Prayers to Broken Stones by Dan Simmons
DR. HUBBARD
Louis, I’ve known your family for years … I was your father’s doctor when you were just a child, all during his long struggle …
Dr. Hubbard looks straight at Louis, all business now, his voice brisk.
DR. HUBBARD
When I spoke to you before your mother’s operation … before your accident … I had some hope that the surgery alone might eradicate her cancer. But the metastasis was more rapid than we thought and now … well, we’ll have to take it one day at a time now. There’s always something else to try …
Louis is stunned, speechless. Dr. Hubbard grips the younger man’s shoulder.
DR. HUBBARD
We’re going ahead with radiation treatment, Louis. We have new drugs now, medication to help diminish the pain of the … of the coming weeks. We can hope for a remission. New procedures are being perfected all the time …
LOUIS
Where is she, Dr. Hubbard? Is Mom nearby?
DR. HUBBARD
She’s right down the hall, Louis. Room 2119. You can visit her in a couple of days … when we’re sure you’re better. The kind of head injury you sustained can have all sorts of nasty side effects …
Louis struggles to get his legs off the bed, to stand up.
LOUIS
Mom!
Dr. Hubbard restrains him, forces him back onto the pillows.
DR. HUBBARD
(shouting over his shoulder)
Nurse!
A syringe is brought to the doctor. He checks the contents administers it via Louis’s IV.
DR. HUBBARD
You can see your mother tomorrow. Right now you have to rest. This will help you sleep.
Again in Louis’s P.O.V., we see the doctor go out of focus and the overhead light glow brighter, brighter …
DR. HUBBARD
(as if from a great distance)
There’s nothing you can do tonight, Louis. Just rest now. Rest. Rest …
CUT TO:
3. NIGHT. HOSPITAL ROOM.
Louis awakens to see the hospital room transformed by night. The curtain is drawn around the bed next to him. Rain taps against the windows and tall shadows are thrown on the opposite wall by the single nightlight in the monitor panel on the wall above his bed. Louis sits up, groans, removes his IV drip, and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. He is still groggy, half out of it.
LOUIS
I’m sorry I wasn’t here, Mom … They wouldn’t let me in to see Dad … I was too little …
Louis gets to his feet, sways, and staggers to the far wall, using it to brace himself as he moves toward the door.
LOUIS
I’m coming, Mom.
CUT TO:
4. INT. ANOTHER HOSPITAL ROOM. NIGHT.
The door to a hospital room slowly opens and we see Louis in his hospital gown. He is hanging on to the doorframe and obviously exhausted and in much pain. He moves into the room, weaves, and leans against the wall to keep from falling. There is a single bed in this room. It is dark and a curtain is drawn most of the way around the bed, but Louis can see his mother’s head and shoulders through the opening. She is asleep, obviously sedated, and Louis is shocked at her appearance.
LOUIS
Mom! Mom it’s me!
Louis steps forward and throws back the curtain.
LOUIS
Oh, my God …
There is a figure leaning over his mother. It is the size of a child, but this is no child. The body is thin and white … fish-belly white … and the arms are skin and tendon wrapped around long bone. The hands are pale and enormous, fingers three times the length of those on a human hand. The head is huge and misshapen, brachycephalic, reminiscent of photographs of fetuses. The eyes are bruised holes from which two yellowed marbles, striated with mucus and yellow cataracts, stare out blindly … but even though the thing must be blind, the yellow eyes dart back and forth purposely. The thing has no mouth, but the bones of its cheek and jaw seem to flow forward under white flesh to form a funnel, a long tapered snout of muscle and cartilage which ends in a perfectly round opening. This opening pulses as Louis watches, pale-pink sphincter muscles around the inner rim expanding and contracting as the thing breathes. It is a CANCER VAMPIRE.
LOUIS
Oh, dear God …
Louis staggers toward the thing, grasps the back of a chair to keep from falling. His expression changes from revulsion to total horror as he watches the cancer vampire slowly, almost lovingly, pull back the thin blanket and topsheet above Louis’s mother. The cancer vampire lowers its head until the opening of its obscene proboscis is inches above Louis’s mother’s chest. A SLIDING, RASPING is audible. Something appears in the flesh-rimmed opening of its snout … something gray-green, segmented, and moist. Cartilage and muscle contract and a five-inch TUMOR SLUG is slowly extruded from the cancer vampire’s proboscis and hangs wiggling above his sleeping mother.
FADE OUT
END ACT I
FADE IN on: ACT II
5. INT. HOSPITAL ROOM. NIGHT.
The moist slug falls softly onto his mother’s bare skin. It coils, writhes, slides across his mother’s chest, and burrows quickly away from the light. Into flesh. Into his mother.
LOUIS
Stop!… Aw, no … no
Louis staggers to the tray table, throws a glass at the cancer vampire. The creature lifts its head as if sensing Louis’s presence, stands, extends its impossibly long fingers, and drops out of sight behind the bed … it remains stiffly upright as it disappears, as if a hydraulic lift were lowering it through the floor.
LOUIS
(sobbing)
No … no … no … no …
Louis lunges toward his mother’s bed, falls against the side of it, wraps his fingers in the bedclothes, and slides to the floor, still sobbing, slipping into unconsciousness.
DISSOLVE TO:
6. NIGHT. HOSPITAL ROOM.
Louis awakens in his own room. He looks around, disoriented. It is still dark, rain still sends streaks down the window and shadows onto the wall, but he is lying in his own bed, his IV attached. He moans and touches his head.
LOUIS
God, did I dream that … that thing?
Louis suddenly becomes aware of a wet, swallowing, SLURPING sound. This is what awakened him and has been in the background all the while. Now the slurping rises in volume. Louis realizes that it is coming from behind the drawn curtain pulled around the bed next to his. The bed that had been empty when the doctor had been there.
LOUIS
(whispering)
Hello?
The SLURPING continues.
LOUIS
(louder)
Hello? Is someone there?
The noise continues, growing even louder. Louis leans out of bed, reaches the end of his IV tether, raises his free hand to the curtain, and flings it back.
LOUIS
Ah …
An old man, JACK WINTERS, looks up from SLURPING whiskey in a glass through a bent hospital straw. A bottle of cheap booze, almost empty, is on his tray table. In the glow of the nightlight and the occasional lightning flashes, the old man is a sight—pale and obviously ravaged by illness, hairless except for the gray stubble on his wrinkled cheeks. He is toothless but grins up at Louis even as he continues slurping.
LOUIS
Jeez … I’m sorry … I didn’t know anyone else was in here.
JACK
That’s all right, young fella. My name’s Jack Winters. Been your roommate all along but you slept for three straight days after they brought you in an’ I guess I was downstairs for my radiation treatment when you woke up yesterday.
Louis collapses back in his pillows, holding his head.
LOUIS
God, I had the worst dream.
Jack gives another toothless grin and pours out more of his whiskey.
JACK
That’s what ?l’ Nurse Haversmith … she’s the night nurse and mean as a junkyard dog … that’s
what she said when they brought you back in a couple of hours ago after you’d gone sleepwalkin’. She said you was screaming and carrying on somethin’ fierce while you was in your mommy’s room. I had me a cousin once who was a sleepwalker … they useta have to tie him to his bed with a clothesline …
Louis had been on the verge of drifting off again despite the old man’s monologue, but suddenly he realizes what is being said and snaps awake, sitting up and leaning over to grasp Jack’s arm.
LOUIS
What’s that? What did you say about me being in my mother’s room?
Jack shields his whiskey bottle as if Louis is trying to steal it.
JACK
I just said what Nurse Haversmith said when she an’ the others brung you back, Boy. Said you got to your mommy’s room and passed out or somethin’ …
Louis releases Jack’s arm and collapses back into the pillows.
LOUIS
(to himself)
It wasn’t a dream. I saw it …
Jack resumes slurping up the whiskey, edging to the far side of his own bed to stay away from Louis. The drink revives his spirits.
JACK
Hellfire, Boy, consider yourself lucky if you just got a bump on the head that makes you a mite crazy. Most of us on this floor are in for the Big C …
LOUIS
The Big C? You mean cancer?
JACK
Damn right I mean cancer. Look at me, Boy, three months here and they took out ’bout everythin’ I had two of … and some things I only had one of … cut so many things off me and outta me that there ain’t nothin’ left to remove that I can get along without. So now they just zap me with radiation and fill me up with drugs that make me puke.
(grins toothlessly)
So now I prescribe me my own medicine. My daughter Esther Mae sneaks it in … (Jack hesitates and then offers Louis the bottle) Care for a little late night pick-me-up?
LOUIS
(shakes his head and grimaces from the motion)
No … thanks. Mr.… uh … Winters …
JACK
Jack.
LOUIS
Jack. You say this is a cancer ward?
Jack chuckles but the laughter soon turns to thick coughing. He sets aside the straw and gulps the last of the whiskey. The coughs subside.
JACK
Ain’t supposed to be a cancer ward … but that’s what it amounts to. It upsets the regular patients to bunk with us terminal cases … that’s what Nurse Haversmith calls us when she don’t think we’re listenin’ … so Doc Hubbard and the other cancer docs just sorta dump us in this ward.
(then, mumbling to himself)
Makes it easier for the damn night critters to find us, too …
Jack fumbles behind his pillow and finds another bottle. He busies himself with filling his glass and replacing the straw.
LOUIS
What? What did you say about night critters?
Jack freezes in mid-slurp. He glares suspiciously at Louis.
JACK
I didn’t say nothin’.
LOUIS
Yes you did. About night critters.
JACK
Just things I seen while in my DT’s, Boy. Nothin’ real.
LOUIS
Yes it is. You’ve seen something … got a glimpse of something that shouldn’t be here. Something that shouldn’t exist …
Jack looks as if he is about to speak, to talk about something that he has seen late at night there in the cancer ward, but instead he glares at Louis, makes a motion with his hand as if warding off evil spirits, leans forward, and draws the curtain back between them. The room seems to darken further. From behind the curtain we hear resumed SLURPING.
CUT TO:
7. INTERIOR. DAY. HOSPITAL ROOM.
Sunlight fills the room. Fresh flowers overflow from a vase on a tray table pushed against the wall. Jack Winters is out of the room for one of his tests and his bed is neatly made. Dr. Hubbard sits on a chair by Louis’s bed, fiddling with his pipe and listening intently as Louis paces back and forth. Louis has been removed from the IV and is wearing a robe over pajamas rather than his hospital gown, but his head is still bandaged and his eyes look feverish. He gestures as he talks and his voice is rapid, almost manic.
LOUIS
Let’s just say that I did see something last night. Is that all right? Can we just suppose … for argument’s sake … that I saw something rather than hallucinated that I saw something? Can we just work under that assumption for a moment?
DR. HUBBARD
All right, let’s work with that assumption, Louis. What did you see?
Louis stops pacing for a moment and holds his arms as if chilled by the memory of what he saw.
LOUIS
Well, it wasn’t human, but …
DR. HUBBARD
Yes, yes, … you’ve told me several times what this thing looked like. But what is it? Assuming you saw it, what was it? A ghost?
(he allows himself a single, reassuring smile)
Perhaps it was an extraterrestrial … an alien M.D. interested in our medical facilities?
Louis pays no attention to the sarcasm. Lost in thought, he walks over to the window and stares out … seeing nothing … letting the light warm his face. After a moment he speaks.
LOUIS
I’m not sure what it is. Some … some thing that brings those slugs I told you about. Maybe it’s from another dimension or something. Maybe these things are around us all the time … coexisting … but we can’t see them …
(he touches his bandages ruefully)
… unless we have a certain type of concussion with certain types of pressure on certain parts of the left frontal lobe …
Dr. Hubbard continues smiling but he is sufficiently shaken by the absurdity of Louis’s explanation that he tries to inhale smoke from his pipe … forgetting that it is empty.
DR. HUBBARD
All right, Louis … assuming this thing you saw was … was not human. Assuming that only you could see it because of your injury. Was it attacking your mother?
LOUIS
Yes … no … Look, somehow it was using Mom …
DR. HUBBARD
But you said it was leaving this … this slug thing. It put something into your mother’s body you said. Now why would it …
LOUIS
(interrupting, agitated, pacing again, voice high and rapid)
Look, I don’t know! Maybe it has to do with Mom’s cancer. Maybe they lay these slugs in people and they grow or change inside our bodies. Maybe what we call tumors are really the eggs of these … these things … and we’re only incubators to them. Or maybe … maybe they sow those slugs, let them multiply in us … isn’t that what cancer does, Doctor? … and then these creatures come back and harvest the slugs for food. Like vampires …
(Louis stops, struck by a revelation)
My God, that’s what they are … cancer vampires!
Dr. Hubbard nods, appearing to listen, anything to calm Louis down. Louis stops suddenly, makes a motion with both hands as if starting a final appeal to a jury.
LOUIS
(excitedly)
Look, Dr. Hubbard, that makes sense! I mean, tell me the name of a famous person who died of cancer a hundred years ago. Go ahead …
DR. HUBBARD
I don’t understand …
LOUIS
I mean, this cancer scourge is like an invasion. An invasion of cancer vampires. And a recent one. Tell me someone who died of cancer a century ago.
DR. HUBBARD
I can’t think of a name right now, Louis. But there must have been many …
LOUIS
Exactly! I mean, today we expect people to get cancer. One in six. Or maybe it’s one in four. These things must be everywhere, using us … Planting their slugs in us. I mean, everybody knows somebody who’s died of cancer. Look at my family … first my dad years ago, now Mom. Those creatures must be all around us … feeding on us … w
e just can’t see them!
DR. HUBBARD
All right … all right. But we don’t need your … ah … cancer vampires … to explain this recent so-called scourge of cancer. In the modern world we’re exposed to more carcinogens …
LOUIS
(laughing almost hysterically)
Oh, yeah … carcinogens! That’s what I used to believe in. And we read the official list of carcinogens and they’re in everything we eat, breathe, wear, … I mean, come on! You medical experts want us to believe in “carcinogens” … and you don’t even know where tumors come from.
DR. HUBBARD
(angry but trying to hide the fact)
But you do?
LOUIS
Yes. Cancer vampires!
Triumphant but exhausted, Louis sits on the edge of his bed. Dr. Hubbard removes his pipe and leans forward to grab the young man by his upper arms.
DR. HUBBARD
All right, Louis, I’ve listened to your fantasies and allowed your assumptions. Now will you listen to my theory?
Louis nods, totally drained of energy.
DR. HUBBARD
My theory is that you’re very concerned about your mother and very upset that she has cancer. In addition, you have a serious subdural hematoma that is creating low grade hallucinations. Your concern about your mother is dictating the form of these hallucinations.
(pauses, decides to be blunt)
Louis, be honest … your father’s death from cancer when you were a boy changed you … I remember a happy boy … outgoing … generous … in recent years you’ve been withdrawn, moody, your behavior alternating between dangerously reckless and near-paranoid.
(beat)
I know you’d love to see … a thing … something solid … something you could fight rather than the intangible assassin of cells running amok. But it’s an hallucination, Louis … a visual malfunction … and the sooner you admit it, the sooner you can get well so you can help your mother get well.
Louis, I’ve known your family for years … I was your father’s doctor when you were just a child, all during his long struggle …
Dr. Hubbard looks straight at Louis, all business now, his voice brisk.
DR. HUBBARD
When I spoke to you before your mother’s operation … before your accident … I had some hope that the surgery alone might eradicate her cancer. But the metastasis was more rapid than we thought and now … well, we’ll have to take it one day at a time now. There’s always something else to try …
Louis is stunned, speechless. Dr. Hubbard grips the younger man’s shoulder.
DR. HUBBARD
We’re going ahead with radiation treatment, Louis. We have new drugs now, medication to help diminish the pain of the … of the coming weeks. We can hope for a remission. New procedures are being perfected all the time …
LOUIS
Where is she, Dr. Hubbard? Is Mom nearby?
DR. HUBBARD
She’s right down the hall, Louis. Room 2119. You can visit her in a couple of days … when we’re sure you’re better. The kind of head injury you sustained can have all sorts of nasty side effects …
Louis struggles to get his legs off the bed, to stand up.
LOUIS
Mom!
Dr. Hubbard restrains him, forces him back onto the pillows.
DR. HUBBARD
(shouting over his shoulder)
Nurse!
A syringe is brought to the doctor. He checks the contents administers it via Louis’s IV.
DR. HUBBARD
You can see your mother tomorrow. Right now you have to rest. This will help you sleep.
Again in Louis’s P.O.V., we see the doctor go out of focus and the overhead light glow brighter, brighter …
DR. HUBBARD
(as if from a great distance)
There’s nothing you can do tonight, Louis. Just rest now. Rest. Rest …
CUT TO:
3. NIGHT. HOSPITAL ROOM.
Louis awakens to see the hospital room transformed by night. The curtain is drawn around the bed next to him. Rain taps against the windows and tall shadows are thrown on the opposite wall by the single nightlight in the monitor panel on the wall above his bed. Louis sits up, groans, removes his IV drip, and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. He is still groggy, half out of it.
LOUIS
I’m sorry I wasn’t here, Mom … They wouldn’t let me in to see Dad … I was too little …
Louis gets to his feet, sways, and staggers to the far wall, using it to brace himself as he moves toward the door.
LOUIS
I’m coming, Mom.
CUT TO:
4. INT. ANOTHER HOSPITAL ROOM. NIGHT.
The door to a hospital room slowly opens and we see Louis in his hospital gown. He is hanging on to the doorframe and obviously exhausted and in much pain. He moves into the room, weaves, and leans against the wall to keep from falling. There is a single bed in this room. It is dark and a curtain is drawn most of the way around the bed, but Louis can see his mother’s head and shoulders through the opening. She is asleep, obviously sedated, and Louis is shocked at her appearance.
LOUIS
Mom! Mom it’s me!
Louis steps forward and throws back the curtain.
LOUIS
Oh, my God …
There is a figure leaning over his mother. It is the size of a child, but this is no child. The body is thin and white … fish-belly white … and the arms are skin and tendon wrapped around long bone. The hands are pale and enormous, fingers three times the length of those on a human hand. The head is huge and misshapen, brachycephalic, reminiscent of photographs of fetuses. The eyes are bruised holes from which two yellowed marbles, striated with mucus and yellow cataracts, stare out blindly … but even though the thing must be blind, the yellow eyes dart back and forth purposely. The thing has no mouth, but the bones of its cheek and jaw seem to flow forward under white flesh to form a funnel, a long tapered snout of muscle and cartilage which ends in a perfectly round opening. This opening pulses as Louis watches, pale-pink sphincter muscles around the inner rim expanding and contracting as the thing breathes. It is a CANCER VAMPIRE.
LOUIS
Oh, dear God …
Louis staggers toward the thing, grasps the back of a chair to keep from falling. His expression changes from revulsion to total horror as he watches the cancer vampire slowly, almost lovingly, pull back the thin blanket and topsheet above Louis’s mother. The cancer vampire lowers its head until the opening of its obscene proboscis is inches above Louis’s mother’s chest. A SLIDING, RASPING is audible. Something appears in the flesh-rimmed opening of its snout … something gray-green, segmented, and moist. Cartilage and muscle contract and a five-inch TUMOR SLUG is slowly extruded from the cancer vampire’s proboscis and hangs wiggling above his sleeping mother.
FADE OUT
END ACT I
FADE IN on: ACT II
5. INT. HOSPITAL ROOM. NIGHT.
The moist slug falls softly onto his mother’s bare skin. It coils, writhes, slides across his mother’s chest, and burrows quickly away from the light. Into flesh. Into his mother.
LOUIS
Stop!… Aw, no … no
Louis staggers to the tray table, throws a glass at the cancer vampire. The creature lifts its head as if sensing Louis’s presence, stands, extends its impossibly long fingers, and drops out of sight behind the bed … it remains stiffly upright as it disappears, as if a hydraulic lift were lowering it through the floor.
LOUIS
(sobbing)
No … no … no … no …
Louis lunges toward his mother’s bed, falls against the side of it, wraps his fingers in the bedclothes, and slides to the floor, still sobbing, slipping into unconsciousness.
DISSOLVE TO:
6. NIGHT. HOSPITAL ROOM.
Louis awakens in his own room. He looks around, disoriented. It is still dark, rain still sends streaks down the window and shadows onto the wall, but he is lying in his own bed, his IV attached. He moans and touches his head.
LOUIS
God, did I dream that … that thing?
Louis suddenly becomes aware of a wet, swallowing, SLURPING sound. This is what awakened him and has been in the background all the while. Now the slurping rises in volume. Louis realizes that it is coming from behind the drawn curtain pulled around the bed next to his. The bed that had been empty when the doctor had been there.
LOUIS
(whispering)
Hello?
The SLURPING continues.
LOUIS
(louder)
Hello? Is someone there?
The noise continues, growing even louder. Louis leans out of bed, reaches the end of his IV tether, raises his free hand to the curtain, and flings it back.
LOUIS
Ah …
An old man, JACK WINTERS, looks up from SLURPING whiskey in a glass through a bent hospital straw. A bottle of cheap booze, almost empty, is on his tray table. In the glow of the nightlight and the occasional lightning flashes, the old man is a sight—pale and obviously ravaged by illness, hairless except for the gray stubble on his wrinkled cheeks. He is toothless but grins up at Louis even as he continues slurping.
LOUIS
Jeez … I’m sorry … I didn’t know anyone else was in here.
JACK
That’s all right, young fella. My name’s Jack Winters. Been your roommate all along but you slept for three straight days after they brought you in an’ I guess I was downstairs for my radiation treatment when you woke up yesterday.
Louis collapses back in his pillows, holding his head.
LOUIS
God, I had the worst dream.
Jack gives another toothless grin and pours out more of his whiskey.
JACK
That’s what ?l’ Nurse Haversmith … she’s the night nurse and mean as a junkyard dog … that’s
Louis had been on the verge of drifting off again despite the old man’s monologue, but suddenly he realizes what is being said and snaps awake, sitting up and leaning over to grasp Jack’s arm.
LOUIS
What’s that? What did you say about me being in my mother’s room?
Jack shields his whiskey bottle as if Louis is trying to steal it.
JACK
I just said what Nurse Haversmith said when she an’ the others brung you back, Boy. Said you got to your mommy’s room and passed out or somethin’ …
Louis releases Jack’s arm and collapses back into the pillows.
LOUIS
(to himself)
It wasn’t a dream. I saw it …
Jack resumes slurping up the whiskey, edging to the far side of his own bed to stay away from Louis. The drink revives his spirits.
JACK
Hellfire, Boy, consider yourself lucky if you just got a bump on the head that makes you a mite crazy. Most of us on this floor are in for the Big C …
LOUIS
The Big C? You mean cancer?
JACK
Damn right I mean cancer. Look at me, Boy, three months here and they took out ’bout everythin’ I had two of … and some things I only had one of … cut so many things off me and outta me that there ain’t nothin’ left to remove that I can get along without. So now they just zap me with radiation and fill me up with drugs that make me puke.
(grins toothlessly)
So now I prescribe me my own medicine. My daughter Esther Mae sneaks it in … (Jack hesitates and then offers Louis the bottle) Care for a little late night pick-me-up?
LOUIS
(shakes his head and grimaces from the motion)
No … thanks. Mr.… uh … Winters …
JACK
Jack.
LOUIS
Jack. You say this is a cancer ward?
Jack chuckles but the laughter soon turns to thick coughing. He sets aside the straw and gulps the last of the whiskey. The coughs subside.
JACK
Ain’t supposed to be a cancer ward … but that’s what it amounts to. It upsets the regular patients to bunk with us terminal cases … that’s what Nurse Haversmith calls us when she don’t think we’re listenin’ … so Doc Hubbard and the other cancer docs just sorta dump us in this ward.
(then, mumbling to himself)
Makes it easier for the damn night critters to find us, too …
Jack fumbles behind his pillow and finds another bottle. He busies himself with filling his glass and replacing the straw.
LOUIS
What? What did you say about night critters?
Jack freezes in mid-slurp. He glares suspiciously at Louis.
JACK
I didn’t say nothin’.
LOUIS
Yes you did. About night critters.
JACK
Just things I seen while in my DT’s, Boy. Nothin’ real.
LOUIS
Yes it is. You’ve seen something … got a glimpse of something that shouldn’t be here. Something that shouldn’t exist …
Jack looks as if he is about to speak, to talk about something that he has seen late at night there in the cancer ward, but instead he glares at Louis, makes a motion with his hand as if warding off evil spirits, leans forward, and draws the curtain back between them. The room seems to darken further. From behind the curtain we hear resumed SLURPING.
CUT TO:
7. INTERIOR. DAY. HOSPITAL ROOM.
Sunlight fills the room. Fresh flowers overflow from a vase on a tray table pushed against the wall. Jack Winters is out of the room for one of his tests and his bed is neatly made. Dr. Hubbard sits on a chair by Louis’s bed, fiddling with his pipe and listening intently as Louis paces back and forth. Louis has been removed from the IV and is wearing a robe over pajamas rather than his hospital gown, but his head is still bandaged and his eyes look feverish. He gestures as he talks and his voice is rapid, almost manic.
LOUIS
Let’s just say that I did see something last night. Is that all right? Can we just suppose … for argument’s sake … that I saw something rather than hallucinated that I saw something? Can we just work under that assumption for a moment?
DR. HUBBARD
All right, let’s work with that assumption, Louis. What did you see?
Louis stops pacing for a moment and holds his arms as if chilled by the memory of what he saw.
LOUIS
Well, it wasn’t human, but …
DR. HUBBARD
Yes, yes, … you’ve told me several times what this thing looked like. But what is it? Assuming you saw it, what was it? A ghost?
(he allows himself a single, reassuring smile)
Perhaps it was an extraterrestrial … an alien M.D. interested in our medical facilities?
Louis pays no attention to the sarcasm. Lost in thought, he walks over to the window and stares out … seeing nothing … letting the light warm his face. After a moment he speaks.
LOUIS
I’m not sure what it is. Some … some thing that brings those slugs I told you about. Maybe it’s from another dimension or something. Maybe these things are around us all the time … coexisting … but we can’t see them …
(he touches his bandages ruefully)
… unless we have a certain type of concussion with certain types of pressure on certain parts of the left frontal lobe …
Dr. Hubbard continues smiling but he is sufficiently shaken by the absurdity of Louis’s explanation that he tries to inhale smoke from his pipe … forgetting that it is empty.
DR. HUBBARD
All right, Louis … assuming this thing you saw was … was not human. Assuming that only you could see it because of your injury. Was it attacking your mother?
LOUIS
Yes … no … Look, somehow it was using Mom …
DR. HUBBARD
But you said it was leaving this … this slug thing. It put something into your mother’s body you said. Now why would it …
LOUIS
(interrupting, agitated, pacing again, voice high and rapid)
Look, I don’t know! Maybe it has to do with Mom’s cancer. Maybe they lay these slugs in people and they grow or change inside our bodies. Maybe what we call tumors are really the eggs of these … these things … and we’re only incubators to them. Or maybe … maybe they sow those slugs, let them multiply in us … isn’t that what cancer does, Doctor? … and then these creatures come back and harvest the slugs for food. Like vampires …
(Louis stops, struck by a revelation)
My God, that’s what they are … cancer vampires!
Dr. Hubbard nods, appearing to listen, anything to calm Louis down. Louis stops suddenly, makes a motion with both hands as if starting a final appeal to a jury.
LOUIS
(excitedly)
Look, Dr. Hubbard, that makes sense! I mean, tell me the name of a famous person who died of cancer a hundred years ago. Go ahead …
DR. HUBBARD
I don’t understand …
LOUIS
I mean, this cancer scourge is like an invasion. An invasion of cancer vampires. And a recent one. Tell me someone who died of cancer a century ago.
DR. HUBBARD
I can’t think of a name right now, Louis. But there must have been many …
LOUIS
Exactly! I mean, today we expect people to get cancer. One in six. Or maybe it’s one in four. These things must be everywhere, using us … Planting their slugs in us. I mean, everybody knows somebody who’s died of cancer. Look at my family … first my dad years ago, now Mom. Those creatures must be all around us … feeding on us … w
DR. HUBBARD
All right … all right. But we don’t need your … ah … cancer vampires … to explain this recent so-called scourge of cancer. In the modern world we’re exposed to more carcinogens …
LOUIS
(laughing almost hysterically)
Oh, yeah … carcinogens! That’s what I used to believe in. And we read the official list of carcinogens and they’re in everything we eat, breathe, wear, … I mean, come on! You medical experts want us to believe in “carcinogens” … and you don’t even know where tumors come from.
DR. HUBBARD
(angry but trying to hide the fact)
But you do?
LOUIS
Yes. Cancer vampires!
Triumphant but exhausted, Louis sits on the edge of his bed. Dr. Hubbard removes his pipe and leans forward to grab the young man by his upper arms.
DR. HUBBARD
All right, Louis, I’ve listened to your fantasies and allowed your assumptions. Now will you listen to my theory?
Louis nods, totally drained of energy.
DR. HUBBARD
My theory is that you’re very concerned about your mother and very upset that she has cancer. In addition, you have a serious subdural hematoma that is creating low grade hallucinations. Your concern about your mother is dictating the form of these hallucinations.
(pauses, decides to be blunt)
Louis, be honest … your father’s death from cancer when you were a boy changed you … I remember a happy boy … outgoing … generous … in recent years you’ve been withdrawn, moody, your behavior alternating between dangerously reckless and near-paranoid.
(beat)
I know you’d love to see … a thing … something solid … something you could fight rather than the intangible assassin of cells running amok. But it’s an hallucination, Louis … a visual malfunction … and the sooner you admit it, the sooner you can get well so you can help your mother get well.