Twisted (2)
Movieland - Chapter 14 (2)
Snowblind.
14/2
Twisted
The Detour
Fade in: night.
The Ford Fairlane is on the side of the road, against a snow bank. Illuminated by passing headlights, we see Marti resting against the closed window through streaks of sleety precipitation, her head wrapped snuggly in a kerchief. She wakes. She tries to start up the car, fails. “Please …” Turns the key again, the engine whines, then dies. Overcome, overtired, she rests her forehead on the wheel; the horn blares out. Hand to forehead: even this? Marti shuts her eyes and turns the key.
The car starts up with a hacking growl and continues to complain as she pulls cautiously out of the snow drift. The icy black road shines in the headlights, the snow is falling faster. Marti looks about searchingly. The wipers sweep back and forth, and she must wait for the windshield to clear before she can finally see.
There! An exit sign: “Echo Valley.”
The Ford Fairlane turns off the rural highway, down a hill to a snow-covered Main Street. Every store is dark as the car with the rocketship tailfins plods through the blowing flakes. Off along a side road, she makes out a gas station with a Flying Pegasus logo. Marti turns toward it. It’s further than it looks, quite out of the way. The trek is slow going, snow piling up on the windshield. At last, she pulls in beside the pumps, honks the horn … honks again … no one comes. She gathers her coat collar around her throat and gets out of the car, careful to leave the engine running.
She raps on the door.
Behind the glass, a goofy cartoon turkey, with a musket under its wing and a pilgrim’s hat on its head, stands on a banner that says “Happy Thanksgiving.” Under the turkey, another sign, more somber, and in metal: “CLOSED.”
Marti drives cautiously back to Main Street, slowed by the accumulating drifts, looking for the highway through the wiper swipes that briefly clear the windshield. She has gotten turned around somehow, and there are no street signs. Then she glimpses something that might be right. A sign: “Route 76,” and she turns up a steeply climbing hill, the car sputtering and hacking as it battles the whirling snow.
The Flickering Sign
Glancing out the side window, Marti sees the road rising treacherously over a sheer drop. The hacking Fairlane slows so as not to skid. Close-up of a tire slipping on the ice-glazed road as the car veers toward safety, the side that is woods and mountain. Now comes another Route 76 sign, with an addition: “Los Angeles … 427 miles.”
The sign fills Marti with despair. “This is the wrong way,” she murmurs. She glances out the side window. The road is too narrow. “I can’t turn around. I can’t get off this road!” And so the rocketship Fairlane continues to climb against the battering snow. Up ahead, through the blurry windshield swipes, it looks like something is burning behind tall pines. All at once the engine dies, the car slips backward. High-heeled shoe stomps on the brake. The large, heavy Fairlane swivels dramatically and slides to a standstill on the edge of the road.
Marti is so shaken she grabs her purse and scrambles out of the car. To her alarm, one of the back wheels is half-hanging over the dangerous drop. Gingerly she extracts her suitcase from the trunk as the car rocks in the blowing snow. Marti shivers in her cloth coat and clutches the collar about her throat. She looks up the slanting road, squinting against the biting ice. The trees are swaying in the whistling winds, and now she sees the pines are not on fire at all. Behind their black silhouettes are flickering letters. She lowers her kerchiefed head and fights her way toward the light.
The sign comes into view, some of its letters blacked out, others going on and off with the wind blasts, but there’s enough bright white neon to make out “The Fireside Log Cabins.” The letters are shaped like patterned logs.
Marti reaches the darkened office. She rings the bell. It buzzes far off. In desperation, she bangs on the door. “Hello! … Anyone! … Someone!” Defeated, betrayed, she sobs. Porch lights appear on a hill, and she sees a narrow black house against a snowy black wood. A figure is coming toward her, loping down the hill, throwing on a mackinaw as he reaches the bottom step.
And now he comes upon her:
“You must have gotten lost on the road.” Tall, boyish, concerned eyes, something odd about his stare. (Sometimes there would be a gasp from someone in the audience; usually, a young woman who had grown up on this once milky face and now saw it so defined and intense.) He opens the door of the office with a key on a hoop of keys. “We never get people up here in the winter anymore.”
The office is not much warmer than the woods. Marti hunches in her coat, and the young man rubs his hands together as he steps behind the counter. He flips on the space heater near the cash register and turns it toward the late-night arrival.
Marti explains: “My car broke down a little ways from here. I was hoping I could call a mechanic.”
“Oh, sure,” he says, mirroring her concern. As he dials the phone, he glances up doubtfully at the clock. Several rings. He shakes his head. “You’re not going to get anyone at this hour. Not on Thanksgiving. Not in the middle of a—.”
Just then the office lights flicker and go out. They are now in the dark, two black shapes outlined by moonlight streaming through a rear window. He explains: “Power is always cutting out up here during the heavy weather. I was surprised —“
The lights flicker on.
He smiles blandly, a quick up and down, and continues. “I was surprised anyone would risk taking the mountain road in this blizzard. No one uses seventy-six anymore, not since they put in the Interstate. We only get the summer people now, families that rent the cabins for the season.”
“But you’ll rent a room to me, won’t you? Just for tonight.”
“S-sure. I don’t know what we have ready.” He turns, going out of focus as we see him from the point of view of the key rack, one key in particular, large in the foreground, with a diamond-shaped tag that says “Cabin 6.”
“Well…maybe one.”
Dissolve to the number 6 on a piney wood door. Marti and the young man approach the cabin in the hurling snow. He is carrying the space heater; she, her suitcase. They enter the cabin, and he flips on the lights.
“You have wall heaters!” Marti exclaims.
“Don’t know when they were last used.”
She dials the heater on, and out belches a cloud of dust. Coughing, shielding her mouth with the back of her hand, she waves away the particles. “I think between the two of them, though …” she says, indicating the space heater, which the young man is plugging into a wall socket.
The lights flicker as a blast of wind rattles the windows, but the lights stay on.
“In the morning,” he promises, about to depart, “I’ll get old Maynard up here to look at your car. And if he’s too antsy for the icy roads, I’ll look at it myself. Got some tools out back in the garage.”
She thanks him and shuts the door. The air is hung with dust from the old heater as she moves through it and enters the bathroom. She sweeps back the shower curtain and finds, to her amazement, no shower nozzle. It has been ripped out and the hole cemented over crudely. She sits on the rim of the tub, still in her coat. She is tired, discouraged. She puts her suitcase on the closed toilet seat. It has never left her side.
Throughout the scene, a cello broods through a series of descending chords, then nervous flurries among the violins, all very subdued, very suspenseful, before the cello begins its troubled descent again.
Marti stands to examine the tub and turns on the hot water tab. It groans, dribbles a few rusty drops, locks up. She opens a feeble stream at the sink, pats some water on her face, considers herself in the mirror for a long, unsparing moment. When she turns, she finds there is no towel on the rack.
Marti opens her purse. We glimpse loose, crumpled bills. She fishes out a Kleenex, dabs away her teary mascara. Now she straightens, steeling herself to the cold night ahead.
She heads back to the bed, opens the suitcase lock with a tiny key, clicks the suitcase open. We now see the magnitude of her haul, piles of bills haphazardly scattered. Worried look. “I must have been mad.” She stands over the heater and slips off her coat.
We are suddenly watching her through a peephole. The camera pulls out and we see the back of the young man’s head as he crouches outside the cabin. The snow is blowing about him. Extreme close-up: his eye in profile, lit in a circle of light coming from within the cabin.
Peephole view: Marti slips off her blouse. In her black bra, she runs her hands over her shoulders for warmth, looking vulnerable, fragile. The wall heater — two buzzing coils set into an iron casing — glow behind her, outlining her figure. She unzips her skirt. It falls to the floor, and she bends to pick it up in her shapely black slip.
There is a brief eye flutter at the peephole, so quick that first-time viewers may miss it. Now the young man turns away in anguish. Quickly he plugs the hole with a chunk of wood, then takes off running, slipping, sliding on the icy grounds. The violins prickle with agitation. He doesn’t stop until he reaches the hillside steps. There he hesitates. Sudden silence. He looks up.
The camera mimics his gaze. It sails up above the black house on the hill, the snow-tipped forest trees shuddering in the wind, turning straight up to a black sky, full of stars and an oppressively large moon. Snowflakes twirl down, smudging the camera lens. From this eagle’s vantage, the camera turns down.
When Thorncraft assumes the bird’s-eye view, he invites us to look down on the characters and judge them, to see them as unwitting actors in a larger pattern. We gaze down now. How small the man looks as he searches the sky, how insignificant the log cabins in their broad semi-circle, how desolate the bright white snow lying on the land. The cellos begin to ruminate. As always, the Reinhardt Heft score is suggestive, framing the scene in wariness.
All at once the flickering sign buzzes out, as does the faint light in Cabin 6.
Cut to Marti, dressing hastily in the dark. The violin flurries are rising with anxiety. She pulls on her pointed pumps, throws on her coat, grabs her purse and suitcase and swings open the door. A tall black figure blocks her way.
“Listen,” the young man says apologetically. He is silhouetted against the whirling snow, his face dark. “This isn’t right. The power will cut on and off all night, and I have a great big house with a roaring fireplace. Just me and my little sister.” He moves back a bit, and one side of his face appears, molded by moonlight reflected off the impacted snow.
“She’s an awful chatterbox, my little sister. I’ve been taking care of her since mother passed, and honest, I’d welcome some real company. It gets so empty around here once the leaves turn and the summer people go. You don’t think you’d miss the noise, but you do. Why don’t you wait out the blizzard with us … up at the house? We have plenty of hot chocolate. A big roomy couch. Lots of logs for the fire.”
Marti is quite overcome. It takes her a moment. “Thank you!” she manages, eyes glistening. “You don’t know how much that means to me tonight. That’s the kindest thing anyone has said to me … in a very long time.”
“My name is Raymond, by the way.”
The House on the Hill
We watch them leave the cabin from on high, treading the snow-dusted semi-circle, coming up on the lifeless sign, no longer flickering.
Iced-over stone steps are inset into the hill. As they head up the steps, we are right behind them. Marti’s head, in her kerchief, tilts up. First-person camera: slowly, smoothly the house approaches. It is dark, narrow, stern. A shrill blast rattles the windows, but something about the house is unmoved. Black against the black stand of snow-topped pines, it looks down on them with a stiff-backed rectitude, looming ever larger as they ascend.
Close-up: Marti in profile, looking up stark-eyed. Beyond her, half-obscured by the flapping kerchief, the long face of the young man, studying her intently.
In first-person camera, we reach the rickety wooden porch. The camera glides up the steps, and we steadily approach the door.
Camera cuts to third-person: they enter.
In the vestibule, Mari puts down her suitcase, and Raymond helps her off with her coat. As he hangs it on one of the hooks along the wall, she wanders into the hall, then the living room. The fire crackles, casting the room in long shadows. She crosses to the fireplace and stares pensively into the blaze. Marti is troubled. Her purse, hanging on her arm, is large and prominent in the shot, its black patent gloss mirroring the flames.
From the kitchen: “What does the ‘M’ stand for?”
The question stirs Marti from her reverie. She is confused.
“You signed the register ‘M. Perkins.’”
“It stands for Martina,” she calls back. “But everyone calls me Marti.”
She looks about the room. There are opened books lying about, and one wall seems to be all bookcase. She pulls out a worn volume and examines it. Its spine is shredded, its cover lopsided: “The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad.”
“You certainly do a lot of reading,”
“That’s all we do up here,” Raymond calls back from the kitchen. “Read about other more exciting places. Live other more exciting lives.”
In the darting firelight, Marti walks about the room. Bell jars encasing dried, withered flowers gleam here and there. An ancient wind-up Victrola with a magnificent petaled horn sits on a tasseled stand. Sentimental figurines abound, including an upward-rising maiden worked into a bronze table lamp with flame-shaped bulbs inserted into bronze daffodils. Out in the hall, the wallpaper is flocked damask in ornate swirls. Even more than Mrs. Engels’ house, the Edwardian decor here has the air of the past embalmed. Making a complete revolution, she finds the tall figure of Raymond approaching with a tray.
“Hot chocolate,” he says with an up-down smile and sets the tray on the coffee table. She joins him on the couch, and he hands her a cup, topped with whipped cream. Then he offers her a plate of cookies sprinkled in a Christmas design.
“An old-fashioned holiday,” she says wistfully. “I feel like a child again.” Her eyes begin to brim, and before she can stop she is weeping into her hand.
“Did I do this wrong?”
“Not at all,” she replies, gaining control of herself. “You see, I love children … And I always thought one day—“
But Raymond is embarrassed, a feeling that is intolerable to him. He knows he is socially awkward, cut off from people, and he so wants to pass for one of the normals. He stammers:
“P-people expect turkey on Thanksgiving. I … we … don’t have turkey on Thanksgiving. Not since Mother passed. All that basting, the thermometers. My mother liked things like that. Everything complicated, everything in an uproar. I like simple. I like order. I want things to stay put. So I cook as little as possible … but I do make the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich this side of the Sierra Nevadas, if you want to roll the dice and give it a try.”
Marti is charmed. “You eat like a little boy left on his own!” she declares. “But this is perfect. A treat … for a good, pure child on Christmas morning. The way we all were … once …” She grimaces away tears.
He is watching her intently.
She manages the rest: “… before … before we made mistakes, you know?”
Marti now is aware of his steady gaze. She has exposed too much of herself. She looks down at the plate, misty-eyed, and shakes her head. “Hot chocolate and Christmas tree cookies. I bet your sister loves this. Where is your sister?”
“My sister?” The question seems to unnerve Raymond. “She … what is the phrase? … she’s not herself today. I put her in the attic.”
Marti: a confused look.
“Sometimes I think she’s sicker than I like to admit.”
“Oh? What’s wrong with her? I don’t mean to pry, I happen to be a nurse.”
“All sorts of things are wrong with Ruby. Things with long Latin names. We moved her to the attic when it got really bad. Mother used to keep her camera equipment up there. But she made me lug all the backdrops and chemicals down to the cellar so she could turn the attic into a sick room. Just so Ruby would see the sign.”
“The …? Oh, you mean the motel sign?”
“It calms her … when she wakes from the night terrors. She sees it from the little round window in the attic. The way the letters flicker … through the stained glass. Like a heart beating. All is well, it tells her. Sail on, little bird, sail on through the storm. On your broken wings.” He looks down embarrassed. “I read too much, I know. Anyway, that’s why I keep the sign going straight through the winter. People say it’s bad wiring and I should get the flicker fixed … but I never will.”
“You must love your sister very much.”
He stares back blankly for a moment, considering this alien idea, then, remembering to do so, he mirrors her expression, which is soft and sympathetic. “It’s okay,” he says self-effacingly. “I don’t mind. She’s what keeps me here. My … my ‘fatal flaw,’ as they say in books. My ‘trap.’”
“I guess we all set traps for ourselves, one way or another. And when we fall into them, we are so surprised. I fell into mine … recently.”
“You mean, the wrong turn?”
“Excuse me?”
“How you got here. Up the mountain road.”
“Yes,” says Marti ruefully. “How I got here … The wrong turn.”
Raymond is studying her again, his stare steady, unwavering. Then cooly, he adds, “We all go a little mad sometimes.”
Marti brightens, nods, the sentiment gives her hope somehow. Here is someone who understands. “But we can climb out of those traps, can’t we? I mean, we don’t have to live out our mistakes. We can go back, we can make things right.”
“My sister will never be right” Raymond replies darkly, putting his spoon down with finality.
“But she’ll grow up, and then you can—“
“You know, I don’t think Ruby will ever grow up. She’ll always be in the attic. Rumbling around.”
“How long have you taken care of her?”
“Mother died in…I don’t remember anymore. Mother died of something with a long Latin name too. Latin seems to be fatal to this family. But it was a black lump in the middle of her heart. That’s what I tell the summer people who remember her. Mrs. Shepard, my mother, had a black heart. It never beat right. It never was any good.”
“Oh, look!” Marti exclaims. A rumble of thunder has abruptly flickered lights off in the hall. The hall now lies in deep darkness, illuminated only by lace-patterned moonlight coming through the narrow windows.
“It’ll do that all night, I’m afraid. On and off, on and off. I’m almost used to it.” As he speaks he watches her take a sip of the hot chocolate. “Listen, I … I’d like you to meet my sister. The truth is she really needs a woman to talk to right now. She’s at that age, you know. She has … these questions.” He looks away, embarrassed.
“I understand,” Marti replies, putting down her cup. “Let’s go see her now.”
“Oh, I have to get her ready first. She’ll throw an unholy fit if she’s not just so. She can be a very terrible little girl. Very willful is our Ruby.”
“Sick children always are.”
“Sometimes she gets out of the attic —I don’t know how. I lock the door, but she suddenly appears … downstairs … out of the side of my eye. Then she runs me around playing hide and seek. She loves to hide in the shadows, and you think you have her behind the next corner, but she’s gone! You wouldn’t think a child that sick would be so quick! But there she is, and there she isn’t. Then everything goes quiet. That’s the worse part. It’s when things go quiet that the mischief gets done.” His voice trails off. “In the stillness, in the dark…” faintly, barely audible “… you lose track of time …”
“Children need to play,” explains Marti, very much the nurse giving an informational seminar. “It’s the real work of childhood, to try on different roles. Who will I be when I grow up?” Far-off thunder rumbles. “Playing down here probably helps your sister imagine she’ll get well again.”
Raymond stands, gathering the plate and cups onto the tray. “No, it’s mother. Mother spoiled her rotten. Then mother went off and died on us. I’m left to pick up the pieces. I’m always left to mop up the mess.”
A shrill wind rattles the house. Raymond goes to the window.
“Do you think it’s safe,” wonders Marti in the firelight, “leaving my car like that?”
Raymond parts the lace curtain with the side of the tray. We see him now from outside the window, Marti blurred in the distance. “It’s getting rough out there,” he says blankly.
The wail of the winds is more audible outside, and under them, we hear Marti say, “It’s just that my car is sticking out into the road.”
Raymond has other things on his mind. In a distracted way: “No one will be coming. We’re alone up here.”
For a moment Marti, on the couch, comes into focus, looking concerned, and Raymond goes fuzzy. Then focus returns to him, dull-eyed. “I’ll be going to the attic now.”
The Stairs
The camera follows Raymond into the hall. Two narrow windows allow moonlight to penetrate the dark hallway, lighting it through the pattern of lace curtains. Raymond lays the tray down on a hall table, beside a stack of unopened mail. He turns, comes stealthily toward us, and peeks out from the darkness.
We see what he sees: The deeply shadowed living room. Marti on the couch, gazing into the fire. A table lamp flickers back on for a moment with the distant thunder, then goes dark. Marti puts the purse on her lap. She snaps it open.
With her attention occupied, Raymond sneaks back into the hall vestibule. He finds her coat hanging limply on a hook, feels around the pockets, pulls out what he’s looking for: the kerchief, the one he saw Marti wear in the motel office.
He crushes it in his hand, presses it to his mouth, his nose, as if he were taking oxygen. His head flips back, eyes flutter. Is he about to have an epileptic fit? No. Raymond gains control of himself, stuffs the kerchief in his pocket, is about to leave when he looks over to the side table. He stares at it alertly, his reflection caught in the oval mirror. The camera cuts to the table and we see what he’s looking at: an aluminum flashlight, silver and large, lying on the lace cloth.
Marti is fishing through her purse, pushing aside the cramped bills. Behind her in the darkness, Raymond hurries across the hall and lopes up the stairs. Now Marti finds what she’s looking for, a photo of Gavin, a handsome (somewhat too perfect) studio shot.
She takes it out of the purse, lingers over it, then brave, determined, walks to the fireplace. But now she hesitates. The fire glitters beneath the photo held between thumb and forefinger. The broad manly smile, the appealing eyes. All her talk about going back and correcting her mistakes seems hollow now. She lets it fall, the faithless photo, watches it curl in the flames… and with it, her dreams… marriage, children, husband. In a moment it will turn to a black crisp.
But that moment never comes … for all at once there is a terrible crash on the floor above, a girlish scream, and the entire house goes dark.
“Raymond!” Marti cries out.
In the darkness, Marti makes her way to the bottom of the stairs. She is lit by the lace-patterned moonlight coming through the narrow windows.
“Raymond?”
Silence.
Close-up: Marti puts one foot on the first step.
She calls out again.
Silence.
Then: from way up in the attic, a high wispy voice: “Help me.”
Close-up: Marti’s high heel climbs the next step.
“Ruby?”
The violins begin to murmur among themselves: gathering tension.
“What’s happened?”
Now the double-base begins to descend…something terrible is coming.
“I’m frightened,” the small voice pleads.
First-person camera: Slowly, smoothly we climb higher. The dark landing on the second floor is coming into view.
Close-up: “Raymond, are you okay?”
First-person: Above us, the sounds of steps creaking… someone is coming down from the attic. A beam of light ripples down the attic steps, and then the blinding glare of a flashlight is turned upon us.
“R-Ruby…?”
Behind the white-hot glare, we just make out a black silhouette: a nightgown with puff sleeves, pigtails, tall.
“B-but…?” Marti stammers, shielding her eyes. “I thought you were a child!”
She takes another step to get a better look, her face flooded with light.
Now it had come. Fate meeting the moment. Her foot on the step midway up the stairs … where Marti Perkins had been heading all along.
Preview: Three minutes that will make movie history.
