Panic Room Page #3

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INT. BATHROOM - NIGHT

In the master bathroom, Meg soaks in a bath. She is

exhausted. She reaches for her wine glass, finishes the last

of it.

She stretches for the bottle, which is on the floor next to

her. She refills the glass. Again.

INT. MASTER BEDROOM - NIGHT

Meg, dressed in an old Knicks T-shirt and boxer shorts,

stands next to the alarm panel in the master bedroom, reading

from an instruction manual. She's frustrated. She mutters,

slurring, a bit drunk.

MEG:

Bypass non-ready zones... shunt,

enter, zone number...

She tries it, pushing a few buttons, but the alarm panel

BEEPS at her disapprovingly. She's doing something wrong.

She sighs, sits on the floor, gets serious about figuring out

the instructions.

MEG:

Bypass non-ready zones... ah, shunt,

enter, shunt again, zone number...

wait...

HER FINGERS:

dance over the alarm panel, some time later. She seems to

have figured it out, and a small light on the panel lights

up.

SYSTEM ARMED:

The very moment the red light goes on, we cut sharply to --

INT. PANIC ROOM - NIGHT

-- the darkened panic room, where the dozen small video

screens all suddenly wink to life, showing a dozen views of

the house. Whatever she pushed turned these on too, probably

not what she meant to do, but at least she got the alarm on

for the night.

The door that leads from the panic room to the master bedroom

hangs open. In the middle of the floor in here, somebody has

made a small tent of blankets and couch cushions. Sarah must

have been playing here before bed.

INT. MASTER BEDROOM - NIGHT

Meg puts sheets on her bed in the master bedroom.

She fills a glass of water, puts it on a box she's using for

a night table.

She plugs in a battery charger for her cell phone, places the

phone in the cradle. It BEEPS. "Charging."

She sets the digital clock, puts it next to the glass of

water. It's 12:
26.

She gets in bed, her side, the left side.

She lies in the dark, half an acre of empty bed across from

her.

We drift off her, see the clock again. The time changes, the

number one dissolves away, changing the time to --

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. MASTER BEDROOM - NIGHT

-- 2:
26. Meg is in a hard, boozy sleep. We drift out the

door of the master bedroom, into the third floor hallway, and

down the open stairwell. We glide through the entry floor,

still gently falling through the stairwell's airway, dropping

even further, all the way down to the kitchen floor, the

ground floor.

We drift across the darkened kitchen, serpentine through the

canyon of moving boxes, approach the window that looks out on

the street.

We move right up against the window, peer through the glass

just as --

-- a van pulls up across the street and stops. Can't see

through its windows. No movement for a moment, then the

driver's door opens and a MAN climbs out. He wears dark

clothes.

The Man closes the door, looks both ways, and starts across

the street towards us. He's carrying a bag of some kind.

He goes to the door, and we drift down toward the doorknob.

We hear a key slide into the door, rattle.

But the lock doesn't turn. The key slides out, back in

again, jiggles. Still won't open the door.

The Man steps away from the door, goes to the kitchen window,

which is heavily barred, and peers inside, right at us.

Can't see anything, it's darker in here than it is out there.

He turns, looks both ways on the street again, then steps up,

onto the window ledge. Now we can only see his legs, can't

tell what he's doing. He's reaching up, stretching for

something. It drops into view with a metallic SCRAPE.

The fire escape.

The Man climbs, his feet disappearing from our field of

vision.

We turn around, facing the other way in the kitchen. We

start back the way we came, through the canyon of boxes in

the kitchen, toward the stairwell.

INT. STAIRWELL - NIGHT

Back in the stairwell, the exact reverse of the shot we saw

earlier. We're drifting up, off the kitchen floor, through

the entry floor, and as we rise we notice something all the

way up on the roof that we couldn't see before, when we were

looking down.

A skylight. We continue to rise, drawn toward it. We move

up, through the master bedroom floor, creeping up alongside

the stair banister, now reaching the top floor of the house,

and just as we near the skylight --

-- a figure appears, visible through it. The Man in dark

clothes, on the roof now. He stops, peers down through the

skylight, looking at us without seeing us again.

He steps across the skylight. This is not the way he intends

to enter. We drift again, following his soft footsteps on

the roof, which we can hear faintly through the ceiling.

Here in the hall, just outside Sarah's bedroom, a closet door

is ajar. We squeeze through the gap and into the closet.

IN THE CLOSET,

it's completely dark. Can't see a thing. But then a sliver

of light appears, coming from above. We look up.

There is a ladder that's bolted to the wall in this closet,

it leads up to a square panel in the ceiling.

Roof access. And that roof access panel is moving, ever so

slightly, moonlight spilling in as it twists in its setting.

A shiny silver something slides through the crack along the

edges of the portal.

It slithers along the edge of the hatchway, searching for

something. It finds a small round nub in the crack. The

silver something stops. It HUMS with electricity for a

moment, then there is a bright spark and a soft CRACK.

INT. MASTER BEDROOM - NIGHT

In the master bedroom, a message appears on the alarm panel:

ZONE 19 DISABLED

INT. CLOSET - NIGHT

In the closet, the silver something withdraws and the roof

access panel is removed. A million stars are visible in the

night sky above. But we're inside.

And in a moment, so is this intruder. The Man peers down,

through the open hatchway, then slips through the opening and

climbs silently down the ladder.

INT. MASTER BEDROOM - NIGHT

In bed, Meg stirs. An alcohol sleep is a restless one, and

she's suffering.

She sits up groggily, chugs a glass of water. Lies down

again.

INT. FOURTH FLOOR HALLWAY - NIGHT

One floor up, the Man steps into the hallway and starts for

the stairs, moving quickly and confidently. Knows where he's

going, knows what he wants. He starts down the stairs,

happens to glance to the side as he does so.

He freezes. He's looking in the open doorway of the top

floor bathroom, staring hard at something that clearly

disturbs him.

A nightlight. Plugged into an outlet in the baseboard in the

bathroom. (For the record, it's the Power Puff Girls.) The

Man climbs the stairs again, concerned, goes to the door of

the bathroom. He looks from the nightlight to the

countertop.

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