Ellipses

CAVE (VO): "It starts where it ends, in the hole I can’t dig myself out from..."

INT. CAVE’S LOFT - NIGHT

Moonlight pours through the window of a filthy East Side apartment, casting hard shadows on the scene within. CAVE, a thirty-somethings Private Eye, lays passed out on the couch.

-- CAVE (VO): "The medicine had made a sinner and a sloth, and it hurt to breathe and it hurt to not breathe..."

PUSHING-IN towards his head, we see his face is all wrapped up in bandages like ‘The Invisible Man’ -- deeply contused eyelids visible through jack-o-lantern holes in the gauze.

We DISSOLVE into his dream...

INT. DARK VOID

CAVE stumbles blindly in a pitch-black void, his eyes covered in bloody bandages.

-- CAVE (VO): " In the dream I can’t see and grapple blindly, drop, and claw at my feet for the only thing I can feel now..."

He drops to his knees and claws a hole in the dirt of the floor.

-- CAVE (VO) : "And I dig, and I dig, and I dig down in my hole."

INT. CAVE’S LOFT

Back in the apartment, CAVE crinkles his nose and stirs from his slumber. He looks across the room...

-- CAVE (VO) "Suddenly, I smell a familiar perfume on the air, and though I’ve prayed for your return for years, I’m ashamed to see you standing there..."

A young woman, BÉLA, sleekly dressed and gaudily bejeweled, steps from the shadows of the entrance hallway into Cave’s living room, her face hidden beneath a black veil. Cave sits up, knocking empty shooter bottles from the stained couch as he does. Béla glances down the hall at the bedroom.

Her POV spies: the sequined dress of a nightclub singer in a pile on his bedroom floor.

-- CAVE (VO) : "You recognize your old dress in the bedroom, sparkling like an idol, and baptized in the sweat of my keepers."

BÉLA turns back towards him, motherly and somber...

-- BÉLA : "I heard you had some trouble, that you were still hanging around this hole. I didn’t want to believe it."

-- CAVE : "And you thought you’d come dig me out?"

-- BÉLA: "Figured it was worth another try."

Cave pours himself a stiff drink from a bottle on the filthy coffee table.

-- CAVE : "What was it, in the paper or something?"

-- BÉLA : "If you consider ‘The Globe’ a paper. Writeup by some hackjob named Driscoll. Full of banal platitudes. I’d rather hear your side."

He sticks a cigarette in the mouth slit of his bandages, lights it.

-- CAVE: "Three days ago. Got off a call at 2am. Infanticide. Some really rough stuff."

INSERT: 35mm B&W Crime Scene photos. Nothing explicit, more like b-roll of the scene itself, though some flecks of blood insinuate horrific and violent crime.

-- CAVE (VO): "Needed to get my mind off it. Couldn’t dwell. So I picked up a girl. Bit of fairy dust."

INT. CAVE’S LOFT - FLASHBACK - NIGHT

QUICK CUTS: Cave and a GIRL (MARLENE, 20, a prostitute, presumably) rail coke off his bedside table. He hands her the sequined dress.

CAVE: " Let’s see this on you."

She slips into it.

-- CAVE (VO) : "We’re just getting into it when I hear some keys fumble at the front."

CLOSE-ON: CAVE, thrusting, sweat running down his brow. He looks, intoxicated, over his shoulder as the sound of KEYS JINGLE somewhere behind him.

-- CAVE (VO): " I figure it’s some drunk thinks he’s on a different floor. So I think nothing of it, keep at it."

GONG! GONG! GONG! The bell from the neighborhood cathedral.

-- CAVE (VO): " I remember the church bell outside strikes three, and, at exactly that moment..."

ANGLE: From behind Cave, still thrusting, a pale hand creeps into frame...

-- CAVE (VO): " ...I feel a clammy hand like a wet steak seize up my shoulder and whip me around."

The hand does as described; Cave’s attention is jerked away from Marlene. Before he has a chance to get angry... SMACK! A wet, brutal punch lands square between his eyes.

INT. CAVE'S LOFT - PRESENT

BÉLA : What’d he look like?

CAVE : That’s just it...

INT. CAVES’S BEDROOM - FLASHBACK

QUICK CUTS: SMACK-SMACK-SMACK! The unknown assailant throttles CAVE. Marlene, watching, disoriented, SHRIEKS.

CAVE (VO) : "Seven years on homicide and I can’t even remember his fuckin’ face. It’s a blank canvas, all fuzzy. Like it’s been burned out with a smoke. He might’ve killed me, too, if I hadn’t had company."

Marlene takes up a nearby bottle of whiskey and CRACKS it over the back of the attacker’s head. Cave, his face a bloody pulp, grabs the assailant by the collar and hurls him SHATTERING through the bedroom window.

CAVE (VO) : "Four stories. Four stories he falls, and yet: on the ground, there’s no splat, no marks, no body, no nothing. Poof."

INT. CAVE’S LOFT - PRESENT

Cave finishes his drink, smoke curls to the ceiling. His bruised eyes pierce through his wrappings to Béla.

-- CAVE: "Speaking of ‘poof’. Was that all I had to do for you to come back? Throw someone out the fuckin’ window?"

-- BÉLA: "Guess so. I’m here for you, here because I think I can help you find that someone."

-- CAVE : "Don’t tell me: you’re screwing him."

A quiet winter BREEZE idles in from the bedroom.

-- BÉLA : "No."

Cave clears his throat, embarrassed.

-- CAVE : "Erhm. Sorry..."

-- BÉLA : "Don’t be."

Her hands go to the back of her neck and unclasp a necklace. She leans over and slides it across the coffee table to softly clink against his empty glass: A SPARKLING, HEART-SHAPED LOCKET.

CAVE (VO) : "I recognized it, for I’d been the one to purchase it for you many years ago, in Cairo, on our one last glimpse of the world outside the castle walls of the home we were together to build."

He takes it up in his hand.

-- BÉLA: " It starts in there, Cave. Where it fell apart. Face it..."

And, like that, she dissolves into the air. He turns the locket over in his hand, inspecting its locked latch. We PUSH-IN towards a KEYHOLE there.

He pours himself another two fingers. Kicks it back.

VROOOOM... The rattling of a MOTORCYCLE ENGINE...

EXT. LINCOLN TUNNEL - NIGHT

Cave surges on his bike, cruising abandoned and trash-strewn streets, light from passing fires dances like reflected stars across his helmet.

INSERT: A WALL OF FIRE. THE SPINNING OF HIS WHEELS. The sounds of his journey echo, reverberate, hypnotize...

EXT. ABANDONED HOME - NIGHT

Lightning CRACKS across an oily sky. CAVE walks from his parked bike through the front gates of a dilapidated suburban home long blackened by the smoke of a severe fire.

INT. ABANDONED HOME - NIGHT - THAT MOMENT

Inside, he creeps across the rotted floorboards. Water drips from the ceiling and dances off the brim of his hat. As if in a trance, he moves towards a beacon of light in the heart of the home’s main room.

HIS POV: the glowing beacon appears, at first, to be a small pillar - something like a birdbath. Getting closer, he finds the object to be the basket of a baby cradle, grown out of a marble pillar like a flower budding from a stem.

Closer: the inside of the cradle contains a small pond, like a tidepool, complete with sand, stones, aquatic flora, and: an OYSTER. CAVE reaches in and pulls it from the water. He palms a small knife from his belt, sticks it to the rim of the oyster and SHUCKS it open...

Placed like a pearl upon the wet flesh of the creature within: a tiny silver KEY. He pinches the key up in his fingers, returns the oyster to the cradle and pulls the locket from his pocket.

A low, AMBIENT HUM begins to pulse, building tension as he inches the key closer to the lock.

He sets it in, gulps, and CLICKS it... WOOSHH!!!

No sooner has the locket swung open than a SURGE OF PRESSURE erupts forth and blasts him across the room, the piercing sound of an INFANT’S CRYING fills the room. His back SLAMS into the wall behind him as the locket drops to the floorboards by the cradle, emitting its WIND, CRIES, and a BLINDING LIGHT.

Cave struggles to his feet and covers his ears; dust and rotted wood dervish wildly in every which direction. He hoists his weight against the turbulence and begins his struggle across the room back toward the SCREAMING locket.

One. Step. At. A. Time. The wind RATTLES. The CRYING DEAFENS.

Finally, grimacing, he stands over the locket and pulls a revolver from his windwhipped overcoat. He AIMS for the locket, squints against its harsh light...

CLOSE-ON: Inside the rattling locket, the small daguerrotype of a smiling infant -- its edges singed.

He CRIES out.

BANG!

The locket shrapnels across the room. Its winds and screams subside. Its light dies.

Cave SCREAMS, his hand goes to his eyes, where tears of blood are running.

-- CAVE (into the air) : "That’s the face you wanted me to see?? And you thought you had to drag me out to Queens to do it? You think you left me alone with dreams of anything else?? Think I can close my eyes for two seconds without it shooting across the darkness there??"

He collapses to his knees. He cradles his bandaged face in his hands and sobs, sobs, sobs.

INSERT: THE WALL OF FIRE.

EXT. ABANDONED HOME - NIGHT

CAVE, the bandages around his eyes newly bloodstained, stumbles back through the front gate, a cigarette sizzling in his lips. Approaching the spot where he parked his bike, he stops.

HIS POV: It’s gone.

-- CAVE : "Figures."

EXT. LINCOLN TUNNEL - NIGHT

Track behind CAVE as he shuffles on foot back through the trash-strewn tunnel.

INT. CAVE’S LOFT - FRONT DOOR - NIGHT

Outside his apartment door, CAVE drops his keys as he pulls them from his pocket. He bends down to pick them up...stops.

From inside the apartment, the suggestive MOANS of a MAN and a WOMAN. The man’s VOICE can be heard...

-- VOICE (OC) : "Béla...Béla...."

He scoffs. Beneath his bandages, his lip curls up in a twitching sneer.

-- CAVE (VO): " For a moment, in my shame, in the calling of your name, I allowed myself to think you’d come here for revenge."

He puts the keys in the lock, opens the door.

INT. CAVE’S LOFT - NIGHT - THAT MOMENT

Cave creeps down the hallway, crunching garbage and clinking empty liquor bottles as he goes. The MOANS from the bedroom grow louder.

-- CAVE (VO): " That you’d sent me away like the errand boy, just to rip open my old and fettered wounds while you make love to another in my bed."

He turns into the hallway. We track like his POV: shadows move on the other side of his bedroom door ajar.

GONG!!! The churchbell, outside.

-- CAVE (VO) : After all these years I’m still this sinking mess, still fool enough to think that you, my love, have ever been my enemy.

GONG!!!

-- CAVE (VO): "And so it starts where it ends, in the hole I can’t dig myself out from..."

He creeps into the...

INT. BEDROOM - NIGHT - THAT MOMENT

On the bed, the man, naked, grunts behind the woman. Coke laid out on the table beside them.

-- CAVE (VO): "The medicine had made a sinner and a sloth, and it hurt to breathe and it hurt to not breathe..."

-- VOICE: " Béla...Béla..!"

GONG!!!

CAVE moves towards them, stepping on the sequined dress upon the floor...

His hand goes up the man’s back and whips him around, bringing them face to face...

It’s the scene from three nights before. The man on the bed is CAVE (2), unbandaged, sweat dripping down his face, eyes saucers. The girl is Marlene.

-- CAVE 2: "What the?? Who the fuck are you?? What are you doing in my fucking house??"

They stand face to face for a moment. Bandaged CAVE trembling, unbandaged CAVE 2 coked-out and screaming.

CAVE, at a loss, widens his eyes and CACKLES. He winds up and CRACKS a wet punch between CAVE 2’s eyes.

-- CAVE (VO) : "In the dream I can’t see and grapple blindly, drop, and claw at my feet for the only thing I can feel now..."

The sound goes SILENT as the beatdown ensues. Marlene screaming. Glass and furniture breaking. Marlene takes up a nearby bottle of whiskey and CRACKS it over the back of the attacker’s head.

CAVE 2, his face a bloody pulp, grabs CAVE by the collar.

-- CAVE 2: "Who the fuck do you think you are??"

He pulls off his bandages...

-- CAVE (VO): "And I dig, and I dig, and I dig down in my hole."

INT. MORGUE - N/A

MATCH CUT: A muslin blanket is pulled from the face of a pale corpse. We CUT before the face is revealed.

Béla is standing there. Looking down.

CAVE (VO): "Suddenly, I smell a familiar perfume on the air, and though I’ve prayed for your return for years, I’m ashamed to see you standing there."

She nods to the mortician.

-- BÉLA : "That’s him."

INT. CAVE’S LOFT BEDROOM - NIGHT

Béla, standing before CAVE in the living room, glances down the hall to his bedroom. Her POV spies: the sequined dress of a nightclub singer hanging on his bedroom floor.

-- CAVE (VO) : "You recognize your old dress in the bedroom, hanging like an idol, and baptized in the sweat of my keepers."

This time, the camera pushes further down the hall and reveals a CRIME SCENE NUMBER “3” set next to it.

Back in the living room...

-- CAVE : "And you thought you’d come dig me out?"

BÉLA turns her gaze from the bedroom to look longingly at CAVE, bandaged on the couch, as he pours himself another drink.

-- BÉLA (OC) : "Figured it was worth another try."

CUT TO BLACK.