Eaten (Scenes from a Moving Picture)
NEIL GAIMAN
Neil Gaiman has been writing professionally for almost thirty years. He won the Newbery Medal, the Carnegie Medal, and the Hugo Award for The Graveyard Book. He won no awards of any kind for A Walking Tour of the Shambles, his little book with Gene Wolfe, but is ridiculously proud of it anyway. He has three children, two dogs, and about half a million bees.
INT. WEBSTER’S OFFICE. DAY
As WEBSTER sits reading the LA Times, MCBRIDE walks in
and tells in
FLASHBACK
how his SISTER came
to Hollywood eleven months ago
to make her fortune, and to meet the stars. Of how he’d heard from friends that she’d “gone strange.”
Imagining the needle, or far worse,
he travels out to Hollywood himself
and finds her standing underneath a bridge. Her skin is pale. She screams at him “Get lost!”
and sobs and runs. A TALL MAN DRESSED IN BLACK
grabs hold his sleeve, tells him to let it drop “Forget your sister,” but of course he can’t…
(IN SEPIA
we see the two as teens,
a YOUNG MCBRIDE and SISTER way back when,
giggles beneath the porch, “I’ll show you mine,”
closer perhaps than siblings ought to be…
PAN UP
to watch a passing butterfly.
We hear them breathe and fumble in the dark:
IN CLOSE-UP now he spurts into her hand, she licks her palm: first makes a face, then smiles…
HOLD on her lips and teeth and on her tongue).
END FLASHBACK
WEBSTER says he’ll take the case,
says something flip and hard about LA,
like how it eats young girls and spits them out,
and takes a hundred dollars on account.
CUT TO
THE PURPLE PUSSY. INT. A DIVE, THREE NAKED WOMEN dance for dollar bills.
WEBSTER comes in, and talks to one of them,
slips her a twenty, shows a photograph,
the stripper—standing close enough that he could touch her (but they’ve bouncers on patrol,
weird steroid cases who will break your wrists)—
admits she thinks she knows the girl he means. Then WEBSTER leaves.
INT. WEBSTER’S CONDO. NIGHT.
A video awaits him at his home.
It shows A WOMAN lovelier than life
Shot from the rib cage up (her breasts exposed)
Advising him to “let this whole thing drop, forget it,” promising she’ll see him soon…
DISSOLVE TO
INT. MCBRIDE’S HOTEL ROOM. NIGHT.
MCBRIDE’S alone and lying on the bed, He’s watching soft-core porn on pay-per-view.
Naked. He rubs his cock with vaseline,
lazy and slow, he doesn’t want to come. A BANG upon the window. He sits up,
flaccid and scared (he’s on the second floor) and opens up the window of his room.
HIS SISTER enters, looking almost dead, implores him to forget her. He says no.
THE SISTER shambles over to the door.
A WOMAN DRESSED IN BLACK waits in the hall.
Brunette in leather, kinky as all hell,
who steps over the threshold with a smile. And they have sex.
THE SISTER stands alone.
She watches as THE BRUNETTE takes MCBRIDE
(her skin’s necrotic blue. She’s fully dressed).
THE BRUNETTE gestures curtly with her hand,
off come THE SISTER’S clothes. She looks a mess.
Her skin’s all scarred and scored; one nipple’s gone.
She takes her gloves off and we see her hands:
Her fingers look like ribs, or chicken wings, well chewed, and rescued from a garbage can—
dry bones with scraps of flesh and cartilage. She puts her fingers in THE BRUNETTE’S mouth…
AND FADE TO BLACK.
INT. WEBSTER’S OFFICE. DAY.
THE PHONE RINGS. It’s MCBRIDE.
“Just drop the case.
I’ve found my sister, and I’m going home. You’ve got five hundred dollars, and my thanks.”
PULL BACK on WEBSTER, puzzled and confused.
MONTAGE of WEBSTER here. A week goes by,
we see him eating, pissing, drinking, drunk. We watch him throw HIS GIRLFRIEND out of bed.
We see him play the video again…
The VIDEO GIRL stares at him and says she’ll see him soon. “I promise, Webster, soon.”
CUT TO
THE PLACE OF EATERS, UNDERGROUND.
Pale people stand like cattle in a pen.
We see MCBRIDE. The flesh is off his chest.
White meat is good. We’re looking through his ribs:
his heart is still. His lungs, however, breathe,
inflate, deflate. And tears of pus run down his sunken cheeks. He pisses in the muck.
It doesn’t steam. He wishes he were dead.
A DREAM:
As WEBSTER tosses in his bed
He sees MCBRIDE, a corpse beneath a bridge,
all INTERCUT with lots of shots of food,
to make our theme explicit: this is art.
EXT. LA. DAY.
WEBSTER’S become obsessed.
He has to find the woman from the screen. He beats somebody up, fucks someone else, fixated on “I’ll see you, Webster, soon.”
He’s thrown in prison. And they come for him,
THE MAN IN BLACK attending THE BRUNETTE.
Open his cell with keys, escort him out, and leave the prison building.
Through a door. They walk him to the car park. They go down,
below the car park, deep beneath the town, past shadowed writhing things that suck and hiss
and glossy things that laugh, and things that scream.
Now other feeder-folk are walking past…
They handcuff WEBSTER to A TINY MAN who’s covered with vaginas and with teeth, and escorts WEBSTER to
THE QUEEN’S SALON.
(An interjection here: my wife awoke, scared by an evil dream. “You hated me. You brought these women home I didn’t know,
but they knew me, and then we had a fight, and after we had shouted you stormed out. You said you’d find a girl to fuck and eat.”
This scares me just a little. As we write we summon little demons. So I shrug.)
The handcuffs are removed. He’s left alone. The hangings are red velvet, then they lift, reveal THE QUEEN. We recognize her face, the woman we saw on the VCR.
“The world divides so sweetly, neatly up into the feeder-folk, into their prey.”
That’s what she says. Her voice is soft and sweet.
Imagine honey ants: the tiny head, the chest, the tiny arms, the tiny hands,
and after that the bloat of honey-swell,
the abdomen enormous as it hangs translucent, made of honey, sweet as lust.
THE QUEEN has quite a perfect little face, her breasts are pale, blue-veined; her nipples pink;
her hands are white. But then, below her breasts
the whole swells like a whale or like a shrine,
a human honey ant, she’s huge as rooms,
as elephants, as dinosaurs, as love.
Her flesh is opalescent, and she calls