Nocturnal Emissions (14 page)

The glowing, burning bell could no longer stay aloft in the sky, and all it once—reminding Jeremy of the film of the Hindenburg collapsing—the vast form settled down like a parachute, draping itself across the treetops…some of it catching there while much of it tore away and continued falling to the earth in sludge-like heaps and in liquefying pools. The last of the flare’s spreading pink fire was flickering out, only a few last embers here and there sputtering like candles, uncanny as will-o’-the-wisps.

It was now so dark, by contrast, that Jeremy tightened his grip on his brother’s arms as if afraid they’d be pried away from each other in the gloom.

There was a far-off rumble, like a big truck rattling along a lonely highway, or a train desolate upon its nighted track. Another big storm was stewing, for certain.

The murk of the incoming storm and the imminence of night did not make them afraid, however, that huge-headed scarecrow figures would emerge from the brush, ghastly and vengeful. Even Allen, who had seen and conversed with the twin aliens, knew that there had never been any aliens at all.

-SEVEN-

Jeremy peeked out one of his livingroom window at the storm. Allen’s wife had just called, berating him for not being home yet. When he returned to the livingroom, he said, “I told her I was waiting out the storm a little bit, until it isn’t so violent.”

Jeremy nodded, lost in the dark, unseen rain. It was mysterious, for that, but cleansing. Not like that nightmare rain of fiery plasmic meat, streams of ectoplasmic membrane. That Fortean matter.

Without looking, he gestured to a book on the sofa beside him. “I pulled that out of a box.
Shannon
was always telling me to throw out some of my boxes of books, or give them to the Salvation Army. You remember that one?”

Allen picked it up. The cover scuffed, the corners of the pages blunted, the paper slightly yellowed and smelling of mildew.
Wonders of the Sea
, was the title, and Allen cracked the book to a page Jeremy had just marked with an old pay stub. Allen read from the book aloud, this book with its paintings of giant squid locked in combat with sperm whales, deep sea fishes like animals that might populate the river
Styx
, this book they had once pored over together as kids.

“‘The bodies of jellyfish are comprised of 95% water, as they have no bones or cartilage, blood or even brains. Although jellyfish lack brains, biologists believe that they have vision.’” Allen skipped to the next paragraph.

“‘Fish will swim unaware into the jellyfish’s nearly invisible tentacles, which possess millions of stinging cells called nematocysts. A potent venom is injected into the prey, paralyzing it.’”

“How big can they grow?” Jeremy asked in a subdued voice.

“Um…” A moment later: “‘The Arctic Lion’s Mane jellyfish can reach 7

feet across, with tentacles 120 feet long…’”

Jeremy nodded, still staring out into the night. “It was an animal. Just a poor animal that couldn’t communicate with you properly. That just wanted to understand how it got here, and to go back where it belonged.

Whatever…plane that is. And I killed it. I killed the poor thing.”

“Jeremy, listen to me. You didn’t know. I didn’t know. The thing lifted me up into the air, right in front of you. What were you supposed to think?” Allen tossed the book back onto the sofa, wincing at the movement; his upper arms and underarms burned where the thing had held him, poisoned him even through his clothing. “I would have done the same thing.”

“It was probably even more than an animal,” Jeremy continued to muse.

“Though we’re just animals ourselves, aren’t we?”

Allen thought about a recent TV program he had watched about gorillas that had been taught to speak in American sign language. How they were able, remarkably, to compose simple sentences and express themselves very well, despite the mode of communication being so naturally foreign to them. Allen had felt moved by the program. And all the more depressed for the dwindling numbers of the beautiful animals…animals so like people, but so different.

He clung to that idea, of apes learning sign language, as his best way of comprehending the method the hovering animal had used to communicate with him. Being so alien in form, it had drawn in his mind as close an approx-imation of human beings as it was able. Stick men, incomplete, with just the barest of features and details, like the representations of humans his own three-year-old son would draw. Like the rough sketches Jeremy himself had rendered after his own brief communion with one of the creatures.

With these images projected into his head, the animal had thought it might better communicate with him. Get its point across. This was what Allen intuited. He had shared this idea with Jeremy, and Jeremy had found it probable as well.

“I spoke to two of them,” Allen mumbled softly. “But I don’t know if that was really two of the animals talking to me at once, or if the one animal was creating both images.”

“Maybe they have communal minds,” Jeremy suggested. “We don’t know how many of them came through. But that’s what was found floating in the lake; the balls of jelly. The remains of at least one other of them.”

“They obviously connected with you, like they did me. But somehow they made you forget, afterwards…whereas with me, when you shot the flare into it, the connection was broken so suddenly.”

Jeremy started letting the curtain slip back into place, started to turn toward his brother. “I’m glad I can’t remember. I’m glad I won’t be seeing the faces of those things clearly when I lie down at night. But in a way, you know, I envy you. I sort of wish…”

“Hey,”
Allen said, his eyes flicking past his brother, toward the window—where a light had entered into the darkness. He shot forward, leaned across his brother to gaze out into the pounding storm. Jeremy turned back toward the pane himself.

Above the huddled black rooftops, the crowns of trees thrashed by the tor-rents, and the looming chimney of the nearby abrasives company, a softly glowing form scudded across the sky. Placid, beautiful, and—although this might have been a projection of both men—forlorn. A ring of bluish biolumi-nescent dots pulsed around the edge of the animal’s immense, translucent bell, its clusters of tentacles not visible from this distance.

“My God,” Jeremy breathed, no longer afraid, as he had been that other night when he had seen this, or another of the pod of lost creatures, swimming across the sky. “It’s so beautiful.”

After less than a minute, the barely corporeal entity had passed out of their range of sight. Though the town was full of people, both men felt as if only they had been privileged enough to have witnessed its flight through the storm.

“Maybe the storm will open the door again,” Allen said. “You know?

Maybe this one will be able to find its way back home.”

Despite his experiences, and the memories that had not been erased, he was no longer afraid, either.

The pterodactyl had turned out to be a blue heron.

But what a bird, the blue heron.

Channel 5:

demeter

Hi, Jerry,

Please excuse my informal tone, and the informal nature of this pitch, but I’d like to think we’re familiar enough with each other from having worked together on
Verdigris Tears
(oops; that is,
Metallic
—forgive me for slipping back to the title of my humble original script). Granted, soon enough a succession of other writers came in my wake, each molding the clay anew, and you along with them of course, until my subtle, haunting tale of a man falling in love with a bronze cemetery statue that reminds him of his deceased wife, and which consequently becomes a vessel for her spirit, morphed into the successful fright flick we all know and love of a woman returning from the dead in the robot-like form of a graveyard statue, bent on vengeance as she dispatches with increasing gruesomeness the men responsible for her murder. By the way, I think you could have described
Metallic
in the press kits as a cross between the undead avenger of
The Crow
, and that scene with the giant animated statue in
Jason and theArgonauts
, but your publicity people know more about that side of things than I do. Just as you and the writers who so thoroughly reworked my modest script know better than I—and of course, pointed that out more than once to this thick-headed country bumpkin!—what makes for a successful movie these days.

Anyway, like I say, I do hope you don’t mind me taking the liberty of approaching you directly with a new pitch. This time, from the inception of the project, I’ve had a better sense of the kind of material you’re looking for.

Thus, hopefully we wouldn’t require quite so many fingerprints on the clay this time—that is, obviously, if you should be interested in this proposal at all!

Not to say I didn’t appreciate the check I received for my involvement with
Metallic
, but I still dream of owning a screenplay byline all to myself. Well,
Hollywood
is the province of such unbidden dreams, is it not?

What I propose to show you here, because I know you’re a busy man, churning out all those blockbusters, is just a precredit sequence to whet your appetite, and should you care to see more, more will swiftly follow.

Translating into: no more than this sequence is written yet, aside from the synopsis I will attach to this letter, but I assure you the script will be written in full posthaste should you express the desire to see it!

With that introduction—consider it the trailers before the feature!—I now turn you over to the material in question. I am calling it
Demeter
, though I’m aware that would probably be changed into something better digestible, along with their popcorn and Milk Duds, by a teenage audience. But that’s the working title:
Demeter
. Now let me dim the theater lights for you…

««—»»

1. INT. SHIP’S HOLD. NIGHT.

Darkness. But then the darkness draws aside, and soft light falls on the face of a beautiful woman in peaceful sleep, smiling contentedly, her head on a pillow of lustrous red hair. The camera lovingly draws nearer and nearer to her pale, luminous face…and her eyes open. The whites of her eyes are a shocking, blood-soaked red.

A charismatic looking, gray-haired man with a neatly trimmed beard and preda-tory features stares down at the camera. His eyes are suffused with blood, as well. He offers his hand, and smiles. His smile reveals extended canine fangs.

The woman lifts her hand to him, allowing him to help her out of the coffin we now realize she has been lying in. We see other coffins resting beside it.

Two other women, wearing diaphanous nightgowns like the first, approach.

Their movements are sinuous, seductive but menacing. They are all beautiful.

They are all vampires.

2. EXT. SHIP’S DECK. NIGHT.

An old seaman whirls to face the camera in close up, claw marks deeply etched across his terrified face. He is seized from behind, and one of the beautiful women bends her mouth to his neck with a crunch of penetrating teeth.

A younger sailor, with a head of curly hair and water-blurred spectacles, struggles valiantly with the ship’s wheel as a storm rages around him, slashing him with wind and water. He throws a nervous look over his shoulder. Another frightened sailor stands by him as if to protect him, holding a knife at the ready.

The gray-haired male vampire, unperturbed by the wild weather, walks calmly after a sailor who is trying to scramble away from him, but who slips and loses his footing on the pitching deck. The male vampire reaches down, hoists him to his feet, and with his hand on the sailor’s face, cracks his neck back at a bone-breaking angle to expose his throat. As the sailor’s legs convulse, the vampire opens his mouth impossibly wide—like a snake dislocating its jaws—and clamps down on the arched neck.

The bespectacled sailor at the wheel is lashing himself to it with rope, so as not to be swept away and to keep the ship from drifting off course. But he is sobbing and blubbering to himself, half mad, as he does so. He keeps throwing looks over his shoulder. We see his friend with the knife charge with a cry.

The charging man runs straight into the arms of two of the beautiful women.

They grab hold of him easily. One bites into his wrist and he drops the knife.

The other locks her jaws onto his throat.

Back to the man at the ship’s wheel, who is still roping himself to it, still sobbing with mounting terror as he watches the crew die around him. He sees something in particular that makes him all the more horrified…

The first beautiful woman is approaching him. Smiling. She is already splashed with blood, her lips smeared with it. She raises her hands like claws—and then flinches, as she is attacked from behind.

Cut to a knife imbedded in the first woman’s lower back.

There is a seaman behind her, and she spins
with an animal snarl and a pow
erful back-handed blow.

The sailor flies across the tossing deck, strikes the side and nearly goes over but manages to cling to the edge.

From another angle, we see the wounded sailor desperately hanging onto the outside of the ship. His body partially lies against the name of the vessel—

DEMETER.

The first beautiful woman approaches the clinging sailor, leering.

The wounded sailor, bleeding from a gash in his forehead as a result of her blow, sees the vampire nearing—and decides to let go. His body drops into the raging waves.

3.
EXT.
OCEAN
. NIGHT.

In a silent, underwater near-darkness, we see the man’s body sink away…trailing a cloud of dispersing blood.

4. EXT. SHIP’S DECK. NIGHT.

Cheated of her prize, the first woman hisses. But a howling cry of agony makes her turn away from the ship’s rail to view something behind her.

We see the male vampire has reached the bespectacled sailor at the wheel, grabbed a handful of his curly hair to jerk his head back, and sunk his fangs into his throat.

The ship gives an especially violent lurch and thunder booms.

The first female vampire is sent reeling back as the deck tilts beneath her. She is thrown backwards over the ship’s rail, crashing into the water below.

5.
EXT.
OCEAN
. NIGHT.

In the water, the first beautiful woman fights to keep her head above the waves. She hisses again in angry frustration. She digs her claw-like nails into the side of the hull, and actually begins to hoist herself up. But a sudden tug from below halts her progress. With a snarl of pain and fury, she looks down at what’s gripped her.

A huge shark has clamped onto one of the vampire’s legs. It thrashes its head to one side.

Cut to the vampire’s claws raking the hull as she is snatched underwater.

Beneath the waves, the vampire struggles in the shark’s grip. She rakes its hide, gouging deep wounds in its head. It responds by letting up for a moment—only to open its jaws much wider.

Up to her waist now in the Great White’s maw, the first woman punches her fist into the shark’s eye. Blood clouds emerge from its punctured orbit. In a last desperate effort, she doubles at the waist, leans over the shark’s head and sinks her own fangs into its flesh.

Cut to a shot of the shark’s tail and lower body, whipping in pain and anger.

With one tremendous gulp, the shark takes in the rest of the vampire’s body.

We see just a slim arm protruding from its clamped jaws…and the fingers of the hand are moving spasmodically.

Cut to blood billowing through the water. It thickens until its darkness and redness blots out everything.

OPENING CREDITS.

««—»»

Okay, Jerry, do I need to spell it out for you? The marketing is child’s play, despite what I said earlier about my not being experienced with that stuff. The killer one-line pitch? “Think
Jaws
meets
Dracula
.” A new spin on the monster shark flick and the vampire in one go! Does it not appeal to your appetites, Jer? Doe it not fit in perfectly with your aesthetic tastes? I think this idea is so hot the pages should already have butter and chocolate stains all over them!

You’ve got a shark, already a savage killing machine, now with its thirst for blood pumped up to volume eleven! And on top of that, it’s an
undead
shark, over a century old, and the conventional weapons of police, Coast Guard and Navy Seals alike will prove ineffective against it!

Sorry about all the exclamation marks, but damn it, you’ve helped open this writer up to the world of exclamation marks! Now it’s my favorite key!

As I say, the rest of this nautical nightmare awaits a single word, just a wave of your kingly hand, for me to bend to the task. The opening needs more polishing, I know, but the idea so excited me that I had to rush it out to you in this raw state (lest some other hungry guppy like me chances upon the same concept; and why indeed hasn’t this been done before, and done again to death?). Maybe it’s a lazy habit of mine, harking back to when I tried my hand at novels and worked people I knew into the fiction, but for now, as place-holders in my mind’s eye, you might have gleaned that I’ve “cast” a few familiar faces here. We all do it, though of course, usually we script writers envision the likes of Robert De Niro and Angelina Jolie, whereas I cast people—consider it a tribute, Jerry!—like you in the role of our dashing blood-drinker with the gray hair and neatly trimmed beard, and my own paltry self in a cameo role as the curly-haired and bespectacled poor fool who tries to keep this hijacked ship on track, in vain. And you may have recognized our mutual friend Valerie in the opening shot, our ravishing redheaded vamp who sets the shark’s blood aflame and magnifies his already prodigious hunger. It’s awkward for me to ask this favor of you, but if you should care to, please pass along my best wishes to Valerie. I hope your cohabitation with her is more successful than was hers and mine! If anything constructive has come of our collaborations thus far, Jerry, it may be this: that I was able to introduce my (now ex) wife to her current, mega-successful boyfriend! Bringer of joy that I am!

Sharks and vampires—think of it Jerry, and think of it again.

I eagerly await your reaction. Until then, I remain your humble servant,

– Geoffrey Sumner

P.S.:
Demeter
synopsis attached. And incidentally, if you’re not that acquainted with Mr. Stoker’s novel, Demeter is the name of the ship that delivers Dracula to
England
. It does not refer, in this instance, to the Greek goddess of fertility, Demeter, who among her other duties served as the “preserver of marriage.”—G.S.