not like that.”
“Dead, you mean?”
“She believed in the angels too. In her own way. Her own angels.”
“You weren’t helping her,” Hale says. “Or me.”
“You don’t understand,” Stan says, but it’s too late: the shear blade in his belt has become far too important. Hale closes his eyes, offers his throat. “So finish it,” he says. “Pretend I’m Jenny. Hide me from Mom. Hide me with Mom.” When he opens his eyes seconds later though, there’s only the blade in the ground, in Stan’s place. Tracks too muddled by their wrestling match to really guess direction.
“No,” Hale says, “not like this.”131
He unplants the blade, snags the flare, then stifflegs it to the front yard, a long shot of him yelling as he rounds the corner of the house: “Fatherrr!”
From the corner of the house he beelines the cellar door, one of the two places he’s yet to visit, then stands over it as if waiting for something.
Egan is squatting just to the side of the door. He coughs to be seen.
“It’s true,” he says, shivering. “They all return to the scene of the crime. To finish … unfinished things.”
Hale looks at Egan as if no longer interested in him. Egan shows what he means by fake-hanging himself again.
“You don’t really have to go down there, though,” he continues. “I’m saying this because you know the way out and I don’t.”
“You’re standing guard,” Hale says. “For him.”
“No,” Egan says, spitting ice, displaying his fingers (that have been in his armpits), “I’m freezing my livelihood off. And you’re fucking paranoid. Guilt, anger, then paranoia. Like a windup toy. I shouldn’t have given you my stuff (he holds his pill bottle out, in display). It makes some people paranoid. You’d be better off asleep. Next you’ll be wondering if any of this is even real. Us, I mean.”
“Don’t anticipate me,” Hale says. “I’ve had enough of that already.”
“There,” Egan says, giddy with it, “it’s already starting. How could I anticipate you if this wasn’t all some mind trip? If I wasn’t some construct … some mental projection, someone programmed into the game just to fuck with you?” He hunkers down further into himself. “I’ll be here when you come up,” he says as good-bye, “if.”
Hale pries the rusted-over padlock off with the blade then flings the door open, giving it to the wind. Drops the flare hissing down. Descends after it.
AT the bottom of the stone stairs Hale breathes too deep, vomits. Vomits again. Stays there for way too long, doing nothing. Finally the stillness is broken by someone behind him—Egan.
“This is sacrilege, y’know,” he says, but still, tosses Hale the snow shovel.
Hale catches it defensively and doesn’t nod thanks, but does show a modicum of trust by turning his back on Egan, digging, digging. Behind him Egan studies the still-hanging noose.
“The freaky things people save … ” Egan says. “But … the medics. It’s SOP132 to cut this, right? They wouldn’t have tried to lift you out, shit … not even in the dark ages of emergency medicine … ”
Hale ceases digging for a moment, studies the noose too. Doesn’t get it either. Poses for a nice through-the-noose shot, the rope-as-frame shaped like a teardrop, oval like a cameo. It manages to signify age, somehow—evoking the past.133
Hale returns to digging and his next thrust crunches bone.
He closes his eyes, opens them.
Egan pushes the rope away, swinging it. “Okay,” he says, not wanting to look, “now we know. We don’t have to—” but Hale does. Bit by bit he uncovers Seri’s mangled body—arm broken to pillow the head, legs shattered, face skin flayed back, her skin pale now from simple blood loss, phone-cord ligatures neat around her neck.
“He was hiding her from me,” Hale says.
“More than hiding, I would say,” Egan adds.
“But she’s got to be here,” Hale says.
“Your mother?” Egan asks, no answer.
Hale digs and digs, even with his father’s blade finally, but only bottoms out on the half-poured concrete floor.
He collapses onto the ground, shaking his head no in delayed response to Egan’s question. “My sister,” he answers, low enough in his throat that it’s almost below hearing. “It happened,” he says, voice rising. “She was here. I saw it … him. She was here … ” He leans back then, against the wall, and it gives: another dirty blanket. Behind it, a narrow tunnel.
Egan backs away from it. “No, Hale,” he says, “seriously now. Even I—”
“Door number one,” Hale says, reckless with defeat, and climbs in, up. Ahead of him someone or something’s scrabbling away—presumably Stan, just moving more like an insect than a man. Hale does everything he can to catch up.
BEHIND him, in the cellar, Egan, scared shitless, tests the rope noose for strength, pats the beam it’s wrapped around.
“Give me five minutes,” he says to the noose. “I’ll be back.”
He trudges up the stairs, with the blade, is sitting, waiting for Hale when he finally emerges from behind the brush minutes later, covered with dirt, etc. Reborn is the visual push. The door cracks of the cellar are glowing evil red with the flare, as is the dust rising angry and steamlike from the vent pipe. When Hale reaches him Egan hands the blade over, and Hale hesitantly accepts it, leans over to catch his breath.
“Been thinking,” Egan says. “Angels and demons are phylogenically134 similar. I mean, the Bible tells me so.”135
Hale looks up at him in question.
“Meaning your sister’s angels were demons already. Before you or your dad even got to them. I saw the wall.”
A beat passes between them.
“She knew,” Hale says finally. “She wanted to die, I think. After I … ”
“You don’t have to say it for me,” Egan says. “I don’t really give a damn. My only question is can we leave now?”
“We?”
“I didn’t have to give you the blade so … politely. As you know. But why believe me.”
“In the morning,” Hale says, a compromise.
“How about now,” Egan says back.
“I—” he begins, then corrects: “We’d freeze.”
“Probably,” Egan says. “But there are worse things.”
In the silent looks they pass back and forth an agreement is reached. They rise, walk to the house, keeping their distance from each other.
“So his name,” Egan says, almost back to his old self—as if it all really is almost over, as if this could be the closing credits already—“it’s really Stan? One vowel away from ‘Sa-tan’? And a son named—”
But the scene cuts ahead before he can finish, to brass buttons, Hale wrestling them together, pulling the jacket over the two he’s already got on. Egan has three jackets on as well, not yet buttoned. He’s in the doorway to the kitchen, stuffing cans of corn into his many pockets. The door yawns behind them, evidently rekicked in. Hale leans the blade against the coffee table, shoulders the phone, listens to nothing, then recradles it.
Egan, occupied with the corn, takes note of this.
“Seri thought,” he says, then starts again: “She thought that the bum at the convenience store was your father. Your eyes, she said. The same.” He two-finger points to his own, as if Hale isn’t getting it.
Hale considers this, lets it go. “What’s with the corn?” he asks finally.
Egan smiles. “Souvenirs,” he says.
Hale shakes his head.
“You want to remember this?”
/> “Proof, then,” Egan amends, then returns to the kitchen for more, leaving Hale alone in the living room, which is improper protocol, typical fare.
The meager candlelight they were able to raise flickers out as the door yawns open again, and there in it—inevitable—is Stan, the exact same posture and everything as when Hale was fourteen and seeing him then. Only now Stan’s in a mask. And Hale isn’t in the kitchen door, but is sitting on the edge of the coffee table, roughly where Jenny was in her wheelchair.
Which is to say he’s in her position.
He’s aware of this.
And he can’t move.
For a moment there’s the distinct possibility that Stan might be dead on his feet, wavering, about to fall, but a quick shot from the porch remedies that: he’s physically whole, unharmed. Entering. Speaking: “I took care of her, for … all this time. While you were gone.”
“Mom?” Hale asks hesitantly, but gets no answer. “Where is she, then?”
“They took her. Into the movie. Her movie. She went.”
“Is that how you say it, ‘went’? They are you, Dad. We’ve got that far already. Have you looked in the mirror? Have you looked in the cellar?”
Stan approaches, closer, closer, Hale backing away at first, then standing his ground.
“You don’t understand,” Stan says, lifting the mask over his mouth to speak clearer.
“Do you?” Hale asks, the blade springing up silently in his hand, Luke and Anakin all over.136 “If everybody has their own way of dying,” he asks, “then what’s yours?”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Mom.”
“Yes.”
“What are you telling me then?”
Stan stares, stares.
Hale continues: “I made them up, Dad. You.”
Stan shakes his head no though, and does it in a way that lowers Hale’s blade in increments.
“You took care of who, then?” he asks.
Stan nods as if Hale already knows, says it anyway: “Jennifer.”
“No!” Hale says, stepping forward with the blade again. “She’s … I saw you bury her, father. I saw you break her legs … ”
“That’s over now,” Stan says. “I replaced her. You saw. She doesn’t have to be there … like that anymore.”
“Where’s Nona?” Hale asks finally, and Stan is at first confused by the question—evidently not all there—then simply looks upstairs. Leads Hale to look upstairs.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t use this,” Hale says, meaning the blade. “After all … this.”
Stan looks to the kitchen—at something—then away. “You didn’t kill her that day,” he says finally. “Jennifer. She’s not—”
“It doesn’t work like that, Dad. You can’t just put my friend in Jenny’s place in the ground. It’s not that easy.”
As Stan’s looking back up though, about to say something, anyway, a can of corn catches him hard under the cheekbone, whips him around, zygomatic arches collapsing in THX.137
“Speak of the devil,” Egan says, striding in. “Old Satan himself. He’ll tell you lies,138 Haley boy. Whatever you want to hear.”
He whips another can at Stan, and Stan goes down to one knee. And another, and another. Because we’re trained to,139 we count the flying cans: six.
The seventh one Stan catches with his gloved hand, as he caught Seri’s bookend. Which is when things turned back on her.
“You,” he says, the mask fallen back down, distorting his words. “Don’t do this a—” but he’s interrupted by a can in the gut. His hand goes there, returns with Nona’s pistol, a fast draw per Videodrome.140
Egan flinches at first but then smiles, advances. Bares himself. Looks knowingly to Hale then back to Stan. “Never point a gun at anyone unless you plan on using it,” he says, “isn’t that the rule?” [looking to Hale to play along] “Isn’t that what he taught you? Isn’t that what all fathers say?”
Stan throws the can he’d caught down. It rolls between them, in slow advance of other projectiles. “I never liked that corn,” he says lucidly, bringing it all down to the moment, immediate cause, immediate effect, and—even with Hale saying “No” nanoseconds too late—the inserted trigger guard frames Stan’s gloved finger, easing back gently.
Egan laughs o.s. and, from an angle that isolates him for effect purposes, Stan’s hand blooms graphically along with the gun, red ink spilling in water. In the strained silence afterward he looks to Hale as if just hearing him, then staggers down to the floor, curling around his hand.
Egan calmly approaches, his own face flecked with shell fragments—tiny dots of blood welling like anger—and stands over Stan, looks once to Hale with an evil grin, then makes his own [swishing] sound effects for the miniknife he has palmed.
“Scalpel please,” he says, handing it from left to right.
He turns Stan brutally over then and goes to work on his neck, carving, carving, removing the mask at neck-level it seems, Stan trying at first to resist, but finally giving in. As Egan leans back to inspect his handiwork—the liberated mask, blood everyfuckingwhere—the garden shear blade emerges from his chest, curving up, up.
The shot backs off to reveal Hale on the other end.
“But we … were winning … it was—” Egan says, trying to look behind, see where he missed this eventuality, but dark, oxygen-rich blood froths up in the place of more words, and he keels over, off Stan.
Hale tries to ferret a pulse from Stan’s wrist.
When there is none he lowers his mouth to Stan’s, breathes life into it. Pumps the sternum dutifully, which only pushes blood out the nicked carotid.
Hale sits back, holds the gargoyle mask up, tosses it aside for the second time. There he is, Stan, some ten years older than in the flashback. Waxy. Lifeless.
“You should have let her rest,” Hale says to him. “It wasn’t your fault. It was mine. I shouldn’t have let her foot—the peg … ”
He stands then, using the stair banister. Egan is on the floor, flaying his hands trying to pull the blade through, refusing to die as he should. It’s a sad spectacle, even for him. He looks to Hale for help.
“I understand,” he coughs, “serious … just … get this … ” but Hale doesn’t, won’t.
“You shouldn’t have come,” Hale says to him. “You didn’t have to.”
As Egan coughs his lungs up and out, Hale allows a muffled bumping sound to lead him upstairs, squeeze light in hand, reunion in the air.
THE feeling in the upstairs hall is all epilogue—Hale with his ear to the door of his old room, trying the knob in vain. Past him, deeper yet in the hall, is the wheelchair glint. He hasn’t noticed it yet. He backs away from the door to kick it in but at the last instant doesn’t, instead pulls the attic stairs smoothly down. Which is when he finally catches the wheelchair glint, is drawn to it momentarily, but turns away. Up the stairs, back down into his old bedroom, via the hole Egan made. He uses the phallic bedpost as a guide down, his POV taking it all in in order: Jenny’s angel wall; his old posters, hot rod models; the locked door; a FIGURE sleeping in Jenny’s bed. Hale approaches, pulls the covers back slowly, revealing Nona, bound and gagged. He unbinds her. She ungags herself.
“I didn’t break the door down,” he explains.
“Yeah,” Nona says, her voice weak, the rest of her disoriented, resisting.
“I wanted to walk out through it,” Hale says. “Us, I mean.”
“Like the bicycle at the end of It.”
On cue, Hale produces the plug to the three-wheeler, offers it to Nona. She takes it, holds it tight. Turns around, wanders to the window, the storm oddly calm past it.
“Blizzard of Oz,” she says to herself, Egan’s words.
“Let’s get out of here,” Hale says.
But Nona’s not quite there yet. “I heard the gun,” she says, leaving room for more, from Hale.
Hale nods, squints as if trying to come up with an acceptable story. Which is to say n
ot the real one.
“You were right,” he says. “It … didn’t shoot.”
Nona waits for the rest; Hale falters on: “Egan’s … not coming with us. We’re the ones who live. My father—”
“He didn’t know what to do with me,” Nona says, as if from a dream. “He carried me all over. Outside, but it was so cold. The other bedroom, but all the blood.”
“He put you here because the door locked,” Hale explains.
“But why didn’t he just … ”
“Because he already had Seri. To replace … to bring my sister back, I think.”
“He was confused,” Nona says weakly. “He was calling me something else too.”
“‘Jennifer,’” Hale says, and Nona’s reflection in the glass doesn’t answer, is trying hard to blink away tears.
IN the living room below, Stan’s chest rises with sudden breath, establishes a shaky rhythm, all rasp, little oxygen. The angle is level with him on the floor. He gropes for the mask with his good hand, latches onto it.
UPSTAIRS, Nona is still at the window, facing out, Hale hesitant to touch her.
“So it’s over?” she asks.
“He’s dead, Nona.”
“So it’s just us now … ” she says.
“A romantic hideaway tucked into the woods … ” Hale offers, trying to lighten the mood, failing: seen from the front side, Nona is crying softly, fists balled. But she doesn’t let it infect her voice; it’s even, controlled: “So, Romeo, where you taking me for the second date?” No reaction shot from Hale before we cut outside, to Stan, mask in hand, slouching out the open door, making it to the middle of the yard. The mask blows away, out of the shot.
Stan looks up into the night, smiles.
“I’m ready,” he says, overlong grey hair whipping serenely around his head, and we pan down his body to his feet, to his tracks coming from the porch, the only sound a leathery flapping.
The shot expands slowly—just like with the mother—and then his footprints end midstep. All that’s left of him is a light splatter of blood on the snow.
It’s not over yet.
THE hall upstairs is empty, the door to Hale’s mother’s bedroom swinging (the window in there broken by Seri), the other bedroom door still closed. Slowly, the knob of the second door turns, turns, and Hale and Nona walk out hand in hand. As they pass the first door a SHAPE momentarily passes the bedroom window—going simply up—but they’re not looking in there.
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