town. There's a picket fence surrounding a winter-dead lawn (but there's no snow at all, not out here on the island), and a gate that stands open, offering the concrete path to anyone who cares make the trip from the sidewalk to the steep porch steps and the front door. To one side of the gate is a mailbox, amusingly painted and accessorized to turn it into a pink cow. Written on the side is CLARENDON.
MIKE (voice- over)
The first person on Little Tall to see Andre Linoge was Martha Clarendon.
In the extreme foreground of the shot, there now appears a SNARLING SILVER WOLF. It is the head of a cane.
5 EXTERIOR: LINOGE, FROM BEHIND DAY.
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Standing on the sidewalk, back to us and before the open CLARENDON gate, is a tall man dressed in jeans, boots, a pea jacket, and a black watch cap snugged down over his ears. And gloves yellow leather as bright as a sneer. One hand grips the head of his cane, which is black walnut below the silver wolf's head. LINOGE'S own head is lowered between his bulking shoulders. It is a thinking posture. There is something brooding about it, as well.
He raises the cane and taps one side of the gate with it. He pauses, then taps the other side of the gate. This has the feel of a ritual.
MIKE (voice-over)
(continues) He was the last person she ever saw.
LINOGE begins to walk slowly up the concrete path to the porch steps, idly swinging his cane as he goes. He whistles a tune: 'I'm a little teapot.'
6 INTERIOR: MARTHA CLARENDON'S LIVING ROOM.
It's neat in the cluttery way only fastidious folks who've lived their whole lives in one place can manage. The furniture is old and nice, not quite antique. The walls are crammed with pictures, most going back to the twenties. There's a piano with yellowing sheet music open on the stand. Seated in the room's most comfortable chair (perhaps its only comfortable chair) is MARTHA CLARENDON, a lady of perhaps eighty years. She has lovely white beauty-shop hair and is wearing a neat housedress. On the table beside her is a cup of tea and a plate of cookies. On her other side is a walker with bicycle-grip handholds jutting out of one side and a carry-tray jutting out from the other.
The only modern items in the room are the large color TV and the cable box on top of it. MARTHA is watching the Weather Network avidly and taking little birdie-sips of tea as she does. Onscreen is a pretty
WEATHER LADY. Behind the WEATHER LADY is a map with two large red L's planted in the middle of two large storm systems. One of these is over Pennsylvania; the other is just off the coast of New York. The WEATHER LADY starts with the western storm.
WEATHER LADY
This is the storm that's caused so much misery and fifteen deaths as it crossed the Great Plains and the Midwest. It's regathered all its original punch and more in crossing the Great Lakes, and you see its track
The track appears in BRIGHT YELLOW (the same color as LINOGE'S gloves), showing a future course that will carry it straight across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
WEATHER LADY
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(continues)
before you in all its glory. Now look down here, because here comes trouble.
She focuses her attention on the coastal storm.
WEATHER LADY
(continues)
This is a very atypical storm, almost a winter hurricane the sort of knuckle- duster that paralyzed most of the East Coast and buried Boston back in 1976. We haven't seen one of comparable power since then . . . until now. Will it give us a break and stay out to sea, as these storms sometimes do?
Unfortunately, the Weather Network's Storm-Trak computer says no. So the states east of the Big Indian Waters are getting pounded from one direction She taps the first storm.
WEATHER LADY (continues)
the mid-Atlantic coast is going to get pounded from another direction She goes back to the coastal storm.
WEATHER LADY
(continues)
and northern New England, if none of this changes, tonight you're going to win the booby prize.
Look ... at ... this.
A second BRIGHT YELLOW STORM TRACK appears, this one hooking north from the blob of storm off New York. This track makes landfall around Cape Cod, then heads up the coast, where it intersects the first storm track. At the point of intersection, some Weather Network computer genius with too much time on his hands has added a bright red blotch, like an explosion graphic on a news broadcast.
WEATHER LADY
(continues)
If neither of these two systems veer, they are going to collide and merge over the state of Maine.
That's bad news for our friends in Yankee land, but not the worst news. The worst news is that they may temporarily cancel each other out.
MARTHA (sipping tea) Oh, dear.
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WEATHER LADY
The result? A once-in-a-lifetime supersystem which may stall over central and coastal Maine for at least twenty-four hours and perhaps as long as forty-eight. We're talking hurricane-force winds and phenomenal amounts of snow, combining to create the sort of drifting you normally only see on the Arctic tundra. To this you can add region-wide blackouts.
MARTHA Oh, dear!
WEATHER LADY
No one wants to scare viewers, least of all me, but folks in the New England area, especially those on the Maine coast and the offshore islands, need to take this situation very seriously. You've had an almost completely brown winter up your way, but over the next two to three days, you're apt to be getting a whole winter's worth of snow.
SOUND: DOORBELL.
MARTHA looks in that direction, then back at the TV. She'd like to stay and watch the WEATHER
LADY, but nevertheless sets her teacup down, pulls over her walker, and struggles erect.
WEATHER LADY
We sometimes overuse the phrase 'storm of the century,' but if these two storm tracks converge, as we now think they will, the phrase will be no exaggeration, believe me. Judd Parkin's in next to talk about storm preparations no panic, just practicalities. But first, this.
An ad comes on it's a mail-order disaster video called Punishments of God as MARTHA begins working her way across the living room toward the hall, clutching the bicycle-grip handles of her walker and clumping along.
MARTHA
When they tell you the world's ending, they want to sell cereal. When they tell you not to panic, it's serious.
SOUND: DOORBELL.
MARTHA I'm coming fast's I can!
7 INTERIOR: THE FRONT HALL OF MARTHA'S HOUSE DAY.
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She makes her way down the hall, holding tight to the walker. On the walls are quaint photographs and drawings of Little Tall as it was early in the twentieth century. At the corridor's end is a closed door with a graceful glass oval in its upper half. This has been covered by a sheer curtain, probably so the sun won't fade the carpet. On the sheer is the silhouette of LINOGE'S head and shoulders.
MARTHA (puffing a little)
Hold on ... almost there ... I broke my hip last summer and I'm still just as slow as cold molasses
. . .
And the WEATHER LADY is continuing:
WEATHER LADY (voice-over)
Folks in Maine and the Maritimes saw one heck of a storm in January of 1987, but that was a freezing-rain event. This one is going to be a very different kettle of chowder. Don't even think about the snow shovel until the plows have come by.
MARTHA reaches the door, looks curiously at the shape of the man's head on the sheer curtain, then opens it. There stands LINOGE. His face is as handsome
