Lets make up a Horror Flick!!! PART III

Okay... Let's see if I can finally come up with half a decent plot based on that nightmare I had as a child.

Name (tentative): Sparks

Genre: surrealist horror

Plot: Little boy Andy is out in on his bike after dark one night. His parents always told him to come home before dark, but he's far afield, he knows he's going to be punished when he gets home, and he doesn't want to face his punishment. In a vicious cycle, the longer he stays out, the worse the punishment is going to be, and the less he wants to go home. So it's getting very late indeed.

Then, in a clearing somewhere just outside of town, he sees some light and hears people talking. He leaves his bike in a ditch by the side of the road (because who's going to look for it there at this time of night anyway?) and makes his way up over a grassy knoll to find out what's going on.

It's a gathering of witches. They're dressed in earth tones like a bunch of new-age eco-feminists or something, but in all other respects they're something right out of a medieval depiction of witches: for one thing they're all women, and for another, they're dancing around a fire and cackling among themselves like old crones, even though they're all different ages and some are young and beautiful while others are old and withered.

When the dance ends, one fat middle-aged woman, who's apparently the head witch although she has no special markings on her, speaks up, telling them of the terror the rite they were just performing has just unleashed on the town: a shriveling sickness that will soon infect this whole town, beginning with one little boy who's safe, so his parents think, in his bed tonight. In a "magic mirror" she has that looks remarkably similar to a large drive-in theater movie screen, the witch conjures a movie of what is going to happen in the next few days.

To little Andy's horror, the magic mirror shows a boy he knows from school. He doesn't know the boy all that well: he's just an associate, not a friend or an enemy, but he knows the boy's name. What the mirror indicates will happen is this: the victim, little A.J., will wake up feeling sick tomorrow, too sick to go to school. His mother, not knowing what he already is, will feel his brow and be infected too before the day is out. Meanwhile, sometime in the afternoon, little A.J. will feel a strange restlessness. He'll crawl out of bed and into the hall, his flesh shriveling up.

The first anyone else will know of what has happened to him is when his father gets home that evening and stumbles over what looks like a piece of coal shaped like a big prune, infecting himself with the shriveling sickness too. Before the sickness sets in, however, he and A.J.'s mother will miss their boy, and start looking around for him. Meanwhile, what remains of A.J.'s physical form will continue to shrivel up until it's nothing more than a tiny raisin-like thing, glowing ever so slightly reddish like a hot coal.

This thing, which the head witch calls a "spark" will then tumble seemingly aimlessly around the town as if blown by a wind, infecting everyone else it touches. Contrary to appearances, however, a spark does not move around randomly, but like some tiny little parasite, seeks out living creatures to touch in order to turn them into sparks as well. Since this includes pretty much all of the animals in town, the place will be over-run with sparks in a single day. From there, the plague will spread rapidly.

The witches all cackle cruelly as they applaud the terrible evil they have unleashed on mankind while Andy lies petrified with terror at what he is seeing. Then the witches end their meeting and, to Andy's even greater terror, scatter in all directions, including one of them who comes right up on him. She's a beautiful young woman who was laughing as cruelly as any of the rest, but now, to his great surprise and relief, she makes him keep quiet, but only because she doesn't want the others to know he's here. She tells him she's a traitor, and the others will kill her if they find out what she's doing.

From her knapsack, she produces a blanket. There's nothing she can do about the coming plague, she tells him, and there's nothing he can do either, but she will do this for him: the blanket is enchanted so that it repels sparks. If he wraps it around himself, it'll keep him safe, and anywhere he puts it, sparks will not be able to go. Now she really has to go. Little Andy is so traumatized that he can barely comprehend what she's saying, but he accepts the gift in silence, and then the traitor witch is gone. After a while, he pulls himself together enough to get back on his bike and go home.

As Andy is pulling himself together, we hear a voice-over of someone asking the witch why she gave him that blanket. She doesn't know, she says. She'd murdered other little boys just like him any number of times before, sometimes for human sacrifices and, sometimes just to spite their parents and relatives. The whole cult she had joined was based on doing as much evil as possible. One's ability to do magic increased in direct proportion with the sheer amount of depravity and/or unnecessary cruelty involved in the evil one was willing to do to get power. The scene shifts, and we see the young witch in portrait behind a veil, giving a testimony about what happened.

In fact, she explains, up until the meeting that night, she hadn't been a traitor to the other witches at all, except when murdering one of them in order to increase her own power, which was simply part of the business. These meetings were a sort of orgy of madness in which the idea was for the witches to drive themselves into a frenzy of depravity so that they could push themselves to commit greater atrocities and thereby gain more power. The traitor witch speculates that maybe she really did just go crazy, and maybe that's why she was suddenly so altruistic and thoroughly out of character. In fact, maybe she's crazy now.

Now we return to Andy, who gets home very late indeed (maybe even at midnight) to find his parents worried for him, wondering where he's been, and relieved just to see that he's alive and in one piece, at least physically. They've called the police, of course, and everyone tries to get him to tell them what has happened to him, but he's still so traumatized that he can't answer. The questioning overtaxes what little mental facility the kid has left, and he faints, leaving them to decide they'll just have to wait and see if he recovers his wits enough to tell them what's wrong.

The next day, Andy is still out for the duration, and the sparks are on the loose. Images from the night before swim before his eyes in his delirium, and though he tries to speak, his words come out slurred and incoherent, and the parents asking him questions one moment seem the next moment to be the witches, or the victims he saw in their mirror, or the traitor witch. Though his parents don't understand him, they notice that the blanket has some significance to him, and he begs them through his delirium to hang it on the door of the house so that the sparks won't get in.

Deciding that doing this harmless thing he asks of them might help bring him out of his trauma, they hang the blanket on the door as he asks, and when he begs them not to leave the house, they think he just wants the people he loves to be near him, and they comply. Unfortunately, they don't think to heed his warning when he also begs them not to let his brother or anyone else they know leave their houses either, and merely pretend to comply with these requests. The brother (so they think) has to go to school, and of course they can't exactly tell all their friends and neighbors to stay home just for the sake of their child's peace of mind.

By the end of the day, nothing much seems to have happened, but the next day the brother hears at school about the sick child who went missing from his bed and how his parents are sick, too, and several other kids at school have mysteriously come down with the same illness. Many of them, in fact, had to leave in the middle of the school day. This is all very strange, but of course the parents don't make any connections between this and the strange ramblings of their delirious child.

The next day, while his brother is at school, Andy finally begins to come out of his trauma and speak more coherently. When he learns his brother is at school, he cries out for them to bring him home at once, saying that the sparks are going to get him. As his parents try to calm him down, the brother arrives home early anyway. It seems the sickness is sweeping the town, and the school has been closed on account of a government-imposed quarantine. Meanwhile, strange and conflicting rumors are flying about people finding strange prune-shaped coals lying around on the floor in their houses and out in their yards.

While he's telling them about all this, he mentions that something strange happened when he tried to come in the front door today: for some reason, he suddenly felt very afraid, as if something utterly terrible would happen to him if he came in that way. So he used the back door instead, and now he feels as if there's no way he could possibly go out through the front door either...

Little Andy starts screaming, begging his parents not to touch his older brother, but of course it's too late for them already: the mother already hugged him in greeting when he came in, and though the father's not tainted yet, he will be, because he still thinks his son Andy is not entirely in his right mind and doesn't see why he shouldn't touch his other son. Nevertheless, to ease the child's mind, they don't touch each other in his presence.

When Andy begs them to bring his blanket from where it's hung on the door, the parents decide once again that doing what he asks might improve his mental health, so they go to get it. Strangely, though, the mother starts feeling the same irrational fear her older son felt , as if touching the blanket would cause something awful beyond all imagining to happen to her, so the father has to get it instead. By now, he's beginning to think there's something very strange about this.

Although they realize the brother is coming down with the mysterious sickness as well when he starts saying he feels tired (which, athletic boy that he is, he never is at this time of day), the parents can't think to do anything but quarantine him in his room and call a health service, which is (naturally) swamped with calls like this from all over (and is very short on staff to answer the calls). Outside, meanwhile, great whirling hordes of sparks are already bouncing around in the streets.

Later that evening, the mother begins to feel ill as well, and quarantine herself in her bedroom. The father becomes very alarmed, and trying to take his mind off the creeping fear that the disease will soon claim him as well, he sits down and tries to watch some TV. The staff of nearly every local station is already succumbing to the plague, so what he gets is a national news channel, on which he learns of the rapidly spreading plague and the government's futile attempts to do anything about it.

All the doctors researching the disease have been able to figure out at this time is that the disease is highly contagious, and people who have it are shriveling up into sparks. While they have not yet confirmed that the raisin-shaped things cause the shriveling disease, they have every reason to believe this is so, and indicate that people should not anything that has to do with the disease touch them. Just then, the father hears the door to his older son's room creak open...

His older son comes staggering out, face ash-gray like death, and stumbles into the terrified father as he rounds the corner on his way to the room to investigate. Before his very eyes, his son shrivels down into a hard, black prune-like thing, just like the ones he was hearing about on the news.

Grief-stricken and knowing he's doomed, he goes up to little Andy's room and asks him to explain what happened one more time, slowly and carefully. Andy tells him plainly about the witches and their sparks, and how the blanket is charmed against them, and this time it all makes sense to the father. With tears in his eyes, he tells Andy how he wishes he could hug him one last time, but he now feels the same nameless dread for the blanket that the others did, and all he can tell him is goodbye, and that he loves him, and to keep safe anyway he can until someone comes to rescue him. Then he goes to lie down for the last time.

Now the story turns to the traitor witch again, as she betrays the other witches in her coven one by one, killing them in any way she can, including introducing sparks into their magically guarded houses and weakening the defenses against them. In spite of the great power these witches are gaining from their atrocity, they're getting highly vulnerable from having to tie up a lot of their magic in defending against the sparks, and they're seriously beginning to regret their tactical error in creating such a terrible menace. Moreover, they hardly expect her attacks in such a hectic time, so she manages to get the drop on them all.

When they're all dead, she finds her way to Andy's house and to his room where he sits all alone in his bed, mute and despairing from all of the things that have happened to him and the ones he loves. Gathering him into her arms, she carries him away to a helicopter she has been using to get around, and flies him out of the area.

The final scene is at her testimonial again, where she explains in reply to the questions asked of her that while the sparks are not completely invincible, getting rid of them is essentially impossible, since there are millions of them by now and they are made of a rock-hard substance that's not easy to destroy. Left to themselves, the sparks will last as about as long as the lifespan of the creatures they're made from before they finally disintegrate, but this means that no one should go to the American continents for more than a hundred years. (Mercifully, the sparks can't cross the oceans)

Rescuing survivors of this plague is a rather iffy prospect at best, since rescuers will have to wear full-body suits to make sure the sparks don't touch them, and all survivors rescued will have to be quarantined for a day to make sure they really have survived. (Survivors will be mainly people who found a way to seal themselves off from the sparks. For all of their numbers, sparks are not intelligent enough to climb stairs and can't really break through anything.)

Finally, the camera pulls back to reveal that she's in a British submarine, and the officer, who has been interviewing her with his camera trained on her, explains that some moron in Europe didn't observe this protocol with the fleeing survivors from the Americas, and the sparks will soon devastate the Old World too. All that remains to humanity is Britain and Ireland, if no one makes the same mistake there, and other various island countries.

He asks her why he shouldn't kill her for her part in this atrocity, and she replies simply that she's the only one who knows anything useful about the sparks, and he needs her to help him convince the remaining nations to take the strict measures necessary to survive the plague of the sparks. So the story ends with the officer trying to decide whether people need her as much as she says or not, and whether this outweighs the need for justice against the only living perpetrator of the atrocity.

Characters:
Little Andy (of course)
Little A.J.
The traitor witch
The other witches.
The brother
The father
The mother
The British submarine officer
Various bit players (the news people on the TV, the people in the sub, etc.)