Halloway

COLD OPEN

REESE (V.O.) People ask me where it started. They want a door, a date — one moment they can point to and say there, that's where the trouble got in.

REESE (V.O.) The honest answer is that it started with a road. A long one, going somewhere nobody drives to on purpose. And a little black card with one white word on it — a word that wasn't even a word.

REESE (V.O.) If I could go back, I'd tell those two girls in that car to keep driving. To not stop in Halloway. To never, ever pick up the card.

REESE (V.O.) But that's the thing about a road like this one. By the time you can see it for what it is — you're already on it.

REESE (V.O.) ylobrkrd. Episode one.

SCENE 1 — THE CAR / THE ROAD

REESE (V.O.) Six days after graduation, Sloane and I did the thing you're supposed to do before your life closes over your head like water. We ran.

REESE (reading a sign, delighted) "Halloway — eighteen miles." Eighteen miles to nowhere. Sloane. Sloane, look — there's not even a dot for it on the map.

SLOANE (dry) That's not a selling point, Reese. That's a warning label.

REESE It's got mystery. That's the whole point of the trip. You promised me one place with mystery.

SLOANE I promised you the coast. I promised you oysters and a nice hotel with robes. I did not promise you a town that fell off the edge of the internet.

GPS In eight hundred feet, turn — turn — turn —

REESE ...Huh. It just gave up.

SLOANE So did my phone. One bar. Then nothing. (a beat) Reese — when's the last time you saw another car?

REESE (V.O.) I couldn't remember. That was the first thing Halloway took from us, before we ever arrived: the feeling that anyone in the world knew where we were. It did it so gently that we said thank you.

REESE (shaking it off, easy) I already booked us somewhere on the coast for after. The good one. My treat — don't fight me.

SLOANE It's always your treat.

REESE That's what it's for. Money's just — permission. Right? Permission to go see what's down the road.

SLOANE (quiet) In my family it's the opposite. It's the leash.

REESE (V.O.) I laughed. I actually laughed, because I thought she was being dramatic. I know now she was telling me the truest thing anybody told me all week.

REESE Two days. Give me two days in Halloway, and then it's robes and oysters and I'll never complain about a single thing again.

SLOANE (beat) You'll complain in an hour.

REESE I'll complain in an hour. But you'll have said yes.

SLOANE ...Fine. Two days. And Reese? If a single person in this town owns a taxidermied anything, we leave.

REESE (V.O.) We should've made a rule about coffee shops instead.

FLASHBACK — BERKELEY, TWO YEARS EARLIER

REESE (V.O.) You should know how we happened, or none of the rest will land right.

REESE (younger, breathless) — okay, this is going to sound insane, but I think you're in my sociology lecture, and I think you took the last good seat every single day for three weeks, and I need to know how.

SLOANE (younger, flat) I get there early.

REESE Nobody gets there that early.

SLOANE I don't sleep much. Family thing. We're all very... scheduled.

REESE (V.O.) Her family. She said it like a weather report. It took me a year to understand it was more like a sentence — the kind a judge hands down. The firm. The name on the building. The life already poured, just waiting for her to step into it and set.

REESE (younger) Well. Family thing or not. You're sitting with me tomorrow. I already decided.

SLOANE (younger, a small pause — surprised) ...You just decide things about people?

REESE Only the ones worth deciding about.

SCENE 2 — HALLOWAY, MAIN STREET

REESE (V.O.) Halloway looked like a photograph of a town somebody had abandoned mid-sentence.

REESE (low) It's so quiet.

SLOANE Half these places are boarded up. Reese, look — that one, and that one. Nobody's lived on this block in years.

REESE Somebody swept the sidewalk, though. Look how clean it is. You don't sweep a sidewalk for nobody.

SLOANE (beat) ...Okay, that's actually a little unsettling. Well done.

REESE (V.O.) We walked the length of Main Street and it took four minutes. I counted the open businesses on the way. One. I counted the lit windows on the second floors. None.

REESE (stopping) There's a curtain. Up there — third window. Did it just —

SLOANE Don't. Don't do the thing where you make it a story.

REESE It moved, Sloane.

SLOANE (a beat, quieter than she wants to be) ...Then somebody sweeps the sidewalk, and somebody watches the street. Wonderful. Two for two.

REESE (V.O.) And then, in the middle of all that shut-up gray, one lit window. One open door. The only warm thing on the street.

SCENE 3 — THE COFFEE SHOP (EMMETT)

EMMETT (warm, unhurried) Well, look at this. Two brand-new faces. We don't get brand-new faces.

REESE (charmed) We're just passing through. Your town is gorgeous.

EMMETT My town is half-asleep, sweetheart, but I'll take it. Sit anywhere you like. First one's on me — house rule for anybody brave enough to find us.

SLOANE (polite, guarded) That's kind. Thank you.

REESE (V.O.) Plain white napkins, folded into a neat little fan by the sugar dish. I want you to hold on to those napkins. I didn't. Not for a long time.

EMMETT So. The coast girls. Robes-and-oysters, up from the Bay — one of you dragged the other here for the mystery of it.

REESE (a laugh, slightly off) ...Okay, that's a good guess.

EMMETT (smiling in his voice) I've been pouring coffee a long time, Reese. You learn to read a cup.

REESE (V.O.) I didn't tell him my name. I want you to hear that clearly, because at the time I didn't. I thought Sloane had said it. Sloane thought I had. Neither of us had.

SLOANE (lightly, testing) Two days. That's all we're here for.

EMMETT Two days is about right for Halloway. Any less, you don't really see her. Any more — (a warm chuckle) well. Folks who stay more than two days tend to stay.

SLOANE (a beat) Is that so.

EMMETT (warm, easy) It's a small town, sweetheart. Everybody who's here chose to be. One way or another.

REESE (V.O.) One way or another. He said it into a coffee cup, kind as a grandfather, and we smiled and drank it down.

EMMETT (brightly, moving on) You'll want to see the old cannery down by the water before the fog eats it. Prettiest ruin in the county. Go on — before the light goes.

REESE (gathering up) Thank you — really.

EMMETT (as the bell rings) Reese. Sloane. (a beat, warm) Careful on the rocks down there. People get turned around.

FLASHBACK — BERKELEY, LAST SPRING

REESE (V.O.) There was a night near the end of school I keep going back to. Because it's the night she said yes. Sort of.

SLOANE (younger, flat) My father wants me to clerk for Judge Merrick this summer. He's already told them yes. He told them before he told me.

REESE (younger) So tell him no.

SLOANE (a hollow laugh) You say that like it's a sentence I'm allowed to say.

REESE (younger, gentle) Then come with me instead. One trip. Anywhere. Before all the doors close.

SLOANE (a long beat) ...You really think it's that easy. Just — go.

REESE I think money's a door or a wall depending on who's holding it. And I'm holding it. So let me hold the door. Just once. For you.

REESE (V.O.) She said yes to the trip that night. It took her ten more months to actually get in the car. I didn't understand then how much it cost her — to say yes to a door when every door you'd ever been handed turned out to be a hallway to the same room.

SCENE 4 — THE CANNERY / THE DISCOVERY

REESE (V.O.) He was right about one thing. It was beautiful. The old cannery, half-fallen into the water, fog pouring through the broken windows like the building was breathing it.

SLOANE (a few steps ahead) Careful — the boards down here are half-rotted. Stay on the concrete.

REESE (distracted, delighted) It smells like salt and rust and — I don't know. Time.

SLOANE It smells like tetanus, Reese.

REESE (V.O.) There were little signs of people, if you looked. A cigarette gone soft in a puddle. A single work glove on a piling. Somebody had strung new rope along the worst of the drop — bright yellow, not faded at all. For a town with nobody in it, somebody sure kept the dangerous parts tidy.

SLOANE Reese, this is genuinely — okay, I'll say it. This is worth the drive. Don't tell anyone I said that.

REESE (distant, slowing) Sloane.

SLOANE I said don't tell anyone —

REESE Sloane. Stop.

REESE (V.O.) I'm not going to describe it to you. I've spent a long time trying to un-see it, and I won't hand it to you the way it was handed to me.

REESE (V.O.) A person. Down among the rocks where the tide had left them. Young. Not from here — you could tell, somehow. And very, very still.

SLOANE (shaken, fast) Don't — don't touch anything. Reese, back up. Back up, we call someone, we — is there even signal —

REESE (quiet, strange) There's something in their hand.

SLOANE Reese —

REESE It's just a card. It's a little black card.

REESE (V.O.) Everything down there was wet. We'd been walking in fog for an hour — my sleeves were heavy with it, Sloane's hair was flat with it, the rocks shone black and slick. Everything, everything was wet.

REESE (V.O.) The card was dry.

REESE (V.O.) Bone dry. Not a drop on it, not a curl at the corner. Like it had been set down one second before we walked up. Like it had been waiting for a hand to take it.

REESE (V.O.) And I know how that sounds. But that is the exact moment — a dry card in a soaking-wet world — that something in me leaned forward instead of back. Somebody had put it there. On purpose. For someone. And I had to know who, and I had to know why, and the wanting came up so fast it scared me more than the body did.

REESE (reading, confused) It's... one word. No name. No number. Just — one word.

SLOANE What word?

REESE (slowly) "Ylobrkrd." Y-L-O-B-R-K-R-D. It's not — Sloane, it's not even a word.

SLOANE (unsteady) Let me — (a pause) There's nothing else on it. No name, no number, no company. Who prints a card with nothing on it but that?

REESE (V.O.) And the letters. I want to tell you about the letters, because I'd see them again. That night. And the night after. And in places that should have been safe.

REESE (V.O.) Always the same. Always that exact same shape, that exact same font — white letters on black, clean as a logo. Like a brand. Like something that had a whole company standing behind it.

SLOANE (pulling it together, hard) Okay. Okay. We put it back, we drive to the nearest town with a police station, and we report exactly what we saw. That's it. That's all we do.

REESE (not moving) ...Yeah.

SLOANE Reese. Put the card back.

REESE (quiet) Yeah.

REESE (V.O.) I didn't put the card back. I want you to remember that I lied to her, that very first day, with the very first thing. I told myself it was so we'd have proof. That was a lie too.

REESE (V.O.) The truth is it was already working. Whatever it was. That dry little card had already reached into me and turned something on.

REESE (V.O.) We climbed back up in the wrong kind of silence. Sloane kept glancing at my jacket pocket — where the card was. She never asked me to prove I'd left it behind. I think she already knew I hadn't. And I think she was too afraid of the answer to make me say it out loud.

SCENE 5 — BACK IN TOWN / THE NON-ANSWER

REESE (V.O.) Here's the part nobody believes. We reported it. We did everything right, that first afternoon. And it went nowhere — the way water goes nowhere when it hits sand.

SLOANE (strained patience) A body. At the old cannery. Down on the rocks. We can show you exactly where — we'll take you right now.

DEPUTY (kind, slow, deflecting) Fog's coming in heavy tonight. Rocks down there are treacherous. You girls have had a scare, that's plain.

REESE It wasn't the fog. There was a person.

DEPUTY (gently) We'll take a ride out at first light. Do me a favor — fill out the front page there. Name, date, what you saw.

REESE (V.O.) He slid a clipboard across the counter. One page. And I remember thinking the form looked old — not old like history. Old like unused. The kind of pad where you peel off the top sheet and the one underneath is yellow, because nobody's needed one in years.

REESE (carefully) Can I ask — has anyone been reported missing? Recently. Anyone at all?

DEPUTY (easy, almost amused) In Halloway? No, miss. Nobody goes missing here.

DEPUTY Hardly anybody left to go missing.

REESE (V.O.) There was a book open on the counter beside me. A visitor log — the kind an inn keeps, or a town too small for a hotel. I looked. I couldn't help it.

REESE (V.O.) Page after page of empty lines. Months of nobody. And then, near the bottom, in fresh dark ink — two names. Neat. Recent.

REESE (V.O.) Reese. Sloane.

REESE (V.O.) We hadn't signed anything. We hadn't told anyone where we'd be. And somebody had already written us into the book.

SLOANE (quiet, reading it too) ...Reese. Time to go. Now.

DEPUTY (rising, warm as ever) You two get some rest. Halloway Inn — tell 'em I sent you. (a beat) And careful walking back. Folks get turned around in this fog.

REESE (V.O.) He never asked our last names. He never asked what the person looked like. He wrote nothing down. He only wanted us to feel heard, and warm, and on our way.

REESE (V.O.) And "folks get turned around" — the deputy said it, gentle as anything, like a man wishing you goodnight. And I finally heard it. Because Emmett had said it too. The exact same words. An hour before we'd found a single thing. Careful on the rocks. People get turned around.

REESE (V.O.) The same line. Twice. Two different men, word for word — like a thing two actors had both been handed and told to say. And that's when the word came up in me, the one I wouldn't let myself finish thinking:

REESE (V.O.) Rehearsed. The whole town, warm and smiling and reading off a page I couldn't see.

SCENE 6 — NIGHT / THE INN / THE ARGUMENT

SLOANE We leave in the morning. First light. We don't wait for the deputy, we don't go back to those rocks, we get in the car and we go.

REESE And just — leave them? Leave that person out there like they were nothing?

SLOANE (hard, but frightened) That is not our job. Reese, look at me. A town with no people that somehow keeps its sidewalks swept and its death-drops roped off in bright new yellow. A coffee man who knew your name before you gave it. A deputy with a visitor log that's empty for a year — except for us, already written in, before we walked in the door.

SLOANE And a card that isn't a word, in a dead person's hand, bone dry in the rain. Everything about this is arranged. Every single piece of it was set out for us to find.

REESE (quiet) You felt it too, though. In the coffee shop. Before any of it.

SLOANE (a long beat) ...Yes.

REESE Then you know it's not nothing.

REESE (pressing, softer) We could just — look. Not go in, not touch anything. Just see where the road —

SLOANE "The road." (a beat) Listen to yourself. You're already calling it the road.

REESE (V.O.) I was. I hadn't even noticed until she said it out loud. Somewhere between the rocks and the inn, it had stopped being a dead body and a strange card — and started being the road. Their word. In my mouth. And I never heard it happen.

SLOANE (almost pleading) That's exactly why we go.

SLOANE This is exactly what my father does. You understand me? He doesn't order anyone. He builds you a road. The right school, the right firm, the right name over the door — and he lays it down so smooth and so early that by the time you're old enough to ask whether you ever wanted it, you're already halfway along it with your bags packed. And he calls it a gift.

SLOANE That card is a gift like that. Somebody built us a road tonight, Reese. Laid it out brick by brick and pointed it right at the part of you that can't stand not knowing. And I have spent my whole life learning one thing — one single thing I'm good at —

SLOANE — not walking down the road somebody built to trap me.

REESE (V.O.) She was right. She was completely right. Of the two of us, she was always the one who was right.

REESE (V.O.) And I loved her, so I said —

REESE Okay. First light. We go.

REESE (V.O.) — and I meant it, the way you mean things when you already know you're going to break them.

SCENE 7 — CLIFFHANGER / BRICK TWO

REESE (V.O.) We went out for one more coffee. The only warm light in town, remember. We told ourselves it was the last thing we'd do in Halloway.

SLOANE (sharp, low) Reese.

REESE What?

SLOANE The alley. Reese — look inside the alley.

REESE (V.O.) Deep inside the dark mouth of a narrow alley — one we'd have walked right past — there was light. A projection, thrown big and bright on the wet brick wall high inside the alley, clear as day against all that dark. Somebody was casting it from somewhere we couldn't see.

REESE (breath gone) That's — Sloane, that's the word.

SLOANE (barely) Same letters. Same — that's the same font.

REESE (V.O.) ylobrkrd. Ten feet tall, glowing on the alley wall, pointing like a hand — straight down into the dark.

REESE (V.O.) And then it pulsed. The word dimmed, and brightened, and dimmed again. Slow. In and out. Like breathing.

REESE (V.O.) Like it had been waiting. Like it had just seen us.

SLOANE (grabbing her wrist, hard) Reese. Reese — look at me. Not the wall. Me.

REESE (V.O.) Her hand closed around my wrist. I could feel her pulse going through her fingers, fast as mine, faster. She was holding on with everything she had.

REESE (V.O.) And I felt my own breath catch — and this is the part I've never told anyone. It wasn't fear. God help me, it wasn't fear. It was the same thing I'd felt down on the rocks. The dry card in the wet world. The pull. Forward. Toward it.

REESE (barely a whisper) ...It wants us to see it.

SLOANE (the smartest thing anyone said the whole time we were in that town) We do not go down there.

REESE (V.O.) I went down there. Of course I did. And Sloane — because she was Sloane, because she would follow me anywhere she was terrified to let me go alone — Sloane came after. One step behind me. She was always one step behind me on that road, watching the way out.

REESE (V.O.) The alley didn't end where I thought it would. It bent — hard, to the right — and kept going past the reach of the streetlight, narrower, darker. And at the very end of it, where the black got thickest, there was a door.

REESE (hushed) ...There's a door.

REESE (V.O.) An old one. Wrong, somehow. The kind of door you already know is locked, and already know you're going to open anyway.

SLOANE (behind her, very quiet) Reese.

REESE I see it. I see the door —

SLOANE No. Reese — behind us. The word. It's —

REESE (V.O.) Sloane was in the back, so Sloane was the one who turned around. And Sloane was the one who saw that the light on the wall — the ten-foot word that had reached out and pulled us in off the street — was gone. Simply, completely gone. No glow. No projector. No sign it had ever been there at all.

SLOANE (quiet, unsteady) ...It's almost as if we're being watched.

REESE (V.O.) Like the road only existed in the direction we were already walking.

REESE (V.O.) That was brick one — the card. And the light on the wall, breathing in the dark and then vanishing the second it had us — that was brick two.

REESE (V.O.) I didn't know to count them yet. I do now.

REESE (V.O.) ylobrkrd. Next time — the door at the end of the alley. And the world we found on the other side of it.