And she wears a mask because she has no face.
She hides the end of the world inside.
The poem ends to the right of the gash in the wall. With just that single word:
After she finishes writing, the woman moves the ladder a couple more feet to the right. She drops the can of green spray paint to the sidewalk and digs a new one from her bag. This one is bright red. She draws a giant arrow around the right-hand side of the poem, arcing up from the word
She’s pointing up toward the Poet. Pointing into her home.
When she finishes, the woman pulls back her arm and hurls the can of spray paint far into the distance; after a moment of hang time, there’s a loud clatter offscreen as the can skips across the pavement and collides with something solid—something metal and hollow that rings like a bell. The woman jumps down to the sidewalk, violently grabs hold of the ladder, and sends it crashing flat against the ground. Then she takes a couple of abrupt steps back, and—still facing the wall, still facing her poem and the Poet’s window—she raises her hands and gives the building a double-fisted two-finger salute.
SABINE: Just one more thing. One more thing and my work is done. (She glances back over her shoulder at the camera. The sly smile is once again there, twisting her face, somehow wedded to her anger and not at all incongruous.)
She grabs the top of the ladder and pulls it offscreen. When she returns a couple of seconds later, she is carrying a sledgehammer. Actually, she is
Laboring under its weight, the woman lifts the hammer from the ground and squares off in front of the gash in the wall. She swings, and the hammer crashes into the brick with a dull
But she doesn’t stop. Over the next five minutes, the woman relentlessly assaults the wall, breaking bricks from the facade, usually one by one but occasionally triggering a miniature avalanche, sending a half dozen or more tumbling down into the darkness, or down to the sidewalk around her feet. By the time the gash is about four feet high and three feet wide, she has slowed down quite a bit. Her arms tremble visibly each time she lifts the hammer.
She hits the wall one final time—weakly, to absolutely no effect—and the sledgehammer drops from her hands, nearly crushing her feet. She collapses back against the wall. Her chest is heaving. Her arms dangle limply.
SABINE, IN A WEAK, BREATHLESS WHISPER:
After about a half minute of rest, she pushes herself off the wall and turns to face the hole. Then she leans forward and peers inside. Her hands are motionless against the wall as she tilts her head down and pauses, her face pressed into the darkness, peering down at … at
Then her right hand starts to move, darting frantically—crawling like a spider—to the messenger bag at her back. Without taking her face from the hole, she manages to dig a pen-size flashlight from her bag. She whips it forward, into the hole next to her face, and immediately points it down into the gap behind the wall.
And she freezes. The scene remains still for nearly a minute. It is a frozen tableau, a static picture stretched across the screen: a woman—a girl—standing, crouched, on the sidewalk, surrounded by bricks from a damaged wall. Spray-paint spiders and words swarming up and out while she peers down and in, into the darkness.
Then she moves. Her left hand slides to the edge of the hole, quivering slightly. She grabs hold, braces herself, and lifts her leg over the litter of bricks, through the gap, and into the wall. She tests her weight on the other side—her foothold isn’t visible, but it looks to be about six inches below street level—then she crouches down and slides all the way in. Her messenger bag catches on the right-hand edge of the gash, and she has to reach back to pull it through. Her hands are moving slowly now, and they are definitely quivering—maybe from all that exertion with the sledgehammer. Or maybe it’s excitement. Maybe fear.
Once inside the hole, she pauses briefly, her back filling up the diamond-shaped gap. Then she starts to inch away, into the space behind the wall. She is moving to the right but also down. Descending beneath the city streets.
Her left shoulder is the last thing we see. It is only about a foot above street level when it disappears from view.
Then she is gone. And there is no one on-screen for a very long time.
The sky turned red not long after we left the research facility, and it stayed red the entire way home.
Again the color changed with a roar. It was a great rending in the sky, and when I looked up, it felt like I was staring into a widening wound.
Again I got the impression of blood, and I was half expecting it to come raining down over the city. It would be a horrible thing, I thought, a horrific squall filled with gristle and teeth, and we’d have to run the last couple of blocks absolutely drenched in gore. But it didn’t happen. It was the same as before: a twirling liquid red sky, suspended above our heads.
Floyd hadn’t seen it the first time around, and he greeted it with stunned, wide-eyed terror.
“Oh, my God,” he muttered. “Oh, my fucking God.”
Taylor and I tried to calm him down. We tried to convince him that everything was fine, that the red sky would pass and the world would return to normal, but nothing seemed to work. He remained transfixed by the color above his head, his face going pale, his shoulders drooping, as if pressed down by that massive sky. And there were honest-to-God tears in his eyes.
I don’t know if Charlie had seen the sky the first time around, but either way, he wasn’t terrified. In fact, the sky didn’t seem to affect him at all. He remained lost inside his own head. Battling demons and memory. Chasing his parents.
I, for my part, was surprised at how calm I remained. The sky was terrifying—objectively, it was a terrifying sight—but I couldn’t find the energy to care. My reserves of horror had run bone dry. I was trying to comfort Floyd,
