Things Beyond Midnight (37 page)
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 watered.
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.