“INFANTS OF THE SPIRIT”

By

William Cattell

FIRST DRAFT
Copyright 2017 by the author
0449 739 202
dunny.themovie@yahoo.com
SCENE 1. INT. DAY.
ENTRANCE HALL. House. The front door is unlocked from the
outside. CHRIS and CEDAR enter. They are in their mid-late
thirties, in mid conversation. They enter the house. Chris
is carrying a handful of mail and a couple of newspapers.
CHRIS
…and all these bills and subscriptions
will need to be cancelled. I don’t know
how many subscriptions she had. Doesn’t
look like too many.
CEDAR
It’s a nice street.
CHRIS
I grew up here.
(He pauses briefly and looks
around the entrance hall.)
Nothing changes much…
CEDAR
I never come north of the bridge.
CHRIS
Me neither. Not since I grew up.
Chris has chucked the mail to one side on the floor. Both
of them are looking around the entrance hall.
CEDAR
How long since you saw her?
CHRIS
About an hour and a half.
CEDAR
Alive though? Not at the morgue.
CHRIS
Not too long.

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They are both still eyeing-off the entrance hall.
CHRIS
They bought this house before I was born.
Still the same wallpaper from when I was a
kid. I used to look at the pattern and
squint my eyes and think it looked like
dinosaurs.
(Pause.)
Now I don’t have any parents left. Now I’m
an orphan.
CEDAR
They had you late?
CHRIS
Yeah. I think they were in their forties
when they had me and Janet.
CEDAR
Now you own their house. In Killara.
CHRIS
Janet owns half of it. I wonder if Mum
kept anything.
CEDAR
Anything like what?
CHRIS
Photos. That kind of stuff. Stuff from
when she was young.

SCENE 2. INT. DAY.

Cedar is looking from the entrance hall into the LIVING
ROOM. Chris has wandered off but his voice can still be
heard.
CEDAR
When was the last time you spoke to her?

3
 CHRIS
(Offscreen.)
Not long. Me and Janet spoke to her on the
phone a bit. She was going a little bit
mad. She kept talking about her
‘children’.
Chris’s voice has grown more distant as he wanders into the
house. We are with Cedar in the living room.
CHRIS
(Offscreen.)
Not her real children. Imaginary children.
It was senility.
Cedar is inspecting the artifacts of the living room,
artworks etc. Chris’s voice is fading.
CHRIS
When me and Janet were kids we had a drop-
log cubby-house out the back.
(Fade.)
Coming into Cedar’s POV in the living room, from behind a
chair, is a couple of very small teddy-bears having a
picnic on the carpet in front of the fireplace, with a
small picnic blanket and basket etc. There is a third place
set at the picnic. Cedar looks at the static teddy-bear
setup for a moment and then begins to withdraw.

SCENE 3. INT. DAY.

Chris in the KITCHEN. Close-ups as he opens a kitchen
cupboard and sees an array of eight or ten baby milk-
bottles. He quickly closes the cupboard.
CHRIS
The executor is this guy in North Sydney.
I’ll have to see him on Monday…

SCENE 4. INT. DAY.

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Cedar is moving down the CORRIDOR. Chris’s voice can be
heard offscreen.
CHRIS
And she kept talking about these
‘children’ of hers, like they were
actually here or something…
Cedar is coming in line with the doorway to the PARLOUR.
Revealed is another teddy-bear sitting on a chair, looking
directly to camera.
Cedar now moves to the DINING ROOM. On the circular table
there are a number of dinner-places set. The plates are
very small, about the size of fifty-cent pieces, with tiny
cutlery.
There is food on the plates – two cooked peas each and tiny
pieces of vegetables. The food is stale and old in close-
up. As Cedar inspects the setup, there is a sudden,
surprising sound from another room – strange squawking baby
crying, with multiple voices, somewhat distorted. Cedar is
now disconcerted and she looks in the direction of the
weird noise. She moves out of the dining room toward the
KITCHEN, following the source of the noise.
In the kitchen, she finds a baby-monitor unit on the bench
– the source of the distorted noise. Close-up of the baby
monitor with the crying emanating from it.

Cedar slaps the baby monitor and it stops making noise. At

first it seems that there is now silence. Then we can hear,
faintly, the crying sounds coming from their original
source in another room.

Cedar turns around and moves out of the kitchen.

In the corridor she traces the original source of the
babies’ crying. She approaches the doorway to a BEDROOM.
Revealed in the bedroom is a large, old-fashioned cot, from
which the noise is emanating. Slowly, Cedar moves into the
room, approaching the cot.
Revealed in POV over the top of the cot is a row of static
china-dolls, tucked up in bed. The strange crying noises

5
continue. Chris enters.
CHRIS
What is that…?
Cedar looks at Chris. Chris quickly approaches the cot,
digs around under the bedclothes and pulls out an old tape-
player. He pulls on the power cord which leads to a dial-
timer at the wall-plug. He pulls it and the sound of crying
abruptly ceases.
Cedar and Chris look at each other, shaken.

SCENE 5. INT. DAY.

Entrance Hallway. Nobody is present. The table lamp comes
on by itself. We see a close-up of the dial-timer on the
wall and hear its faint, fast clicking sound.

SCENE 6. EXT. DAY.

The driveway outside the house. Chris and Cedar’s car is
parked in the drive and there are a few boxes or milk-
crates, about to be loaded into the car. Chris and Cedar
are standing by the car.
CHRIS
We’ll have to separate the stuff for St.
Vincent de Paul’s. A lot of it I’ll have
to run past Janet. She’s coming down from
Port Macquarie on Tuesday.
CEDAR
(Looking at the house.)
How long since your mother was in that
house?
CHRIS
Since a week ago I think. When she went
into hospital.
Cedar is still looking at the front of the house.

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 CHRIS
We can drop this stuff off on the way to
the funeral director. I hope I can find a
parking spot.
Cedar spies a teddy-bear through the gauze of the front
window curtain in the house, looking at her, with its arm
appearing to wave.

SCENE 6. INT. DAY.

Credits roll over a slow tracking close-up of a series of
photographs on the fridge of the kitchen. They are
individual portraits of all the china-dolls. One of the
shots is a picture of the old woman sitting on a picnic
blanket, smiling, holding all the dolls in her arms.

THE END.