Prayers to Broken Stones (26 page)

Again in Louis’s P.O.V., we see the doctor go out of focus and the overhead light glow brighter, brighter …

CUT TO:

3. NIGHT. HOSPITAL ROOM.

Louis awakens to see the hospital room transformed by night. The curtain is drawn around the bed next to him. Rain taps against the windows and tall shadows are thrown on the opposite wall by the single nightlight in the monitor panel on the wall above his bed. Louis sits up, groans, removes his IV drip, and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. He is still groggy, half out of it.

Louis gets to his feet, sways, and staggers to the far wall, using it to brace himself as he moves toward the door.

4. INT. ANOTHER HOSPITAL ROOM. NIGHT.

The door to a hospital room slowly opens and we see Louis in his hospital gown. He is hanging on to the doorframe and obviously exhausted and in much pain. He moves into the room, weaves, and leans against the wall to keep from falling. There is a single bed in this room. It is dark and a curtain is drawn most of the way around the bed, but Louis can see his mother’s head and shoulders through the opening. She is asleep, obviously sedated, and Louis is shocked at her appearance.

There is a figure leaning over his mother. It is the size of a child, but this is no child. The body is thin and white … fish-belly white … and the arms are skin and tendon wrapped around long bone. The hands are pale and enormous, fingers three times the length of those on a human hand. The head is huge and misshapen, brachycephalic, reminiscent of photographs of fetuses. The eyes are bruised holes from which two yellowed marbles, striated with mucus and yellow cataracts, stare out blindly … but even though the thing must be blind, the yellow eyes dart back and forth purposely. The thing has no mouth, but the bones of its cheek and jaw seem to flow forward under white flesh to form a funnel, a long tapered snout of muscle and cartilage which ends in a perfectly round opening. This opening pulses as Louis watches, pale-pink sphincter muscles around the inner rim expanding and contracting as the thing breathes. It is a CANCER VAMPIRE.

Louis staggers toward the thing, grasps the back of a chair to keep from falling. His expression changes from revulsion to total horror as he watches the cancer vampire slowly, almost lovingly, pull back the thin blanket and topsheet above Louis’s mother. The cancer vampire lowers its head until the opening of its obscene proboscis is inches above Louis’s mother’s chest. A SLIDING, RASPING is audible. Something appears in the flesh-rimmed opening of its snout … something gray-green, segmented, and moist. Cartilage and muscle contract and a five-inch TUMOR SLUG is slowly extruded from the cancer vampire’s proboscis and hangs wiggling above his sleeping mother.

FADE OUT

END ACT I

FADE IN on: ACT II

5. INT. HOSPITAL ROOM. NIGHT.

The moist slug falls softly onto his mother’s bare skin. It coils, writhes, slides across his mother’s chest, and burrows quickly away from the light. Into flesh. Into his mother.

Louis staggers to the tray table, throws a glass at the cancer vampire. The creature lifts its head as if sensing Louis’s presence, stands, extends its impossibly long fingers, and drops out of sight behind the bed … it remains stiffly upright as it disappears, as if a hydraulic lift were lowering it through the floor.

Louis lunges toward his mother’s bed, falls against the side of it, wraps his fingers in the bedclothes, and slides to the floor, still sobbing, slipping into unconsciousness.

DISSOLVE TO:

6. NIGHT. HOSPITAL ROOM.

Louis awakens in his own room. He looks around, disoriented. It is still dark, rain still sends streaks down the window and shadows onto the wall, but he is lying in his own bed, his IV attached. He moans and touches his head.

Louis suddenly becomes aware of a wet, swallowing, SLURPING sound. This is what awakened him and has been in the background all the while. Now the slurping rises in volume. Louis realizes that it is coming from behind the drawn curtain pulled around the bed next to his. The bed that had been empty when the doctor had been there.

The SLURPING continues.

The noise continues, growing even louder. Louis leans out of bed, reaches the end of his IV tether, raises his free hand to the curtain, and flings it back.

An old man, JACK WINTERS, looks up from SLURPING whiskey in a glass through a bent hospital straw. A bottle of cheap booze, almost empty, is on his tray table. In the glow of the nightlight and the occasional lightning flashes, the old man is a sight—pale and obviously ravaged by illness, hairless except for the gray stubble on his wrinkled cheeks. He is toothless but grins up at Louis even as he continues slurping.

Louis collapses back in his pillows, holding his head.

Jack gives another toothless grin and pours out more of his whiskey.

Louis had been on the verge of drifting off again despite the old man’s monologue, but suddenly he realizes what is being said and snaps awake, sitting up and leaning over to grasp Jack’s arm.

Jack shields his whiskey bottle as if Louis is trying to steal it.

Louis releases Jack’s arm and collapses back into the pillows.

Jack resumes slurping up the whiskey, edging to the far side of his own bed to stay away from Louis. The drink revives his spirits.

Jack chuckles but the laughter soon turns to thick coughing. He sets aside the straw and gulps the last of the whiskey. The coughs subside.

Jack fumbles behind his pillow and finds another bottle. He busies himself with filling his glass and replacing the straw.

Jack freezes in mid-slurp. He glares suspiciously at Louis.

Jack looks as if he is about to speak, to talk about something that he
has
seen late at night there in the cancer ward, but instead he glares at Louis, makes a motion with his hand as if warding off evil spirits, leans forward, and draws the curtain back between them. The room seems to darken further. From behind the curtain we hear resumed SLURPING.

CUT TO:

7. INTERIOR. DAY. HOSPITAL ROOM.

Sunlight fills the room. Fresh flowers overflow from a vase on a tray table pushed against the wall. Jack Winters is out of the room for one of his tests and his bed is neatly made. Dr. Hubbard sits on a chair by Louis’s bed, fiddling with his pipe and listening intently as Louis paces back and forth. Louis has been removed from the IV and is wearing a robe over pajamas rather than his hospital gown, but his head is still bandaged and his eyes look feverish. He gestures as he talks and his voice is rapid, almost manic.

Louis stops pacing for a moment and holds his arms as if chilled by the memory of what he saw.

Louis pays no attention to the sarcasm. Lost in thought, he walks over to the window and stares out … seeing nothing … letting the light warm his face. After a moment he speaks.

Dr. Hubbard continues smiling but he is sufficiently shaken by the absurdity of Louis’s explanation that he tries to inhale smoke from his pipe … forgetting that it is empty.

Dr. Hubbard nods, appearing to listen, anything to calm Louis down. Louis stops suddenly, makes a motion with both hands as if starting a final appeal to a jury.