Slippage (11 page)

Then, in smaller form, to accommodate the confines of the office, the shape of Volkerps solidifies
inside
the office. Nino is around the desk instantly. There is the SOUND of hurricane winds.

NINO

(yells)

Hazel...
now!

And Hazel, who has been behind the open door, slams it fast and hard.

NINO

(yells)

Arky...the patch!

And Arky, who has been at the peephole, slaps a gray lead-painted patch with stickum over the hole. Now the CAMERA CIRCLES showing us all four of them inside a small room that is totally, unbrokenly gray with lead coating. Trapped!

42 – ON NINO

As he throws open the lid of the carved box from Berne. We can see that the interior of the box and lid are the same gray lead-lined surface as the office. Nino yanks something resting on the velvet lining of the box. He keeps it hidden in his hand.

43 - FAVORING VOLKERPS

Who is so large that he almost touches the ceiling. He raises a muscled arm to sweep Nino's head off, and Nino makes a mystical pass with his hands, sweeping and circling and intricate as a karate series, one fist closed over whatever was in the box. Volkerps shrinks a little and is thrown back against a wall as if he's taken a punch. His hideous snout begins to bleed. With childlike amazement he puts a finger to his nose, examines the blood.

VOLKERPS

(childlike, amazed)

I'm bleeding!

(awed)

I'm actually losing pus and ichor (pronounced eyecore) and lovely slime!

He rages, trying to swell to full size again, having been magically reduced; and he puffs his chest as if to fry Nino with a pointed claw, and Nino makes another intricate gesture, still holding the hidden object.

As he makes the pass, one of Volkerp's horns snaps and breaks off, and where it hits the lead-painted floor it causes sparks.

Then in rapid succession, another pass and the demon suddenly has a big black eye, the king of all shiners. We see fear on the demon's face, and he turns to run, but he can't get out. He bashes the door again and again, hits the walls, turns and turns, rolling along the walls, Hazel and Arky ducking and dodging, trying to stay out of his way, but all his pummelling cannot break him out. We realize the lead lining has him ensnared. He rages and roars, rushing about the office, knocking over chairs, shattering the desk, throwing filing cabinets.

44 - 2-SHOT

VOLKERPS stops and turns to face Nino. Nino now has a look on his cultured face we haven't seen before. He is a wolf with his prey trapped in a cave. His lips are skinned back over his teeth, and his eyes burn.

NINO

(mean, hard)

You lousy twerp... enough is enough!

And he begins an incantation, intoning in a VOICE that is Nino's, but more. It is as if he were in the center of the earth, and his voice coming from a volcano. This is a Nino with powers we've never suspected:

NINO (CONT'D)

(enchanting)

Submit, submit, submit. I order you by the power of Asmodeus (pronounced: Ass-moe-dee-us), Belphegor
(Bell-
feh-gore), Belial (Bay-lee-ahl) and the toad of death to suppress thyself! Submerge, submit, suppress ... get your miserable ugly backside into the box, you twerp, you lousy punk!

And he now—with a wide, dramatic gesture—throws up a flat palm and, nestled in that hand, is a blood-red, glowing, many-faceted crystal like a sacred idol's eye. And from that jewel comes a blinding light. The light bathes the demon, who shrieks and begins to shrink within its glow. (NOTE: or whatever substitute technique you care to devise for an adequate inexpensive effect.) The light takes him, fills the frame, and we HEAR the rushing of WINDS as they are sucked into a Black Hole. LIGHT FILLS FRAME.

45 - ANOTHER ANGLE

As silence falls in the office. The box stands open, and a bright light pours out of it. Hazel and Arky crawl out from under the halves of the shattered desk. They stand and look at Nino, who is perspiring. His shirt is soaked. His hair is mussed, the white streak more prominent.

They look at him in wonder. CLOSEUPS if desired. He looks back at them, smiles gently, a bit embarrassed.

NINO

(humbly)

I've had some, uh, small experience in these matters.

ARKY

(awed)

Is that how you got away from him at the mall?

NINO

(nods, shrugs)

He got me a little, but he couldn't get me very much.

Now we hear a TINY PIPING VOICE like David Hedison as The Fly. They go to the box as CAMERA COMES IN BEHIND AND OVER THEM and their heads frame the box in the center of the frame as we look down. BLUE SCREEN inside lead-lined box shows us a teeny tiny Volkerps in there.

CUT TO:

46 - INT. MAGIC BOX - CLOSE

Volkerps in the box, looking up at the huge face of Nino Lancaster peering down at him. Volkerps glows a bit, as if he's ensorceled, and trapped. He is jumping up and down, screaming, lashing the walls of the box with his tail and talons.

VOLKERPS

(in a squeaky, diminished voice)

I'll get you, I'll rend you, I'll savage you, shred you, suck your bones dry as death!

Nino smiles, and when he speaks, his VOICE IS HUGE:

NINO

(amplified)

Listen, punk...you think you're the first slug from Hell, all puffed up with hot air, who ever tried to muscle in on my operation?

(beat)

If you're wondering how I beat you, look around in there. You're small potatoes!

And CAMERA WITH VOLKERPS as he turns to look behind him and we see a larger (but nonetheless shrunken) demon, even more horrific than Volkerps, but bearing a striking family resemblance. Amazed, he stammers:

VOLKERPS

Poppa? Poppa, what are
you
doing in here?

The other DEMON comes over and slaps his son in the mush.

PAPA DEMON

(pissed off)

You idiot! I knew I shouldn't leave the family business in your inept claws!

Volkerps starts to cry as Poppa Demon glowers and we:

CUT TO:

47 - SAME AS 45 - OUTSIDE BOX

As Nino replaces the crystal and closes the box, cutting off the light.

NINO

Like father, like son.

Hazel hugs him, covers him with kisses. Arky is dancing around the room, comes and hugs them both, slobbers over Nino, his little weasel face rapturous with relief.

ARKY

(jubilant)

You
saved,
me! You
saved
me!

Arky is all over Nino, who now takes him by the shoulders and holds him away at arms-length. CAMERA IN on Nino as he smiles a particularly nasty smile and says:

NINO

(with power)

Yeah, I saved you. Now all you've got to do is make a deal with
me.
 

(beat)

Business, Arky, is strictly business.

HOLD on Arky's horrified expression, Nino's overwhelmingly evil expression for a long beat as NARRATION BEGINS OVER:

NARRATOR

(Over)

Oh, Arky, Arky, poor Mr. Lochner.

(beat)

There is an old, old,
very old
saying:

(beat)

Making a deal with a demon is seriously crazy. But making a deal with the
master
of demons...well ...that's crazy as a soup sandwich.

And as preceding NARRATION is HEARD OVER, CAMERA IN AND DOWN to FULL CLOSE SHOT on Nino's hand and the carved box on the table. Nino is idly drumming his fingers on the box, lightly and absently, as NARRATION CONCLUDES, and just before the phrase "soup sandwich" the brilliant light suddenly escapes from that thin line between lid and body of box, like a halation around the moon, light rays fan out around Nino's fingers and we:

FADE TO BLACK

and

FADE OUT

THE END

Darkness Upon The Face of The Deep

Morning of the day after All Hallow’s Eve dawned with a brightness that cast orange and rose light over the mountain of Hindustan. Hysteria seemed to have possessed the birds: they rose in a canopy, spreading their great patchwork wings, proclaiming in a minor key another year of safety.

In the valley shadowed beneath the grandfather mountain could be heard the sound of nails being prised from the heavy slats used to board up the villagers' windows. And the laugh of the first adventurous child as he held his nose and yanked off the wreath of malodorous henbane protecting a front door. The fountain had been unplugged and its music rose toward the black thorn of the escarpment. The nilgai, sheep, and goats had been chivvied together in the shallow caves where they had been secreted; and now the shepherd girls drove them up the ramps from underground. Fresh flowers were laid on the pedestals of the thirty-two idols circling the rustic plaza.

When the mountain of Hindustan creaked, and then rumbled, the villagers paused in their activities, relief drained from their faces, and they turned to stare up at the dark spire.

Slowly, then more rapidly, the face of the mountain showed a fissure. The rent widened and very softly from within the crevice a sooty shadow began to seep out. It could not be said to shine—it was an absence of illumination—but it spilled out into the air and scintillated, neither smoke nor fog.

The mountain split.

The villagers had held silent for longer than might have been prudent, but when the shapes began soaring out of the great black wound, rising in a cloud to throw a blade-shaped shadow across the sun, a covey of snakelike, winged blood bats, they knew they had been falsely lulled into thinking danger had passed. One of the gods had lied, or the seer had miscalculated the year.

Then they screamed, the music died, and they rushed to replace the boards across their windows.

In the Deccan, on the plateau that lies between what were known as the Narbada and Kristna rivers, some of the oldest men and only three of the very oldest women remember the stories passed down through many generations, of the village of Antagarh. Not the tiny village of that name to be found on maps of the present day, but the original Antagarh, where the sigil of even more ancient days had been hidden. Where all in a morning the darkness descended, and feasted, and finally lifted, leaving only one child.

This little boy, possessing sight only in his left eye, had been lost on the face of the mountain (it is said), and thus escaped the fate that befell his village. (It is said.)

No mother, no father, no home waiting at his return later that day (for Antagarh no longer existed; just a plain of pumice on which nothing grew for three hundred years; no blade of grass, no weed, no shrub; where no line of dawn sunlight passed again). The child crawled through the gray dust, and saw a cloud of black wings rising away from the valley, snake bat shapes climbing toward the staring idiot's eye of the sun.

Alone, he lay in the wasteland and watched as his past disappeared. His future: sailing toward him borne on the wind that blows forever between the stars, the wind that carries ancient and encoded messages of indecipherable night.

On rare, perfect nights when the stars had swung into extraordinary alignments unnoticed by dozing humanity, the glyph would slowly begin to glow. As if breathing deeply with the light from stellar lamps, the engraved stone seal would become lambent, radiating warmth through its deep orange surface. The signs stood out perfectly, barely smoothed by erosion: circles, crescents, hooks, human heads, hands, and designs that were neither animal nor human. A coherent script utterly beyond understanding, giving itself up to no known mechanical system of decipherment. The radiance stronger as night deepened.