Script:
I'm looking for an old work in German, an encyclopedia in twelve volumes entitled Das Kloster by Johann Schiebel." His base voice boomed. "'I have found nothing on the web. Do you have any idea where we could obtain this work, Mrs. Morrigan?' "'You didn't find anything in the antiquarian database either?' "'No,' answered the man. "'I'll have a look for you, doctor. Do you have the search-words?' "'Start with the title, Mrs. Morrigan. The Monastery, secular and spiritual, and search beyond that for the key-words Faustian pact and Faustian magic. You do speak German.'
Script:
I am Ariel Fall, a private investigator from London, burdened by the weight of my solitary existence. My wife and baby girl are dead, and me? I'm trying to pull myself together after this accident. It feels as if I'm desperately grasping at shards of shattered glass, only to inflict more pain upon myself. I'm burdened by things that no one in their right mind would ever want to face, desperately clinging to the hope that they will somehow assist me in piecing together the shattered fragments of my life. Unfortunately, regrets are like a birthday. They still keep coming. My heart aches with the weight of my past actions, and the guilt consumes me. Just like this dilapidated city, drenched in rain, is sadly home to a multitude of scum. Serial killers, criminals, maniacs, and me. A pitiful existence. I used to think I was better than them. But I crossed all moral boundaries so long ago that now I don't even remember what they looked like. I used to think I was better than them. I used to think I was better than them.
Script:
Yes, I have a question for Mr Whitmore. Do you realise that literally everything you just said is a steaming load of crap? You're completely delusional. You're living in a fantasy world. Literally nothing you just said has any connection to the reality of what actually went wrong on this project. It's like you're wearing your own little virtual reality helmet. At a certain point you have to take off your helmet and start to get familiar with the real world. You did all the hiring and firing. You picked the game engine. You approved the milestones. You assigned the job roles. You had full control over every aspect of this project and this team. You set us all up for failure and there were plenty of people telling you from day one that you were making bad decisions. Now that the ship's hit the iceberg, the least you can do is accept some of the accountability you always go on about and go down with the ship and stop blaming everyone else around you.
Script:
CHAPTER I. A DEVIL IN THE HILLS WEST CORK, PARIS, DECEMBER, 1996 The bright moon had faded and the grey dawn was breaking in the valley. Nobody in West Cork could have predicted that it would be replaced by the morning star of evil. Lights were being switched on in the silhouetted houses in the area and in the nearby villages and small towns, from Gouline and Scull to Bally de Hob and beyond. Most householders would soon be in the feverish grip of the final preparations for Christmas Day. Some would be more advanced in their plans than others, but last-minute yuletide tasks were on the lists of even the most punctilious and organised of shoppers. It was a crisp, dry and cold day, and soon the sun would shine in a bright clear sky. Unusual would welcome at this time of the year. In Turmur, the normal rhythm of nature – the sheep and cows that dotted the landscape, the twittering birds in the trees and bushes – created a peaceful atmosphere. That aura of solitude would soon be shattered, even if nature would remain indifferent to human tragedy. Just before ten a.m., Sophie's next-door neighbour, Shirley Foster, left the house, got into a white Peugeot car and eased towards the S-Bend in the laneway, intending to drive to Scull. As she rounded the bend, something struck her as unusual. The gate of the laneway was open. As she slowed the car, she saw a piece of white clothing flapping from a barbed wire to the left of the concrete gatepost. She stopped the car, got out, and was overcome with a sickening feeling. A crumpled shape that she first thought was a mannequin, she soon recognised as a human, laid on the grass margin near the gate. She fled back up the laneway to her house and alerted her partner, Alfie Lyons. He rushed down the lane to confirm her suspicion that there was a corpse near the gate, which led to the valley, and saw the body. He went to Sophie's house to warn her not to go out, but not getting any reply, thought the body might be hers, and immediately rang the emergency line for help. Alfie's call was put through to Bandon Garda Station, which is the divisional headquarters of the area, and was handled by Garda Eugene McCarthy, who made notes of the conversation and then rang the nearest station in Scull, where the call was answered by Garda Martin Malone. Two colleagues on patrol, Sergeant Gerard Prendeville and Garda Billy Bourne, were told at 10.15am to go straight to the location in Tormoor. They arrived at the scene twenty minutes later and quickly established that the body was that of a woman with extensive head injuries. Garda Bourne was tasked to cordon off the area where the body lay, while Sergeant Prendeville went to Alfie and Shirley's house to make initial inquiries. The shocked and shaken couple informed them that the house next to theirs was owned by Sophie Bunyol, who had arrived some days before. The silver Ford Fiesta parked in front of the house was the car she had hired at Cork Airport, confirming the fact that she had not returned to Paris. Sergeant Prendeville rang Bantry Garda Station, spoke to Superintendent Toomey and requested help to secure the crime scene and make preliminary inquiries. As well as guarding the body of a small woman, her long blonde hair tied back, Officer Bourne also took notes of details he witnessed at the scene, including multiple injuries, particularly to the head and neck. There was a blood-stained slate rock near the body and a bloodied concrete block lying on the blue dressing gown, which the victim wore over torn white leggings and brown walking shoes. A portion of the leggings were caught on a barbed wire fence. There were large amounts of blood on her hair, face and neck. The white shirt she wore was pulled above the stomach. School-based Dr. Larry O'Connor was summoned to the scene, arriving at 11 a.m. and taking notes of injuries, before pronouncing the victim as deceased and noting that rigor mortis had set in, while Catholic priest Father Dennis Cashman arrived to administer the last rites to the then-formerly unidentified victim. At around 12.35 p.m. and in the presence of the officers and Superintendent Toomey, Josephine Helen and her husband Finbar, he identified the body as being that of Sophie Toscane Duplantier. While officers talked to Alfie Lyons and Shirley Foster for background on the victim, back in Paris, the Buñol family were unaware of the unfolding investigation.
Script:
He went inside and started looking for them. He searched under the chairs, under the tables, under the carpets, under the floor, everywhere. The Christmas sacks were indeed missing. As fast as he could he ran back to Father Christmas's snowcastle and slammed open the heavy door. "'Father Christmas, wake up!' he shouted at the top of his voice. "'Oh, what on earth is going on? Who dares to wake me up so early when I have to work all night to-night?' "'The Christmas presents are missing!' shouted the storage elf. ''Someone has stolen all the magical sacks!' "'Impossible!' said Father Christmas. "'Who would do such a mischievous thing? Are you sure?' "'I have looked everywhere. I can't find the money where,' said the elf. Father put on his heavy red winter coat followed by his big black snow boots and began to walk towards the workshop building. He was soon followed by all two hundred elves, Mrs. Claus and Rasmus the Cat. "'Who could have done such a terrible thing?' he shouted. Suddenly the tracker elf, famous for his incredible tracking skills, he could track a polar bear through a snowstorm, shouted. "'Look over here!' Santa then scurried up to see what he was pointing at, a huge footprint which was visible in the deep snow. Whatever it was it had gone to a lot of trouble to hide its tracks. "'This is the only footprint I can find,' said the tracker elf. "'We were just about to get ready to leave the moon,' said Reinhold the Reindeer. "'That's why it took longer than usual,' he added. Santa's magical reindeer preferred to live on the moon where they grazed on starlight, the favourite food for these magical animals. Suddenly huge tears rolled down its cheeks. "'But, but, but we have never had any friends before. Why do you want to be our friend? We feel something strange inside us. Why are we crying? We don't understand. We feel, we feel, we feel happy. We have never, ever felt happy like this before. Nope. Never, ever. Ever, never,' sobbed the monster.
Script:
They say a picture paints a thousand words, but mine only tells me one thing. Ken, you really shouldn't be here. There was no way I could have known, but what happened that night on a busy highway in southern Nigeria changed everything. Things were still a blur by the time I came to and found myself lying on my back in the middle of the road, the warm tarmac the only thing giving me comfort on an otherwise chilly night. It wasn't until I tried to stand to get out of the oncoming traffic that I realised the true extent of my injuries, my foot turning sideways as I placed it awkwardly on the ground. I could see Chris, who had also been on the bike, miraculously running uninjured towards me through crowds of people and the glare of lights, and could hear Jerry behind screaming for help. Despite the pain, chaos and trauma, what happened to me in that split second turned out to be the defining moment of my life. And now I sit, almost twenty years later, in a comfortable home I never expected to own, with a wonderful, healthy family I never expected to have, surrounded by dozens of reminders and mementos of a story I never thought would be mine to tell.
Script:
Time. The hours. The minutes. The seconds. The blink of an eye. Amidst the mountainous thermal waters of Pella, the daughter of snakes parts her legs upon a soft bed of furs, giving birth to the most feared of all Argate's dynasty. The boy grows to be a man. His vast, unrelenting armies sweep Europe, Asia, and North Africa, a brief life that blazes brilliantly. Alexander the Great bows his head the same as Aristophanes. The renowned playwright smiling through his matted beard as Thalia, muse of comedy, takes him by the hand and leads him to the land of laughter and good cheer.
Script:
In the pub that day, there were families, young children, old men, old women. Family pub, packed to the rafters. I also had a few friends inside, ex-boxers. These men were about to put their life on the line for me. When the gangs eventually got onto my car park, there are thirty-seven of them, armed with a handgun, a shotgun, hatchets and machetes. I'm in the office making my second call to the police. The pub has sixteen security cameras and the monitor can show pictures from all sixteen, or eight, or four, or only one. It's showing the four main ones, the car park, the inside foyer, the lounge and the bar. I can see the armed gang gathering in the car park, around the area of the cabbie rank. They're starting to throw glasses. Many of them have masks and scarves around their faces and various weapons, clubs, sticks, machetes, baseball bats. With his army swarming behind him, Jake Welch approaches the double front doors, one of which is open. He takes out a silver .32 calibre handgun and starts firing rapidly at the doors. He's wearing no mask or gloves. After three shots, the gun jams. He makes several attempts to fire it, then throws it down to the ground. People are panicking and screaming and ducking. I'm coming out of the office inside and heading towards the front foyer. Unknown to me, one of his men has now handed Jake Welch an even deadlier weapon. Jake Welch, no mask, stepped up to the open doorway, up to my door with a shotgun. As I rounded the corner from the office, I saw him entering the bar directly in front of me, with the shotgun levelled. I stepped back immediately behind the wall, pressed back against it and crossed myself. I'm not ashamed to say I was afraid. As he stepped into the bar, a good friend of mine, Steve Dalton, an ex-boxer, ran out from the bar screaming. Jake Welch looked shocked. The last thing you expect any man to do is run against a gun. He pointed the shotgun half-down and let rip the first shot. Some of the pellets hit the ground and some of them came up and caught this guy in the legs and the arms. He didn't take the full force of the shotgun, but the ricochets are catching him. At this stage, Jake Welch is panicked because, whether his intentions were to wound or whatever, his intentions weren't to do somebody else. His intentions were to do me. At the time I didn't realise this, but I know it now. Remember, I phoned the police, who are well aware that this attack is happening. In court later, it was established there were four phone calls that I made begging for help. As I'm looking at my wounded friend, an old man, a guy called Jim O'Brien, steps out with his hands up. Jim's from Limerick. A good customer and I'd built up a friendship with him. He also lived next door to the Darcy family, all their lives. His children had played with their kids, grown up with them. His daughter was living in one of the Darcy apartments. John Darcy's girlfriend was sharing an apartment with Jim's daughter. So Jim O'Brien steps out with his hands up. Please, I can stop this. I know these boys. At this point, I step out from behind the wall to pull the old man in behind the wall. Jake Welch raises the shotgun now for the second shot. I've looked into many men's eyes over the years from boxing and from rows. I've looked into their eyes, but I've never looked into a man's eyes with pure evil. I mean pure evil like you could not imagine. And he let rip with the second shot from the shotgun. He blasted that old man to get to me. I was standing behind the old man and he didn't care. This is an old man who he knew. He blasted the old man in the hip, blew the hip clean out of him. He fell into my arms. Some of the shotgun pellets hit around my arms and a shotgun pellet punctured my nose, a few all over my body. So I've got the old man now in my arms and he's splattered all over my foyer, bits of flesh and whatever else. He's took a bad blast. The moment the second shell from the shotgun was gone, the lads that were in the bar and the lounge ran out. I put the old man down to be attended to in my lounge by my bar staff and a couple of my customers. And I go outside and there's a scene in my car park, right across as far as the eye can see. There's a battle going on. There's a guy cornered and he turns around with his hatchet and he goes, come on. And one of them sticks the hatchet into his chest. He drops his weapon and he's shaking now. So he's grabbed by the hair, he's pulled down and this guy's trying to chop his head off. And he's going to his face saying, stay still. He's getting chopped to bits. Another guy with a bayonet standing beside this person saying, jeez, you're going to kill him. This person turns to this other guy, get another one. This guy that was chopped to bits underneath the tree in the car park had to be brought back to life in my car park. His life was saved in hospital. There was a load of the other gang too badly wounded. George Darcy, Fat Darcy, was trying to climb a wall and he was pulling his friends down as he was trying to climb the wall.
Script:
As Elion was recovering, Linley and O'Donovan explored the cave. They continued to practise the Hy-Brazilian dialect. "'You have learned our language amazingly,' Linley said. "'You only need to practise a few phrases and you will sound native-born.' "'You have been most helpful,' he said. The cavern was a giant duct. In the cavity past the waterfall the tubular rock spouts fanned out into tributaries. The mountain moaned but there were no rock slides. They followed one tunnel. In just a short distance it opened to the forest outside. "'Do you hear a fluttering sound?' Linley asked. "'Look up,' O'Donovan said. "'It is a large bat colony. They hang from their feet upside down on the ceiling. It is best if we move back inside. Bats can get into your hair and be pesky.' Thriving in the guano between rock crevices were dark bell-shaped mushrooms. O'Donovan recognised the usefulness of such foretelling plants, gathered a handful and placed them in a leather bag tucked in his vest. "'We need to plan our escape now that Elion is healing. If we can find an outlet to the mountain's top we might be able to slip away unnoticed. In case that becomes necessary,' he said. Deeper in the cave they found white crickets and in the warm water colourless crabs scurried in a stream that coursed between the footpath. "'This cavern seems to go on forever,' O'Donovan said. "'Let us go back.' They found Elion sitting up and resting against the rock wall when they returned from their explorations. "'Your breathing and colour have much improved,' O'Donovan said. "'I feel I am steadily regaining my power,' Elion said. "'I gather you have been discovering the cave.' "'Have you been to the other end?' O'Donovan asked.
Script:
Ordinary. Every story has a beginning. This is mine. It was all pretty ordinary at the start. We were just your average sort of family. Our lives were nothing to write home about, and my life wasn't that different to many of my friends. It was neither amazing nor terrible, happy nor sad, good nor bad. It was just, normal. It was what it was, and knowing no different, I never really had any complaints. We all just got on with what we had. I was born in St. Helier on the island of Jersey in August 1966. A month earlier, England had beaten West Germany in the World Cup final at Wembley, and the country was still in celebratory mood. My dad was Welsh, so I'm not sure how he took it, but anything for a drink, I suppose. My brother had arrived less than a year before me, during a prolific spell for my mother. Within the space of four years, she had four children. Two more were to come after me, both girls. She later said, you were the best thing to have ever happened to me, but I doubt she felt that way at the time. We lived in a state of flux, my dad changing jobs frequently. He was a bit of a chancer, and we lived day to day. As a result, we neither had money nor security. My mother looked after us and did her best to keep things relatively safe, stable and sane. We'd already had two homes by the time I was three, moves that we didn't make by choice, and eventually we ended up on a pretty grim housing estate with lots of other families who all seemed to be in similar positions. We didn't have much by way of toys, so we spent most of our time playing in the street outside. Most kids did, so there were regular fights and brush-ups between gangs. Bikes got stolen, things got smashed, police got called. The single glazed, steel-framed windows in our house were freezing in the winter. A couple of small electric bar heaters were somehow meant to heat the whole place. My brother and I shared a tiny bedroom, and my sisters another. Bunk beds made best use of the limited space available. It wasn't a big house, and we always seemed to be on top of one another. Arguments and squabbles were common. Our numbers dropped in April 1971 when my dad suddenly died. Surprisingly, little changed after that. Clearly, ordinary is ordinary, and challenging is challenging, regardless of how many parents you have. Five years later, we almost lost our mother too. She was in hospital for what felt like an eternity, I missed her terribly, writing her letters every day, begging her to come home. I was only ten and didn't understand how sick she really was. I have no idea what would have happened to us if she died. We had no family anywhere on the island. I had friends in children's homes, so we might have ended up in the one ten minutes down the road. Horrific stories of child abuse would later emerge from there, stories that would make the national news. We had such a very close escape, all four of us. When our dad went, so did the car. He drove a beat-up dark grey Morris Minor, but I don't recall any of us ever going anywhere in it. I was once allowed to sit on his lap turning the steering wheel as we inched our way around the estate, but that's about it. My mum wouldn't learn to drive for another ten years, so most of the time we were confined to the estate. Once or twice she'd muster up the courage and the five of us would take the bus to town, or perhaps the beach, but that didn't happen often, and we could rarely afford the fare. Holidays were generally non-existent. I only remember going away once as a child, a Rotary Club day trip for disadvantaged kids to Guernsey. I remember crying with joy when I got home. As time went by, the estate lost what little colour it had, and it became rougher around the edges. Small trees withered and eventually died, later dug up and never replaced. Open spaces got redeveloped to make way for new homes. It was never an amazing place, and time wasn't kind to it. The only saving grace turned out to be a youth club down the road, something which helped keep many of the children on the straight and narrow. Nobody did particularly well at school. I, for one, had an awful time, and only one of my friends made it to university. Most of us just focused on getting by. Ambition wasn't something any of us spoke of, and that didn't change much even as we got older. Most of us got jobs, some better than others, and a few managed to escape and set up home in other parts of the island. Many didn't, though, and life took a predictable turn as many juggled bringing up kids with jobs they didn't really want or like and the lure of the Five Oaks pub up the road. Some years I'd go back at Christmas, only to find the same people drinking in the same seats they sat in years before. Culturally, I was easily influenced growing up. A late 1970s revival in the mod era coincided with my early teens, and I harboured dreams of being like Suggs, the lead singer of Madness. I'd buy cheap jackets from second-hand shops and wear fingerless gloves and a flat cap and carry my stereo around on my shoulders. Many nights I'd sit by the garages with my friends, playing the jam, Madness, the specials and the beat. But I was never cool enough to be a real mod. I was far too skinny and looked silly in the clothes, and I knew it. But there was something inside me desperate to belong. My brother, on the other hand, looked the part, and for a while he seemed to be the most popular kid on the island. There were regular flare-ups between the mods and the rockers, so I rarely wore my jacket to town in case I got beaten up. I had an intense fear of violence. My mum did famously break up a fight once, though, when a rocker started picking on my brother. She called him a bully, and he seemed taken aback. He was soon gone. No one messed with our mother. So this was how it all began for me. It wasn't great, but it could have been worse. I'll never know to this day how I managed to break free from a way of life many of my friends had resigned themselves to. My sensitivity and heightened awareness probably helped as I got older, but where I grew up that was a weakness and certainly not a strength. Luckily, I became best friends with Mark, a tall, tough, lanky, roughly-shaven character who became something of a leader to us all. I'm sure that friendship buffered me in some way from the trouble many others got themselves into. Mark was to die young, and I broke down talking about our friendship at his funeral some years later. In all, three good friends from that estate left this world far too soon, but most are still around. It turned out the only chance of escape would be to grab every single opportunity that came my way, an approach I was to relentlessly pursue as I got older. So, you see, that was how it all began for me. I'd look to say there were early signs of resilience, ambition or successes to come, but there weren't. There was no reason to think that life was to turn out any differently to how it all started. Ordinary.
Script:
CHAPTER XXXII. REPTILIANS REIGN I understand. Is there a way to tell which of the reptilians are self-aware and which ones are not? I've got to go. Sorry. We can pick it up tomorrow. What can I do for you? Oh, right, of course. Let me get you started with the demo. And here are the controllers. Alright, I need you to stand very still for this next part, as I calibrate. Alright, let me get the demo started. I need to get a cup of coffee. I'll be back in a few minutes. It's so convincing. It must be one of the ones that don't know the reptilian. Seven seconds in, seven seconds out. Well, it's because the broom engine deadlines keep getting pushed back, and every time they give us a deliverable, it's in a badly broken state and my team has to spend a ton of time trying to fix somebody else's code. That was the moment the mask came off completely. He spent more than an hour yelling at me because the team wasn't meeting the engineering milestones and I had to put in more hours to make up for it and I wasn't cut out to be a member of the team. But I was already working till midnight every night even in those early days and most of the time coming in on Saturdays and Sundays. It was like I was suddenly dealing with a completely different person. It was no more Mr Nice Guy. He just reduced me to absolutely nothing and I had no control over it. That was the frustrating thing. He'd forced us to use a technology engine that turned out to be a Pandora's box of problems, then started beating us all up for not fixing it fast enough. So it was like being in a torture chamber. My motivation really went to zero at that point. I was a lot less productive at the job from that point forward. And he gave me your card and he said, go see my therapist. Maybe she can make you a better person. So over the past few months I've been feeling my sanity slip away sometimes and I start to wonder if I'm actually crazy. I feel like I'm caught between competing realities. I spend all day switching between the code, which is this Byzantine labyrinth of complexity, and the game itself, which is kind of a false reality, a hallucination like any game is, and then when I talk to the management I have to switch to the parallel reality that Bill and Mickey are living in which is completely different and built entirely out of fairy dust and leprechauns, especially the deadlines, which are absolutely ridiculous. And having to constantly switch back and forth between all three of those while trying to keep all of them straight in my head and reconcile all the contradictions between them, it's driving me mad. I mean, these people are literally insane. And working with crazy people makes you crazy. They need to be locked up in a mental institution. There's nothing quite like getting sent to therapy by someone who needs therapy himself.
