Still Valley At 20,000 Feet - Mike Burns (good ebook reader .TXT) 📗

This is conjure stuff!

Teague laboriously tries to straighten up. When he can’t make it, Paradine reaches down and helps him up. Teague looks at him with a glimmer of gratitude.

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OLD MAN TEAGUE
Son, I’m forgettin’ my manners. Come on inside here, and I’ll tell you what all’s goin’ on here, from start to finish. It’s a bit of a long story, longer’n you’d wanna be standin’ up to hear it all.

Sergeant Paradine shakes his head, and casts another doubtful glance at the frozen tableau in the street.

OLD MAN TEAGUE
Don’t worry about them none. They ain’t goin’ nowhere.

Paradine (still somewhat dazed) goes inside with the old man.

INT. COLONIAL-STYLE SITTING ROOM, WITH BRICK FIREPLACE AT FAR END, WOODEN WARDROBE TO LEFT OF FIREPLACE, LARGE LEATHER COUCH IN FOREGROUND. TEAGUE CIRCLES AROUND COUCH, SITS ON IT.

OLD MAN TEAGUE
Folks that live here, they fled when the Yanks come. So, I’m just helpin’ myself to some hospitality, seein’ as how I done such a service to the town. I figure they owe me. And yore name might be...?

SERGEANT PARADINE (sitting down on couch himself)
Paradine. Joseph Paradine. Sergeant, Ninth Virginia Cavalry.

OLD MAN TEAGUE
Fine, fine, Mr. Paradine. There’s some whiskey and a glass on that end-table beside ye there.

Paradine looks at it, doubtfully.

OLD MAN TEAGUE
Go on, go on, Mister Paradine. I wouldn’t p’ison y’. If I wanted to kill you, I’d have done it already. That lieutenant of yores ain’t gonna know, either.

Paradine looks up sharply at this.

SERGEANT PARADINE
My lieu--Mr. Teague, how do you know about him? Are you a Yankee spy?

OLD MAN TEAGUE
Oh, no, I make it mah business to know, Mister Paradine. Like I said, I’m a conjurer, like my pappy before me, and his before him, and on back for another four generations. Back to my great-great-great-great grandpappy, man name o’ Sennacherib Teague, man what lived in the Old Country, in Surrey, England. He was a seventh son o’ a seventh son, and come to Jamestown when he was fifteen. He had seven sons, too. And so did ever’ generation since then, right down to me. All my ancestors back to him was seventh sons, an’ I’m the seventh one that’s a seventh son.

Interested in spite of himself, Paradine picks up the bottle and a small glass on the end-table, and pours himself a whiskey.


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OLD MAN TEAGUE
Anyway, Mr. Paradine, that ancestor of mine, Sennacherib Teague, he weren’t much good as a father or husband. He run away from home after his seventh and last son was a-born, and he went wanderin’ around the world. Put it all down in the first pages of this here book, the record of all his wanderin’s. He weren’t no coward, if we are to believe his writin’s about himself, and I figure they’re true enough. But he was a vain man, and what he wrote about himself was full of descriptions of himself, and the way he looked and acted, the things he said to people, the battles he fought.

Teague rises from couch, reaches up to two crossed sabers that are mounted on the wall, above the fireplace’s mantelpiece. Takes one down. Going into a crude parody of a swordfighter’s stance, he slices and stabs at the air, but not at Paradine, who remains calm but alert with his rifle still clutched in right hand.

(FLASHBACK)

EXT. ROCKY HILL WITH A LARGE STONE CASTLE AT SUMMIT, SOMEWHERE IN EASTERN EUROPE, PARTIALLY SHROUDED IN MIST. ALL SUFFUSED WITH A REDDISH LIGHT, GIVING IT A SURREALISTIC LOOK. MORNING, APPARENTLY.

Standing on lower slopes is a tall, broad-shouldered man in Puritan garb--large broad-brimmed hat, greatcoat, booted feet, leather belt with musket pistols thrust into it. Carrying a longsword in one hand, and a curiously-carved walking staff in other. Looking up at castle, then continuing to make his way up toward it.

OLD MAN TEAGUE
(SIMULTANEOUS VOICE-OVER)
One time, he ingratiated hisself with a Bulgarian count, givin’ him a sack of gold coins right off the bat, an’ sayin’ he had taken it off a travellin’ Frenchman, who had thought him to be one of the count’s lackies, an’ sayin’ the count was known to exact ‘tolls,’ as he called ‘em, from travellers passin’ through his land. He told the count he wanted to join such a man, and be his ‘muscle,’ the one who would actively waylay and rob people, and bring back the ones worth takin’ hostage. Once he had the count’s confidence, he found out that he (the count) kept a dungeon full of women he would impregnate, an’ sacrifice the children to a heathen demon name o’ "Tollig." Eventually, when the women’d lose their looks or start to get ill from conditions in the dungeons, he’d sacrifice them, too. Once Sennacherib saw it done, an’ heard the words to invoke Tollig, he wrote ‘em down, and then it was
off with the count’s head, and all the remainin’ women, too. Then he moved on.

A series of silent scenes depicts the described actions.

(DISSOLVE TO)

EXT. SWAMPY AREA IN EQUATORIAL AFRICA, WITH THE BLACK-CLAD SENNACHERIB TEAGUE TRACKING A SLAVE CARAVAN ALONG A RIVERBANK. EARLY MORNING


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OLD MAN TEAGUE
(SIMULTANEOUS VOICE-OVER)
Sennacherib got hisself captured by these Arab slave-traders, and got in good with the slaves, and led ’em in a uprisin’, and the slaves thought he was...well, thought he was a savior incarnate, or somethin’. Onlyest thing he axed was, could he interrogate the slave- traders, and have their personal things, an’ the slaves could have all the other stuff in the caravan baggage? They was agreeable, so he questioned the traders, and come to find out the very freezin’ spell I use was what they used to immobilize their slaves ’fore they chained ’em up. It took him some studyin’ and cipherin’ to render it all into English, but he figured it out, and wrote it in the book.

More silent scenes depict these actions.

(DISSOLVE TO)

INTERIOR A TORCHLIT GOKHANG TEMPLE IN NEPAL, ONE DOMINATED BY STATUE OF A DARK, HUGE-FANGED DEMON WITH GOLD JEWELRY AND FLAMING CROWN.

OLD MAN TEAGUE
(SIMULTANEOUS VOICE-OVER)
Ol’ Sennacherib thought he bit off more’n he could chew this time. This temple was a-guarded by warrior monks with swords, and it was high up on a mountain where y’ couldn’t sneak in. He hid out in a cave on a nearby mountain and watched all the traffic that went in and out. He saw people bring in entrails o’ animals--for offerin’s!--and he got