Friday, August 5,
1966
My name is
Victoria Winters. A brewing storm buffets the great house on Widow’s Hill, and angry
spirits out of a dim past seem to pound against its walls, demanding admission.
There is no
sound in the house, nothing but the echo of thunder and the whine of the rising
wind. Yet the emptiness seems alive, alive with fear and tension, and built on
a single terrifying fact: I am alone.
Vicki comes down the stairs as
the lightning flashes intermittently through the windows. She goes into the
drawing room and closes windows that have somehow still not been shut tight,
despite all of Liz’s efforts. (And where is Liz now? Fast asleep from her
exhausted worry, or out walking the grounds she never leaves at lightning
flashes in the sky?)
While Vicki is attending to
the windows, the drawing room doors shut, apparently by themselves. The lights
go out, just as Carolyn warned they would. Vicki tries to open the doors, but
they will not budge.
She gets matches off the
mantelpiece and lights a candle. The doors open. A lightning flash reveals a
silhouette standing in the doorway.
Vicki asks, “Who’s there?” but receives no
answer.
When the flash comes again, there is only the empty hallway.
The lights come on. Vicki
snuffs out her candle and turns the holder over as a possible weapon (Miss
Winters with a candlestick in the drawing room? Miss Winters with a candlestick
in the hall?), going cautiously into the hallway.
Roger comes in from the door
next to the stairs. He says he must have been the figure Vicki saw—he’d been on
his way to the basement to replace a fuse. (It doesn’t seem likely that this
still, standing figure was Roger on his way anywhere.)
Vicki tells Roger that David,
not Burke, tried to kill him. Roger finds this impossible to believe. He knows it was Burke.
“I found the bleeder valve,”
Vicki tells him, “hidden in David’s room.”
David returns from washing up.
Burke says when he was a kid, he had a dog that used to hide under the bed when
it stormed. David never had a dog. Burke promises to buy him one someday. David
says his father would never let him have one. Burke says they’ll see about
that.
David tries but fails (as he
must, since it is no longer there) to retrieve the bleeder valve from under the
sofa cushion.
Driving David home, Burke
tells him how, when he was a kid, he ran away and got seasick on a coastal
freighter.
David wants to know it Burke
meant it about being friends. Burke assures him he did. David says he needs to
go back to the hotel room to get something he forgot, but Burke says they need
to get David home. David won’t say what he forgot.
Vicki tells Roger about
finding the valve and David’s retrieval of it. Roger says he knew David was a
bright boy. This is probably the nicest thing Roger has ever said about David. Vicki
shows him the magazine.
Roger says he never liked
David, and never pretended to, but he never dreamed . . . “What monsters we
create.”
Burke arrives with the
prodigal son in tow. Roger takes David into the drawing room and shuts the
door. Vicki tries to get Burke to leave, but he won’t.
David tells Roger that Vicki’s
lying.
“If it wasn’t true, you could
have stayed here and told me so.”
Roger would never have
believed David. Vicki’s a grownup. He’s only a kid. Vicki probably took the
valve, and when Roger got hurt, she—
Roger stops him. He makes
David empty his pockets. Of course, no valve.
Burke is prattling on about
the grandfather clock. He (again) brings up the first time he and Vicki met,
when he advised her to go back home. He says, “There’s something going on in
that room, and if my guess is right, you’re living in a madhouse, and you’d
better get out while you still can.”
David sticks to his story.
Roger asks Vicki to join them in the drawing room. He pointedly bids Burke good
night.
David says Vicki made up the
story about the bleeder valve because he took her letter.
“How many times did you tell
me how much you hated your father?” That Roger was going to send David away.
That David would get even with him.
David says he never meant any
of that.
Vicki says he meant to take
the valve out of the car. Maybe he didn’t know how serious it would be, but he
meant it anyway.
Burke bursts in with the
bleeder valve and asks if this is what they’re looking for.
Cast,
In Order of Appearance
Victoria Winters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .Alexandra Moltke
Roger Collins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . .Louis Edmonds
Burke Devlin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . Mitchell Ryan
David Collins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . .David Henesy
Fashion by Ohrbach’s
Directed by John Sedwick
Story created
and written by
Art Wallace
No comments:
Post a Comment