"STIR OF ECHOES" (1999)

Close on a little boy’s eyes. JAKE, a five year old, sits in his bath, humming the haunting melody. The door to the bathroom is open; in the background his father sits on the edge of a bed, plucking at an acoustic guitar -- rather well.

Jake answers someone’s question, but we’re close in on him and can’t see who he’s talking to.

JAKE

YES!

(back to the tub) My favorite? Umm... my glow-in-the- dark sword. Yeah, that one, ‘cause it has magic.

{lowers his voice) Can I ask you a-

Tom Witzky, thirties, with the lean, muscled body of somebody who works for a living, puts down the guitar and comes into the room carrying Jake’s pajamas.

He puts down the pajamas and lifts Jake out of the tub, wrapping him in a big white towel. He steals a hug while he’s at it. Loves his kid.

for tonight, aren’t they?

(CONTINUED )

2. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: 2

He turns and leaves. Jake watches him go, waits until he’s sure he’s really gone, then turns back and looks to the tub. He lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

He checks the door, to make sure Tom isn’t coming back yet.

Pulling back, we see he is all alone in the bathroom. Jake must have a Special Friend.

MAGGIE WITZKY, Tom’s age, former club flea with a couple tattoos she doesn’t regret yet, embraces another woman in the living room as Tom comes down the stairs. He takes a pair of Jake’s pajamas (bugs on ‘em) out of a basket of clean laundry at the foot of the stairs.

Lisa, the other woman, looks at Tom over Maggie’s shoulder and shakes her head.

3. (green) 03/23/00

CONTINUED : 3 LISA You impregnated my sister again. MAGGIE Bitch! LISA

I thought you wanted me to!

Tom is shell-shocked. She shrugs.

He fumbles, can’t come up with anything. This was not planned. Angry, Maggie turns and goes into the kitchen, leaving Tom alone with Lisa.

4. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (2) 3

out a window. Go upstairs, please.

He turns and heads into the kitchen. Lisa shrugs, as if he has just proven her point.

Tom comes into the doorway of the kitchen, where Maggie is putting things away. He forces a cheery tone.

She gives him a dirty look. Nice try.

CONTINUED :

He pauses at

5. (green)

the door.

She pulls him close and kisses him.

03/23/00

a

6. (green) 03/23/00

CONTINUED: (2) 4

He turns and heads out of the room.

Jake is in bed, asleep. Tom slides a blanket up under his chin and turns on a baby monitor (the transmitter end) on the dresser next to his bed. Its “on” light glows red. Tom turns on a blue nightlight near the window and leaves the room.

Then Jake opens his eyes.

A huge old Polish church towers over their Chicago neighborhood. It’s not the suburbs, but it’s not quite downtown either. There’s a bar on the corner (Bernie’s Tap), and barely room for a raised voice between the houses. The house next to the church is our house. Wood frame, two stories with an attic.

The hot engine of a Trans-Am fires up across the street. The DRIVER honks the horn and a SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD KID runs out of another house and jumps into the passenger side as the car pulls away, fast. A NEIGHBORHOOD GUY rants at them, shaking his fist.

Tom, Maggie, and Lisa come out of the house and head down the steps. Tom carries a baby monitor (the receiver end). He holds it to his ear. Jake’s breathing is clearly audible on the speaker.

7. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 6

Tom forces a smile. They approach a party at a house across the street. PEOPLE have spilled out of the house and onto the large stone front porch.

OUTSIDE THE PARTY HOUSE, 7

we stop at a telephone pole, noticing a few hand flyers stapled there -- lost dogs, car wash at the church this Saturday, somebody looking for a missing girl. That last one’s been there a while.

LISA

Well now, that could be a good thing, if he has a heart attack and dies right after...

FIFTEEN OR TWENTY PEOPLE are on the front porch, more are visible through the windows of the house, jammed into the crowded living room. It’s loud, smoky, there’s music and a ton of booze -- empty beer bottles, five gallon jugs of wine, big liter bottles of vodka and gin.

Tom joins the men on the porch. BOBBY, a heavy guy in his late twenties holding a sleeping three-year-old on his shoulder, talks with FRANK McCARTHY, fortyish, big Irish drinker, and HARRY DAMON, also older than the rest, stiff posture and short haircut. Frank draws Tom a beer from a keg.

TOM

Actually, we’re drilling holes in all your floors. Hope you don’t mind.

(CONTINUED )

8. (green) 03/23/00 7 CONTINUED : 7

Harry smiles, ha ha, very funny, sir. Tom sits on the porch rail. His own house is visible in the background, right across the narrow street.

Tom tunes out. Finishes his beer. That was quick. He holds his plastic cup under the tap, draws another from the keg.

FRANK

I mean, I could see if he just heard the noise and wandered in --

(CONTINUED )

9. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (2) 7

LENNY

-- don’t come crying to me!

While they all laugh, Lisa, near the door to the house, evaluates this selection of available males.

The party wanes. Some have left, the ones that remain are bombed. In the narrow passageway between the party house and the one next door, a DRUNK COUPLE make out ferociously.

On the porch, Frank stares long and hard at someone’s cleavage. SHEILA, a nervous woman, catches him. He gives her a “What?” gesture. Must be married to each other.

The baby monitor sits on the porch, next to Tom, Jake’s breathing audible on it. Tom turns, looks across the street. A dozen yards away, he can see Jake’s bedroom window, the blue nightlight glowing brightly.

Tom hears a SHRIEK of women’s voices from inside the house. He turns and looks through the window. Inside, he sees Maggie blushing, receiving hugs and congratulations from the two or three women around her.

He hits the keg again.

The party’s down to the hard-core half dozen, who are all in the house now, passing a joint around. Tom sits on the couch, feet on the coffee table next to the baby monitor. His mood has not improved. Maggie is next to him, Frank and Sheila are jammed in there too. Bobby and VANESSA, his wife, sit on the floor opposite. Lisa is in a chair at the end.

9 CONTINUED :

Embarrassed, lighten up.

10. (green) 03/23/00

a sound? FRANK Bulishit. VANESSA You never saw that happen. FRANK Bullshit! SHEILA

Can you learn another word?

You know what I don’t understand? How a person who’s been in college for most of her adult life can believe in all that superstitious crap.

Maggie squeezes Tom’s arm, trying to get him to

LL. (green) 03/23/00

Maggie talks

over her, to get them to stop.

(to Vanessa, standing) Thanks a lot for inviting us over, it was a great party, if you want-

12. (green) 03/23/00

CONTINUED: (3) 9 LISA You’re drunk. TOM I’m not drunk. LISA

You’ re not supposed to mesmerize someone if they’ve been drinking.

instruction, to the letter. And it still won’t work. Come on.

He finishes a beer and sits forward, challenging.

The room is tense. Lisa stares at him for a long moment.

A hand switches off a light. Another hand turns off the stereo. Another bulb goes black.

Lisa sits on the coffee table in the semi-darkened room, facing Tom. The others watch, fascinated.

As Tom does, our eyes close too, big heavy lashes dropping over everything and plunging us into blackness.

(CONTINUED )

il

13. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (4) 9

MENTAL IMAGE - IN THE BLACK 10

we can still hear the sounds of the living room. Tom breathes. Ice CLINKS in a glass as someone drinks. A car HUMS by outside.

TOM (o.s.)

Out of the pitch black, we can detect tiny images.

LISA (o.s.)

Focus on it.

A small squiggly line comes into focus, drifting up through the black, then bouncing suddenly downward.

We’re sitting in a theatre, a bare stage at the front.

Okay, we’re sitting in a movie theatre, one of those multiplex shoeboxes. It’s crowded with people, waiting for the movie to start.

The people disappear. The theatre is empty. LISA (o.s.) You look around. It’s a huge, empty

theatre, one of those great old movie palaces.

(CONTINUED )

14, (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 12

We whiz back twenty rows, as the shoebox turns into a movie palace with statues, chandeliers, carved frescoes on the walls.

Black paint oozes down over the rococo walls.

Black fabric crawls over the seats.

The lights fade out.

Up ahead of us, the screen is a dazzling white. We move slowly toward it, floating over the seats.

Blurry black letters appear on the screen. We drift closer.

The moment she speaks the word, five giant black letters come into focus on the white screen, filling our entire field of

vision.

15. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (2) 12

We stare at that word, then everything goes black for a long moment. Suddenly --

An image pops up out of the black, just for a split-second, barely long enough for us to make out what it is. It’s a point- of-view shot, we’re falling down, toward unpainted wooden floorboards. We hit hard, and as we spit out blood one of our own teeth skitters out across the floor and into our field of vision.

Just as suddenly as it appeared the image disappears and --

Tom’s eyes snap open. He’s horrified. SIX FACES stare right at him from up close. Tom looks around, disoriented. He’s still in Bobby and Vanessa’s living room.

All six faces burst out laughing simultaneously. Somebody turns the lights back on, somebody else hits the music.

People start talking, all at once. Lisa seems very pleased with herself. Maggie comes and sits on the arm of the chair next to Tom, puts her hand on his face.

Maggie wipes his face with her hand.

16. (green) 03/23/00 14 CONTINUED : 14

She points to two dining room chairs that are sitting back to back four or five feet apart.

They laugh again.

17. (green) 03/23/00

races across the back of his eyelids:

16 -- Lisa’s face, close to his, as she begins to hypnotize him. 16A -- A flame, leaping out from a cigarette lighter.

16B -- Six faces, pressed in close to his.

16C -- Himself, floating in an armchair above an empty movie theatre.

18A

18. (green) 03/23/00

Tom opens his eyes. He squints at the clock. Now it’s 2:26. He rolls over, punching his pillow. He closes his eyes again.

A hand drops over Tom’s shoulder. It’s Maggie, who has been partially roused by Tom’s tossing and turning.

He settles, puts an arm around her and pulls her closer to him. Her hand strokes his chest. Then it slides beneath the sheets, moving.

Still not fully awake, she begins to kiss his neck.

He rolls over to face her.

She’s still half unconscious as they start to make out, sleep- sex.

NEXT TO THE BED, Maggie’s pajama pants drop onto the floor.

IN BED,

things have moved right along. Maggie rolls over on top of Tom, puts her legs around his. She reaches down for him and they start to make love.

He puts his hands on her hips, she puts hers on his chest. She brings her mouth down to his, they kiss. They move. Tom closes his eyes.

Immediately, images come to him, first person point-of-view.

His own house, seen on a winter day. A FIGURE IN AN OVERCOAT stands on the front porch, waving to us to come inside.

A face, close to ours but blue-tinted, blurry and distorted.

Also above him, also moving. The right half of the image is spiderwebbed and blurry, but the left is not.

IN BED, 19 Tom opens his eyes. What was that? He turns his head to the

side. He sees his hand. He grips the bedding as they make love.

19. (green) 03/23/00

Another hand matches that image. This hand is slender, ina similar position, but clawing at wooden floorboards instead of bedding. A fingernail SNAPS off one of the fingers. Again, the right half of the image is spiderwebbed and blurry.

IN BED, 21 Tom opens his eyes, upset.

He starts them moving again, tries to lose himself in the sex.

He and Maggie build toward the Moment. He closes his eyes

again. More images come, and these are very upsetting:

Rough hands attack us, covering our eyes and face.

Wooden floorboards race up toward us as we fall. We hit, hard, and our blood sprays out onto the wood.

A tooth, one of our own, snaps right out of our mouth and tumbles into our field of vision. It’s the image we saw when Tom was under.

IN BED, 23

Tom SHOUTS and sits up, pulling away from Maggie, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

TOM

I’m seeing things.

She puts her arms around him from behind. He resists.

20. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 23

She tries to get things going again, but he pulls away, gets up, puts on his pants.

He picks up a glass of water from the bedside table and drinks, thirstily.

He puts his hands to the side of his head. It hurts. A lot.

Tom shakes some aspirin into his palm; swallows three. He runs water in the sink, splashes some on his face. He straightens, looks in the mirror as he wipes his dripping face with a towel. When he pulls the towel away --

-- he notices a thin stream of blood running down his chin. He leans close to the mirror, bares his teeth. The blood seems to be coming from around one of his front teeth.

He licks the blood away, reaches up and touches his tooth. It moves, He jerks his hand away. That ain’t right. But you know how it is, once you know the tooth wiggles, you gotta try ita few more times.

He squeezes it between his thumb and forefinger, to see how much it moves.

The tooth pulls right out of his gum.

21. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 24

Tom GASPS and opens his hand, the tooth CLATTERS into the porcelain sink, Tom looks up at the mirror, horrified --

-- and the blood is gone from his face. He looks down at the sink, confused. There’s no tooth there.

He opens his mouth again. All his teeth are fine. Huh?

Tom strides into the living room, deeply disturbed. He paces back and forth, muttering, holding his head in his hands.

Tom rips the refrigerator open and searches the top shelf. He grabs a carton of orange juice and drinks from it, juice running down his chin. He finishes it all. :

Still unsatisfied, he flips on the faucet, bends over and drinks right out of the spigot. Can’t get enough.

Tom drops onto the sofa. He sits forward, picks up the remote off the coffee table, points it at the TV and turns it on. When he sits back --

-- there’s a woman sitting next to him.

She’s eighteen or nineteen years old, so pale her skin’s almost luminous. She’s attractive but odd, she wears a billowy black dress with a diamond pattern, bangles up and down each wrist. Her eyes are vivid blue but red-rimmed. Steam rises softly from her hair and skin; when she opens her mouth to speak, her breath comes out of her mouth in clouds of vapor.

But try as she might to form words, the sounds aren’t coherent. They’re muffled, distorted, ugly.

Tom SHOUTS and bolts to his feet, leaping away from the couch. When he turns back, she’s gone.

ON THE STAIRS, 28 Tom staggers back upstairs, shaken. He stops, staring up.

Jake, his five year old, is standing at the top of the stairs, perfectly straight, staring down at his father calmly.

22. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 28

The little boy doesn’t answer, just stares at him. Tom climbs the last few stairs and bends down to his son. The vertical bars of the bannister cast shadows across his face.

Jake reaches out with one hand and rests his fingertips on Tom’s forehead. His face lights up in a wide smile.

JAKE * Don’t be afraid of it, Daddy. *

Jake turns, walks down the hall, and goes back into his room. Leaving that for Tom to interpret.

Cur TO:

The next morning. An old monster movie is on the television. Jake, in his pajamas, is watching it on the couch.

IN THE KITCHEN, 30

Tom is wearing jeans and a phone company uniform shirt, pulling pages of work orders out of an old fax machine on the counter as they scroll in. Maggie’s at the table.

+

Fe

23. (green) 03/23/00

CONTINUED : 30 From the TV, a woman SCREAMS. * MAGGIE * Jake, I know you’re not watching that * monster tape again! *

IN THE LIVING ROOM, 31

Jake picks up the remote and quickly changes the channel to a kids’ morning show.

IN THE KITCHEN, 32 Maggie lowers her voice again, back to Tom.

didn’t look familiar, though. * MAGGIE

Did you fuck her? * TOM

You’ve got to be kidding.

24. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 32

From the living room, there is another SCREAM. Jake has changed it back to the monster movie.

cur To:

Lisa, Maggie’s sister, is still in bed in her smallish apartment. She’s on the phone.

A maze of phone circuits HUM and CLICK as calls are routed through them. A red clip is stuck into the middle of the circuits. Following the clip’s wire back, we see Tom in a bucket arm raised up next to a phone pole in the riverfront industrial district. He’s talking into a test handset unit that he holds to his ear.

clumsy-ass feet around inside my brain?

and I- TOM

A receptive frame, what is that? * LISA

Just what it sounds like.

CONTINUED :

25. (green)

LISA

You know, a door, like a mental block.

Everybody’s got ‘em. You open the door, you release repressed memories,

latent abilities, whatever you got back

there. In your case, it was probably Mannix reruns.

But he’s hung up.

She hangs up.

03/23/00

Immediately, her phone starts to ring again. She

rolls over, pulling the pillow on top of her head.

picks up.

Hi, leave me a message and hope for the

best.

Her machine

26. | (green) 03/23/00

Cor TO:

Jake sits at the kitchen table in his pajamas, eating a bowl of cereal. Maggie, in work clothes, is walking back and forth behind him, talking on the phone, finishing her makeup, drinking coffee, and doing the dishes. Her voice continues from Lisa’s machine.

Over at the table, Jake turns and looks at the empty chair next to him. His Special Friend must be there.

JAKE

Call Vanessa and ask her about Debbie.

27. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 36

MAGGIE (cont’ d)

Debbie? That’s the girl who baby-sits for them?

She snaps up the phone. As she dials:

Hi, Vanessa! Hey, are you guys going

out Friday? A DOORBELL rings.

curt To:

Tom answers the front door. A GIRL stands on the porch, late teens, moody-looking, crucifix around her neck, wearing more

black than you’d hope your baby-sitter would.

She steps inside. Maggie comes into the room.

MAGGIE

Thanks for coming, I’m Maggie. Jake’s asleep already and he hardly ever wakes up, a band could play in his room and he wouldn’t hear it, so you shouldn’t have any trouble with him at all. His room is right up at the top of the...

28. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 37

As she goes on, Tom stands rooted where he is, staring at Debbie. A strange BUZZING sound grows in his ears. He watches, frozen, as Maggie shows Debbie the TV, how the remotes work, etc. Debbie glances over at him and smiles. ‘The buzzing fades.

She runs upstairs. Tom is still standing where he was. Debbie sits on the sofa.

She does. She looks up at Tom. He’s making her nervous.

He goes upstairs.

In the bathroom, Tom drinks a glass of water quickly. He happens to glance into the mirror. For a moment, it appears the bones under the skin of his face are visible, and moving under the flesh. He blinks, looks again. Must have been seeing things. He shakes three or four aspirin into his palm. In the mirror, he sees Maggie staring at him from the doorway.

He pops the pills in his mouth and swallows them dry.

29. (green) 03/23/00

Tom and Maggie step back into the living room and head for the front door. The moment Tom lays eyes on Debbie, the BUZZING

sound returns, louder this time. It drowns out Maggie’s voice as she gives Debbie last minute instructions and says goodbye.

Tom reaches the open doorway and glances back inside. Debbie is looking at him as he swings the door shut.

The buzzing stops the moment the door is shut. Tom and Maggie go down the steps. Tom looks back over his shoulder, at the house, in time to see Debbie’s face, peering out between the blinds at them.

Curt TO:

Tom and Maggie walk down a crowded sidewalk with Frank and Sheila, from next door. (They pass a telephone pole, more flyers posted.) Tom is terribly distracted, looking back over his shoulder, still plagued with a headache.

They round a corner. Just ahead, a high school football field is surrounded by bright lights, mobbed with STUDENTS and PARENTS.

crowd) ...and yeah, the kid has an arm, but high school football is power, it’s running the ball, always been that way, it was when I played. What’d you play in high school?

Frank just looks at him -- what are you, kidding? Tom looks at the cars on the street. The brake lights glow

bright red, and as he looks at the red lights the BUZZING sound comes back. He shakes it off.

(CONTINUED )

41 CONTINUED :

30. (green) 03/23/00

Frank says the average guy carries around a hard-on two and a half hours out of every day. Three and a half for him.

31. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED :

A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN walks past and Frank gives her the big crank- around.

Back in their living room, Debbie sets the baby monitor on an

end table and sits down with a magazine. She turns the monitor up. Jake’s breathing is clearly audible. She reads.

As they near the stadium, they pass a police car, a couple COPS busting UNDERAGE DRINKERS. The red lights on top of the car are flashing. Tom stares at the red, puts a hand to his temple. Maggie catches up.

It’s very quiet in the house. From the monitor, Jake’s breathing is still normal.

Debbie reads.

There is a huge throng pressing to get into the stadium’s entrance tunnel. Some TEENAGERS on the sidewalk are sneaking beer into the game by tossing cans up to their FRIENDS in the top row of the bleachers, who catch them. Or don’t. One or two hit the sidewalk and burst, spraying everywhere.

The two couples join the mass of people. Frank takes another bump and passes Tom the bottle. This time, Tom takes a swig.

32. (green) 03/23/00

Debbie turns a page.

Suddenly, on the monitor -- Jake’s breathing stops.

Debbie doesn’t notice.

The two couples are in the middle of the crowd now, pressing into the tunnel. It’s loud in there, packed with people, many of them loaded. Above and to the sides, they can hear SCREAMING fans, POUNDING feet. It’s deafening.

And on top of it all, Frank is still screaming in Tom’s ear.

Tom, sweaty and anxious, looks up ahead to see what the delay

is. At the base of the stairs that lead up into the stadium,

two SECURITY GUARDS with handheld metal detectors are checking every fan for weapons.

The monitor is still silent. Debbie turns and looks at it. That’s odd. She reaches out and turns the volume up. Still nothing.

She picks it up, brings it closer to her ear. Suddenly, JAKE’S VOICE comes out of the monitor, blaring.

Debbie almost drops the monitor. She sets it down again. Jake’s voice continues. His Special Friend is back!

32A. (green)

CONTINUED :

03/23/00

Debbie stands up. What the hell is going on up there? She goes

to the base of the stairs, nervous. She starts up.

In the tunnel, which is jammed up like a Who concert, the fans waiting to get into the game hear the kickoff, and the ensuing

ROAR of the crowd that’s already in.

They press forward, trying to force their way in.

There are

SHOUTS at the Security Guards. Tom and Maggie sweep forward in

the crush.

Tom’s face is a mask of worry. Maggie notices. the noise.

Debbie creeps down the hall toward Jake’s room. him WHISPERING to someone as she draws closer.

She SHOUTS over

She can hear

33:5 (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 50

Still no answer. She reaches his door and pushes it open. IN JAKE’S ROOM, 51

the light from the hallway spills across the carpet. Jake is sitting in the middle of his bed, cross-legged. He turns and looks at her.

Debbie’s reaction is way out of hand. She bolts across the room and grabs the little boy by the arms.

DEBBIE

Samantha was here?! She was here, in your house?!

34. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 51

The ROAR of the crowd above and around is maddening now. Tom is at the front, being checked by the Security Guards, who wave him in. But he freezes, doesn’t want to go.

But Tom just stands there, shaking his head, can’t move. Behind him, angry fans shout at him to get the hell out of the way.

As Tom turns to her, his eye is drawn by a flash of light behind her. A red neon sign on the wall of the tunnel flashes the name of the school’s team. As Tom stares at the light, the BUZZING sound overwhelms him.

Tom turns and fights his way back into the crowd, like a salmon swimming upstream. But it’s dense going, and it’s pissing everybody off. He BANGS through bodies, some of them shove back, an empty beer can bounces off his head.

Debbie races down the staircase, carrying Jake in her arms, a blanket hastily wrapped around him.

Tom bursts out of the crowded tunnel and onto the busy sidewalk, threading his way between PEOPLE and cars.

34z,. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 54

He races into the street, forcing a car to lock ‘em up at the last second, narrowly missing him. He takes off down the street. Maggie follows, not far behind.

Debbie unlocks the front door, slings it open, and bolts outside, carrying Jake.

(OMITTED) 56

35. (green) 03/23/00

Tom races down his block. He reaches the sidewalk just in front of his house and stops in his tracks, staring at the house, wild- eyed. The front door is hanging open, lights are on inside. He races in. We stay outside, hearing his anguished, enraged voice BELLOWING for his son.

A moment later, Maggie comes running up, out of breath. She reaches the front of the house just as Tom is coming out again.

TOM

SHE TOOK HIM, HE’S NOT THERE, SHE TOOK HIM SOMEPLACE!

He runs to the corner, desperate, and looks up and down the street in both directions. There are a lot of people out, she could be anywhere.

He turns, looks up and down the side street. Nothing in the first direction, but when he looks the other way, he hears a faint BUZZING sound in the distance. He doesn’t hesitate, just takes off toward it.

Tom runs through a tunnel under elevated train tracks. Above him, a train is SCREECHING to a stop. He looks ahead. He’s standing in front of a train station. The BUZZING is louder as he stares at it.

Maggie comes through the tunnel, catching up to him.

36. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 58

They race inside.

Tom and Maggie enter through a waiting area. They hurry across the floor, looking left and right, worried out of their minds. Near a newsstand, TWO COPS notice them and follow. What’s up?

Tom sees a red light mounted on a wall near one of the tunnels. The light is flashing on and off -- “BOARDING.”

As Tom stares at the light, the buzzing returns, but faintly now. It’s not in his head, it’s actually coming from the light. Tom walks toward it. When he’s finally standing right under the light, he turns around. Directly behind him --

-- he sees Jake, held over Debbie’s shoulder as she stands at one of the ticket windows. Jake is exhausted, distraught, eyes staring blankly up at the buzzing light, the red flashing off his face.

Debbie is at the front of her line, talking animatedly to the TICKET SELLER. Tom doesn’t want to startle her. He takes one step closer to her. Jake’s eyes drop from the light, he notices his father, picks up his head and smiles.

Maggie sees Jake at the same time. She and Tom rush over to their son. Debbie notices.

She turns and tries to run, still carrying Jake, but Tom and Maggie descend on her.

37. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 59

Tom tries to wrench Jake away from her but Debbie whirls, violently. Jake starts to cry. The Ticket Seller (YVONNE), a woman in her mid-forties, comes running out from behind the row of cages, SHOUTING.

The cops who spotted them upstairs come racing down the steps and run over. When they reach the ticket windows, everyone is shouting at everyone else, still locked in struggle.

CoP 1 Hey, hey, HEY, HEY, HEY! Everybody shut up a minute!

cop 1 (to Debbie) Is that your child?

Jake is still crying, reaching his arms out to his parents.

CoP i I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to her. Is that boy your child?

38. (green) 03/23/00

The First Cop steps toward her.

Reluctantly, Debbie holds Jake out. He practically leaps into Maggie’s arms.

coP 1 (to Debbie) Do you know that what you’ve done is a felony? Do you know you could go to jail for this?

MAGGIE

I want to file charges.

Terrified, Debbie falls against Yvonne, who puts an arm around her.

39. : (green) 03/23/00

Debbie rips her purse off her shoulder and fumbles inside for something.

She has her wallet open now, to a photograph. She lunges forward, toward Jake, who’s trying to hide in his mother’s arms. She gets right in Jake’s face.

Tom catches a glance of the picture. He grabs Debbie by the wrist, hard, and pulls it right up in front of his eyes.

It’s a shot of Debbie, standing on the shores of Lake Michigan in summertime, one arm around her older sister. Samantha is pretty, about seventeen years old.

She’s the woman Tom saw in his living room.

40. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : (4) 59

She rips her arm free. Tom just stands there, stunned.

cop 1 Just take a look at the picture, please.

Debbie hands the picture to Maggie.

CoP 1 {to Tom) What about you?

Tom takes the picture and looks at it again. He notices Samantha’s arm this time. She’s wearing a lot of bracelets, different colors, all up and down her arms, just like when he saw her sitting on his couch.

He hands it back.

Let's just forget about it.

curt To:

41. (green) 03/23/00

Maggie and Tom, who is carrying Jake, come out of the train station. As soon as they’re outside:

The girl in the picture. Samantha. She’s the woman I saw on our couch the other night.

She stops, staring at Jake, who is shaking his finger at her.

Jake sits on the floor of his room in his pajamas, playing intently with model cars. He’s HUMMING a soft tune to himself, the same one he hummed during his bath in the opening.

Maggie and Tom stand in the doorway, staring at him for a long time. Maggie finally speaks up, her tone soft, gently probing.

42. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: 61

Jake doesn’t look up, just keeps playing and HUMMING.

He keeps playing, HUMMING. Tom and Maggie exchange a look.

(no answer) Can you remember any of the things that she-

They freeze, staring at him. His tone sounded odd, as if his voice was overlaid with a second pitch. And did he just refer to himself in the third person?

JAKE (cont’ d)

Talk to me. He goes back to playing, and to that haunting little tune. Maggie covers her mouth, horrified. Jake remains calm, still * humming his favorite tune. . * Tom comes over and bends down in front of his son. * TOM * What did you say, Jake? * JAKE * Huh? * TOM * What did you say just now? *

42a. (green)

CONTINUED: (2)

Tom sits down next to him, lowers his voice to a whisper.

Maggie steps

TOM

Come on, Jake, make the voice again.

in and picks up Jake. MAGGIE Okay, Sweetie, let’s go see if

Beetleborg’s on yet.

IN THE UPSTAIRS HALLWAY,

Maggie is headed downstairs, Jake on one hip.

extended, TOM What’s the matter with you? MAGGIE What do you think? TOM I’m just trying to have a conversation with my kid!

Maggie comes behind them.

03/23/00

+

ee eS

62*

Tom follows, arms *

in with Jake and heads for the couch. Tom is right *

CONTINUED :

They drop onto the couch.

to Jake.

Jake looks back and forth to his parents.

42B. (green)

(to Jake) See, I was sitting right here when I saw her, and I picked up the remote like this, see, and when I sat back she was there.

03/23/00

Tom is there in a flash, right next

He doesn’t like their

tones. Tom digs the jar of aspirin out of his pocket and eats a

few.

OF OF OF ee ee He HH HH *

+

43. (green) 03/23/00

CONTINUED: (2)

He CLAPS his hands twice, loudly, in front of Jake, who winces.

Everybody stops what they’re doing. Jake is the one who breaks a long pause.

Maggie forces a smile and wedges herself onto the couch -- between them. She kisses him on the forehead, and Jake seems reassured, She gently slides the remote control out of Tom’s hand and turns on the TV. The sound of a KIDS’ SHOW plays in the background.

Tom, who realizes he’s gone too far, lowers his voice, touches her hand.

Se

+

+ + ee He ete

HH HH HH

44. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (3)

He dumps another couple aspirin in his hand, pops them in his mouth.

pulls her close) I’m fine. It’s over anyway. Don’t worry. It’s over.

He puts one hand on her belly, slides her shirt up and touches her belly.

But he yanks his hand away fast, as from a hot stove.

She looks at him. It’s not over.

Cur To:

+e He + Oe * + OOF

45. (green) 03/23/00

Maggie lies in bed, Jake asleep beside her. Tom’s side is * empty.

Tom sits on the couch in the living room, alone in the dark, hoping for something to happen.

He leans forward, picks up the remote for the TV, and turns it on. When he sits back --

-- he’s still alone in the room. It’s the same movement he made when Samantha first appeared, but tonight she doesn’t.

He turns off the TV, puts the remote back on the coffee table. He repeats -- leans forward, picks it up, and turns the TV back on. When he sits back, still nothing. He turns off the TV.

He repeats. cur TO:

It’s a street party, and it’s jammed. Police barricades are at both ends of the block. Half barrels of beer sit in big plastic garbage cans, ice dumped over them. Most of the couple dozen cars parked in the driveways have their radios on, loud, the windows hanging open. One side of the street likes rap, the other side’s into heavy metal.

Outside Bernie’s Tap, the bar on the corner, a DOZEN DRUNK GUYS are running pass patterns out the front door, cutting left at

the mailbox, and catching a football thrown from inside the bar, out an open window. Well, they don’t actually catch the ball...

AT ONE OF THE KEGS,

a HOMELESS Guy is drinking right out of one of the beer taps while nobody is watching. Lenny, the local crank, is outraged.

He chases the Homeless Guy off, trying to kick him in the ass but spilling his own beer in the process.

(CONTINUED )

ita bes

46. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 66

ON A FRONT YARD,

Jake plays with a couple NEIGHBORHOOD KIDS. NEARBY,

Maggie and Lisa walk through the party. Maggie looks terrible, dark circles under her eyes, stress showing everywhere.

She notices Maggie has buried her face in her hands, even begun te ory.

i

47. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (2) 66

IN FRONT OF BERNIE’S TAP,

somebody actually manages to catch one of the passes coming from out of the bar and is immediately tackled by three drunks. On the pavement. Ouch.

IN THE CROWD, Harry Damon, Tom’s landlord, is talking to the Neighborhood Guy.

HARRY

. but if you live on the base, room and board are covered, and you’ve got service pay on top of that. So by the time I retire I’ve got more than enough for a couple downpayments, some improvements. The day I take off the uniform I’m already a landlord. Five years later, I got three houses in this neighborhood.

He notices Tom staring at them. Tom looks like hell. Unshaven, two day old clothes. Harry looks him up and down.

He pops a couple aspirin in his mouth, chews them. They stare at him.

Harry turns to his son KURT DAMON, a great-looking seventeen

year old who’s leaning against the front of his Trans-Am, talking to a couple other guys.

48. (green) 03/23/00

The music coming from the car is too loud, Kurt can’t hear.

He gestures. Kurt comes over.

Lenny, the crank, joins the conversation.

They look at him -- this guy needs some sleep. Or maybe lithium.

MAGGIE AND LISA

are still talking. Lisa has been told everything. Maggie is drying her tears.

LISA

49, (green) 03/23/00

He leaves it at that. There’s an uncomfortable silence.

Frank joins them. He’s with his son ADAM, an athletic kid with big deep eyes.

No. I just bought that one. You’re the first tenants.

MAGGIE AND LISA

have lowered their voices.

66 CONTINUED :

WITH TOM

50. (green) 03/23/00

(5) 66 MAGGIE Jake won’t even talk about it any more. * Not to me anyway. He says Samantha’s * waiting. LISA For what? MAGGIE Like I know. Tom and Jake, it’s like they have this private club or * something. They sit in the living room *

and whisper, and when I come in, they both shut up right away.

Frank has taken over the conversation. He has a big arm around his son’s neck.

Behind them, the guys playing football out of Bernie’s Tap have now organized a full-fledged game of tackle in the street, over the objections of their wives and girlfriends.

over by Baldwin, you know, the one that ran away?

51. (green) 03/23/00

CONTINUED: (6) 66 FRANK Jesus, Lenny, don’t use that word. LENNY What, retard? FRANK

God damn it, Lenny! Why don’t you shut your fuckin’ mouth once in a while, huh?!

Lenny backs off, hands up. Frank is embarrassed, realizes he went a bit too far.

remember? FRANK Guy gets on my nerves, that’s all. (to Tom) She wasn’t a retard, she was just kinda slow. TOM

(turns to Adam) You know anything about her?

But before Adam can answer, a CHORUS OF SHOUTS comes from nearby.

The football WHIZZES through the group and SMACKS into Adam’s chest. A second later, the Players tumble right through the middie of them -- sweaty, middle-aged bodies fly in every direction. Everybody SHOUTS and lunges backward, protecting their beers. The conversation is broken up.

But the football players are upset, and a fight breaks out. The crowd gets out of the way, half to watch the fight with glee, the other half to shake their heads.

And watch the fight.

LISA AND MAGGIE

ignore the fight, intent on their conversation.

ee +

CONTINUED :

51A. (green) (7)

Maggie laughs, in spite of herself, feeling a bit better.

03/23/00

+e

ee ee EE HE HE

52. (green) 03/23/00

OVER AT KURT’S CAR, while the fight goes on in the background, Adam wanders away

from the group and sits down on the hood of Kurt Damon’s car. He’s rattled. Kurt notices him and comes over.

NEARBY, Sheila, Frank’s wife, watches the fight and shakes her head. SHEILA Somebody’s always gotta ruin it. It

can’t ever just be nice.

curt To:

66A-67 (OMITTED) 66A-67

53. (green) 03/23/00

The living room coffee table is covered with books, food, cans of Jolt Cola, an alarm clock. Blankets and pillows are piled on the sofa. Tom, asleep on the couch, has set up camp here.

Sunlight streams through the window, right into his face. He pries his eyes open, exhausted. He squints, looks at the clock. It’s 10:26.

He sits up, painfully. A beam of sunlight cuts him right across the eyes.

A MINUTE LATER,

Tom pulis his jeans on. He sits on a chair, puts on a shoe. But the other one’s gone. He feels under the table. Not there.

He flips some clothes around on the floor. Not there. He looks under the couch. There it is. He grabs it.

A note is taped to the bathroom mirror -- “ABOUT TIME YOU GOT UP! WENT TO PARK WITH JAKE. M.”

Tom takes it down and reads it.

Tom comes back downstairs. Frank, his neighbor from next door, is standing in his living room. Frank is staring at the floor. He’s wearing a red shirt.

Frank looks up at him. His face is sad.

Frank turns and walks to the front door. He opens it, walks outside, and sits on the top step of the porch, looking out at the street. Tom follows him.

54. (green) 03/23/00

It’s a beautiful day. Tom comes out and looks down at Frank, who’s just sitting there, staring.

Still no answer. Frank is seriously strange. Tom is concerned.

He heads down the steps. On the street, TWO KIDS ride their bikes straight at each other, full tilt, SCREAMING. At the last second, one of the kids

swerves, the other taunts him with cries of “Chicken!”

Tom walks down the street, toward Frank’s house. The MAILMAN waves to him. Tom waves back.

Tom walks up the steps to Frank’s front door and knocks. A VOICE calls from inside.

Tom opens the door and comes in. Adam, Frank’s son, is standing

in the middle of the living room floor, a big smile on his face and one arm behind his back.

ADAM

Want to see what I’ve got?

(CONTINUED )

55. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 72

Adam pulls his arm around from behind his back. He’s holding a .38 with a carved white handle.

Tom walks toward him.

Tom walks closer. He’s right in front of Adam.

He points the gun barrel at Tom -- -- then swings it around and points it at his own heart.

TOM | No, you shouldn’t do that.

Outside, a dog BARKS. Adam pulls the trigger. Tom SCREAMS as Adam collapses to the floor, blood pouring from his chest. His body convulses --

-- and Tom’s eyes pop open. He’s back on the couch, still in the living room, the coffee table piled high with his stuff.

Sunlight streams through the window, right into his face. He squints, looks at the clock. It’s 10:26. What a weird dream.

He sits up, painfully. A beam of sunlight cuts him right across the eyes.

A MINUTE LATER,

Tom pulls on a pair of jeans. He sits down, puts on a shoe. But the other one’s gone. He feels under the table. Not there.

56. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 73

He kicks around a bunch of clothes on the floor. Not there either. Tom blinks, unsettled. This is kinda familiar. He turns and looks at the couch.

He bends down and looks under the couch. There’s his shoe.

A note is taped to the bathroom mirror -- “ABOUT TIME YOU GOT UP! WENT TO PARK WITH JAKE. M.” Tom winces as he takes it down and reads it. Again.

Tom comes back downstairs. Frank’s not there this time, thank God. Tom goes to the front door and opens it.

But Frank’s not on the porch either. Tom steps outside.

It’s a beautiful day. A SHOUT draws Tom’s attention. Those same two kids ride their bikes at each other, full tilt. Tom walks down the steps of the porch, staring at them as they SCREAM. At the last second, one of the kids turns away. The other taunts him with cries of “Chicken!”

Tom stands frozen on the sidewalk. The Mailman waves to him, headed down the block. Too stunned, Tom doesn’t wave back.

He turns, panicked, and looks at Frank’s house. He starts to walk toward it, slowly at first, then picking up speed. He glances across the street. A DOG strains at the end of its leash. Tom’s eyes widen.

The dog BARKS --

-- and a GUNSHOT rings out from inside.

57. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 76

He races the rest of the way, bounds up the steps to the house, rips open the screen door. But the front door is locked. He POUNDS on it.

He POUNDS harder, but there’s no answer. He goes to the window beside the door and peers through it. He sees Adam lying on the floor in the middle of the living room.

He picks up a porch chair and heaves it through the window, which is crowded with religious paraphernalia.

Glass SHATTERS and sprays all over the floor. Tom knocks the rest out of the frame with his elbow and climbs into the house.

He races over to Adam’s body. There is a pool of blood around his chest and his body is convulsing. In his right hand, he clutches a .38 with a carved white handle.

He grabs a blanket off a chair nearby, presses it to Adam's chest, trying to stop the bleeding.

Curt To:

Tom and Maggie sit on their front steps, shell shocked, red light flashing off their faces. An ambulance and two police cars are parked in front of Frank’s house. A car comes barreling around the corner and SQUEALS to a halt in front of the house.

Frank and Sheila leap out of the car and race toward the house. They’re intercepted by a COP who tries to restrain them for a second, but they blow past him and hurry up the stairs, just as TWO PARAMEDICS wheel a stretcher out of the house, headed for the ambulance.

(CONTINUED )

58. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 78

The sheet isn’t over Adam’s head, at least, but that’s about the only good sign, they’re working on him frantically. Tom and Maggie look away as they hear the cries of Adam’s parents.

Maggie looks over her shoulder. Jake is standing in the open doorway of the house, staring at the police cars with fascination.

Maggie and Jake walk down the street, alongside a tall brick wall overgrown with ivy. They’re playing follow-the-leader, with Jake in the lead. Jake hops on one foot, Maggie hops on one foot. Jake walks backwards, Maggie walks backwards. Jake stops and looks up at the top of the wall.

Maggie stops and looks up at the top of the wall.

She stops. She’s staring up at a statue, a mournful angel, slightly disturbing. She turns. There are a dozen more statues stretching the length of the wall. A cemetery lies beyond.

With a strange GROAN, a mournful kind of music rises up nearby.

He takes off running, toward a break in the wail.

Jake races onto the broad lawns of the cemetery, where a police funeral is in progress. He wanders closer. The music is recognizable now, it’s coming from a BAGPIPER playing near a graveside ceremony.

59. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 80

A DOZEN UNIFORMED COPS are lined up between Jake and the casket, standing at attention, saluting the fallen officer.

Maggie catches up to Jake, lowering her voice.

But Jake is fascinated, and he continues to wander closer to the grave.

When he’s just about there, the FOURTH COP FROM THE LEFT, who is facing away from him with the rest of the saluting officers, turns slowly away and looks back, over his shoulder.

Right at Jake. They make eye contact.

Maggie finally gets hold of Jake’s hand and pulls him away, headed toward the entrance again. The Cop watches them go. Jake looks back over his shoulder at the Cop.

The funeral service ends, the crowd starts to break up. The Cop raises a hand and waves to Jake.

ACROSS THE CEMETERY, 81

Jake is wandering in an older part of the cemetery, overgrown foliage and some falling-down tombstones. He’s fascinated. Maggie’s a bit unnerved.

Maggie notices the Cop, who is following them, staring. She smiles, tight-lipped. The Cop smiles back, doesn’t go away. She moves Jake a short distance in the other direction, away

from the Cop. But the Cop follows. Maggie turns to him, unnerved.

60. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 81

He’s staring at Jake.

COP

Huh? Oh, no, it’s fine. It’s fine.

She sweeps Jake up onto one hip and starts to walk away.

Maggie turns and looks at him. The Cop just smiles. He holds his fingers up to his own eyes, stretches them open wide.

Maggie is taken aback. The Cop takes a step closer, cocks his head, really looks at her.

Maggie is completely freaked out. The Cop keeps looking at her, thinking.

Maggie nods. The Cop leans in and lowers his voice.

She’s too rattled to speak. The Cop pulls out a note pad, scribbles something on a page, tears it out.

Her hand shaking, Maggie accepts the paper. The Cop reaches out and tousles Jake’s hair.

61. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (2) 81

The Cop turns and walks away.

The Cop looks back over his shoulder and smiles. Maggie looks at her son as if she’s never seen him before.

cuT TO:

Tom is on the couch, fiddling with his guitar. Jake is in a chair, watching his monster video on TV. Tom is picking at a melody, trying to figure it out. It’s a close-but-slightly-off version of the tune Jake has been humming.

Jake looks at him. He gets up and walks over to face Tom. He

reaches out and slides Tom’s fingers down two frets, then plucks

a string. That’s the first note. Then he slides his fingers

back up three frets and plucks the string again. That’s the ) second. |

Now Tom plays it. The melody is vaguely familiar. Jake smiles.

Tom looks at his son, wide-eyed. TOM (whispers) Why do I know that song?

Before Jake can answer, Maggie breezes into the room.

Tom dives over to his CD collection (which is massive) and starts flipping through discs.

Maggie shakes her head and turns to go. She stops at a hook near the front door where Tom’s tool belt is hanging.

62. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 82

Her back to Tom, she slips his lineman’s knife out of its sheath and drops it into her purse.

cur To:

Maggie walks down a street in a dodgy neighborhood at night, checking addresses against the slip of paper the Cop gave her. She passes strange bookshops, fortune tellers, places with names like “The Third Eye.”

She stops, looking into the window of The Third Eye. She turns, notices a KOREAN WOMAN standing in the doorway behind her, eating a bowl of noodles.

The Korean Woman points down. Maggie looks at her -- huh? The Korean Woman gestures to a nearby alley, then points down again.

Maggie heads for the alley.

Maggie walks down the alley toward a doorway at the far end.

She knocks. No answer, but the door is slightly ajar. She pushes it open.

Maggie descends. There is a door at the bottom of the stairs, and from behind it she hears VOICES.

At the door, she knocks. The voices immediately go silent. The door is jerked open by HERMAN, seventyish, wears a bottle of oxygen on his belt with a narrow tube that runs up to his nose.

Herman closes the door before Maggie can get so much as a glimpse into the room. The voices argue a bit, then the door opens again and Neil, the cop Maggie met in the cemetery, steps out. He comes into the corridor, quickly pulling the door most of the way shut behind him.

63. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: 86

Maggie glances past him. She can see four or five figures moving in the room, but only barely. A HEAVY-SET WOMAN is on a chair in a corner, sobbing, angry, being comforted by a. HOMEY around twenty years old.

He starts to close the door, but she stops it.

He looks at her, impressed. And strangely sympathetic. He comes outside, pulling the door partway closed behind him. He lights a small cigar.

NEIL

How long has he had it? MAGGIE

Just a few days. NEIL

What happened? Car wreck? MAGGIE

No. NEIL

Child die?

tt ee OF

OF

CONTINUED :

64. (green) 03/23/00 (2) 86

MAGGIE * No. *

Does it go away?

jointed. (taps his head) Up here. MAGGIE Jake too? NEIL

Your son? Much better flashlight.

642. (green) 03/23/00

MAN’S VOICE Neil, close that motherfucking door right now!

(CONTINUED) .

65. (green) 03/23/00

She didn’t ask anything.

he’s not doing it. If he don’t do her * thing, she’11 never go away. * MAGGIE What kind of thing? NEIL Depends what kind of person she was. MAGGIE Would she... want him to hurt someone? NEIL

That’s been asked.

Instead of answering, Neil just tosses the remains of his cigar

in a puddle, where it goes out with a wet HISS.

66. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (5) 86

On the television, a woman SCREAMS as she is devoured by a monster. It’s an old monster movie, the one Jake likes to watch. He’s lying on his parents’ bed in his pajamas.

Steaming hot water spills out of a tap, filling the bathtub. Maggie, in her bathrobe, sits on the edge of the tub, head in her hands, exhausted. She turns and feels the water. Plenty hot.

Tom is on the floor of the living room, headphones on, opened CD cases sprayed on the floor all around him, searching obsessively for the song he played on the guitar before.

Maggie comes into the bedroom and sees the monster movie on the television.

She goes to the VCR and hits eject. JAKE

Oh, please, please, please, five minutes, just, just, just-

(CONTINUED )

67. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 90

The tape pops out. A Nickelodeon show comes on, very tame by comparison.

Maggie puts the tape on top of a tall cabinet. MAGGIE I know, I’m horrible. I’m gonna take a

bath. You okay for ten minutes?

He slumps back against the pillows and watches the kiddie show. She kisses him on the forehead.

Tom rips out one CD and puts another one in. The music starts.

The water keeps running, still steaming. Maggie’s at the medicine cabinet, peering into the mirror, assessing the state of her skin. The cabinet’s slightly ajar. She closes it --

-- revealing Samantha, who’s standing in the bathroom.

We jump about a foot, but Maggie does not. She can’t see her. She turns to the tub, shuts off the water. The faucet drips. Samantha, unseen by Maggie, is standing in the tub, knee deep in water. Maggie drops her robe, puts one foot into the bathtub, then yanks it out again.

She pulls her robe on again.

68. (green) 03/23/00

Maggie’s bare feet pad down the staircase.

Jake is still watching TV. The Nickelodeon show continues, happy, bouncy music playing over people dousing each other with paint.

A woman with her back to the camera turns and looks directly into the lens. It’s Samantha.

Jake’s face darkens.

IN THE LIVING ROOM, 95 Maggie calls out.

Still no answer. She peers around the corner, into the living room. She sees Tom, headphones still on, flip a CD box over his shoulder as he continues his search.

She heads off to do it herself. UP IN THE BEDROOM, 96

Jake’s Nickelodeon show switches over to another channel abruptly.

This channel is showing an old black and white movie. It looks familiar. There’s no cheesy looking monsters, like Jake is always trying to watch, this one is deeply weird. There’s a strange-looking little man with a misshapen face on screen.

Jake snatches up the remote and changes the channel. Safely back to Nickelodeon. Phew.

69. (green) 03/23/00

97 DOWN IN THE KITCHEN, 97

Maggie opens a drawer and pulls out a screwdriver. She picks up a fire starter.

In the middle of the kitchen floor, she tosses aside a carpet flap that covers the floor. She shoves the screwdriver into a crack in the floor and pries up a trap door, two feet square.

Through the hole, she can see a ladder resting up against the wall below. She feels for the rungs with her feet and starts to

climb down. 98 (OMIT'TED) 98 99 IN THE BEDROOM, 99

the Nickelodeon show switches back to the black and white film. The strange-looking little man has joined a number of other strange-looking people. Yuck, we recognize the movie -- it’s “Freaks.”

He picks up the remote and switches back to Nickelodeon again.

Maggie reaches the bottom of the ladder in a darkened space.

Very little light shines down from the trap door. She feels forward, both arms out in front of her, searching for something.

Her fingers close around a chain that hangs from a light bulb in the ceiling and she pulls it. Light floods the basement.

Samantha’s standing right beside her. Still, Maggie can’t see her.

Samantha just stares at Maggie, curious, as Maggie looks around. This is only a partial basement, a ten by ten foot space about eight feet deep. The rest of the area under the house is just crawl space, barely enough to wriggle through. There are many Pipes and low-hanging joists down here, Maggie has to carefully pick her way to avoid hitting her head.

She sees the water heater on the far side of the room and walks over to it.

Samantha is standing next to that, too. Staring at Maggie. Maggie bends down, to find the hole for the pilot light.

70. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 100

Samantha reaches down and touches Maggie’s hair. Maggie scratches her head.

IN THE LIVING ROOM, 101 the music is BLARING into Tom’s ears. His eyes are closed. UP IN THE BEDROOM, 102

Jake is in a war with the television, desperately changing the

channel as the horror movie comes on, but as soon as he does it changes itself right back. We no longer see what’s going on in the movie, but it sounds like it’s getting to an awful part.

IN THE BASEMENT, 103

Maggie strikes a match and holds it out near the pilot light hole.

Samantha, next to her, looks up. At the light bulb. Suddenly, she’s standing next to it.

Maggie peers into the tiny hole. A blue flame burns inside. She sits back, puzzled.

A hand closes around the light bulb. The monofilament abruptly goes dim. The basement is plunged into darkness.

UP IN THE BEDROOM, 104

the remote no longer does anything. Jake hurls it aside and runs over to the TV. He hits the power switch. It does nothing. From the TV, the sounds of the movie are horrific. SCREAMING. The WHINE of a tool. Something wet.

Jake reaches down and pulls the plug from the wall. But the sounds go on. He stares at the screen, transfixed, plug in hand, the sickly blue light bathing his face.

The ghastly creatures on screen chant -- “We accept her! We accept her! One of us! One of us!”

DOWN IN THE BASEMENT, LO5 Maggie takes a few steps forward across the darkened basement

and SMACKS her head into a low-hanging joist. She GROANS in pain and crumples to the floor, holding her head in her hands.

71. (green) 03/23/00

IN THE LIVING ROOM, 106 the music stops.

Tom’s eyes pop open. He feels for the cord and wiggles it,

maybe there’s a short in it. But there’s no short. The cord is no longer connected to anything. He pulls it toward him, and he’s holding the jack in his hand.

He sits up and looks around.

He’s sitting in an empty room. And it’s daytime.

It’s not just that there’s no one else there, there’s no furniture in the room either. No lights. No carpet. The floor is unfinished, the walls unpainted. But it’s the same room. As if the house had flashed back in time to its own construction.

He stops, noticing his breath has come out of his mouth in a cloud of steam. There’s a woman standing in the doorway.

You wish. It’s Samantha.

She turns and looks at him. Steam rises lightly from her as she breathes. Tom is shaking, barely finds his voice.

She speaks, but her voice is muffled, strangely distorted. IN THE BASEMENT, 108

Maggie drags herself to her feet and staggers over toward the ladder, wiping blood from her forehead.

Tom takes a few trembling steps across the room, closer to Samantha, drawn to her. She walks forward a step or two. She speaks again, louder, but the voice is still unintelligible, bizarre. She’s trying desperately to communicate something to him, but he can’t make it out.

111A

111B

72. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 109

She reaches out a hand. Tom raises his in response. She comes closer.

Tom is frozen in the middle of the room. Their hands draw closer still. Their fingertips touch.

Tom GASPS, as if something very heavy were suddenly put down on his chest. His mouth drops open, his chest twitches. He can’t breathe.

IN THE KITCHEN, 110 Maggie crawls out of the trap door that leads to the basement.

IN THE FLASHBACK LIVING ROOM 111 Tom hears MAGGIE’S VOICE call out to him.

He can’t answer. With every twitch of his chest clouds of steam burst from his mouth, all the air going out, none coming in.

IN THE REGULAR LIVING ROOM, 111A

Maggie appears in the doorway to the room. She can see him, standing there, hand outstretched into the air in the fully- furnished and well-lit nighttime living room, touching nothing.

IN THE FLASHBACK LIVING ROOM, 111B

But from Tom’s point of view, he’s touching fingertips with Samantha in a daylit, empty, bone-cold room. He’s frozen, breathless, and now his cheeks start to turn pale, unnaturally white. Another few seconds of this and he’11 pass out.

Tom can’t look at her, can’t move. His lips turn blue.

She grabs hold of him. As soon as Maggie makes contact, Tom collapses, falling to the floor of what seems to him to still be an empty living room. He sees Samantha break away from him with a SHRIEK of irritation.

1118

111¢

aks (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 111B

She moves, not quite walking, but a herky-jerky kind of lateral movement away from him, fast, like someone on a dozen espressos, an angry thing that has to slow itself down to a crawl just to talk to us.

On the far side of the room, she flops over onto the floor, like a reflection appearing suddenly on the surface of a pond. Into the floor, she disappears. As soon as she’s gone, the reality of the room explodes back upon Tom.

IN THE REGULAR LIVING ROOM, 111¢

Maggie grabs his face and turns it toward her. He takes a big lungful of air.

UPSTAIRS, 112

Tom and Maggie come flying up the stairs. They can hear Jake CRYING in their bedroom.

IN THE BEDROOM, 113

the television screen is blank, its plug lying next to the socket where Jake yanked it out. Jake is curled into a ball in the corner, sobbing. Maggie races to him and sweeps him up into her arms.

Tom stands in the doorway, chest heaving, staring at them -- his son crying uncontrollably; his wife, shaking like a leaf, blood seeping from a fresh gash on her forehead.

A hand slaps a fresh “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON?” poster onto a telephone pole and pounds a few staples into it. The picture is new and clean this time, definitely a picture of Samantha. Debbie, her sister, moves on down the street, a stack of posters in her hand. She will not give up.

cur To:

74. (green) 03/23/00

Lisa’s apartment door opens and Tom bursts inside, right past Lisa. He looks horrible.

He stops, noticing a LATIN WOMAN sitting on the couch. The room is smoky.

Lisa sees his urgency and says something apologetic to the woman in Spanish. The Woman raises an eyebrow, picks up her coat, and heads for the door, cursing in Spanish. ,

The door SLAMS. MINUTES LATER, Lisa drops onto the couch, flustered.

75. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 115

MOMENTS LATER, they sit face to face.

He does. IN THE BLACK,

Tom listens. The factory CHURNS softly outside the windows. A few CARS in the street below. His BREATHING.

IN LISA’S APARTMENT,

We're sitting alone in the darkened, empty movie theatre. LISA (o.s.) It’s very dark. In the whole pitch- black theatre, there’s only one thing you can see. The white screen. You drift toward it, in your chair.

Up ahead of us, the screen is a dazzling white. We move slowly toward it, floating over the seats.

76. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: 116

We do drift closer to the blurry letters, but our attention is diverted by something. Three rows from the screen, there is a figure in one of the seats, its back to us.

Tom’s eyes are still closed. His face furrows in concern.

But there is someone in the theatre with us, and we continue to drift forward toward them.

Actually, we’re rather nervous, drifting closer and closer to that figure sitting in the third row, its back to us.

Tom’s eyes are still closed. His chest is twitching.

The figure in the seat is only a row or two ahead of us now. It’s a woman. We keep drifting closer.

(CONTINUED )

77. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: 120

Our hand reaches out, touches the shoulder of the woman. She turns. It’s Samantha. Her face is shrouded in plastic. Her mouth presses against the plastic, it forms a horrible round 0, contorted in a silent scream.

Tom’s eyes flicker madly under the lids. Lisa’s worried.

Now Tom’s not just an observer in the movie theatre, he’s in the movie theatre, sitting right next to Samantha. She’s pawing at him, it’s all he can do to fight her hands off.

In their struggle, his fingers close around the plastic that shrouds her face. He sweeps it off her head. She’s missing one of her front teeth.

Samantha’s face is bloodied and bruised, as the plastic comes off she lets out a ghastly, inhuman SHRIEK that fills the theatre.

Tom, still holding off Samantha’s grasping hands, turns and looks up at the movie screen.

Tom’s eyes widen as he stares at the screen. Three huge letters pop into focus and £il11 our field of vision.

The letters say:

78. (green) 03/23/00 122 CONTINUED : 122

79. (green) 03/23/00

Tom’s eyes pop open and he staggers backwards, gasping for air, knocking the chair out from under himself. He falls back against Lisa’s desk, scared out of his mind.

He shoves Lisa out of the way, finds the refrigerator on the other side of the room. He rips it open, searches for something to drink. Lisa follows him.

LISA

I think you need to sit down, something very next level was going on there, you should have seen your face.

(he opens a beer) Uh... want a beer?

(he drinks half the can) Feel better?

(he nods) What happened?

Maggie’s car parks in front of their house, behind Tom’s phone company truck. She gets out, dressed in work clothes, and pulls two bags of groceries from the trunk.

Maggie comes in the front door and struggles to take the keys out of the lock while still holding the groceries.

No answer. She kicks the door shut behind her. From somewhere in back, there is a faint CRUNCHING sound.

No answer. She heads into the kitchen with the bags.

80. (green) 03/23/00

In the kitchen, a letter rolls into the tray of an old fax machine on the counter. Maggie stops in the doorway, staring at the floor. Muddy footprints lead into and out of the kitchen, through the door to the back. Thick chunks of wet mud are everywhere.

She sets the groceries down on the counter and pulls out a gallon of milk. She opens the refrigerator. She does a double take. The entire top shelf is jammed with cardboard cartons of orange juice.

From outside, the CRUNCHING sound comes again. She follows the muddy footprints out the kitchen door. The fax machine BEEPS.

The back yard is smallish, but it’s a nice little patch of grass. Used to be, anyway, because now there are three large holes in it, dug at seemingly random locations. Piles of dirt and rock are heaved up next to the holes.

Tom stands in one of the holes, his back to Maggie, hoisting a large pick axe high over his head. CRUNCH. He brings the pick down, into the hole.

Maggie is aghast. She walks slowly across the yard, past a pile of shovels and buckets and other tools, past Jake, who is sitting in his sandbox, calmly digging with a plastic shovel. Just like Dad.

She draws closer to Tom.

Tom raises the pick high and brings it down hard. CRUNCH. The hole he’s in at the moment isn’t more than two or three feet deep. But, hey, it’s early.

Maggie draws closer. In between swings --

Tom whirls, the pick raised to defend himself. His shirt’s off, his chest and face are streaked with mud and sweat.

CONTINUED :

Maggie jumps back.

CRUNCH.

81. (green) TOM You scared me. And with that, he turns back to the job. Swing.

Swing.

Swing.

Swing.

CRUNCH.

CRUNCH.

CRUNCH.

Maggie walks around him, so she’s facing him.

Tom shrugs. Swings the pick.

He just looks at her from under his sweaty brows.

03/23/00

He keeps working.

You know who.

Tom manages to break apart the rock he was working on with the He tosses the axe, which bounces crazily across the grass at Maggie’s feet. She jumps out of the way. He hoists himself

pick.

out of the hole and picks up the garden hose.

into the hole.

He sprays water

82. (green) 03/23/00

MAGGIE * Why are you doing this? *

TOM

Water softens up the dirt.

He tosses the hose aside and grabs a shovel. He jumps back in the hole and starts to dig.

(isn’t it obvious?) I’m searching.

(off her look to Jake) * He’s fine. It’s not over there. * MAGGIE

I think we should call the police.

IN THE ALLEY BEHIND THE YARD,

(green)

03/23/00

someone is watching Tom and Maggie through a narrow gap in the fence. They look at the holes in the yard, at Tom with the

shovel, they can hear snatches of what is being said.

IN THE YARD,

me? Take a break.

This is just fucking typical, isn’t it?

TOM

He climbs out of the hole and walks toward her.

What do you want me to do, Maggie, you want me to go inside, sit down in front

TOM (cont’d)

of the TV, drink eight or nine beers

till I fall asleep in the chair?

that?

tomorrow and the day after and the day

after after after after after after after

STOP!

-until I grab my chest and die?! I was already dead! important thing that’s ever happened to me, the most important thing I’ve ever

Maybe repeat the whole thing

and and and and and and and

the the the the the the the

after after after after after after after-

MAGGIE

TOM

and the and the and the and the and the and the

done in my life, Maggie, my whole stupid life, and you want me to just

STOP?!

Like

Maybe This is the most

By the end of his tirade, TWO NEIGHBORS are staring over the back fence. He’s only a few feet from Maggie now, the veins in his neck standing out.

She holds her ground.

84. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 129

She turns, to go back in the house, then turns back, furious.

Maggie sits at the kitchen table, reading the letter that came in on the fax. Tom comes into the room behind her, pauses in the doorway, composing himself. She keeps reading. He sighs, heavily. She doesn’t turn around.

He goes to the refrigerator and takes out a carton of orange juice. He takes two glasses from a cupboard and sits down at the table opposite her. He fills both glasses and puts one in front of her. She looks up at him as he drains his. He pauses, staring at her. Then at her glass.

She doesn’t answer. He takes her glass, drinks some.

CONTINUED :

No answer.

84a.

(green)

03/23/00

85. (green) 03/23/00

She ignores him. He looks at the letter in her hands.

He shakes his head.

They stare at each other. Tom’s face is pale. Maggie is concerned.

The phone RINGS. Maggie stares at Tom. The phone RINGS again. She lowers her voice, pleading.

Tom can’t look at her. The phone RINGS again. Tom gets up, opens the door that leads to the back yard, and goes outside.

Tom takes a few steps out of the house, putting his hands to his head in pain. Whatever it is, he knows. In the house, the phone rings a fourth time. Maggie’s voice drifts through the open doorway as she answers it.

Tom closes his eyes. MAGGIE (o.s.)

Steve, I was just going to-

86. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 132

She stops. There is a long silence. Tom turns and walks back toward the house, slowly. There is dead silence inside. As he nears the doorway, he hears the sound of the telephone being placed back in its cradle.

Maggie reaches the doorway at the same time Tom does. She looks up at him, her eyes filled with tears. He puts his arms around her and holds her for a long moment.

She stiffens.

She looks at him, deeply hurt. Then enraged. She pushes him away from her, hard. He stumbles back into the yard.

Jake looks up from the sandbox.

135A

87. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (2) 132

She looks at him, absolutely incredulous -- -- and then storms back into the house, SLAMMING the door so hard two of the glass panes spiderweb right over Tom’s reflection.

Jake, twisted around in his car seat, looks out the back window of Maggie’s car. He raises one hand, waving.

Tom stands on the sidewalk, still in his mud-stained jeans and tee shirt. He waves back.

The car pulls away, fast, and ROARS off down the block. Jake and Maggie are gone. Tom turns and heads back into the house.

(OMITTED) 134

There are now five large holes in the back yard, and Tom is running out of places to dig. Nevertheless, he drags the hose across the yard to an untouched patch of grass in the far

corner.

He stops short. Hose won’t reach.

AT THE SPIGOT,

he unscrews the hose and carries it across the yard.

AT ANOTHER SPIGOT, 135A

this one in the far corner, he reconnects the hose and turns on the water. Nothing comes out.

Tom curses and trudges back toward the house.

Tom gets a screwdriver from a tool drawer in the kitchen. He tosses aside the carpet flap that covers the floor. He pries up the trap door that leads to the basement and climbs down the ladder.

(OMITTED) 137

88. (green) 03/23/00

Tom screws a fresh lightbulb into the fixture in the basement. He goes to the far side of the room, where a mess of water pipes all converge. He picks through them, finds the valves that lead outside, turns one off and another one on. WATER surges through the pipes, headed out to the far spigot.

He turns to climb back up the ladder. And stops.

He looks down at the cement floor, thinking.

A FEW MINUTES LATER,

the pick axe falls, cracking the cement floor. Tom has brought all his tools into the basement and is now working in the middle of the basement floor. The bare bulb throws his exaggerated shadow on the brick and stone walls.

It’s quiet in the neighborhood. The CRUNCHING sound of Tom’s pick axe falling echoes over the block. A couple PASSERS-BY notice.

Tom works. He’s covered in sweat and exhausted, but still has only managed to break apart a two or three foot section of the thick cement slab.

He steps back and looks around, at the vast amount of work he has still ahead of him. He tosses the pick on the floor and stares down at it, hands on hips. He’s discontent.

Tom walks down an aisle along one wall in a huge yard supply warehouse. Tools are mounted on the wall for sale -- shovels,

picks, post hole diggers. Got all that. Tom keeps walking.

The tools get bigger. Huge shovels. Tractor blades. Hand pile drivers. Almost, but not quite. Tom keeps walking.

At the end of the row, underneath a sign that says “FOR RENTAL

ONLY” is an industrial-size jackhammer, the kind road crews use to bust through whatever’s in their way.

(CONTINUED )

143A

89. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 141

Tom’s face lights up. AT THE CHECKOUT COUNTER,

Tom wheels up a shopping cart that SQUEAKS under the weight of the jackhammer and a compressor that powers it. The CLERK looks at him over the top of his glasses.

The jackhammer RATTLES in the bed of Tom’s pickup truck. He pulls into his driveway, comes around, and drops the gate.

Using all his strength, he wrestles the jackhammer out of the back of the truck and hauls it into the house.

IN THE STREET, 143

Lenny, the neighborhood crank, is washing his car. He hears a CRASH from over at Tom’s place and turns.. He sees Tom at his pickup, lugging the huge air compressor out of it.

Tom fights his way into the house with the compressor.

Sheila, carrying flowers and looking like she hasn’t slept for days, comes out of her house and heads for her car. She stops and stares too.

The compressor sits on the kitchen floor, plugged into a wall jack. A hand reaches up from through the trap door and feels around for the compressor’s power switch. It finds it and flips it..

The compressor RATTLES to noisy life. We follow its air hose through the trap door --

-- into the basement, and across the floor to the jackhammer, which Tom picks up. He lowers a pair of goggles over his eyes, shoves earplugs into his ears. He swings his weight up, onto the jackhammer, and squeezes the handles.

The jackhammer ROARS, deafening. Tom’s whole body quivers; it’s like riding a bull. The cement slab floor begins to split apart. Tom WHOOPS with joy, barely heard over the din that echoes in his basement.

145A

90. (green) 03/23/00

As the sun goes down, the sound of the ROARING jackhammer is plainly audible on the block. The familiar Neighborhood Guy stops and SHOUTS something at Tom’s house.

DOWN A DRIVEWAY, 145A

Harry Damon, Tom’s landlord, is working in his driveway, cutting through some wood with a circular saw. He shuts it off, immediately hears the JACKHAMMER sound from across the street. He shakes his head in irritation.

cur TO:

A group of PEOPLE IN DARK CLOTHES mill around a living room, muttering in the soft tones of those at a wake. There’s a lot of big Irish guys drinking beer, guts stuffed into sweat-stained white shirts. Maggie excuses herself from the group and steps into another room.

The door is ajar, people visible through it as Maggie dials a number on a kitchen telephone. The phone rings on the other end. And rings. And rings. Just as she’s about to hang up, Tom answers.

(changes his tone) Oh, hi. How ya doin’?

other.

(CONTINUED )

CONTINUED :

91. (green) 03/23/00

-better. Everything’s fine here. Real

good.

an hour.

TOM (o.s.)

I’m, wh, not supposed to use the truck for personal trips.

148A

148B

92. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (2) 147

Behind her, Jake comes into the doorway. He looks terrible. She doesn’t hear him.

Maggie turns back to Jake -- and GASPS. Urine is drizzling out of his pants, down over his shoes.

TOM {o.s.) Maggie, wait, no, Mag-

She hangs up the phone and races over to her son,

Tom SLAMS down the phone. He’s standing in the living room, which looks perfectly normal. But as he turns and walks away, through the dining room, we see the extent of his search.

IN THE DINING ROOM, 148A

the table has been shoved out of the way, and the floorboards have been pried up all over the room, sticking up into the air like the rib cage of some prehistoric beast.

IN THE KITCHEN, 148B

it is now so mud-spattered it looks like the inside of a cave. One corner is filled with a pile of broken-up chunks of cement. Tom strides across the room in two steps and drops through the open trap door.

93. (green) 03/23/00

Tom sails down into the basement and lands nimbly on the floor. Doesn’t even use the ladder anymore.

All but the very edges of the slab is gone now, broken apart by the jackhammer. Tom has dug into the dirt under the slab to a depth of about four feet. He leaps down into it and goes back to work. Frantically.

In the front hall of Uncle Steve’s house, Maggie is putting on her coat. Jake sits on the steps, his coat next to him.

Lisa stands in the doorway to the other room.

Maggie, in a hurry, agrees. She bends over and kisses Jake on the forehead.

She stops. He gets up and grabs her purse off a table by the door, gives it to her.

94. (green) 03/23/00

Maggie comes out the front door of Uncle Steve’s house. Jake stands in the doorway, watching her go. She looks back over her shoulder as she leaves.

Cur TO:

In the basement, Tom is back to using the pick, crazy with frustration. He’s working in a corner now, close to two stone walls, and can’t get much room for his backswings. As he brings the pick back wildly over his head, he knocks it into the stone, chipping a small hole in it.

He keeps working, his swings growing wilder. His backswing hits the wall again, and a stone or two falls loose. As he brings the pick down into the floor, the vibrations knock more and more dirt and stone loose from the wall behind him.

One especially strong backswing CRACKS into the stone wall anda large portion of it falls away, all at once. Tom hears it and turns, to look at it.

Through the new hole in the wall, he can see something shiny sticking out. He steps over and tugs at it.

It’s a piece of clear blue plastic sheeting, about two inches square. Tom’s hand starts to shake as he holds it.

An image flashes through his mind again, one he’s seen before.

A FIGURE IN AN OVERCOAT, standing on the front porch of Tom’s

own house in winter, waving to us to come up.

IN THE BASEMENT, 154 Tom drops the pick and lunges at the wall. He starts tearing at the brick and stone with his bare hands, pulling chunks free and hurling them in all directions.

More blue plastic.

Tom flips open a toolbox and pulls out a utility knife. He slides out the razor blade.

AT THE WALL,

Tom slits the blue plastic from top to bottom. He gets a good grip on either side with both hands and hauls it apart.

95. (green) 03/23/00 154 CONTINUED : 154

Immediately, he recoils and falls to his knees, sickened by the stench that washes over him. As he clears our view, we see what he has unearthed.

It’s the half-decomposed corpse of Samantha Kozak, interred * upright in the wall. She’s missing one of her front teeth, and one arm is bent unnaturally around behind her head, its skeletal fingers extending behind the left ear. A pair of twisted eyeglasses hang from her face, the right lens broken. There are

a bunch of multi-colored bracelets on her wrist, and her rotting dress matches the one she’s always worn.

Tom walks back to the corpse, swallowing. He stands there, chest heaving.

His eyes go up to her hand. He thinks. He reaches up for her hand, then pulls his own back. Can’t do it.

But he’s gotta. He opens his hand, reaching out for hers. He slides his hand underneath --

-- and closes his living fingers around her skeletal ones. His face turns a horrible shade of pale, his lips go ice blue,

and STEAM comes out of his mouth, the way it did hers when he first saw her in his living room. His eyes actually change

color, turning a vivid brown. *

Those vivid brown eyes dissolve into another face, behind *

eyeglasses. Pulling back, we recognize the face as Samantha’s. But she’s alive now, walking down the street, Tom’s block, on a wintry day.

We see what she sees. Steam from her breath rises up in front of us, as if coming from our own mouth. We’re looking at the front porch of Tom’s house as we walk past it. The house is being remodeled, it’s surrounded by scaffolding, its windows covered with plastic Duvateen.

The Figure in the Overcoat waves to us.

96. (green) 03/23/00

CONTINUED : 155 FIGURE C’mere a sec! SAMANTHA What? FIGURE

I want to show you something!

We look back, over our shoulder, then back at the Figure. You mean me? This close now, we see the Figure is Kurt Damon.

Her manner of speech is childish, like a grade-schooler’s. KURT (charming) Well, of course! I don’t see anybody else around!

We start up the steps of the porch. Kurt smiles, beguilingly, and holds a hand out to us.

He tugs. She resists.

Kurt leads us into the living room. There’s no furniture. The floor is unfinished, the walls unpainted. The windows are covered with tinted plastic, casting an eerie blue light through the place.

Adam McCarthy is in the living room too, drinking from a bottle of schnapps. He’s drunk, slurring. He sees us.

97. , (green) 03/23/00

CONTINUED : 156

He giggles.

They laugh and look at each other. Kurt drinks, then forces the bottle back at Adam.

He wrestles with Adam, forcing him to drink. Half of it runs down Adam’s chin.

We turn and start for the door. Kurt hurries around, intercepts us.

He puts his arm around us, leads us back into the room. KURT (cont’ d) The surprise is... we decided we want

to be your friends.

He laughs.

98. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (2) 156

Kurt turns Samantha toward an old mirror that hangs over the fireplace. She’s good-looking, if she knew it. We turn away, embarrassed.

He makes us look in the mirror again. He starts to help her off with her winter parka, but she hesitates.

Reluctantly, she lets him remove it.

He turns her toward him, looks at her, closely.

Come on, let’s be friends. SAMANTHA Well... you can kiss me if you want to.

Kurt leans in close, kisses us. After a moment, we force our head away, looking down. Kurt’s hand is on Samantha’s breast. We push him back.

But Kurt pulls us closer, roughly. We struggle.

We struggle some more. He gets his powerful hands on our shoulders and starts to push us down.

99. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (3) 156

We tear away, get up and run for the door. From behind, something hits us very hard. The floorboards race up at us, all of a sudden. We land on them, hard, bounce off, our own blood spraying out on the unfinished wood.

Our glasses are driven into our face, and the right lens spiderwebs. We spit out a tooth, which skitters into our field of vision. We see Adam McCarthy, vomiting in the corner.

Abruptly, we’re rolled over and are staring at the ceiling, the right half of everything we see broken and spiderwebbed. Kurt

Damon is on top of us, his face too close. Her hands rise up,

try to push him off, but he’s stronger.

Samantha starts to SCREAM. Hands close over our face. She bites, and the hands are pulled away. She SCREAMS again.

Her hand claws the floorboards. One of her fingernails SNAPS off.

Kurt holds her down, begins to try to undress her. She writhes and SCREAMS. She gets one hand into Kurt’s hair and pulls as hard as she can. He SHOUTS in pain.

In the corner, Adam McCarthy has his hands over his ears.

But she keeps screaming. Adam staggers to a boom box that’s sitting on the fireplace mantle and flicks a switch. A SONG comes on, loud. It’s a haunting tune, we recognize it.

It’s the song Jake has been humming.

Kurt continues his fumbling, drunken attempts at rape, tearing her hand out of his hair.

Adam lunges to the wall and tears down a sheet of the blue plastic Duvateen. He races over to us with the sheet --

100. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (4) 156

-- and everything turns blue. Now our sights and sounds are muffled and distorted through the blue plastic. We see the image that has haunted Tom, the face of Kurt Damon, a blue demon as he grapples on top of us.

IN TOM’S BASEMENT, 157

Tom falls back against the wall, his hand still locked in Samantha’s. His color is cadaverous. He’s suffocating.

IN THE FLASHBACK HOUSE, 158

back in Samantha’s point of view, we struggle, we thrash, it seems to go on forever. Slowly, the sounds become fainter and fainter and fainter...

... and everything stops. We hear the muffled voices of Kurt and Adam SCREAMING at each other.

The sheet of plastic is ripped off. We stare up at them as Kurt and Adam stand above us, chests heaving, revolted looks on their faces, looking at us like we’re a dog they just killed with their car.

I never saw nobody dead before.

We start to fall back, and down, as if sinking into the floor. Kurt and Adam grow taller, further away. Their voices fade.

101. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 158

Kurt and Adam are very far away, blobs of light at the end of a black tunnel that’s closing in around us. Just before

everything goes completely black --

Tom’s fingers twitch open and his hand pulis free of Samantha’s. He opens his eyes and gulps air. The color returns to his face as he pulls his hand away from hers.

But as he does so, he stops, staring intently at something in her fingers. We don’t see what it is.

Tom draws himself to his feet and climbs the ladder that leads upstairs.

ADDITIONAL ALTERNATE SHOT:

As he goes, we pause, looking between two rungs near the top of the ladder. In the darkened crawl space under the rest of the house, a pair of eyes stare at us.

In the living room, Tom picks up the phone and dials 911. It rings twice, then picks up. He’s immediately put on hold.

He thinks, hesitates, then hangs up the phone.

Outside, it has begun to rain. Tom comes out of the house and heads up the block, toward Frank’s house.

Tom climbs the steps to Frank’s house. Bouquets of flowers have been left here and there on the steps, along with a few candles

and handwritten signs -- “Hang in there, Adam,” “We Love You,” that sort of thing.

102. (green) 03/23/00 162 CONTINUED : 162

Tom knocks on the front door. A moment later, Frank opens it. He looks devastated, shell-shocked, his eyes sunken from crying. He’s wearing a red shirt we’ve seen before.

Frank shrugs. Can’t talk much.

TOM

Frank, I’m sorry. I’m sorry because... I think I know why Adam shot himself. And I have to call the police about it. But I don’t want you to hear it from them, I don’t want Sheila to read it in the paper. You have the right to know before anybody else.

He nods toward his own house. Frank stares at him, frightened, but what could possibly be worse than what’s already happened?

He turns and heads into the house. A few moments later he reappears, carrying his jacket.

Tom leads him down the sidewalk. The Damon house is visible across the street. One by one, the lights flick on in its windows.

Tom doesn’t see.

Cur TO:

OMITTED (163-166)

166A

103. (green) 03/23/00

A red light, seen through a rain-spattered windshield. Maggie drums her fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for it to change.

Her purse sits patiently on the passenger seat beside her.

OMITTED 167

Tom and Frank stand on opposite sides of Samantha’s grave, staring. Frank is horrified.

He reaches out and pries open the fingers of Samantha’s lifeless hand. She’s clutching a tuft of hair.

Frank stares for a long moment, struck dumb. Finally, he turns his back. His shoulders heave as he cries, silently. A long moment goes by. Tom takes a step toward him, to comfort him.

(CONTINUED )

104. (green) 03/23/00 168 CONTINUED : 168

Tom stops.

Frank lets his jacket drop to the floor, revealing his right hand. He’s holding a gun.

He turns and looks at Tom. FRANK (cont/d)

What were we supposed to do? Send our

own sons to jail for the rest of their

lives? Over her? Frank still has the gun hanging at his side. He rubs it back and forth against the side of his leg, tears streaming down his cheeks. Tom's eyes are glued to the gun.

He’s right, and Frank knows it.

105. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (2) 168

Frank aims the gun just to the left of Tom’s head and pulls the trigger. The bullet CRACKS off the ladder.

Tom starts up the ladder. Frank looks down at the gun. He turns it to face himself. He looks into its barrel.

OMITTED (169-173)

Tom crawls out the trap door and hurries out of the kitchen. A GUNSHOT rings out from the cellar. Tom winces and starts to

turn back.

A SECOND GUNSHOT sends him headed out the front door again.

Tom races across the living room, scoops his truck keys off the desk, opens the front door --

-- and finds himself face to face with Harry Damon and his son Kurt. They’re standing on his front step, doused by the driving

rain.

Tom freezes. Thinks. Can’t even speak. Kurt, faced half away from him, doesn’t make eye contact.

(CONTINUED )

106. (green) 03/23/00 175 CONTINUED : 175

HARRY

It’s important.

They look at each other for a long moment. Tom looks down, to where Harry’s hands are thrust into the pockets of his jacket. He looks back up. Harry’s face is a blank, it’s impossible to read.

Tom swallows. His mouth goes dry.

He steps forward abruptly -- ostensibly to get out of the rain, but it also forces Tom to take an instinctive step back, into the house.

Harry shakes the rain off, coming further into the house as he does so. Kurt steps in quickly behind him.

Kurt does so. Harry steps into the living room. Tom turns, eyes still on him. He is now directly between Harry, who walks to the middle of the living room, and Kurt, who remains next to the door, eyes still averted.

Harry pulls his hands from his pockets. The right side of his jacket sags from the weight of -- well, my guess is a handgun. Tom studies them. Both Harry and Kurt seem a little unsteady, swaying on their feet.

107. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (2) 175

Harry gestures to the dining room, in which the floorboards have all been torn up.

HARRY

What the hell do you think you’re doing to my house?

(no answer) I heard all that pounding and I figured I’d better check it out, but I never in a million years thought you’d be wrecking the place! What’s the matter with you?

Tom flinches at a movement behind him. It’s Kurt, who has walked over toward the fireplace and is standing next to it.

Tom glances at the fireplace poker, which is upright in a holder next to Kurt. Kurt’s not looking at it -- but it’s within easy reach,

Tom looks at Harry’s pocket. It sags. *

Tom’s eyes flip around frantically, to see if he has a weapon near. In his hands are his truck keys. Next to him is a floor lamp. Nearby is a table. On it are: a large candle, his wallet, and a stack of mail. No help there.

108. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (3)

He looks back over his shoulder, at the front door, which is now unguarded.

TOM

No, you guys go ahead. You’1l see it easy enough.

Abruptly, Harry pulls his left hand out of his pocket. [In it, he holds --

-- a half pint of whiskey. He unscrews the top and takes a very big gulp. HARRY (cont’d)

Water main doesn’t run under the house, Tom.

Tom surreptitiously wedges his car keys between his fingers.

Harry screws the cap back on the bottle and tosses it across the room to Kurt.

Drink more. Obediently, Kurt finishes the bottle.

Kurt picks up the poker and hides it behind his leg.

(CONTINUED )

109. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: (4) 175

Harry starts to pull his right hand from his pocket.

Tom reaches out, grabs hold of the floor lamp, and hurls it down on the floor at Harry’s feet. The bulb shatters with a blue electrical flash, spraying glass shards. Harry winces as he draws a 9 mm. from his jacket pocket, and in that split-second, Tom bolts for the door.

But Kurt moves faster, whipping the poker across the room, hard. It hits Tom in the back of the knees as he nears the doorway and Tom falls.

Kurt races over and kicks him in the head. Tom rolls over onto his back, stunned. Kurt starts to drag him across the living room floor.

Kurt drags Tom further, into the middle of an area rug. Tom rolls over, making eye contact with Kurt, who is panicking.

Kurt does. Tom, regaining his strength, starts to struggle, but Kurt puts his knee in the middle of Tom’s back and pulls his head back.

Harry puts the gun to Tom’s head, but hesitates. He looks around.

There is a sweatshirt tied around Kurt’s waist. Harry rips it off him, wraps it around the gun and his hand to muffle the shot, raises the gun to the back of Tom’s head --

-- and a spray of headlights splashes across the far wall of the room.

Nobody moves.

Outside, they hear a car idling in the street. A horn HONKS. Kurt looks at his father, panicked.

Harry looks down at Tom.

Tom prays.

110. (green) 03/23/00

Maggie waits in the front seat of the car. Nobody comes * outside. Impatient, she sighs, pulls the keys from the ignition * and gets out of the car. The rain has stopped, but everything

is wet, big fat drops PLINKING and PLUNKING from the trees and into puddles.

She takes one step toward the house. The light in the living room window abruptly clicks off.

She stops.

She takes another step. The porch light clicks out. She stops, alarmed. She looks back at the car.

IN THE FRONT SEAT,

she rips open the door and grabs her purse off the passenger seat. She digs inside and finds Tom’s lineman’s knife, the one she put in there earlier. (Good thing she brought that purse.) ON THE SIDEWALK,

she starts toward the house again, knife in her left hand, keys in her right. It’s real dark.

She starts up the stairs. She reaches the top. The last light that was on inside clicks off. Now the house is totally black inside.

She goes to the door. She unlocks the deadbolt.

Inside, she hears a SCURRYING sound.

She switches the knife to her right hand, keeping it concealed. * She opens the door.

The room is pitch black, so Maggie leaves the door hanging open. Some light spills in from the street.

No answer. She steps inside and fumbles for a light switch.

She flicks it. Nothing happens.

11. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 177

She crosses the room to another light and CLICKS its switch. As the light floods the room:

Harry, who was hiding behind the front door, BANGS it shut. Kurt Damon is still kneeling on Tom’s back, holding one hand roughly over his mouth, trying to keep him quiet.

Harry raises the gun in his hand and points it at Maggie.

She lunges toward Tom. Harry fires. Maggie hits the ground, and the bullet WHIZZES past her, SHATTERING the mirror over the fireplace.

Tom takes advantage of the moment to flip Kurt off his back. His right hand flashes, his clenched keys gouge Kurt’s face.

Harry turns the gun on Tom, but suddenly SCREAMS in agony.

Maggie has plunged the knife through Harry’s foot and into the floorboards. Harry thrashes, in shock, waving the gun around, his foot pinned to the floor by the knife. .

Kurt SHOUTS and raises the poker high, to swing it down on her -- -- Tom throws himself on top of Maggie, to protect her --

-- and the poker starts to fall.

BANG! BANG!

Two shots ring out from the doorway to the dining room. Kurt takes both in the chest and is thrown back on the floor, the poker CLATTERING next to him.

Harry turns toward the source of the shots. Frank stands in the doorway to the dining room, his .38 in hand. Harry raises his gun, but Frank fires two more shots. Both hit Harry, who falls back onto the floor, foot still pinned, knee sticking up at a grotesque angle.

As he hits the floor, his gun goes off. The bullet RIPS through the ceiling.

112. (green) 03/23/00

On the second floor, in Jake’s bedroom (which Jake is not in) the bullet CRACKS up through the floorboards, tears through his mattress, and bursts through the little boy’s pillow.

The pillow explodes in a cloud of feathers. There are feathers everywhere.

Frank opens his hand and the gun CLATTERS to the hardwood floor. In his red shirt, Frank is exactly the image Tom saw of him in his dream.

He turns and walks out the front door.

Tom looks at Maggie. They're both in shock, can hardly speak. But they’re okay. They turn and look out the open front door. Frank is sitting on the top step, facing the street, like in Tom’s dream.

Tom and Maggie come out of the house. Frank, sitting on the top porch step, makes no attempt to flee. From all around the block, VOICES rise up, people heard the shots. Frank shakes his head.

Faces gather across the street, staring at Tom’s house, wondering what the hell. A SIREN wails in the distance.

Sensing something, Tom turns and looks back, over his shoulder. For a moment, the figure of Samantha is visible in the window of his house, but when he looks closer, she’s gone.

Turning sharply to the right, we see she’s standing on the

street right next to us. She’s wearing the same heavy parka she wore on the cold day when she first went into that house.

113. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED : 180

She turns and walks away, down the street, the arriving Neighbors passing in front of, behind, and all around her, as if they didn’t even know she existed.

She walks toward the grand old church at the end of the block, her breath rising above her in little curls of steam.

A dozen MOURNERS are gathered around a freshly dug grave at a cemetery in town. It’s a wooded place, slightly rolling hillsides, the kind of place you’d choose for yourself. A PRIEST reads from a Bible.

Drawing closer, we recognize two of the Mourners -- Debbie, the baby-sitter, stands at the edge of the grave, one arm around her mother, Yvonne, the woman from the train station. They’re not so much grief-stricken as relieved, at last putting things to rest.

A newly engraved headstone sits on the grass near their feet. The letters are clear, the marker is permanent, finally -- “Samantha Kozak, 1982-1999.”

A U-Haul trailer rolls down the street in a different residential neighborhood.

Tom and Maggie are in the front of the car pulling the trailer. They’ re quiet, tired eyes on the road. Tom glances over at her. She looks at him. Hey, we’re alive.

Tom glances up at the rear view mirror. He adjusts it, so he can see Jake in the back seat. Jake is staring out the window. Seems fine.

IN BACK,

Jake is strapped into a car seat. He stares through the window, his brow furrowed. We look out, at what he sees.

Outside, brick house after brick house rolis by, one of those distinctive Chicago neighborhoods with an endless row of identical houses.

Jake watches them go by, intent. Sounds rise up from the houses

-- a WHISPERED conversation in this one, LAUGHTER from the next, an ARGUMENT from the one after that, a MUFFLED SHOUT further on.

114. (green) 03/23/00 CONTINUED: 182

The sounds grow louder the longer he stares. As the reflections of the houses blur past on his window, a faint strange smile crosses Jake’s face.

Samantha may be gone

but the boy can still hear.