Things Beyond Midnight
Page 23
THIN MAN
This fellow lived up in Vermont, and he believed in falling grandmothers.
(beat)
“Watch out for falling grandmothers,” he used to warn me. “They come down pretty heavy during winter in this area. Most of ‘em carry umbrellas and big packages and come flapping down out of the sky by the thousands.”
(another beat)
This Vermont guy swore he saw a postal worker killed by one. “Awful thing to watch,” he told me. “Knocked him flat. Crushed his head like an eggshell.”
Before ASHLAND can react to this bit of madness, the salesman cuts right in:
SALESMAN
Fruitcake! I know the kind. Like the guy I met who called himself a creative writer. Said he couldn’t write on paper. Not enough texture. So he’d rent a house and scrawl these novels of his on walls and ceilings with a big black crayon, a chapter in every room. When he’d finish the novel he’d rent another house for the next one.
THIN MAN
Did he have talent?
SALESMAN
(with a shrug)
Dunno. I never read any of his houses.
ASHLAND stands up; his glass is empty again.
ASHLAND
I have to get another drink.
THIN MAN
(raising his own glass)
Booze is no good here... no damn good at all.
With a tight smile, ASHLAND moves away from them, back to the bar.
ANGLE AT BAR
Now a frost-haired blonde in sequins edges up to ASHLAND.
BLONDE
I have a theory about sleep. Would you care to hear it?
ASHLAND
Not particularly.
BLONDE
(charging on)
My theory is that we all go insane each night. When we sleep our subconscious takes control – and we become unwilling victims to whatever it conjures up. Our conscious mind is totally out of it. We lie there, helpless, while our subconscious pushes us off high buildings, in front of speeding trains, buries us in quicksand... We have absolutely no control as the mind whirls madly in the skull.
(beat)
Isn’t that unsettling to think about?
ASHLAND
Very. Now, if you’ll excuse me—
But she grips his arm, tightly
BLONDE
I wrote a poem about it...
(begins to recite)
“In the skulled winding sheet of our blooded nightmares We sand-crawl the hallways of madness!”
ASHLAND
I need to find my wife... I know she’s here somewhere, and I—
The Blonde is relentless; she simply won’t let him leave.
BLONDE
(intense, her face close to his)
You know, sometimes, even when you’re awake, your mind can play awful tricks on you. Like this one morning when I was in bed. Woke up. And here’s this huge kind of spider-thing. And I mean it was huge! About the size of a baby. It was right there in bed with me... Well, you can imagine what I—
ASHLAND
(cutting her off)
If you’ll excuse me, I need to find my wife. She’s here at the party.
A hand touches his shoulder. ASHLAND swings around, facing:
SIDNEY
The chauffeur has his jacket off, shirt unbuttoned.
SIDNEY
Looking for Mrs. Ashland?
ASHLAND is startled.
ASHLAND
Sidney! What are you—
SIDNEY
—doing at the party?
(he smiles)
I was invited. We were all invited.
ASHLAND
Where’s my wife?
SIDNEY
(casually)
Around. You’ll run into her. Don’t sweat it.
ASHLAND
(angry)
Damn you! Where is she?
SIDNEY does not answer. He turns away, walks into the depth of the crowd.
Note: More and more people have been entering the main party room and it is now jammed.
CAMERA WITH ASHLAND
as, really pissed, he goes after SIDNEY—and is literally engulfed in the crowd.
We use various distortion lenses... ripple effects... huge close-ups, etc... to achieve a surreal, nightmarish aura as ASHLAND pushes through this mass of bodies in the smoke-choked room.
As he is pushing forward, voices assail him from all sides:
VOICE #1
You can’t get fingerprints off human skin.
VOICE #2
... so he took out the Lüger and blew her head off.
VOICE #3
Like I told him—the X-rays destroyed his white cells.
VOICE #4
They found her in the tub, strangled with a coat hanger.
VOICE #5
What I had, exactly, was a Grade Two epidermoid carcinoma at the base of a seborrheic keratosis.
VOICE #6
Potatoes have eyes. I really believe that.
VOICE #7
Big tiger moth! No blood inside... just like dust when I smashed him against the glass.
VOICE #8
Yeah, yeah... tied in a laundry bag in the car truck. Face was all blue.
VOICE #9
Five hundred seventy six murders in L.A. in 1977. Up to fifteen murders a week by ’79...
VOICE #10
Med schools won’t accept a dead body if it’s more than twelve hours old.
VOICE #11
When a man is shot in the head his eyes go black.
VOICE #12
Never sign your name in blood.
CLOSE ON ASHLAND’S FACE
sweating, filled with panic. His eyes seek out:
HIS POV
the huge Chinese gong, flaring gold from the far wall.
WIDE ON SCENE
as ASHLAND smashes his way through the partygoers to reach the gong.
ASHLAND
(to himself half crazed)
Got to... stop all this...
With his full strength, he drives his right fist directly into the center of the bronze gong.
It trembles and vibrates under the blow. But there is NO SOUND FROM IT.
And no one at the party pays any attention whatever to ASHLAND.
ON ASHLAND
as he staggers back, stunned. The thin-faced cadaverous man leans in close to his ear.
THIN MAN
No use, fella. You can’t stop the party.
ASHLAND
(desperate)
I’m... leaving...
THIN MAN
(with a chuckle)
So go ahead. Nobody cares if you leave.
CAMERA FOLLOWS ASHLAND
as he stumbles to the door, pulls it open, rushes into the hallway.
CAMERA. TRACKS him to the elevator—where he frantically thumbs the “Down” button.
The doors slide open, and ASHLAND reacts to:
LYDIA inside the elevator, smiling calmly.
LYDIA
Been looking for me?
ASHLAND enters in a daze, as the doors close behind him.
INT ELEVATOR
as he stabs the “Lobby” button. The cage descends.
ASHLAND
What’s going on? That party...
It’s insane. Absolutely horrible.
LYDIA
(amused)
But, David, I thought you adored parties.
ASHLAND
(tight-faced)
Let’s just get out of this building. I’ve had enough.
Suddenly, the elevator stops. Doors open again.
ASHLAND’S first wife, TRISH, steps inside, wearing a red-velvet party dress and carrying a martini.
TRISH
Hi, lover! Long time no see.
ASHLAND is totally shocked. He stares at her.
TRISH
(takes a sip of the martini, makes a face)
Ugh! No kick. That’s the hell of it—all the booze is wat
ered.
And, in disgust, she tosses the glass into the elevator’s wall mirror. It shatters.
SMASH CUT TO:
SPLINTERED WINDSHIELD OF LIMO (Accident scene) — NIGHT
In a series of FLASH FRAME CUTS we see twisted metal, broken bodies (LYDIA and SIDNEY)... and we see ASHLAND carried from the wreck to an ambulance—all in quick, fragmented images.
BACK TO ELEVATOR SCENE
as ASHLAND stares at his fractured reflection in the cracked mirror. The two women giggle behind him.
ASHLAND
(numbly)
That truck... on the freeway...
LYDIA
It hit us, David.
ASHLAND
And now we’re all—
TRISH
We are, but not you. Not yet.
LYDIA
Don’t fight it, David. Just let go.
TRISH
You’re not going to make it... not back outside.
Elevator stops. Doors open.
CAMERA FOLLOWS ASHLAND as he bolts for the outside doors, running across the wide, deserted lobby.
As he runs: quick FLASH FRAMES show him in a hospital bed, dying. SHOTS of doctor hovering over him, injecting stimulants, pounding his chest, etc.
At each of these FLASH FRAMES David weakens, stumbles, falls, crawls toward the doors.
ANGLE AT LOBBY DOORS
as ASHLAND claws at the release bar, and the glass door begins to open.
SMASH CUT TO:
INT HOSPITAL ROOM – ON DAVID’S BED
He lies unmoving under oxygen, eyes closed.
PAN TO “beeper” life-support machine by the bed—as the Lifeline suddenly ceases to register heart action. It flattens to an unbroken line across the screen. ASHLAND’S heart has stopped. The “beeping” is now CONTINUOUS.
BACK TO ASHLAND
Just as the “beep” becomes continuous, in the same moment, the lobby doors vanish and the wall seals itself As David claws for the doors that are no longer there we hear an O.S. giggle from the elevator behind him. (Trish and Lydia are amused.)
ASHLAND, now in panic, swings away from the wall, searching for a way out.
HIS POV
Hallways—running off to either side of the main lobby.
CAMERA FOLLOWS him as he sets off in a frenzied run down one of the hallways, past a series of apartment doors... 1D... 1F... 1J...
Exhausted, he falls against one of the doors, begins pounding on it.
ASHLAND
Help me! Somebody, help me!
ANGLE ON DOOR
as it is opened by the same FAT MAN we saw from the apartment ten floors above.
FAT MAN
(with an evil smile)
Hi, fella! C’mon in!
(beat)
Join the party.
And we FREEZE FRAME on the man’s smiling face.
FADE OUT
Version History
Version #: v3.0
Sigil Version Used: 0.7.2
Original format: ePub
Date created: August 4, 2013
Last edited: August 4, 2013
Correction History:
Version History Framework for this book:
v0.0/UC ==> This is a book that that's been scanned, OCR'd and converted into HTML or EPUB. It is completely raw and uncorrected. I do essentially no text editing within the OCR software itself, other than to make sure that every page has captured the appropriate scanning area, and recognized it as the element (text, picture, table, etc.) that it should be.
v1.0 ==> All special style and paragraph formatting from the OCR product is removed, except for italics and small-caps (where they are being used materially, and not as first-line-of-a-new-chapter eye-candy). Unstyled, chapter & sub-chapter headings are applied. ~35 search templates which use Regular Expressions have been applied to correct common transcription errors: faulty character replacement like "die" instead of "the", "comer" instead of "corner", "1" instead of "I"; misplaced punctuation marks; missing quotation marks; rejoining broken lines; breaking run-on dialogue, etc.
v2.0 ==> Page-by-page comparison against the original scan/physical book, to format scenebreaks (the blank space between paragraph denoting an in-chapter break), blockquotes, chapter heading, and all other special formatting. This also includes re-breaking some lines (generally from poetry or song lyrics that have been blockquoted in the original book) that were incorrectly joined during the v1 general correction process.
v3.0 ==> Spellchecked in Sigil (an epub editor). My basic goal in this version is to catch most non-words, and all indecipherable words (i.e., those that would require the original text in order to properly interpret). Also, I try to add in diacritics whenever appropriate. In other words, I want to get the book in shape so that someone who wants to make full readthrough corrections will be able to do so without access to the original physical book.
v4.0 ==> I've done a complete readthrough of the book, and have made any corrections to errors caught in the process. This version level is probably comparable in polish to a physical retail book.
Some additional notes:
vX.1-9 ==> within my own framework, these smaller incremental levels are completely unstandardized. What it means is that I—or you!—have made some minor corrections or adjustment that leave me somewhere between "vX" and "vX+1". It's very unlikely that I'll ever use these decimal adjustments on anything less than a "v3".
Correcting my ebooks — Even at their best, I've yet to read one of my v3.0s that was completely error free. For those of you inclined to make corrections to those books I post (v3, v4, v5, and all points in between), I gratefully welcome the help. However, I would urge you to make those correction in the original EPUB file using Sigil or some other HTML editor, and not in a converted file. The reason is this: when you convert a file, the code—and occasionally the formatting—is altered. If you make corrections in this altered version, in order to use that "corrected" version, I'm going to have to reformat it all over again from scratch, which is at best hugely inefficient and at worst impossible (if, say, I no longer have an original copy available). More likely, I'll just end up doing the full readthrough myself on my file and discarding all of your hard work. Unlike some of the saintly retail posters who contribute books that they have no interest whatsoever in reading, I never create a book that I don't want to read... at least a little. So, having to do a full readthrough on my own books isn't really going to put me out, but it will mean that the original editor's work (i.e. your work )will have been completely wasted, and I'd feel more than slightly crummy about that. So, to re-cap, I am endlessly grateful to those who add further polish to the books I make, but it's only an efficient use of your time if you make corrections in the original EPUB file as you downloaded it.