by Riley Sager
Marge pauses to stare at Charlie. She stares back, knowing they’re alike. Two women made mad by grief.
“The irony is that as soon as I found some sense of purpose again, I got a call from the doctor telling me about the cancer,” Marge says. “My daughter’s in denial. She keeps saying a miracle can happen. But that’s bullshit. There’s no miracle coming my way. My time’s almost up. Which is why you’re here.”
She lowers the knife and picks up the pliers, letting Charlie know exactly what this is about.
Revenge.
The same kind she had fantasized about getting during those sleepless nights when both anger and those little orange pills kept her awake. It never occurred to Charlie that someone else who had known and loved Maddy would have that same thirst for revenge.
And that she’d be on the receiving end of it.
Yet Charlie also understands. Since she blamed herself for what happened to Maddy, it’s natural for Marge to do the same. And since Charlie, at the lowest point of her guilt and grief, had tried to end it all, it makes twisted sense that Marge would want to end her as well.
“You’ve brought me here to kill me, haven’t you?”
Charlie’s amazed at how calm she sounds, considering all the fear churning inside her. It’s how she felt as Josh drove them away from the diner. A combination of terror and inevitability.
Acceptance.
That’s what Charlie thinks has come over her. A grim understanding that this is the way things are going to end.
“No, sweetie,” Marge says. “I’m here for information.”
Her answer doesn’t make Charlie feel any better. Nor does the way Marge flexes the pliers in front of her, opening and closing them like a hungry bird’s beak.
“I don’t know anything,” Charlie says.
“Yes, you do,” Marge says. “You were there. You saw the man who killed my granddaughter. Now you’re going to tell me who he is.”
“I don’t know.”
“You know something. You saw something. Even if you don’t think you did. Maddy told me all about that, you know. Your delusions. How you sometimes see things that aren’t there. But the man who killed Maddy, he was there. He was real. And your eyes saw him, even if your brain saw something else.” Marge taps Charlie’s forehead. “That information’s in there somewhere. You’re going to give it to me. Even if I have to pry it out myself.”
“Maddy wouldn’t want you to do this.”
Marge flashes her another dark look. “Maybe not. But she’s no longer with us, thanks to you. Now, I’m going to ask you a few questions about what you saw that night. And if there’s something you don’t think you remember, well, I’ll make you remember.”
Charlie stares at the pliers, still opening and closing. They make a little clicking sound each time they connect.
Click.
Pause.
Click.
“We’ll start with an easy one,” Marge says. “Just to get that memory going. Were you with my granddaughter the night she was killed?”
“Yes,” Charlie says. “I was.”
“Where?”
“A bar. I didn’t want to go, but Maddy insisted.”
“Why did she insist?” Marge says. “I know there’s a reason.”
“Because she didn’t like to walk alone.”
“Yet that’s what she ended up doing, isn’t it?” Marge says with a curious head tilt, as if she doesn’t already have the answer.
“She did,” Charlie says, knowing not to lie. If anything’s going to get her out of this, it’ll be the truth.
“Why is that?”
“Because I left her there.”
“All alone,” Marge says, not bothering to phrase it like a question. It’s a fact. One Charlie has tried to grapple with for the past two months.
“I regret it,” she says, her voice breaking. “I regret it so much. And if I could go back and change it, I would.”
“But you can’t,” Marge says. “It happened, and you have to live with that. This is your reality now.”
Charlie understands that. So much so that she wishes she could escape into the movies this instant. She longs for the soothing distraction of a film—even one that’s just in her mind. If she could, she’d summon one, taking her away from her current state of uncertainty, fear, and, she suspects very shortly, pain. But that’s not how they work. Even if the projector in her mind does click on, it won’t change the reality that Marge intends to hurt her.
The movies can’t save her now.
“What did you tell my granddaughter before you left her all alone?” Marge says.
Charlie swallows hard, stalling. She doesn’t want to say the words aloud. Not because she fears what Marge will do to her when she does—although Charlie fears that plenty. She wants to stay silent because she doesn’t want to hear them again. She doesn’t want to be reminded of her last words to her best friend.
“Go on,” Marge says. “Tell me.”
“The police already told you what I said.”
“I want to hear it from you. I want to hear the exact words you said to Maddy.”
“I—” Charlie swallows again, her throat tight and her mouth dry. “I told her to fuck off.”
For a long time, Marge says nothing. There’s just silence, thick in the darkness of the lobby. The only things Charlie hears are the pliers opening and closing.
Click.
Pause.
Click.
“For that,” Marge finally says, “I should rip your tongue out. But then you wouldn’t be able to tell me about the man in the alley. What did he look like?”
Charlie twists in the chair. “Please don’t do this.”
“Answer the question, sweetie,” Marge says, holding the pliers open now, the space between the tips exactly the size of one of Charlie’s back teeth. “It’ll be easier for both of us if you do.”
“I didn’t get a good look at him,” Charlie says.
“But you saw him.”
“I saw a figment of my imagination. It was different than the real thing.”
“Or maybe it was the same.”
“It wasn’t,” Charlie says. “He looked like something out of a movie. He wore a hat.”
Marge leans in closer. “What kind?”
“A fedora.”
“And his clothes?”
Charlie closes her eyes, silently begging her memory to conjure what she saw that night. Not the movie in her mind, but the reality she failed to comprehend. Nothing comes to her. All she sees is the same dark figure that’s haunted her for two months.
“I didn’t see them.”
“Yes, you did,” Marge says, angrier now. An anger so palpable Charlie can feel it in her bones. “Now remember.”
“I can’t.” Charlie’s voice is a desperate rasp. “I can’t remember.”
“Then I’m going to make you.”
Marge lunges for her. Charlie bucks in the chair as Marge draws near. Its legs rattle against the floor, creaking from the strain. But Charlie can’t force herself from the restraints.
Not like this.
Not with Marge upon her now, pliers in hand, the tips still opening and closing.
Charlie closes her eyes and, in a last-ditch move to save herself, thrusts all her weight to the left, trying to topple the chair, even though the effort is futile. Her tooth can just as easily be yanked out while she’s on the floor.
Marge uses one hand to steady the chair. The other shoves the pliers between Charlie’s lips without hesitation. Charlie turns her head, but the tips of the pliers hook the corner of her mouth, like she’s a fish caught on a line. Marge keeps up the pressure, first twisting the pliers then knocking them against Charlie’s teeth.
A scream forms in Charlie’s lungs, filling them.
She doesn’t want to scream. She knows it won’t help. Yet here it is anyway, rising in her chest, choking its way up her throat, parting her jaws.
Marge finds the opening and stuffs the pliers through it.
Charlie bites down on them, her teeth grinding against metal.
Marge tugs on the handles.
The pliers open, parting Charlie’s jaw like a car jack.
She tries to scream again, but the pliers are inside her mouth now, snapping open and shut until they close around her tongue.
Instead of a scream, another sound erupts from Charlie’s throat—a strange, grotesque grunt that continues as the ridged insides of the pliers dig into her tongue and Marge keeps pulling, pulling, pulling. So hard Charlie fears she’ll rip her tongue right out. The pain it creates causes more white spots, and Charlie knows their appearance means she’s going to pass out again. Not from chloroform but from pain.
The pliers slip from her tongue with an agonizing rasp and latch onto a molar at the back of Charlie’s mouth. Marge yanks, and Charlie lets out another brutal grunt that’s quickly drowned out by the pliers scraping tooth enamel. A horrible sound that echoes against the inside of her skull.
But then another noise comes.
Distant.
Glass shattering from somewhere else in the lodge.
Marge hears it, too, for the pliers release her tooth and go slack inside Charlie’s mouth.
There’s more noise now. A door opening somewhere and a crunch of glass.
Marge looks behind them. She drops the pliers to the floor and removes the pistol from her apron pocket. Then, without speaking, she stands, grabs one of the lanterns, and leaves to find the source of the noise.
Charlie—in pain, bound to the chair, white spots still swirling across her vision—can only watch as Marge vanishes down one of the lodge’s two wings. The glow of the lantern she carries forms a bubble of light around her. It isn’t until both Marge and the brightness turn a corner and disappear that Charlie sees someone else.
A figure emerging from the darkness in the opposite direction.
Josh.
Seeing him prompts a dozen disparate thoughts in Charlie’s head. Astonishment that he’s there. Relief that he’s alive. Worry about what he might do to her in retaliation for stabbing him.
Half of his sweatshirt is crusted with blood. The other half looks damp with sweat. Josh moves toward her, the stab wound making only half his body work properly. The other half drags behind him. Still, when his half-good, half-limping form draws near, Charlie flinches.
After what she did to him, she expects the worst.
But all Josh does is scan the lobby before whispering, “Where is she?”
Charlie jerks her head toward the wing Marge disappeared down.
Josh puts his hands on her shoulders, almost as if checking for signs of damage. “Are you okay? Did she hurt you?”
Not an easy question to answer. The throbbing pain inside her mouth where the pliers had scraped and clawed tells her that yes, Marge hurt her. But not as much as she could have. Not yet. To save time—and to spare her aching mouth—Charlie just shakes her head.
“Good,” Josh says.
He pulls something out of his pocket.
The knife.
The same one Charlie had plunged into his side.
Unlike her, Josh puts it to better use by cutting through the rope wound around her wrists. He does it carefully, sawing through the rope in a way that won’t cut her. Charlie can’t believe what she’s seeing.
Josh is saving her.
Using the very knife she tried to kill him with.
“I’m getting you out of here,” he says as the rope binding Charlie’s wrists finally falls away.
Josh moves behind her, trying to undo the rope wound around her torso and the chair.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie says, relieved to find that the pain in her mouth lessens when she speaks. “I’m sorry for what I did to you.”
“I’m the one who’s sorry. I never should have let you get into my car. She told me she just wanted to talk to you. I didn’t know she was going to do something like this.”
“And I didn’t know you were a—”
“Bounty hunter?” Josh says. “I figured that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I couldn’t. You’re not a fugitive. And this wasn’t a law enforcement gig. You’re just a college student some old lady hired me to bring to a diner in the middle of fucking nowhere. A private job I took because I needed the money. I could lose my license if anyone found out.”
“So everything you said in the car—”
“Was all just a way to get you here as easily as possible,” Josh says. “I was never planning to hurt you, Charlie. Using force would have been a last resort. So I had to get creative. But messing with your head like that was a shitty thing to do, and I’m sorry.”
Charlie would have been less forgiving under normal circumstances. But it’s hard to stay mad when the rope around her arms drops away from the chair and into her lap. Because her hands are free, Josh lets her try to unloop it from around her as he comes around front again and starts sawing at the ties around her ankles.
He’s almost through one strand when Charlie notices the glow of a lantern over his shoulder.
Marge.
She stands on the other side of the canvas drop cloth, kerosene lantern in one hand, pistol in the other.
Seeing Josh there, about to set Charlie loose and ruin her plan, breaks something inside the woman’s grief-rattled psyche. Charlie sees it happening. An internal snapping that jerks her whole body.
And before it passes, Marge raises the gun, aims, and fires.
EXT. LODGE—NIGHT
Robbie almost used the front doors. After quietly steering his Volvo to a stop behind the dented Cadillac, he intended to just storm into the building, tackle that old waitress if necessary, and retrieve Charlie.
But then he thought about the gun.
He knows the waitress has one. He saw it poking against Charlie’s back outside the diner.
And he’s watched enough movies with Charlie to know things usually don’t end well for characters who simply burst through the front door. Especially if the bad guy has a gun. And since the only weapon Robbie has is the same tire iron he’d used to knock out the Caddy’s taillight, he opted for an alternative route.
Now he clambers through the woods to the right of the lodge. His plan is to find a back way into the building that will let him sneak up on the waitress. But this side of the building isn’t landscaped. It’s just a strip of rocky, tree-choked terrain sitting between the lodge itself and the rushing creek that leads to the nearby waterfall, which is deafening in its roar. Robbie can’t hear anything else, which is good in that it masks the sound of his approach but bad in that it does the same to anyone who might be trying to sneak up on him.
The darkness doesn’t help. The trees here are mostly evergreens with full branches that blot out the moonlight and crowd the ground with shadow. Wearing only sneakers, Robbie’s feet slip often on the snow that had fallen earlier. Never a good thing when you’re mere yards from water. One false step could send him tumbling into the creek, at which point it would be over. Sure, Robbie was the star of the swim team and now a coach, but not even an Olympic gold medalist would be able to overpower the pull of that waterfall.
As he trudges through the snow and the dark, always keeping an eye on the rapids to his right, Robbie knows it would have been easier to use the pay phone he saw outside the diner to call the police.
It also would have been foolish.
He’d already tried calling the police once, and that didn’t help. Then there’s the fact that, had he waited in the diner parking lot for the cops to arrive, he’d have no idea where the waitress had taken Charli
e. He certainly wouldn’t have known this place existed if he hadn’t followed the Cadillac here.
Making his way to the rear of the lodge, Robbie knows deep down that he made the right decision. It’s better for him to be here, where he can actually do something, than back at the diner, waiting for cops who may or may not believe him.
But he also knows he needs to be cautious. Not just in his movements, but in his thinking. He’s a smart guy. He’s studying to be a math professor, for God’s sake. He can deduce his way out of this. Slow and steady. That always wins the race.
But then a noise erupts from deep inside the lodge.
A gunshot.
Robbie’s sure of it.
Not even the angry roar of the falls can disguise that sound.
Hearing it, he knows instantly that slow and steady are no longer going to cut it.
He needs to be fast.
And even then it might already be too late.
INT. LODGE LOBBY—NIGHT
In the echo chamber of the lobby, the gunshot is as loud as a firecracker.
It’s followed by a splat of blood hot on Charlie’s face and a grunt from Josh.
Soft. Surprised.
He lists to the right and hits the floor with a thud that sounds nothing like the way a body lands in the movies. It’s a pitiful noise. Both soft and loud at the same time. Like a sack of laundry landing on a bed.
Charlie looks down and sees Josh facedown on the floor, a bullet hole and widening splotch of blood in the shoulder of his sweatshirt. More blood oozes out from under him, soaking into the canvas drop cloth.
Frantic, Charlie bends forward and tugs at the rope around her ankles. She needs to help Josh. If he’s not already beyond help. He doesn’t move when she looks his way, nor does he make a sound.
On the other side of the canvas, Marge stands with the pistol still raised. Her face is a mask of surprise, as if she, too, can’t believe what she’s just done. Like Josh before her, she leans precariously to the side.