Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales (29 page)

Uh, yeah. Gotta catch up with the wife first.

He pulls out his cellphone, salutes the other two with it:  they grin, move on. Harry goes off to one side, dials, hears:

PHONE NETWORK (V.O.)

The ErickNet customer you are trying to reach is out of cell or has their phone turned off. Please try again later. The ErickNet customer…

Harry puts the phone away, looking unhappy: then takes his beer and moves slowly over to where Carlyle sits by himself. Carlyle glances up. When he speaks, it is plain that Carlyle is several drinks along, but not at all slurred.

HARRY

Mr. Carlyle?

CARLYLE

Welcome to the leprosarium, Mr. —

(squints at Harry’s badge)

Collins.

HARRY

Call me Harry.

CARLYLE

The adorable instantaneous intimacy of our transatlantic cousins. Well, you may call me Michael. Not Mike.

HARRY

Thank you, Michael.

CARLYLE

So doubtless the young minions of British mammon have suggested that you come over and poke the hoary old fossil to hear his sullen borborygmal complaints.

Harry SITS DOWN by him.

HARRY

Wow, you know big words, Michael. I didn’t really have poking in mind.

CARLYLE

Oh come, young man. Grant the spectre at the feast enough intelligence to know what’s going on at the far end of the table. They all loathe me, these wretched little market-driven
parvenus
, for having had what they so desire and fear, a classical education. Yet such advantage counts for little in the crass world outside the university gates.

(another drink)

Would that a truck had hit me in the Carfax before they pedestrianized it. I’d have died young and poor and happy.

HARRY

(in the mood to be rude)

Instead of old and rich and cranky. But not so cranky that you’ll pass on drinking their booze.

CARLYLE

(taken with him)

Why, Harry, there’s a bite under your bark. What a welcome change from these buttery-mouthed, whey-faced youths.

Carlyle GESTURES at a passing BARPERSON for more drinks for the two of them.

HARRY

The scuttlebutt says you’re not entirely happy with Erickson.

CARLYLE

Heresy! Heresy most foul. Here we are all one happy worker-friendly family, awash in employee stock options and corporate handouts to keep the pixel-stained technopeasants content.

(beat)

For myself, I saw which way the wind was blowing, and I took the option package that was offered me and got out of the line of fire.

HARRY

And onto the billionaires’ list.

CARLYLE

(contemptuous)

The land of the many zeroes. Money I may have, but not what matters: respect. There’s nothing more pitiful than a discarded mentor, as even these contemptible graduates of bargain basement MBA programs and gaming arcades can see.

He finishes one of his drinks, picks up another.

HARRY

Why
did
you get out?

CARLYLE

You ask almost as if you’re genuinely interested.

HARRY

I am interested.

CARLYLE

Ingratitude. An awful thing, especially when it thinks itself invulnerable.

HARRY

Ingratitude… It doesn’t seem like much.

CARLYLE

Oh, there’s more. I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would frizzle thee up like the fretful porpentine.

HARRY

Okay. So unfold and let’s frizzle.

Carlyle spends a long thoughtful moment staring at Harry.

CARLYLE

Not here, for pity’s sake. Come on.

They EXIT.

INT. NEARBY OLD LONDON PUB—NIGHT

A quiet place, leaded-glass windows, dark wood paneling, worn plank floor, empty: “fruit machine” video-gambling console DINGING forlornly in b.g. Harry and Carlyle sit at the empty bar. Each has a half-finished pint, empty glasses of the previous round off to one side. Harry takes a drink.

HARRY

It’s really not bad for warm beer.

CARLYLE

Barbarian.

HARRY

That’s “mister” barbarian to you. You were really his tutor?

CARLYLE

Every great university has some bloom of ancient students about it, degreed and undegree’d people who can’t bear to leave, but stay on to learn, and damn the sheepskin. I was one. Like many others of my kind, I took on younger students of other schools for pay and coached them for exams.

HARRY

And you coached Erickson.

CARLYLE

(mild)

I wish I’d slammed the door in his earnest spotty face the first day  I saw him. He was no mathematician, though before God I tried to make him one. A gift for engineering he did have. But none at all for languages.

(grim beat)

And therein lay my downfall.

HARRY

Oh. Is this the ‘porpentine’ part?

CARLYLE

Yes, and mine’s a pint.

Harry SIGNALS for new pints, finishes his glass and pushes it away. Carlyle hangs onto his, gazing into it.

CARLYLE (CONT’D)

He used to go down to Islington, where his parents had a house, and he’d tend their allotment—that’s a plot in a communal garden—in exchange for using its shed as a workshop, where he’d put together electronic components and try to swindle the laws of thermodynamics into doing something profitable. One day young Robert was trenching up the potatoes when he came upon a canister, made of lead, with a curious design on top.

Carlyle wets his finger in a puddle on the bar and traces a circle-and-star design which by now is familiar, except that the point of the star is up.

HARRY

The Erickson logo?

CARLYLE

The pentagram major. Known everywhere in ancient times as the chief sign of white magic. Some called it Solomon’s Seal and claimed that the great King had used it to bind mighty energies… jinni and demons and the lingering spirits of the dead.

Harry is surprised.

HARRY

You
believe
in that kind of thing? Dead people haunting places?

CARLYLE

Many men much wiser than I have believed in it implicitly. Personal survival… sometimes under most strange circumstances. In this world, only a fool would say “impossible”.

Each of them looks slightly haunted now.

HARRY

So what was in this canister?

CARLYLE

Ah. A rolled-up parchment, half a millennium old or thereabouts, written in the hilarious bastard Latin the alchemists used. On the parchment was a diagram of tremendous complexity, all covered with alchemistic signs and scribbles. And there at the bottom, a signature.
Johannes Dee, Doctor Mysteriae et Divinitas.

HARRY

Someone I should know?

CARLYLE

He was Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer. Or a mighty sorcerer, or a clever quack, depending on who you talk to. Robert begged me to translate the thing. I couldn’t understand this sudden interest in medieval curiosities, but I translated the scroll as best I could, while Robert copied the design. He took the translation, and thanked me, and went back to his shed to start work on something.

(bitter)

Last thing he ever thanked me for.

Harry, uncomfortable at the growing weirdness of the conversation, DRINKS faster.

HARRY

So what did he do with it?

CARLYLE

I’m not sure. He became very secretive after that. A year later, he came to me and said he needed venture capital for a business he wanted to start. Then he showed me the prototype Erickson chip. Tremendous speed and storage capacity, processor and memory on the same chip, somehow burned in indelibly. Of course I gave him the capital. And of course I saw a resemblance in the chip’s circuitry to the design on that parchment I’d translated. But there was no way to compare them more closely. Robert wasn’t willing to show me his copy…and the original was gone.

HARRY

Gone? Where?

CARLYLE

Stolen from my house months earlier. Someone tore the place apart looking for it.

(long beat)

Anyway, the company grew by leaps and bounds. Robert bought me out as soon as he decently could: and the rest of the story can be seen in the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Financial Times.

Carlyle reaches for a bar towel and WIPES the design out.

HARRY

How
does
the damn thing work, I wonder…?

CARLYLE

I don’t know.

He’s grim through his tipsiness. Harry eyes Carlyle, suddenly sure he’s lying.

CARLYLE (CONT’D)

But I will rue to my dying day that I helped him.

Carlyle gets up, EXITS slowly and a little unsteadily. After a few beats, Harry EXITS too.

EXT. STREET OUTSIDE OLD LONDON PUB—NIGHT

Harry looks up and down the street for Carlyle: he’s gone. Harry stands thinking, wobbling slightly from drinking too fast. He pulls out his phone, brings up Joy’s number, looks at it: then puts the phone away. Wearing that guilty look again, he heads down the street toward where the computer show’s signs can be seen in b.g. He walks slowly, like a man thinking serious and troubled thoughts.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL—EVENING

Joy comes in, unhappy. She stops by the front desk: Doris is there. She turns to get Joy’s key, finds it’s not there.

DORIS

Good evening, Joy—oh, you’ve got your key.

JOY

I know. I didn’t know I’m supposed to leave it. Sorry.

DORIS

You look like you’ve had a long day.

JOY

It shows, huh? I wish I could get a drink or something.

DORIS

I can do that for you, dear. What would you like?

JOY

At the moment, a double Scotch sounds good.

Down the hall, in b.g., Lorna can be seen walking calmly through the lounge wall and OUT OF SHOT.

DORIS

Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have a spirit license.

JOY

(reacting to Lorna)

You could have fooled me.

DORIS

We have wine or beer, if you’d like some.

JOY

Some red wine, maybe.

DORIS

You go down to the lounge, dear, and I’ll bring it along for you.

Joy goes down to the lounge, finds Lorna there.

JOY

Good evening!

LORNA

Good evening, madame. Have you been out to the theater?

JOY

(too tired to cope)

No, I’ve been having a fight with my husband.

LORNA

How shocking! Tell me all about it.

Gunter PUTS HIS HEAD IN. Joy is in such mixed mood that she isn’t even particularly happy to see him: he notices.

GUNTER

Guten abend!

JOY

Oh, hi, Gunter.

GUNTER

Lorna, have you seen Sarah anywhere?

LORNA

The little one? Not since this morning.

Doris ENTERS with Joy’s wine.

GUNTER

Doris, have you seen Sarah? She usually asks me for a story about this time. But there is no sign of her.

DORIS

Now that you mention it, no.

(toward the door)

George, have you seen Sarah?

George leans in through the wall.

GEORGE

Not since this afternoon. But she never goes far.

DORIS

It’s just not like her to be out this late. She’s such a thoughtful child.

JOY

Oh, George, I saw your weird TV van again, a while ago, down the road. Does Erickson run them for the government or something? It had their logo on it.

GEORGE

The TV vans? No, they’re just plain, usually.

DORIS

And you saw this van the other night, too? I wonder what it’s for.

GUNTER

Well, never mind the van. But I will go out and have a look around for Sarah. It is not like her to be missing so late.

He EXITS. Lorna leans in closer to Joy.

LORNA

You were going to tell us all about your fight with your husband.

Doris and George look at each other with slight embarrassment and take themselves away, leaving Joy drinking her wine and giving Lorna a dry look.

EXT. STREET NEAR ORMONDE HOTEL—NIGHT

Gunter looks for Sarah. The street is quiet: only a little traffic passes. He walks on.

GUNTER

Sarah? Sarah!

Then down the street, coming slowly toward him, he sees that van. He’s curious. Gunter slips into the shadows between two houses.

The van stops down the street in front of a late-opening convenience store. The driver and the passenger, the TWO TECHS we saw previously, get out, lock the van and go in.

Gunter makes his way cautiously toward the van, staying out of sight by STEPPING INTO AND THROUGH THINGS. Looking through the van windows into the shop, he sees the guys buying coffee, cigarettes and newspapers, paying no attention.

Gunter glances up and down the street to make sure no one sees, then MELTS THROUGH THE SIDE OF THE VAN, out of sight.

INT. VAN IN STREET NEAR ORMONDE—NIGHT

In the van, Gunter glances at the technical equipment, also getting a close look at something not visible earlier—lying flat in a clear plastic box, a foot-wide green pancake of plastic that looks like a computer motherboard. It’s etched in lines of gold and silver metal: GLOWING LEDs and tiny crystalline components jut up from its surface, jewel-like. It HUMS faintly, and a subdued SHIMMER hangs about it. The design of the circuit board’s etching recalls the FIVE-POINTED STAR-In-CIRCLE which is both the Erickson logo (inverted) and the pentagram Carlyle described to Harry (right side up). Off to one side of this portable pentagram, along with a couple of empty fast food wrappers and dry coffee cups, is a well-thumbed paperback manual.

Gunter is drawn to this pentagram—
literally
drawn to it, like taffy being pulled. He holds a hand over it, testing the thing’s power the way you’d test the suction of a vacuum cleaner. His ARM IS PULLED OUT OF SHAPE as he holds it closer to the circuit board, and the HUMMING gets louder. Gunter YANKS BACK his arm, alarmed.

Gunter then SPOTS the manual, grabs it and READS a few pages, registers SHOCK AND SURPRISE. He hurriedly LOOKS OUT the van window. In the shop, the two Techs HEAD TOWARD THE REGISTER with their purchases.