2. THE FILTHY WORKSHOP: A TALE OF THE FIFTH GIRL (1999)

“All the scenes that you are about to see are real and were shot as they were taking place. If sometimes they seem cruel it is only because cruelty abounds on the planet.  And anyway, the duty of the reporter is not to make the truth seem sweeter but to show things how they really are.”

n  opening narration of Mondo Cane

The Filthy Workshop

A Tale of the Fifth Girl

1999

Jerome had butchered everyone.  Almost everyone.

Clive watched it.  His camera took him over the monster’s shoulder.  Placed him in the thick of the slaughter. 

It put him there: disembodied and spook-like.

The final girl ran from Jerome.  Predictable.  Inevitable.  History not just repeating but lapping itself.

Clive wasn’t creating anything new or special. This would be an unflattering but passable facsimile of dozens of other films. 

Horror film mimicked itself.  Horror film welcomed its clichés.  Held them tight.  Spun them out in new directions.  But horror film remained striated.  Able to be read and traced like a sprawling rail map.  

Clive wanted to claim no new territory.  He knew the map.  He loved the map. 

He wrote the map.

He gridded it.  He structured it.  In his head.

He rebuilt its intersections.  Forever re-laying the track.  He travelled down its many lines of sub-genre every night:

Change at Psycho for Sisters and Halloween.

Change at Halloween for Friday the 13^th.  For Prom Night.  For hundreds of other stops.

Clive sighed but kept filming.  Knowing he was getting nothing of note.  But unable to stop himself.

Clive tracked Jerome’s lumbering footsteps.  Jerome’s indifference to anything but the running flesh in front.

Clive panned over to the girl. 

Wait.  STOP:

full full full lips pouting naturally and perfectly

dark hair/shoulder length/centre parted/framing:

round face

slight double chin that was innocent/youthful/cherubic

eyebrows plucked to thin dark arches over:

large dark round eyes surrounded by impossibly long, thick lashes

a perfectly slim nose -- slightly pointed/defiant.

Lina Romay.

She looks like Lina Romay.

Lina Romay:  

Born June 25, 1954.  Spanish exploitation queen.  Self-proclaimed exhibitionist.  Common-law wife of legendary sleaze director Jess Franco. 

Clive’s favourite actress.

Clive pulled in on her face. 

In her wide-eyed terror:

The expression of a girl stuck in the horrible circumstance of the here-and-now.  Trapped in a limbo-like moment.  Between this world and whatever came after. 

Clive felt something ghost-like loosen and float about in his stomach.  His mouth dried up.  His grip on the camera grew slippery.  His palms began to sweat, but he refused to shake. 

He refused to ruin or lose this image.

This went far beyond the iconography of the terrified horror-girl.  Eyes watery/chin up/mouth agape.  No.  This was the lost mould of an expression so many had failed to recreate. 

This. 

This was genetics + time + circumstance.   Together birthing something beyond even art or archetype.  This was facial geometry finally meeting the moment that the universe, through the flesh of her parents, had shaped it for.

This was spiritual, perhaps sorcerous in perfection.

There was no doubt. 

Clive had found his muse.

Now all he had to do was stop his brother from killing her.

He forced himself to put the camera down.  He cut around in front of her.  He stepped into her path.  He caught her and held her and together they fell to the ground.

‘Hey…’

            She writhed in his grip like a mad thing. 

She thrashed and screamed against him.

‘Hey!  Shhhh!  Shut it, girl!’

She clawed at his face.

‘Quiet, Damn it!’

Her teeth snapped as she bit at him.

Clive felt himself begin to stiffen, but this was not the time.  He slapped her once.  Hard. 

‘Now, you listen to me, little sister.  You shut your trap or I’ll knock you out colder than a dead chick’s snatch.’ 

Teeth gritted.  Mouth pressed to her ear.  Hand over her mouth.  He heard his brother’s footsteps.  The girl did too, because she began to make all sorts of noise again. 

Clive hauled off and punched her one.  He knocked her out as cold as he said. Maybe colder. 

He heard his brother slowly closing the gap. 

The machete-wielding tortoise caught up to the bunny.

He patted the girl, still unconscious, on the ass.  ‘Don’t you worry, Lina,’ he said.  ‘I’ll save you.’

Clive almost tripped over the girl as he ran towards his brother.

Clive looked his brother over.  Sized him up.

Jerome emerging through the scrub:

Muscle.  Dirt.  Undead stench.  Satanic presence. 

Ugly as an exit wound.  Poisoned with hate and pain.

Motivated.  Ruthless.  Methodical.  Creative in his brutality. 

Determined and authentic in his need to slaughter. 

Near unstoppable.  Repeatedly rising from the grave.  A mass-murdering, mutant mongoloid Lazarus.

All of this was true.  But: 

He was as dull as the blades he carried.  His thinking was even rustier. 

‘High five, man, high five!’  Clive came forward.  Nervous smile.  Obviously trembling open palm held high. 

Jerome stared stab-wounds at him.  Hands at his sides.  Fists filled with machete handles. 

Clive slapped him on the shoulder.  ‘I tell you what, bro, I got that shit on tape man…on tape.  You look like the fucking boogeyman, Jerome…like a big, fucked-off death shroud, man.  Way you took that chick’s head off, man…sssshhhhooonnk!  One slice.  That, that was cool.  I’ll take the footage home, polish it up, but some metal or something over the top, death or grindcore or some shit, all double kick drums and riffs like thunder claps, man…be a thing of beauty.  You want to see it, you swing on by the house.  Any time, man.  Mom’d love to see you, I’m sure…’

Jerome wasn’t listening.  He had a sense for death.  He also had a sense for life.  He could feel a beating in his chest like it was his own rotting heart pounding again. 

He knew there was another. 

He took a step forward.  Grip tightening on his blades.

‘Ah.  Ah.  Oh, come on, Jerome.  Please.  Okay.  Look.  You got nearly all of them, right?  One less for the body count, that’s okay, yeah?  I mean, it’s not like you collect their souls or anything, right?  Hang on…you don’t, right?  Collect their souls?  Because like, holy shit, that’d be heavy man, really, really heavy, like fucked up-monster movie heavy.’

Jerome stepped towards where he felt the heart beating.  Moist earth squished under his footfalls. 

Clive.  Panicked: ‘Jerome…Jerome…I’m begging you, man.  Please.  Not her.  How am I ever gonna meet a nice girl if you keep killing them all?  Huh?  Not her.  No.  She’s perfect, man…she looks like Lina Romay…she…’

Jerome could see the girl now.  Her legs stuck out from behind a tree.  She wasn’t moving. 

He wanted to wake her up.  He wanted her to feel as much of her death as possible. 

‘Come on.  You should see this shot of her I got.  You should just stop, like right here and I’ll get the camera and you can see this shot.  It’s perfect.  Jerome.  You kill those ordinary girls, you kill them all, I don’t care, but please, please, please, not her…just, like, wait and I’ll get my camera and you can see.  You can wait, right?  Just for a second?  If you don’t agree with me, that she’s a slice of living breathing movie that’s been pulled out of some posthuman child-bearing silver-screen pussy, ok, well then, then you can kill her.  Okay?  Deal?  ’

Jerome popped Clive in the chest. 

Clive said ooofff.  Tripped over a tree root.  Fell on his rear. 

Jerome let out a grunt of satisfaction as he looked down at the girl.  The moonlight lit her face.  For a flickering piece of a second, he noticed her prettiness. 

Then the urge to cut her face off took over. 

Clive threw himself in front of Jerome.  On his knees.  Begging.  ‘Ahhhh come on.  You took Maryanne from me, man.  Not again.  Not her.’

Jerome hauled the girl to her feet.  He dropped a machete into the dirt.  He patted her face lightly, almost tenderly, trying to wake her up.  Something guttural and deep escaped his lips. 

Clive grabbed Jerome’s leg.  Not caring about the filth or the stench.  ‘Not her.  Not her.  Not her.  Jerome.  Listen yeah…’

Jerome reached for the girl’s throat.

‘It’s.  It’s…it’s my birthday.’

Jerome stopped.  He looked down at his little brother grovelling in front of him.  He made a soft snorting sound.  He looked at the girl.  She stirred in his grip.  He felt the warm softness of her throat against his fingers and palm.  He felt her pulse drumming against him.  He looked back down at his brother.

‘It’s my birthday.’

Jerome dropped the girl.  He turned.  He walked away.  There were other bodies he could play with.

Clive watched his brother disappear.  When Jerome was safely out of sight he raised his middle finger.  ‘Sucker.’

Clive cradled the girl in his arms.  He rocked her.  He cried tears of thanks to a God he had no believe in whatsoever.  To a universe he knew cared little. 

This girl, this beautiful Final Girl, was his.

***

THE FIRST NIGHT

There was bound to be a room with a terrible secret. 

The basement.  Life goes on up above.  Death goes on down below. 

Elisha knew that she was starring in her own horror movie.  Dragged along the floor, she screamed and cursed and fought as her role demanded. 

She broke nails on the floorboards.  She said oh god.  She had hair pulled out in tufts as she struggled. 

The basement door swung open with the predictable creak.  The light bulb came on with a blink. 

Elisha knew she knew she would be witness to a place that was more a part of this madman’s imagination than a room of the house in which he lived. 

It would be his mind within four walls, furnishing the room.

Elisha imagined sick, grisly things as Clive carried her whimpering down the stairs: 

Bodies and blood and hooks. 

Body parts stacked in retro-looking refrigerators. 

Women chained to walls. Wounds carved into them like crude spare sexual orifices. 

Her dark imaginings and his: were they compatible?  Would her fears and his vision cross-pollinate?  Would they create a new space framed and contained by the dimensions of the basement? 

He dropped her onto a mattress. 

Whimpering still, she covered her eyes, too terrified to look.  Still dreaming up ghastliness and depravity. 

There was a scratching sound as Clive dragged a chair across the floor.  A creak as he eased himself into it. 

He said, ‘It’s not that bad.  ‘Really.  The place could do with some sprucing up, sure, but I think you’ll be comfortable here.’

Slowly, Elisha peeled her hands away from her face.  She picked the strands of hair from in front of her eyes.  She looked up at the room. 

Once, it had clearly been a workshop of some kind.  Large wooden benches with strong metallic legs ran along and were bolted into the concrete walls.  But there were no tools or half-finished home improvement projects.  Instead, the benches were stacked:

With VCRs, DVD players.  Even old Betamax players. 

With cables of all colours and lengths.  Tangled vipers of wire and plastic linking machine/machine/machine. 

With big old clunky video cameras. Oddly Gothic and monstrous.  Piled up all together on the industrial-style benches. They surrounded a single small digital.  It looked clean and innocent next to all the grimy gear.

With headphones and old sound equipment.  Eight-track recorders and microphones and mixers.  All ridiculously big and grey and square.

With an old projector pointed at a section of the wall sloppily painted white.  Cans of old film waiting to be viewed stacked awkwardly on the floor under it. 

With dusty old televisions.  Some flickering.  Some with rolling images, vertical hold obviously broken. Some static-filled, fuzzy images fighting to be seen.  Some showing movies.  Some showing porno.  None of them off. 

Old metal shelves held hundreds of videos.  Some original, with torn and faded labels.  Some copied, titles written in a childlike scrawl running down the spine. 

Elisha recognized most of the titles. 

Horror.  Old exploitation.  Sexploitation.  Blacksploitation.  Nunsploitation.  Japanese pornography of the nastiest kind.  They all rubbed dust covers. 

Camp and kitsch nightmares.  Gothic nightmares.  Techno Nightmares.  Flesh nightmares. Death nightmares.  Fuck nightmares.  Horror and pain of all sorts. 

A metal tower loaded and fortified with fevered, blood-filled celluloid.  Organised beyond the point of obsession by a brain-damaged connoisseur of pain.

Elisha was impressed. 

It was a collection that rivaled her own.

Clive said, ‘I’ve got some things to do for my Mom.  So, you just make yourself comfortable and go ahead and watch any of the movies you like.  I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mess about with my equipment, though okay?  And, yes, that is a warning.  You fuck with any of it, I’ll stick a microphone so far up your pussy, nine months later, you’ll be giving birth to sound waves.  That might not make a whole lot of sense now that I think about it, but just try and touch my shit and you see what happens.’

            Elisha nodded silently.  She looked around at the cut-rate film chop-shop she found herself in. 

Already she felt removed.  Removed from the slaughter of her friends.  From all notions of outside. 

At that moment, in her head, a story began plotting itself.

***

THE FIRST WEEK

Clive set up the cameras.  One in front of Elisha, one on either side of her.  All were filming.  Clive wanted to catch everything.  Every twitch of her face.  Every blink of her eyes. 

Elisha: tied to a chair.  Rope chafing her wrists. 

Clive used the coarsest rope he could find.  He had to go all the way out to the barn to get it.  He was a harsh director.  There was no real need to bind her, but the rope would add to her discomfort.  To the authenticity of the atmosphere. 

            ‘Okay.  Let’s start.  What’s your name?’ 

Clive watched through the viewfinder.  Elisha looked up from her dirty feet.  Directly into the camera in front of her.  Her head hung slightly, embarrassed.  But: in her eyes.  Something fierce. 

She was beautiful. 

            ‘Could you untie me, please?  The rope.  It’s hurting me.  This isn’t necessary…’

            ‘No.  What’s your name?’

            ‘My name is Elisha Maher. 

            ‘How old are you?’

            ‘I’m twenty-two years old.  Mom.  Dad.  Whatever this man wants…just get me out of here.’

            Clive jerked himself away from the viewfinder.  He stood upright, all flapping arms and confused looks.  ‘Wait.  Cut.  What the fuck?  This isn’t a ransom video…’

            ‘I don’t…’

            ‘This is your screen test.  Your audition tape.’

            ‘Audition?  Audition for what?’

            ‘To star in my movies.’

            ‘I want to go home.  I don’t want to be in any movies.’

            ‘You are home.  Answer the questions.  What’s your name?’

            ‘I told you.  My name’s Elisha Maher.  I’m twenty-two.’

            ‘What do you do?  Ahhh…screw all this Q and A stuff.  Talk to me.’

            ‘What?’

            ‘I said talk to me.  No.  Let me rephrase: talk to the camera.

            A heartbeat.

            ‘I…look, what should I say? What do you want me to talk about?’

            ‘I don’t care.  Talk to it.  Tell it things.  What you’re thinking.  What you’re feeling.  What you are.  Spill the beans, your guts, your thoughts.  Whatever.  Just say something and say it now.’

            ‘Okay.’

            Elisha looked away from the camera.  Up at the single bulb lighting the room.  Down again at her dirty feet.  Her toes felt stiff.  She popped and cracked them loose.

            Movie within movie.

            Frame within frame.

            Refine the role:

            Am I sex-kitten promiscuous?

He may want to split the slut wide open.

            Am I virginal and pure?

            He may want to deflower me with saw or stake or pick.

            Am I tomboyish and loud?

My masculinity may threaten.  My MANnerisms may make him homo-horny.  He may kill me from confusion.

            Am I whining and plain?

My annoyance to him may accelerate my death.

            For now: play it straight.

            Elisha looked back up.  Right into the camera.  Clive couldn’t help but smile.

            ‘As I said: my name is Elisha Maher.  Right now I am very, very scared and I have absolutely no idea what you want or what I’m doing.  But I’ll do what you say, because…well, because.  Um…I…ahhh…I like horror movies…just like you.’

            ‘Don’t refer to or acknowledge me.’

‘Right.  Um.  Sorry. I’m actually a film student.  I wrote a thesis on horror.  British Country House Horror and Thatcherism.  Ahh…the first horror movie I ever saw was Cujo.  Scared the shit out of me.  Even at nine, I was fascinated by my own reactions to it.  To how this bunch of pixels on my parents TV made me feel.  I had nightmares and stuff before that, of course, weird ones about gloved hands and windows…I was dreaming giallo movies at seven, like Argento meets The Wiggles or something…  Anyway, Cujo was the first nightmare I saw that was not of my own creation.  Of my own head.  The idea of a fuck-off big rabid animal just messed with me.  The idea of it was just so terrifying.  The idea of most things is more terrifying than the reality if you’ve got the widescreen imagination for it.  Then your idea meets the movie’s idea and then a seed gets planted in your head.  All it takes is a little reality to come along and fertilise it.  Listen to me – I’m rambling.  Don’t hit me.’

‘I’m not going to hit you but I’m sure I’ve got no earthly idea what you’re talking about.  Sounds to me like you’ve spent too much time with your head in a philosophy book.’

            ‘Tell me you don’t have a philosophy. About film.  About death.  I’d like to hear it.’

            ‘My philosophy is my philosophy.  I’ve got it and I know it, but I don’t have to waste all my time thinking about it and complicating it and writing papers that nobody’s going to read about it.  Anyway, we’re not talking about my philosophy.  We’re talking about yours.  You got an example of what you’re talking about?’

‘A few weeks after I saw Cujo, I was playing baseball in the park with my brother and his friends.  He didn’t want me to play, but Mom made him take me.  What was he going to do?  Anyway, I was batting.  He was pitching.  He was pitching fast and hard.  He hit me a few times.  Body blows.  I should have just called it quits and gone home but I didn’t. He kept pitching these crazy balls.  One hit me on the thumb.  It throbbed.  It bled.  I dropped the bat and began to run home crying.’

            Clive closed in even further on her face.  She was lost in the telling of the memory.  She was lovely.

            ‘I saw this big dog.  It began to follow me.  I noticed it looked like it was foaming at the mouth and I just totally lost it.  I started screaming and running as fast as I could.  It was foaming all over the place.  I thought Cujo himself had ripped out of the screen to kill me.  It was stupid, really stupid, I mean the dog was like a golden retriever or something…I don’t know… I forget what kind it was; it just obviously wasn’t Cujo.  This poor dog just wanted to play with me and probably just needed a drink.  I was hysterical though.  My mom laughed at me when I got home.  But that’s how much Cujo got to me.  It became real for me.  I was in that movie.  I was chased by that dog.  And I survived it.’

Elisha scanned the shelves.  ‘You’ve got a good collection…Cannibal Holocaust.  Are you planning a real-life homage?  Are you going to kill me for documentary footage?’

            ‘I don’t do the killing in this family.’ 

The girl was slippery.  Clive tried to gauge her next move: 

Screaming would be of no hope.  The basement was pretty soundproof and there was no-one about anyway.  Jerome went back to wherever he went after killing pretty girls and anything else in his path.  Ma went into town for supplies, though she’d be pissed if she knew. 

Grandpa might hear her, if she was loud enough, but all the sound would do is stir in the old man memories of happier times.  Times when the letting of blood was frequent and easy.  Unimpaired by age or frailty. 

‘I will fuck you up though, if you try to run. Piss me off enough and maybe I’ll fetch Jerome.  I’ll fix the lighting while he rapes you and film your death with six different cameras.  You’re cute.  He’d like you.  Hell, I like you – I’d like to watch him do it.’

            ‘Please, I’m sorry…I just saw that movie, on your shelf and…’

            ‘You know it, honey?  You seen it?’

            ‘Yeah…uh…third of the Italian cannibal movies.  They…they made a shitload of them…’

            ‘Prisoner of the Cannibal God was third.’

            ‘A-actually…no…but they were made the same year.  1979.’

            ‘Yeah?  You like it?’

            ‘Cannibal God?’

            ‘No.  Holocaust.’

            ‘Well…it’s the smartest of the cycle, I guess…I don’t know.  They’re too keen to gross us out.  I don’t find them clever.

            ‘They’re not meant to be.’

            ‘Yeah, okay.  But it’s just entrail, entrail, entrail…you know?  Or Cannibal cuts off man’s cock.  Eats it.  Cannibal chews down some chick’s tit.  Cannibal impales chick ass-first on a pole…throw me a nugget of plot.  The revulsion gets so high it’s not even revolting any more.  It all just gets boring and banal.  A cannibal making toast might shock me more at this point.’ 

            Clive’s gaze hardened.

            ‘I’m sorry…it’s just what I think…you’re welcome to…I mean, your opinion’s just as valid…why do you like them?  You’ve got them all from the looks of it.  The old ones anyway…’

            Clive smiled.  ‘Entrail.  Entrail.  Entrail.  Like you said.  I don’t find it boring.  I don’t find it dull.  I don’t long for plot.  I just like it.  It’s stupid and sick and violent and that’s all it needs to be.

Clive trailed off.  Stared into space.  Snapped out of it.  Again he became as focused as the cameras.

            He looked at Elisha through his viewfinder. 

He noted the way she tilted her head and squinted as she tried to read video labels.  The skittishness of her movements.

He noted the way she blew at loose strands of dark hair that got in her way.  Full lips pouting.  Short sharp intake of breath.  Slow exhalation. 

He noted the streaks the tears had left on her cheeks.  Lines of fear marking her as his.

He noted the way her nose had turned a soft pink.

He noted the way her breasts rose as she breathed.

He felt vaguely nauseous.

‘Anyone ever tell you, you look just like Lina Romay?’

‘Lina…who?’

‘Lina Romay.  Christ, you don’t know her?  Jess Franco’s fucking wife.’

‘Him I heard of.  Can we…watch one of her films?’

            ‘Honey,’ Clive said,  ‘you just got the part.’

***

THE FIRST MONTH

Elisha and Clive watched movies.  Elisha spent a lot of time teaching.  Symbolism, foreshadowing, structure.  Various other aspects of film storytelling and theory. 

            Clive sat cross-legged in front of her for the bulk of it.  He stared up at her like a small child or a pet.  He began to thrive on her knowledge as much as her beauty.  He was an attentive student.  Elisha was surprised at the strength of his memory – Clive forgot nothing she said.  It was like grafting her thoughts into his head.

            However, when he disagreed with her about something he became irritable, angry and, finally, violent.  Elisha received a slapping over her opinion of Blood Diner.  She had her hand stepped on after her critique of The Prowler. 

            Early on, she thought about home and her family and her murdered friends and her predicament.  She spent nights sobbing to herself, curled up on her dirty bed. 

As time passed, she began to grow comfortable in the basement.  She started to enjoy the solitude of the night hours, after Clive disappeared back upstairs.  She walked around the room.  She touched its walls, ran her hands softly over Clive’s machinery.  She lightly traced intricate patterns in the dustcoats they wore. 

She was re-branding them, placing a sign of new ownership on them.  They had a new master now.

            She began to think less and less of the world outside the confines of the basement. Her creative thoughts continued to grow.  She watched many movies on her own.  In her mind, the lead actress, always lacking her presence and her strange unique beauty, disappeared.  She replaced them with herself like some post-production computer trick.  When she slept, she dreamed mad bloody dreams that re-plotted the films she watched.

            Always with herself triumphant.

            Then there were the other dreams. 

Dreams of her and Clive. 

She’d spread herself wide for him.  Between her legs, horror movie images flickered on a fleshy pink screen.  In her dreams she screened her re-plotted movies to Clive on this screen.  He nodded his approval, his pants beginning to bulge in the crotch.

            Elisha began to feel her mind expand in strange new directions.  Her thoughts came in mad spurting rushes.  Ideas and stories bred and multiplied in her head.  Her imagination felt pregnant with plot, image and hypothesis.  She began to feel clogged, oddly backed-up.  Some of these thoughts were obviously way past due.

And so, one night, when all was still, Elisha unwrapped a blank videocassette, slotted it into a camcorder, made sure she got herself in shot and hit record.

Excerpt from the video diary of Elisha Maher.

This is the secret diary of Elisha Maher.  It’s a

video diary because I’ve got no paper to write

on and anyway, given the circumstances, I

think it’s a fitting format.  If I ever watch this

back, I wonder who I’ll see on this tape.  Will

it be the me I remember, or perhaps the queen

of exploitation that Clive seems to see whenever

he films me…like Lina Romay confessing all to

a camera which captures and keeps all it sees. 

I don’t really know what’s what at this point. 

It’s like I’m in some kind of incubator or hothouse

and maybe I think I’m starting to grow out of

myself and into someone else.  Symbolically, in

horror movies, the ‘terrible room’ can be read as

a manifestation of a madman’s thoughts,

imagination actualised and made real.  I can’t help

but think that if this room is Clive’s head and I’m

here, trapped inside it, locked up in his mind, what

is this room doing to me?  What will happen to me

when I’m free from it?  What will I be?

See, there is a comfort to this place.  Whatever

else it is, it’s a creative space.  It’s a workshop of

idea and symbol.  Of narrative and visual agenda. 

It’s a place of creative stimulation.  My mind’s

never felt so active.  I feel ideas waiting to be born. 

They’re starting to scratch around inside the walls

of my skull.  They want to get out and conquer this

space.  To rebuild and reconstruct it.

All of this.  What’s happening to me.  To my

conception of what’s real. It all needs to be

recorded.

The fact is, I’m a Final Girl.  I’m the girl who

survives the slaughter of her friends, her lover, I’m

the girl who sees all the death and all the mayhem

and lives through it.  Who triumphs over it.  This is

my role now.  Clive’s forced me to play it.  But I’m

going to change the plot.  I will use the staples of the

genre.  I will use its patterns and its conventions.  I

will use them all as tools and I will rewrite the script

of this film.  I have to subvert this movie we’re in. 

I have to open up my mind and let it all out here. 

In this room.

I can do this. 

I can beat him. 

I’m an academic.

She stopped recording. 

She put the tape back in its case and hit it under her soiled mattress. 

Her mind buzzed:

            Text.  Subject.

            Creator.  Audience.

            Monster.  Victim.

            Parts yet to be cast.

 ***

Sleep stolen one night:

Heavy breathing whistling its way out of congested, mucous-lined nostrils.

            A flashlight shined in her face.  She rolled over.  She shielded her eyes.  Tense.  Afraid.  She peeked out from between her fingers. 

            She saw a shape:

            Hunched.  Angular.

            The shape cleared its throat. Swilled snot and spit around its mouth.  Breath rasped from its throat.

            How had he got in without waking her?  It seemed impossible.  There was no turn of the key in the lock.  No squeaking of the stairs.  Already, Elisha was sensitive to the sounds of the room.  To the signals it gave. 

            This man.  He moved like a specter.

            The specter spoke:

            ‘Well now.  Hate to drag young things like you out from their beauty sleep, but from the looks of you, you don’t need none anyhow.’

            He paused.  He sniffed.  He continued:

            ‘You aren’t one of mine…’

            Elisha reached up.  She punched a button on one of the TVs behind her.  It came to life.  Static hissed out.  The sound comforted Elisha.  It sounded angry and protective of her.  The TV lit the room with a white flickering beam. 

            The shape stepped out of its reach. 

            ‘Sometimes I come down here.  Sometimes I see things.  I see the girls.  My girls.  They look at me with their tears and their quivering ways and I walk towards them with my old arms outstretched.’

            The flashlight switched off.

            Elisha sat transfixed.  Tension and adrenaline mediated her end of this exchange.

            ‘I move towards them like I’m moving towards you.  And I reach for them.  I reach for their wounds, the wounds I gave to them as gifts and they show me their fear, their unmitigated absolute terror.  It’s their gift to me.  Then, my lovely girl, then they are gone.  Poof.  Gone.  And I’m left standing here like a crazy fool with a raging hard-on and the tang of blood on my tongue.  They leave me, those bitches, those teasing, teasing bitches.  They promise so much, with their tears and their screams and their blood.’

            The flashlight clicked back on.  It shined on Elisha once more.  The glaring light from the TV softened.  The yellow circle of flashlight fell on Elisha’s face.  Softly.  Warmly.

            ‘You.  You’re a piece of work, aren’t you?  No wonder I hear Clive beating off as much as I do.  My god, girl, you’re good enough to be a man’s last supper.’

            He stepped forward.

            Elisha scuttled along the floor.

            The man moved towards her without a sound.

            He walked into the beam of the TV.  It lit him up like a white spotlight.  Flickering, he seemed to come and go.  Appear.  Disappear.  All at the whim of the TV.

            Elisha took her first good look at him.  She tried to judge his age.  She guessed somewhere around the million mark. 

Face: a rotten piece of fruit: sunken/soft/broken.  He wiped his nose, flecked with broken-blood vessel red.

            Hair: wispy and long and textured like dental floss.  It clung in weird grotesque patches to his spotted head.

            Body: wiry and sharp. Old tattoos, blurry like Rorschach blots, on pale, wrinkled arms.  

Clothed in: filthy pyjamas hanging off the bones of his sharp angular body.  Patterned with blue and red steam engines.  Childlike.  Somehow adding to the corrupt vibe he gave off. 

‘I knew you were down here.  I could feel you.  I had this feeling.  Like in the days when I’d bring girls down here.  The days when all this bullshit movie-making machinery wasn’t here.  You know what I used to have in here, girl?  Back when this was my workshop?’

            He took another teetering step towards Elisha. 

She couldn’t understand what was keeping him vertical.  He moved like unseen hands propped him up.  Like invisible strings tied to his limbs and held from way up above jerked him onward. 

His breath came in phlegmy rasps.  Spit, white and thick.  A viscous bridge between top lip and bottom.

            ‘I had girls and I had tools.’

            He smiled.

            ‘Next time.  I’ll show you next time.  I’ll be back to talk.  Been too long since I could talk to a flower like you.’

            The old man again switched off his flashlight.  With a strange burst of grace, he retreated back into the shadows. 

            Elisha held her breath.  She tried to catch any sound of his departure.  All she heard was her heart.  It reverberated its way through her body.  It pounded into her eardrums.

            Another laid claim to this space.

***

Clive brought down breakfast.  Eggs.  Cold.  Badly scrambled.  Elisha could see broken chips of eggshell.

‘I had a visitor last night.’

            Clive lifted her piss-bucket.  Noted the lumpiness of the turd floating in it.  Noted Elisha needed more roughage. 

            ‘Huh?’

            ‘I had a visitor.  Last night.’

            ‘Who?’  Bemused.

            ‘Your grandfather.’

            Piss sloshed in the bucket.

            ‘Bullshit.’

            ‘He was here.  He talked to me.  He told me he had visions of girls he killed in this room.  This room, it’s like his TV set.  He comes down here and switches it on.  Hits and memories.

            ‘My grandfather is a vegetable.’

            ‘How do I know about him, then Clive?’

            ‘I don’t know.  Maybe I said.’

            ‘You never said.  How do I know about him?  About what he did?’

            ‘Wait.’

            Clive set down the piss bucket.  He jogged nosily up the stairs.  He locked the basement door behind him.

            Elisha counted off seconds.  A broken, flashing VCR display clock measured the length of time.

            Elisha counted to three thousand before quitting.  Several thousand display flashes later, Clive returned.

            ‘He’s upstairs.  He’s drooling.  I had to change his diaper.  This all seems impossible.  For starters, I didn’t even know he had a key.  So, he was here last night.’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘What time?’

‘How should I know?  You took away my watch.  All the VCR displays just flash zero-zero-zero at me.  Late, I guess.  I was asleep.  He woke me up.’

 ‘What…what did he want?’

‘To talk.  To ramble. To touch me.’

‘Did he?  Did he touch you?’

Push it.

‘A little.’

‘He shouldn’t have done that.  He has no right to do that.’

‘Are you angry?  He thought I was one of his ghosts.’

‘He’s a hundred and two.  Ghosts are his main source of company.  I don’t like this, Lina.  This is not his space anymore.  It’s mine and you’re not his ghost.  You’re my star.

Push it.

 ‘He doesn’t like your films, Clive.  He doesn’t like all your equipment.  He doesn’t even seem to like you, Clive.’

‘I don’t care what that old fucker thinks.  What did he say?  I tried to get him to speak just now, but he just stared up open-mouthed at a crack in his window.’

‘He sees the basement as his.  Maybe he sees me as his.  You, I don’t think he considers much at all.’

Clive frowned.  Stared into the piss-bucket.

‘I’m going to empty this.’

Twist the knife.

 ‘He said he’d be back.  He said he likes me.’

Elisha heard the bucket slosh.

            That night, her headaches started.

***

Clive threw himself into the work.

            He rigged up an old shower curtain.  It was white with green splotches of mould.  It separated his work area from the rest of the basement.  He didn’t want Elisha to see him work.  To see the footage in any kind of rough-cut state.

            Elisha saw the division of the basement another way: she was now physically increasing her occupation of the basement.

            Time passed.  Elisha spent it lost in idea-space.  Her headaches became migraines.  She closed her eyes.  Colours popped and flashed in the blackness.

            She felt like her head would split.  Maybe explode.  Like Scanners, only this would be her own thoughts bursting to get out.

            Grandpa Mitchell didn’t return. 

            Elisha began to wonder if she’d created the old man.  Maybe her imagination and the room itself fathered him.  Whatever.  He was part of her narrative.  An important and crucial part.   Real or not.

            Clive divided his time between pumping Elisha full of his mother’s painkillers and working on the film.

            Elisha: ‘I need a typewriter.  A pad and pen.  Get me something.  I have to let all this stuff out, Clive.’

            The curtain made a plastic flapping.  Clive poked his head out. 

            ‘I’m busy, Lina.  I’m editing the part where Elisha runs from Jerome.  It’s tricky.  Give me some space…’

            More and more: Lina/Elisha confusion.  Character/actor confusion. 

            Clive wasn’t the only one getting things confused.

            Elisha admired Lina Romay.  She was strong and tough.  She was sexy and womanly.  She was by turns:

fiery/beautiful/horrific/insolent/refined/innocent/corrupt. 

Lina was mercurial and elusive.  Uninhibited and full of PRESENCE. 

Elisha watched Lina movies when she was alone at night.  Lina gave her strength.  Elisha mimicked her mannerisms.  Practiced her pout.  She wanted to become Lina.  Lina granted her access to Clive’s headspace.

‘Please.  Just a pen.  I’ll write on my bedsheets.’

Clive sighed.  Ducked back behind the shower curtain.

‘Jesus.  My head.’  Elisha rocked back and forth on her foldout bed.  Cheap springs squeaked incessant.

Clive could give her as much room as she needed.  While all the ideas remained in her head, she would never control the space.

Clive rummaged.  His hand poked through the curtain.  He dropped a thick black marker.  It hit the concrete with a sharp clatter.  The lid cracked.  Elisha crawled over.  She ripped the lid off. 

She wrote until her pillowcase was completely tattooed with narrative. 

She wrote until the marker ran dry.

She finished a short story with the tip spit-lubricated.

            The throbbing pulse in her head flatlined.

She fell asleep.  On her pillow of words. 

Grandpa never returned.

***

THE SECOND MONTH

Elisha slept wrapped up in her tales.  Her sheets were covered with hastily written stories.  The handwriting was near-illegible.  It looked like some kind of code.  Such was the speed of her writing.

Elisha liked writing on the sheets.  Cotton substituted canvas.  She felt she was truly creating.  Clive gave her a handful of markers.  He didn’t care so much about her stories.  He was just glad Elisha was happy.  That he had time to work.

The film was taking shape.

Excerpt from the video diary of Elisha Maher.

He tells me he’s almost finished.  With his new

movie.  I wish I could record him while he works,

but it’s just too risky.  He looks like a total mad

scientist.  Perhaps the maddest scientist.  Hunched

over his machines, fiddling with fast forward and

rewind buttons, cursing to himself when he fucks

up.  I watch him sometimes.  I see him through the

cracks in the curtain.  The spaces it can’t hide. 

He’s so tender with the machines.  He talks

softly to them, like he’s willing them on.  No, that’s

not quite right.  It sounds like he’s talking to himself,

really, like they’re extensions of himself.  The

machines are like a spare mechanical brain, or some

external hard drive that plugs into his own software. 

What’s the word…the SF word?  Wetware.  They

plug right into his wetware.

The machines are like some fever-dream processor. 

You feed in the image, you shape it, actualise it and it

ejects out of the machine whole and refined.  I envy

him.  He holds his beautiful nightmares in his hands. 

Mine, mine I sleep on. 

He washed the sheets last night.  I nearly cried.  They

came back with my words faded.  My stories ghosts

of themselves.  Already I forget them.  Already I write

over them anew.  There seems to be no end to my

stories.  To my horrible, awful imaginings.  They grow,

my stories.  They grow like cursed babies.  By the day

they grow and grow.  I’m a Medusa: I let one loose,

another five take its place.  I’m reminded of the old

notions of pregnancy.  How the imaginative whims of

a mother, the things she beheld, the desires she felt,

could shape a child.  She moulded her child with

her mind.  This is how monsters were made.  The

Romantics believed that imagination was the power to

generate, to create.  The artist as creator. 

Victor Frankenstein called his laboratory his ‘filthy

workshop of creation.’  This basement…this space…

it’s my filthy workshop.  It’s Clive’s.  It’s Grandpa’s. 

Whose imagination is the filthiest?  The freest? Whose

children, whose monsters are the most horrific?

                        And what am I?  What am I becoming through all of

this?  It occurs to me that I’m both the subject and

creator of my own terror.  I am an accomplice in my

own terrorisation.  I’m recording my own meltdown. 

I’m removing myself from it, fictionalising it.  I’m

viewing myself and my plight with the shallow, facile

sympathy I give to horror movie victims.  What’s

happened to my trauma?  Is this the result of my

trauma?  Perhaps I’m doing all of this, invoking

Lina Romay, recording horrific tales on my linen,

because my mind is defending itself from

breakdown.  Maybe I’ve already broken down. 

Whatever it is, I can’t stop doing it.  I can’t stop

doing it until I bring this narrative to its conclusion,

until I script this film an ending.

When I leave here, when I’m ready to go and I just

walk out of here, which is what will happen, I will

shape and actualise this nightmare, this whole crazy

story.  I will write it down.  I will film it.  I will edit it

with my own hands and my own head and my own

machines.  I will use my contacts out there in that

world, wherever it has gone, and it will be promoted

and distributed and shown on massive screens to

audiences craving the nightmares that they

themselves are too shy or too unprepared to create.

                                    And it will establish me to the point where I can

make another.  And then another.  And then another. 

I’m going to become a perpetual machine.  I will

keep making horrors that are fueled by this horror. 

This horror and the next, the real horror and the fake,

I won’t know when or where or how they differ. 

I won’t care. 

I don’t care now.

I will look upon the images that shape my children

and I will bring them forth into this space, this free,

free space. 

                                   

***

Elisha woke.  A tape rested on the scrawled-upon pillow beside her head.  She popped it in one of the many VCRs.  She turned on one of the television sets.  She hit play. 

The film faded in: starry sky.  Peaceful.  Quiet. 

Cut to: a dying fire. The shot widened out.  A campsite.  It looked familiar.  Kind of.  It sort of looked like the campsite Elisha and her friends had made.  On the night they all died.  On the night she was taken. 

The flames flickered.  Disturbed by a figure.  Huge and dark.  Jerome. 

Curious: the angle was different.  It was shot from behind Jerome.  It traced his steps.    Somehow, Clive had set up another camera. 

Cut to: Jerome’s POV.  Creepy.  Weird.  It meant that Clive had filmed this first.  The sneaky shit.  He’d shot this location out completely before his brother was anywhere near.  He’d probably even storyboarded this massacre in his head.

            Elisha watched on.  Never once did the idea of stopping this grotesque document enter her head. 

Jerome literally walked through the first of the three tents.  He brought his machete down in a huge heavy arc.  Sliced through canvas and flesh in a single slash.

Elisha watched as Jerome lifted her best friend to her feet.  She screamed.  Jerome cut her head off.   It shot off her body and hit a nearby tree.  It had the comedic look of a splatter movie.  Clive had even dubbed in whooshing sounds as the machete cut through the air.  A heavy splotching noise as the head hit the ground. 

            The butchery continued.  Elisha noticed that Clive had taken the horrific slaughter of her friends and stylized it with his cameras.  He had re-contextualized the scene as horror movie farce. 

There was an unreality to the scene.  Elisha recognized none of it.  She couldn’t help but smile at the black humor of it. 

Jerome, lumbering, clumsy at times.  Hacking her tiny friends to pieces with heavy blows.  She felt her whole being quicken with anticipation and anxiety for what would happen next even though she knew exactly what would happen next.  She’d witnessed this scene before in dozens of movies.  She’d lived through this very moment. 

A moment reborn as if it were re-enacted. 

            Editing: fast.  Choppy.  Cut. Cut. Cut.  Cut.  Elisha thought: early Romero.  Elisha thought: The Crazies. 

Extra kineticism.  Extra movement.  It was chopped-up.  Gritty.  Hyper-real. 

This was not what she lived through.  This was not what had happened.

This was how Clive saw that night.  This was how Clive saw his brother.  This was how Clive saw the world

            How, she wondered, would he see her?

            As the thought entered her head:

There she was. 

At first, just a small figure in the foreground.  Running away from the slaughter behind her. 

Cut to: Jerome.  Following her with long, heavy, even paces. 

Cut to: Elisha.  Or someone who looked like her. 

Cut to: CU on Elisha.

She barely recognized herself. 

The lips seemed just a little too full.  The hair just a little too stylish.  The breasts just a little too full.

Near-perfect in her terror.  Post human in her panic.  She looked iconic.  Clive had reshaped her.  Remade her.  Reterritorialized her.  Into a moving image of exquisite expression.

It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

            Elisha knew what this meant.  If there was a doubt before, there was none now.

            The film paused on her face.  The image held for a heartbeat or three. 

The love letter faded to black.

***

He came again.

            Elisha was ready: she turned on the light.  She made a shocked lunge away from him.  Into a camera.  She hit record.  It was set.  Wide-shot of the room.

            ‘Look at this.  Dirty sheets, dirty mind, I always say. Don’t cower.  I don’t like cowering.  Scream if you must, but don’t cower.  I’m too old to chase and there’s nowhere for you to go.’

            He held up a fistful of keys.  Jangled them about.  ‘I have a strong grip.’

            He tapped his temple.  ‘I also have a mind to keep you here, so don’t you think about bolting.  Like I said: there’s nowhere for you to go.’

            Elisha made sure she didn’t block the camera.  She sat back down on her mattress.

            Grandpa Mitchell looked the sheets over again.  ‘What’s all this shit anyway?  Incantations?  Hoodoo?  You going to open a…a…a gateway out of here?  All the mysticism in the whole fucking universe isn’t going to save you, missy.  God and the devil could unite in a titanic team-up and they still couldn’t get that firm young ass of yours out of this place.’

            He came closer.  He leaned towards her.  He jerked like stop-motion animation.  He twitched like a spastic robot.  His left eye winked with a perverse tick.

            ‘You know why girl?  Don’t even try to answer.  I’ll tell you.  The why of it is this: this place.  This space.  It’s mine, girl.  It’s been mine for so long I’ve forgotten how long it’s been mine.  I created this place, girl.  I created it.  I’m the father.  I’m the son.  I’m the holy fucking spirit.  Cells and ideas collided in my head and boom – this place was born.  You’re here at my sufferance, girl.  You’re here not at Clive’s whim, but mine.  Clive.  He’s a fucking squatter.  He’s got no claim on this place.  And you, you got even less.  I populated it with the ghosts of my dead, the ghosts of those I chose to come here and die by my hand in glorious, exquisite ways.  And like the good Christian lord of the bible I keep an eye on my creations.  I keep an eye on them and I monitor them and I dialogue with them and I fucking love them.  Clive comes in here and he brings all these movies and all these cameras and all this bullshit.  I sat back.  I let him.  He’s my fucking grandson.  He has his own creative impulses.  It never got in the way.  Until now.’

            Grandpa Mitchell staggered over to a camera-loaded workbench.  He bent down.  His knees popped.  Underneath the bench: a heavy rusting red metal box.  The size of a coffin. 

            Grandpa picked through his keys.  Selected one.  Unlocked the box.

            The lid opened with a faint metallic death-moan. 

            Grandpa reached in.

            ‘I can’t feel the girls anymore.  I can’t see them.  They seem to have evacuated that first night we spoke.  Slipped out through the cracks in the mortar or something.  They’re gone.  If I had the energy, I’d dig up their bodies and bring what remained back down here and kill them all over again.’

            Grandpa dug his hand into the box.  Heavy objects bumped into each other inside.

            ‘Now.  Now, all there is is you.  My moments of lucidity are become less and less frequent.  But I’m lucid enough to know what you want: you want my space.  You want this basement.  You’ll take it from me and you’ll take it from Clive.’

            ‘I just want to go home.’

            ‘Bullshit.  You could have left.  You’ve got Clive all tied up with pussy hair and film school nonsense.  You wanted to leave, why haven’t you fought me?  Why haven’t you pushed past me, made a grab for the keys, why haven’t you done anything?’

            ‘I’m frightened of you.’

            ‘Be that as it may.  Your behavior.  It’s not normal.  I think you like it down here.  I think you’re addicted to the magic in this place.  The death-infected vibe of it.  The magic of it.’

            Grandpa pulled out a large, rusting knife.  Duct-taped handle.  Odd, dry clumps clung to the blade.  Grandpa pointed it back at Elisha’s sheets.

            ‘Just look at all your spells.’

            ‘You’re wrong.’

            Elisha stared at the knife.  ‘What are you going to do with that?’

            Grandpa ran a finger down the dull blade. 

He tutted at his unscathed finger.  

The spilling of his own blood created drama. 

The spilling of his own blood took fear to a higher plateau. 

            ‘Stop being so stupid.  Do you know how many girls I killed down here?  Do you?  I don’t even know because I lost count.  I can’t even give you a round figure.  They all lied to me, the girls.  The countless, beautiful girls.  They all lied and pleaded.  They spat so many lies at me that I can taste them.  Now, you, you’re spinning different kinds of lies, but they taste just the god damn same.’

            Grandpa pointed to the blade.  ‘The truth comes with this.  The truth comes with the cutting.  What’s really inside, it comes out with the cutting.’

***

Clive.  Concerned: ‘What happened to your hair?’

            Elisha touched her hacked-up hair.  Self-consciously.  Willing forth the tears.

            ‘It’s all on tape.’

            ‘You touched my things?  You used my things?’

            ‘Clive.  Please.  It’s all on tape.’  She held out a remote.  ‘Take it.  Watch it.’

            Elisha edited the footage.  She cut parts out.  Incriminations.  Ambiguities.  Truths.  Cut out.  Footage destroyed.

            Clive sighed.  Pressed play.  Watched it all.  Saw:

            His grandfather’s verbal assault on him. 

            His grandfather’s physical assault of Elisha. 

            The footage: gritty/grainy/grey.    The wide-shot made certain things indistinguishable and ugly: the background.  The shadows.

            Clive watched:

            His grandfather suddenly surging with strength.  Power.  Control.

            His grandfather slapping Elisha.  Holding her.  Pulling at long tufts of dark hair.  Hacking/sawing through it.  Throwing strands into the air.

            His grandfather’s pyjama pants bulge out at the crotch.  Elisha squirming and writhing as her hair is agonizingly shorn.

            Clive heard:

            Screams.  Distorted and blown-out.  Static-filled.  Pain-filled.

            Laughter.  His grandfather snorting.

            Elisha: ‘NO.  NO NO NO NO NONONONONONONONO.’

            Clive rubbed his eyes.  Looked at Elisha.

            She was still touching her head.

            Clive pressed stop.  He watched the blank screen for a moment.  He watched Elisha reflected in its darkness.

            ‘You look even more like her now.  If that’s at all possible.’

            ‘What?’  Elisha looked up at him.  Eyes big and innocent.

            ‘Lina.  You look even more like Lina.’

            Elisha smiled.

            ‘Neaten it for me?  There’s bits going all over the place.  Lina never looked like this.’

            ‘Sure.’

            Clive put on Ilsa, The Wicked Warden.  He sat behind Elisha.  He snipped at her with his mother’s kitchen scissors.  He looked up at the TV.  Watched Lina.  Short-haired as she is in the bulk of her work.  Trimmed accordingly.

            Clive looked at Lina’s ears.  He looked at Elisha’s.  Exposed now, they were just a touch too large.  Just like Lina’s.

            Elisha said, ‘We should finish your movie.’

            ‘You look great.  I’m nearly done.’

            ‘You know, the movie with me in it?’

            ‘The movie’s done.’

            ‘It is?  Really?’

            ‘Mmm.  Why?’

            ‘It feels just like the beginning.  What you shot.’

            ‘Maybe.’

            ‘You know, we could use some of my footage.  Put it in the middle.’

            ‘I don’t know about that.  I understand why you did it, but I’m kind of sore you used my equipment.  I told you not to.’

            ‘I won’t take credit for it.  The footage.  Any of it.’

            ‘I’m trying to fix this up.  Will you be quiet?’

            ‘The movie needs to be finished.  Don’t you think?’

            ‘Please.’

            ‘What are we going to do about your grandfather?’

            ‘I’m going to sleep down here.  He’s not going to touch you again.  I don’t get this.  Every time I go and see him he’s a fucking potted plant.  Now, shut up.’

            ‘He’s my monster now, Clive.’

            ‘I understand.’

            ‘This genre has conventions, Clive.  This genre likes to follow its conventions.’

            ‘What?’

            ‘The Final Girl.  She needs to kill the monster.’

            ‘What about Texas Chainsaw Massacre?’

            ‘Every rule has its exception.’

            Clive stood up.  Stepped away.  Shut an eye and framed Elisha through his fingers.  ‘You are Lina Romay incarnate.’

            ‘Lina has a monster to slay.’

            ‘He’s my grandfather.’

            ‘He’s going to kill me.  He wants you out of here.  He wants to die down here with his creation.  He wants his ghosts back.  There isn’t enough room for all of us down here.’

            Clive stood, popped his back.

            ‘I’ll script it.  You’ll see.  Get me some paper, Clive.  I’ll script it.’

            Elisha widened her eyes.  She pouted a wide and defiant Lina-pout.

            Clive.  Silent.

            ‘We are supposed to be engaged in a totally co-operative creative endeavour.’

            ‘Since when?  You’re getting as delusional as Grandpa.’

            ‘Think about it?’

            ‘I’ll think about it.’

            Clive thought about it. 

            The old man was fucking up his shit. 

            The old man put his hands on Lina.

            The old man potentially had one more homicide left in him.

            The old man had to go.

            There were conventions to follow.

            There was cinematic history to follow.

            Two days later, Clive brought his mother’s old typewriter down into the basement.

            He placed it in front of Elisha.  He dropped a bundle of old and yellowing paper in front of her.

            Clive said, ‘Script it.’

            Elisha fed the typewriter some paper.

            Keys clacked noisily moments later.

*** 

INT. BASEMENT

From above, we track across a sleeping ELISHA’s bed.  All is grey, dull and Gothic.  We can make out some of the poorly-scribbled words that tattoo Elisha’s bedding.  We see the sheets bulge and shift with her movements. 

CUT TO:

CU on Elisha.  She’s at peace but she twitches in the obvious throes of dream.  Various expressions cross her face, from the ecstatic to the angry.  She murmurs indefinable words.  She makes odd noises.  She falls silent.  A faint snore, more of a purr in actuality, escapes her.  We keep things peaceful for a moment or two before the SOUND OF A CREAKING door, metallic and sharp, breaks the quiet.  Elisha opens her eyes at the sound.  The camera remains on Elisha while we hear the CREAKING OF WOODEN STEPS.  Elisha begins to breathe heavily.  All is silent once more, except for her breath.  A FLASHLIGHT turns on with a soft click and its beam falls across her.

CUT TO:

From Elisha’s POV, we stare up at GRANDPA.  A long, thin trail of drool hangs from his chin.  His brow furrows nastily over his insane eyes.  Strands of hair stick up at odd angles as if static-charged.  He looks even more ailing than last we saw him, but more demonic and dangerous as well.  He wears another set of dirty, soiled pyjamas.  He rotates his head and his neck crunches with the movement.

                        GRANDPA

          I knew you were still here.  The pressure

in my head, the blockage, it’s still there. 

You know, don’t you, what this blockage is.

CUT TO:

Elisha, fearful, trying to pull the covers up over her face, like a small child.  Her eyes are wide, tears well up, visible and gleaming in the beam of the flashlight.

                                                GRANDPA (cont’d)

           The blockage.  It’s you.

Grandpa reaches down, bones pop and sinews audibly stretch as he does so.  He reaches for the bed covers.  He pulls them back with a yank. 

Elisha…

Elisha

            Elisha –

            What? 

            What does Elisha do?

            Sheets washed maybe six times.  Covered with scrawl each time.  Reams of old paper filled with words.  With stories.  Ideas so eager to come they near split her head.  Horror upon horror upon horror.  Created with glee and urgency.  By hands now callused and stiff from their birth and transcription.

            Now.  At the most important of all stories.

            Blocked.

            Why?

             This one would have to be induced…

         ***

THE THIRD MONTH

‘Can I film you?’

            ‘No.’

            ‘Can I film you?’

            ‘No.’

            ‘Can I film you?’

            ‘No.’ 

            ‘Think of it as behind the scenes footage.’

‘Ask me again and there will be pain in your immediate, and I mean immediate, future.’

            ‘Look at what you did to me.  What you made of me.  Imagine what I can make of you.  Don’t you want to see?  Don’t you want to know how I see you?’

‘No.’

‘I thought we were partners.’

‘I don’t do cameos.  I’m not Hitchcock.  I’m not that vain.’

            ‘We are supposed to be engaged in a totally co-operative creative endeavor.’

            ‘Again with that.  I never said that.  The only co-operation we need around here is you.  Co-operating with me.  We’re not going over all this again, Elisha…’

            ‘Yeah, but don’t you want to share in my vision?  You look at me and know me and relate to me through the lens.  Let me do the same.  Please.  We can just talk or something, okay?  Like an interview.  When you want to stop, we’ll stop.’

            Clive closed his eyes, scratched his nose and sighed. 

            Elisha looked at Clive.  He was on edge.  Jumpy.  The idea held no appeal.

            Elisha didn’t understand.

            Clive sighed again.  He shuffled over to a bench.  Lifted up a camcorder.  He loaded it with a tape.  He passed it to her.  He dragged a chair into the center of the room. 

Elisha noted: it was the same wooden chair that she herself was once bound to.

Elisha watched: Clive.  Head hanging.  He lowered himself into the chair.  He looked resigned.  Sad.  He looked like one of the condemned.

            Clive said, ‘Rules: one: we never, ever watch this.  In fact, when we’re done, I’m going to rip out the damn tape and set fire to it.  Two: when I say cut, you cut.  I don’t want something filmed, you don’t film it.  Okay?’

            Silence.

            ‘I said, ‘okay?”

            ‘Okay, Clive.  Yeah, okay.’

            He passed her the camera.  She had butterflies.

Her first question:

            ‘Why are you doing this?’

            ‘What, exactly, is this?’

            ‘This.  Let me do this.  Film you.  Now.’

            He flushed.  Scratched his ragged beard.  Couldn’t meet the camera’s eye. 

‘You know why.’ 

He glanced up at her. 

Not at the camera. 

At her. 

            She had to shift gears before she lost him:

            ‘Tell me about your movies.’

            Clive fidgeted.

            ‘First one I ever made was about insects.  I spent a week out there, in the woods, collecting bugs and moths and all kinds of creepy-crawlies.  I filmed them as they were, whole.  Stopped.  Pulled off a wing.  Filmed.  Stopped.  Pulled off another wing…on and on.’ 

            As he spoke, Elisha slowly panned the camera around the room.  Obsolete recording equipment looked bleak and Gothic in the shadows. 

Elisha swore the room was getting bigger.  She looked up from the viewfinder.  It was no camera lens illusion.  Even to her own eyes, the room seemed to have grown.

            ‘I recorded their sounds, if they made any, all kinds of buzzing and clicking noises.  I put them on an old four track, blended all that zzzzzzz-ing together, faded some in, some out.  Sounded like the fucking apocalypse by the time I was done.  I laid that soundtrack over the top of the footage of them flailing about, pieces disappearing, and I had my first film.  Mondo Buzz, I called it.  Editing’s pretty choppy and you see my finger at one point, but, shit y’know, I was fifteen.  Maybe I’ll show it to you one day.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘After that, I made Mondo Maryanne.  There was a girl, you see.  Her name was Maryanne.  She lived nearby.  She was something, I tell you what.  Wore her hair in pigtails all the time.  She was the one, you know?  The one all the boys who went to school wanted to fuck.’

‘The ‘It’ Girl.’

‘Yeah.  The ‘It’ Girl.  I had a thing for her too.  Man.  I liked how she moved.  She had this hip-swinging rhythm and these swaying arms that brushed against you when she walked on by.  She had this cheeky smile and this look in her eye like she always knew what you were thinking.  She liked to look over her shoulder back at people as she past them.  Somehow, the position, the angle of her body, it made her seem even curvier.  See, she also had massive Russ Meyer-movie tits, like Tura Satana or somebody.  Best of all, she had a thing for the camera.  She let me film her.  Naked, I mean.  I never understood why, really.  Maybe she hoped I’d show everyone, show all the boys what they couldn’t have.  Maybe she’d imagine them beating off to it, pumping desire and sex and come at the screen.  At her.  Maybe she thought she could feed off it, like a succubus or something.  I never got it.  The why of it.  Didn’t matter I suppose.  She was a little kooky, that one, but, damn, she was fine.  I tried to do it all in close up, all choppy, like Meyer did in Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, but I really had no idea what the hell I was doing.  I was just so excited that she’d roll down those panties for me.  My first try at it wasn’t sexy enough though and it was a cunt to edit, so I fucked around with the angles, pulled back, got some different shots.  Looks nice.  Wasn’t hard in the end.  She was pretty incredible.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Well, actually, Jerome kinda like her too.  He watched me film her one day, on the sly, and it all just got a little much for him.  I got some great audio of it though.  I got some great sound as she choked.  Jerome was grunting away too.  Sounds like they’re having a freeeeeaky fuck…in his mind maybe they were.  Anyway, that ended up being the soundtrack.’

‘Sounds like you’re confusing your genres a bit.  Mondo’s like…shockumentary…death film’s Snuff.’

‘Ahhh…fucking semantics.  When that Monk immolates himself in Mondo Cane 2…’

‘It’s car-nay, not cane.’

‘Car-nay?  No shit?  What kind of pronunciation is that? ‘

‘Italian, I think.’

‘Car-nay…well there you go.  Anyway… uh…’

‘The monk.’

‘Ah.  Yeah.  The monk.  When that monk sets himself on fire, what’s that?  Snuff?  Mondo?  What?’

‘Yeah.  Okay, it’s death film in the wider context.  I take your point.  Jacopetti.   Prosperi.  The guys who made those films.  They weren’t only exploiting death, at times it seems that, and it’s been argued that, they were also responsible for it.  Nothing on the level you’re talking about with Maryanne though…’

‘It’s all shades of grey, college girl, shades of grey.  You like Mondo Cane?’

            ‘I was…quite nervous about watching it, actually.  The idea frightened me.’

            ‘Why?’

            ‘Because…it felt like true exploitation.  Because it felt like…taboo.  It felt like voyeurism of a horrible, sick kind.  Like maybe I’d cross a line by watching it. I don’t know.  I had no desire to engage with the things it wanted to show me.  I didn’t want to connect with it.  It made me ashamed of my own curiosity.  It was all an overreaction, of course, considering how ludicrous some of it is and how they twist some of the material and considering how much further they went in subsequent films.  Shit, Clive, I don’t know.  It just felt perverse.’

            Clive let loose a belly laugh.  ‘You serious?  Shit, the only perverse thing is when those fat old ladies try to Hula.’

            ‘Look, there’s a difference between the idea of watching a horror movie and the idea of watching a man hack a bull to death with a machete.  A big, big difference…Yes, the film is ridiculous.  The music.  The suspect editing.  The masquerade of reality.  Which brings me back to my original thought, which is there’s some doubt that scene with the monk is actually real.  I mean that stuff did happen and there’s documented proof of it, but the footage in Mondo Cane 2…well, it’s suspicious.’

‘No way.’

‘Yeah. Those guys, the Mondo guys, they didn’t just manipulate events, they manipulated the audience too…like any good filmmaker.  Look at it, really, really, look at it.’ 

            Clive darkened.  Soon, his mood would turn.

‘Turn the camera off.  It’s time for a flick.  I don’t feel like talking anymore.’

Elisha kept filming.  She zoomed in on Clive’s face. 

Past the ragged beard that grew in dark little disconnected islands of hair on his face. 

Past the full lips, cracked and bleeding at the edges. 

Past the broken nose that, oddly, suited him. 

She zoomed in on his left eye.  The eye that twitched a little when he began to get upset. 

Her viewfinder filled with his blood-flecked eye.  His flickering eyelid.  His dark iris. 

‘Turn.  It .  Off,’

At that moment.  Elisha knew:

Clive was not in control. 

He always had to be in control.  In control of the image. 

He became self-conscious when he wasn’t directing the camera’s gaze. 

When filmed, he became aware of the movements of his own body.  The wasted, vandalized beauty of his own image. 

He became strangely embodied when he wasn’t in control. 

He breathed harder.  He sweated.  He fidgeted.  He seemed to become aware of the scent of his body.  The smell of his breath. 

He was just a man. 

He could fuse his own mind with the film, but not his body.

Elisha turned the camera off. 

‘Okay,’ she said, putting the camera in her lap.  ‘Battery’s almost dead anyhow.  What are we watching?’

Silence. 

‘Clive?’

He refocused but wouldn’t look Elisha in the eye.

‘My friend Seth runs a catalog bootleg service.  Nationwide Nasties and Nightmares.  I get all my shit from him.  I got Flower of Flesh and Blood the other day. You know it?  That Jap film Charlie Sheen gave to the FBI because he thought it was real?’

‘Sure.  Heard of it.  Never seen it.  Put it on.’ 

Elisha still filmed. 

With her mind. 

She filmed the way Clive rubbed the back of his neck as he got off his rickety wooden chair. 

She filmed his awkward shuffle to the bookshelf piled high with videos and DVDs.  

She filmed him searching for the movie.  Spilling videos and discs to the floor uncaringly.  Discs that were the treasures of yesterday.  Discs that were the treasures of the day before. 

She slowly panned across to the blotchy stained mattress where she sat. 

Stroking the camera that lay in her lap. 

Plotting the final dying moments of this movie.

*** 

They pulled a double-feature:

Flower of Flesh and Blood.  Demented modern-day Samurai hunts by night.  Quarry: a young girl.  Quarry sighted.  Quarry hunted.  Quarry caught. 

            Samurai slices drugged quarry up.  He slices off her arms.  Her legs.  He scalpels open her stomach.  Hands sink into the slit.  Intestines smother her snatch. 

Samurai machetes off her head.  It slo-mo sails through the air.  Samurai sucks down her eyeball.  Body parts in various states are scattered throughout the room.

Unabridged Agony.  Japanese snuff simulation supreme.  We’re in a BASEMENT.  Tied up chick is slapped and bullied.  Pliers are taken to her.  She’s subjected to white noise for a time-lapsed five hours.  Sound like Elisha’s fiercest headaches. 

Hair is torn out.  A fingernail follows. 

Burning oil pours over her.  Maggots placed on scorched skin.  Torture upon torture until her eye is pin-pricked-punctured.  Twenty time-lapsed hours.

            At its end:

            Elisha felt STRONG.

Excerpt from the video diary of Elisha Maher

The original Gothics were written for a female audience, you

know.  Frankenstein and all that, they were for chicks.  We

were the biggest buyers of horror fiction.  Somewhere along

the line, things got all fucked up and now women get all

trembly at the thought of their innermost terrors being shown

on screen.  Me, I refuse to give these films that much fucking

power over my mind.  Just because my modern day rape-terror

or whatever is being beamed onto a fifty-foot screen, it’s not

reality.  It’s a fiction.  And it’s a fiction that, if you track it all

the way back to Shelley, belongs to me.  Anyway, I want to

engage with my fears.  Bring ‘em on.  Make them as dark and as

fucked up as you want.  Mythologize them.  Mysoginize them. 

Try and make me scared.  Show me the parts of myself I can’t

deal with.  Take me where I don’t want to go.  You’re doing

me a favor, because this film, this fiction, it’s for me.  It gives

me power. 

It’s all story.  Shit, this, this right here is a story.  This is the

gingerbread house.  It’s Bluebeard’s room.  It’s Frankenstein’s

‘filthy workshop.’  And in this story, it’s my place.  It’s my

story.  It’s my movie.  It’s mine. I’m the star here, I’m the

fucking auteur, I’m in command and I say, so far, this sleazy

epic, it’s suffering from a lack of gratuitous nudity, death, and

there’s just been far too much dialogue. 

It’s time for me to finish.  It’s time for me to leave.  It’s time

to stop scaring the shit out of myself.  It’s time to start scaring

the shit out of everybody else.  Out of the real people.

***

Elisha said, ‘I’m ready.’

            Clive said, ‘So am I.’

            ‘He’ll be back, you know.  He’ll be back for me.’

            ‘I know.’

            ‘I’m ready.’

            ‘Finish the script.  It’s not a snuff piece.  It’s a narrative.  I need the script.’

            ‘It’s all up here, you know, in my head.’

            ‘I can’t see into your head, Lina.  You don’t have fluffy little thought bubbles popping out.’

            ‘You know what this is?  This is a case of not seeing the forest for all the fucking trees, Clive.’

            ‘What happens?  Once this is done?’

            ‘What does the Final Girl always do?’

            ‘I don’t know.’

            ‘You’re in denial.  You know exactly what she does.’ 

            ‘What does she do?’

            ‘You want me to say it?  You really want me to say it?’

            ‘I need something to feel real.’

‘She fades to black and the credits roll.’

***

Clive was running errands for his mother.  It was the first significant block of time Elisha had had in some days.  He’d started sleeping in the basement.  Next to her, on the floor.  He was reluctant to leave her side.

Clive never spoke of his mother.  Elisha had no idea what errands he periodically ran for her.  Clive rarely spoke of his brother.  When he did, it was with reverence and awe.  Jerome was myth made flesh.

            As she was.

            Elisha played with the lamp Clive had given her to work and read by.  She nibbled at an apple: unaware of the taste.  She bent the metal neck of the lamp over to the movies stacked on the shelves.  She ran the light over them like a prison yard spotlight.

            She got out of bed.  Walked over to the shelf.  Ran her fingers along the titles.  She found it:

            Mondo Maryanne.

            She plucked it from its siblings.  Pulled off its plastic jacket.  Held it. 

            Of all the pieces of Clive that sat on the shelves.  Of all the twisted downloads from his head – he was most attached to Maryanne.  It was more a piece of him than certain vital organs.

            Wherever Clive was.  Elisha wondered:

            Do you feel this?  Do you feel me touching you?

            She stroked the tape like it was a dream solid and breathing.  Borne from his mind like Athena.  She put it into a VCR.  Searched for a remote.

***

Extreme CU.  Maryanne.  Her dark eyes move from left to right.

            Cuts follow rapid-fire:  ECU Maryanne’s tits, striped shirt stretching.  ECU Maryanne’s ass.  Tight.  Denim hugging it.  ECU Maryanne’s mouth.  Full, glossy red lips part.  A thin trail of spit stretches, snaps.  Lips peel back.  A smile reveals. 

            ECU Maryanne, unbuttoning hotpants.  Dainty fingers fumbling with the buttons.  Naked underneath – fingers rub through the hair.

            T-shirt next: breasts bounce free.  Near-comedically huge and full.  She fondles them cheekily.

            Images keep coming: ECU to ECU.  Rapid.  Disorientating.  Meyer-on-speed.  Manic energy flowing through it.  The choppy lustiness of a pervert:  next/next/next.  Continually moving forward.  A fever-dream peepshow.

            Heavy breathing cuts through the silence.  Not horny.  Not aroused.  Just heavy. 

            Images intercut:  Maryanne playing.  Heavy male hands clenching/unclenching. 

            The shot blows wide.

            Jerome enters.  So different from when Elisha saw him.  Here huge and grotesque, but human.  Alive.

            Maryanne screams but the sound is removed.  Elisha hears it in her head.  Hands clasp around her throat.  Jerome squeezes.  Squeezes.

            Grunts, groans, sighs, exhalations of all kinds abound.  Sexual now – breathy and gasping. 

            Right until its inevitable end.

***

THE FINAL NIGHT

Room rearranged.  Televisions surrounding her bed.  Cords and cables crossed and overlapped.  Tapes cued:  horror/porno/Mondo Maryanne/herself running and screaming and attacked by Grandpa.  A sensual overload.

            A gift for Clive.

            He came downstairs on cue.

            ‘What have you --?’

            ‘Sssshh.  Come here.’

            The room was lit only by television glow.  Elisha stood white and neon in the center of their detuned, twitching beams.

            Clive stopped.  Stared.  At her whiteness.  Her alienness.  Her cathode-enhanced fluorescent beauty.

            She was naked.  Bathing in the glare.

            Clive’s eyes hurt to look at her.

            She pressed buttons.  One machine at a time.  Images came on screen by screen by screen.

            Still Clive stood.  Rooted to the spot.

            Aware he’d entered the spectacle of the final act.

            Elisha held herself straight and tall.  Horror and perversity in front/behind/all around.  Lighting her up.  Her skin flickering shades.

            She smiled.  Outstretched a hand. 

            ‘Come here.’

            Clive stepped into the circle.  He couldn’t take his eyes off her.  peripherally he spied random images of sex and death.  He thought he saw Maryanne.  He thought he saw his brother.  He thought he saw his grandfather.  Things exploded.  Skin sliced open.  guns fired.  Insides became outsides. 

All the while, Elisha smiled.  All the while she remained the focus of his gaze.

She took his hand and pulled him forward.  She stood on the tips of her toes.  She kissed him. 

He sighed.  He tasted her mouth.  He said, ‘Lina.’ 

His mind swelled.  His chest swelled.  He felt vague and unreal.  He touched her softly.  He felt like one ghost touching another.  He wondered if he might phase right into her.  His hand flickered with her skin in the pulsing glare.

She was so soft.  He felt like he might break her.  Part of him wanted to break her.

She stripped him with stealth and gentleness.

She eased him onto the bed.  It groaned metallic under their combined weight. 

She felt the hardness of him.

It was too much for him.  He tried to escape.  He looked up.  Around.  Everywhere: wounds/limbs/orifices/blood/semen/shit/tears.

She pushed him down.  She got on top.  She put him inside her.

            They came together.  Eyes locked on one another.  Sharing thoughts conjured forth by the monstrous imaginings that illuminated them.

            They slept.  They dreamed each other’s dreams.

***

INT. BASEMENT

All is black.  We hear the CREAKING OF WOODEN STEPS, then silence again.  We hear a dull thudding noise.

CUT TO:

ECU of ELISHA opening her eyes.

CUT TO:

Wide shot of the room.  CLIVE lies sprawled out on the basement floor.  Blood trickles down his face from a cut on his forehead.  GRANDPA looms over Elisha.  He’s frightening in the odd lights of the Televisions that surround them.  He holds a wrench in his hand.

GRANDPA

          I knew you were still here.  The pressure

in my head, the blockage, it’s still there. 

You know, don’t you, what this blockage is.

CUT TO:

Elisha, fearful, trying to pull the covers up over her face, like a small child.  Her eyes are wide, tears well up, visible and gleaming in the lights of the TVs.

                                                            GRANDPA (cont’d)

           The blockage.  It’s you.

Grandpa reaches down, bones pop and sinews audibly stretch as he does so.  He reaches for the bed covers.  He pulls them back with a yank. 

Elisha reaches underneath her pillow as he does so.  She pulls out a pencil.  She thrusts it upwards as Grandpa comes down towards her.  the pencil stabs into Grandpa’s eye.  He drops his wrench, jerks backwards, puts a hand over his eye.  He screams.

Elisha gets to her feet.  She picks up the wrench. 

CUT TO:

Grandpa pulling the pencil out of his eye with a scream.  He drops it.  he looks toward Elisha – one good eye twinkling hatefully, the other ruined. 

CUT TO:

From Grandpa’s POV, we see Elisha swinging the wrench.  She SCREAMS.

CUT TO:

The wrench hits Grandpa in the jaw.  The jaw snaps and hangs loose; blood and teeth fall.  Grandpa gargles on his blood.  Spits it out. He grabs at his jaw in a vain attempt to steady it.

He mumbles vague incoherent angry words.  He falls over.

Elisha steps tentatively toward Grandpa.  He’s conscious, but twitching spastically.  She pulls the keys from his pocket.  She races over to Grandpa’s trunk of torture implements.  She tries several keys unsuccessfully.  Finally she opens the trunk.  She pulls out Grandpa’s rusty knife (the same knife he used to cut her hair).

Elisha walks over a moaning Clive, who’s regaining consciousness. 

Elisha sits on top of Grandpa.  She raises the knife above her head and, with both hands, plunges it down into Grandpa’s body.  Again and again and again.  Exhausted, panting, she falls on top of him.

Elisha rolls off Grandpa’s body.  She’s covered in his blood.  She stands.  She drops the knife.  She walks over to a nearby tripod-mounted video camera.

CUT TO:

From the camera’s POV, we see Elisha walking towards us.  She fumbles behind the camera.  The screen goes black.

CUT TO:

Elisha ejecting a tape from the camera.  She walks over to yet another camera.  She ejects another tape.

Elisha kneels down beside Clive.  She pats him on the head lightly.  She examines his wound.  Clive moans painfully.

CLIVE

We get it?

ELISHA

           We got it.

CLIVE

           Always an anti-climax.  The death of a

monster.  Almost as bad as the solving

of a mystery.

ELISHA

Yeah.  There’s no shock ending for us,

Clive.  There’s no seat-jumper.  There’s

just you, me, him, this space and the

inevitability of my departure.  Which is

where we’re at right now.

Clive laughs a soft, sad laugh.

CLIVE

           Right.

ELISHA

           Clive?

CLIVE

           Yeah?

ELISHA

           You’re a much more interesting monster

  than your brother.

CLIVE

We’re going to have a sequel, Elisha.

ELISHA

I know. Hope it doesn’t suck.

CLIVE

It won’t.  My life is now a franchise

based on you.  It’ll be quality work. 

You’ll see.

ELISHA

Hope so.

CLIVE

The Final Girls.  Unless they’re big names,

they rarely survive the sequel.  Your life. 

It’s now reduced to the opening five minutes

of Friday the 13^th Part II.  You best enjoy

those five minutes, Elisha, because Lina Romay,

she was never a big name.  She’d never survive

the sequel to this.  And who the fuck’s Elisha

Maher?  Nobody’s ever heard of her.

Elisha stands.  She smiles down at Clive.  She rips the story-covered sheet off her bed and wraps herself in it.  she gathers loose sheets of papers from the floor and clutches them tight.

ELISHA

           All that’s about to change, Clive.  All

 that’s about to change.

We watch as Elisha slowly ascends the stairs, pushes open the basement door, disappears behind it and pushes it shut.

The screen goes black.