Darkness and Voices

Tessa (16) studies her newly red-dyed hair in the bathroom mirror. Her step-father, Eric (40s) bangs on the door, tells her to hurry up as dinner is almost ready. She exits and goes to her bedroom, where Ben (10), her step-brother, applies her gel to his hair and her makeup to his face. She roughly cleanses his skin, tidies his hair and warns him not to walk around like that, because of Eric. Then, worried she was too harsh, she explains she is just nervous about the psychologist coming to see her soon. She lets him borrow her dress, if he keeps it hidden. He leaves with it. Tessa’s friend, Kate (16), video calls her, to confirm where to meet before the fancy dress house party tonight, but this is interrupted by her mother, Alison (30s), who calls her down to dinner. Tessa ends the call, puts something on and goes downstairs. In the living room, Tessa watches Ben and Eric try to fix the TV, watched by their pet terrier dog. Alison brings dinner and they eat there by the broken TV in an awkward silence. Ben eats loudly to get attention and Alison suggests they eat as usual at the kitchen table. However, Tessa reminds her that the psychologist who is due asked that it not be used for twenty four hours prior to his arrival. Just then, the doorbell goes. Tessa reluctantly goes and opens the door to the psychologist, Gustav (60s), who is dressed like a tweed professorial cliché. They move to the aforementioned table in the kitchen/dining area. As they occasionally observe the rest of the family through the archway obliviously eating their food, Gustav asks her exploratory questions about her night terrors, which is what he is there to treat. Based on her answers, he posits that they were originally triggered by the death of Martin, her biological father, nine years ago. He then explains a little about human psychology. His main point is that a traditional, family home is a good metaphor for the human mind, in particular, the fact that everyone has a psychological ‘basement’ that contains what has been kept out of consciousness. Over time, this ‘basement’ can become full and burst its seams. This is why Tessa’s night terrors have become progressively worse. To address this, he suggests they try his experimental hypnotherapy technique, one which he promises will clear out her ‘basement’ and so enhance her wellbeing like never before. Reluctantly, she agrees. He produces a pair of blindfolds, one for him and one for her, and a tuning fork. When she places the blindfold on, she hears the tuning fork being struck and ‘loses time’. When she becomes conscious again, she peeks out through the side of her blindfold and sees that Gustav stares at her, piercingly. As she jumps, her blindfold falls back into place. Inside it, she then sees a pair of eyes glaring back at her. She screams and blacks out. In the darkness, a strange voice says her name. She wakes up in her bedroom, with Alison by her bedside. When Tessa asks if Gustav has left, Alison nervously says yes. When Tessa suggests her night terrors are indeed probably linked to her real father, Alison changes the subject to her medication, hints she believes Tessa has fallen behind on this, lately. She leaves. The fancy dress party is now clearly impossible and Tessa falls asleep. She has two dreams: In the first, she floats into her mother’s and step-father’s bedroom while they sleep. She sees Gustav in there, who looks at her and makes a ‘sh’ signal to her. In the second dream, she sees the face of her real father, Martin, close up, as he lies on the soil in a cemetery. A worm burrows into his temple. When Martin suddenly looks at her, a strange voice tells her to wake up. She does. In the darkness of her room at night, she hears the same voice whisper her name over and over. She gets up and investigates its source. She searches in the others’ bedrooms, then follows it down to the living room, then opens the stiff, heavy door to the basement staircase and goes down further. In the basement she speaks to a voice called ‘Lucy’ who hasn’t appeared in Tessa’s mind since her mother’s and Martin’s marriage breakdown. ‘Lucy’ tries to remind her of those painful memories, but Tessa remembers how she banished her last time. She repeats the same Latin incantation three times to ‘trap’ her in a nearby discarded teddy bear, then destroys it. It works. Relieved, she returns to the living room, only to find Gustav sitting in the darkness, studying her. He tells her he came back because he was concerned about her, after her reaction to the hypnosis earlier. He reveals that her mother wanted her committed under the Mental Health Act, but that he feels this would be wrong. Instead, he prefers his patients to confront their inner monster, which, he insists, you can never kill. As Tessa smirks and counters that, actually, you can, there is the sound of a tuning fork. ‘Lucy’ reappears to Tessa, this time very angry. Gustav asks Tessa what is going on and she explains about the history of this voice and the ritual to banish her. Gustav suggests that banishing ‘Lucy’ to a toy animal worked when she was seven because, to a child at play, a toy animal is as real as a person. However, for the process to work now that she is a teenager, she would need to use a real animal. He brings over the pet terrier and a knife. Tessa is revolted by the idea, but scared of never being free of ‘Lucy,’ she performs the ritual and kills Georgie. Lucy disappears. Gustav takes this knife from her. Hearing a noise, Eric comes downstairs. Tessa and Gustav cover everything with a blanket, Tessa turns the TV on and Gustav hides just in time. Eric interrogates Tessa about the commotion and she snaps that it was just the TV on loud. He becomes angry at her rudeness, but she counters by accusing him of having sexual intentions towards her. Shaken, Eric returns upstairs. Gustav hides the dead dog and tells her to clean the blood off. She goes upstairs and, in total darkness, showers. She then enters her bedroom where Gustav waits for her. She lays her head on his shoulder. She hears three strikes of a tuning fork and blacks out. She wakes up later on the floor of the basement holding the kitchen knife. In front of her sits Eric, who has been tied up and gagged and tries to scream. Next to him is a bottle of solvent and a rag, and nearby, stands Gustav. Tessa asks Gustav what is going on and he asks her if he is talking to Tessa - or ‘Lucy’. Not believing this apparent confusion, she pushes him against the wall. He points to the fact that she awoke gripping the knife in her left hand, even though she is right-handed. ‘Lucy’ is clearly left-handed. She lets him go and he gently disarms her. He explains to her that ‘Lucy’ clearly replaces her entirely when she perceives a major threat – and the threat just now came from Eric attempting to sexually attack her in her bedroom. In response, she – or, rather, ‘Lucy’ – then forced him with the knife to subdue and help her tie up Eric. Eric tries to contradict this through his gag. Tessa wants him ungagged, to hear his version, but at that moment, Alison can be heard calling for Eric from upstairs. Gustav suggests Tessa get Alison to come down to the basement somehow, to stop her calling the police. Tessa shouts up to her that there was a break-in and that Eric has been injured. Alison rushes down to the basement, where Tessa ambushes her with the same rag dipped in solvent. Tessa ties her up. Tessa then interrogates Alison and Eric about their plans to have her committed to a mental health facility, which they nervously deny. Emboldened, she then asks them when they first met and they maintain it was only after Martin killed himself. Gustav suggests Tessa goes upstairs and subdues Ben, which she does. She interrogates him also as to when Alison and Eric met, but he doesn’t know. Just then, her phone in her bedroom rings. She goes to it. Kate calls her from the party. Tessa talks to her briefly, then hangs up abruptly. Back in the basement, Tessa fears that ‘Lucy’ will return because the truth about her parents’ marriage breakdown still remains hidden, because ‘Lucy’ appeared around then. Yet she apparently cannot get the truth from her mother and stepfather, now. Gustav suggests that the only way to banish ‘Lucy’ for good this time is to use a human vessel. He hands her a lump hammer nearby with which to bash in her parents’ heads. Tessa raises the lump hammer over Eric and performs the ritual as he squirms in terror. She then remembers something Gustav said – that he said she forced him to help her tie up Eric with the knife – but she realises she didn’t have the knife on her in the bedroom when she blacked out. Catching Gustav in a lie, she brings the lump hammer down on him instead - only a glancing blow. She escapes the basement, closes the door firmly, holds it shut. From the other side of it, Gustav reveals that she is part of a Government experiment to trigger Dissociative Identity Disorder, something which will be weaponised in the family members of assassination targets, a technique which will give them perfect plausible deniability. The sound of a tuning fork comes through the basement door and ‘Lucy’ roars in Tessa’s head, more angry than ever. Only now does Tessa realise that ‘Lucy’ is being repeatedly re-triggered by Gustav’s tuning fork, together with a previous auto-suggestion he planted in her subconscious. Tessa wedges the door shut and screams to drown out ‘Lucy’. When this doesn’t work, Tessa flees upstairs, unties Ben and they hide in his bedroom. All the lights go out. They strain to hear sounds of Gustav’s approach, but when there are none, Tessa tells Ben to find a phone to call the police. While he does this, Tessa eases down into the darkness of the living room, where the now freed Eric and Alison grab her. They tie her up, even as she warns them Gustav is still in the house. However, overcome with stress, Alison starts to choke Tessa. At that moment, Gustav emerges from a shadow and knocks Alison unconscious, as Eric flees. Gustav tries to persuade Tessa to murder Alison and Eric as ‘Lucy’ roars in her head, but Tessa tells him she would rather die. Unable to bear his inability to control her, Gustav then strangles Tessa. However, she grabs a blunt object and knocks him across the head, frees herself and runs upstairs. Ben has locked himself in the bathroom. Tessa coaxes him to let her in with promises that she will treat him better and let him hang out with her more. It works. Inside the bathroom, Tessa confesses about ‘Lucy’. He suggests that she listen to her instead of trying to suppress her. This immediately calms ‘Lucy’, who tells her she knows what she has to do. Tessa sees her dress hanging on the back of the door, the one Ben borrowed earlier. To show him she is going to treat him better, she suggests they play dress up. Confused, but happy for this new bonding, he agrees and she dresses him up in her makeup and dress. She lies to him that, because Gustav will think he is her in the darkness and wants to keep her alive for his experiment, he will be safe. She then gets him to go downstairs first. She follows. In the living room, Gustav emerges from the shadows and brings the lump hammer down on his head. Tessa grabs Gustav - and to his surprise, hugs him for a long moment. She whispers in his ear that she is ready to face the truth. He is not real, either. Gustav dissolves into the darkness. She cries over Ben’s dead body. Tessa goes down to the basement. There, a terrified Eric attacks her, but she bludgeons him to death. She goes through the old photo album and studies the photographs of Alison and her real father closely and sees Eric in one that is indeed years earlier than he said he met Alison. She returns to the living room and grills the semi-conscious Alison about the truth of whether Eric was the reason for her split with Martin. She confesses it was. Tessa strangles her to death. A few shafts of sunlight pierce the gloom. Kate enters through the open door, having rushed from the party, concerned. She is now a witness. However, Tessa cannot bring herself to kill her, so she hits the tuning fork repeatedly, closes her eyes. Darkness and the sound of various voices swirling around.