SOUND of a VICIOUS, HOWLING WIND
The space is a cavernous, freezing gloom, lit only by a single, sad string of battery-powered emergency lights.
TYLER JESSOP (30s), cynical and exhausted, wrestles with a portable generator, a relic from another century. His knuckles are scraped raw, slick with cold grease.
His breath hangs in the air, a ragged white plume.
The generator COUGHS. A pathetic, asthmatic shudder. And then, with a final, dying WHIMPER... it goes silent.
The emergency lights flicker once, twice, and die.
The hall is plunged into a profound, oppressive darkness. The wind outside seems to ROAR in triumph.
He fumbles for the pull cord, his threadbare wool gloves doing little against the clawing cold. He gives it a useless tug. The cord slaps back against the metal housing. He lets it drop.
A shadow detaches itself from the deeper darkness near the gallery space. It's DENISE GIRARD (27), earnest and anxious, bundled in a neon green ski jacket zipped to her chin. She clutches a lumpy, abstract sculpture like a life raft.
The sculpture, "Winter's Embrace," looks like a badger losing a snowball fight.
Her own breath puffs white in the gloom. Her wide eyes dart around the dark, cavernous hall.
He drops the pull cord. The THUD echoes. He rubs his hands together, a futile gesture. His teeth begin to chatter.
Denise takes a hesitant step closer, adjusting her grip on the badger-snowball.
The dry humor is completely lost on her. Her face falls.
Tyler closes his eyes. The critic. The exquisitely painful detail he'd been trying to forget.
He gives a loose floorboard a frustrated kick. It GROANS in protest.
Suddenly, the main double doors CREAK open with an ARCTIC BLAST of wind and swirling snow.
A figure, bundled in a coat of formidable proportions, is silhouetted against the white chaos outside. The figure steps in, clapping gloved hands with a loud SMACK.
It's MAYOR BRENDA CARLETON (60s), cheeks rosy, a smile plastered on her face that defies all logic.
She gestures at the gloom as if scolding a misbehaving child.
Denise gestures helplessly at the dark shapes of the exhibit: a sad beaver watercolour, a collage of dryer lint.
Tyler's teeth chatter, a frantic, desperate rhythm.
As if summoned, a distant, unsettling GURGLE echoes from the back of the building. It's followed by a faint, high-pitched WHINE.
The GURGLE intensifies. It escalates into a frantic, SPLASHING torrent. It's getting closer.
He takes off, sliding and stumbling through the darkness toward the sound. Denise is right behind him.
Tyler rounds a corner past a display of "found objects" (old bottle caps). He freezes.
It's aimed directly at Mrs. Davison's ice moose.
What's left of the sculpture is being unceremoniously washed away, its abstract form melting into shapeless lumps. Water pools on the concrete floor, already sheening with new ice.
The dryer lint collage, positioned innocently below, is now a sodden, disintegrating grey pulp.
Brenda catches up, her voice losing a fraction of its cheer.
A weathered figure shuffles into the scene. BEAULIEU (70s), in a faded Carhartt jacket, eternally unimpressed. He spits a stream of tobacco juice into a nearby bucket.
He pulls a rusty monkey wrench from his pocket.
Beaulieu just shrugs.
What follows is a chaotic, freezing ballet of failure. Tyler, Denise, and a surprisingly game Brenda slosh freezing water into buckets, slipping and sliding on the spreading ice. Beaulieu grunts and wrestles with the pipe.
After twenty minutes, the geyser is reduced to a steady, manageable DRIP into a line of overflowing buckets.
The gallery is a disaster. A thin sheet of ice coats the floor. The moose is a memory.
Brenda, wiping a smudge of dirt from her cheek, miraculously restores her smile to full wattage.
Tyler just stares at her, too cold and tired to argue. His hip aches from where he slipped. Denise mournfully pokes the remains of the lint collage with her boot.
She suddenly looks a little sheepish, a rare crack in her optimistic armor.
Her eyes gleam with a terrifying light.
Tyler's head spins. A documentary. A surprise walk-through. At dawn.
He looks from the dripping, jury-rigged pipe, to the frozen swamp that was once an art gallery, to Brenda's beaming, delusional face.
One night to turn this absolute catastrophe into a testament to the "tenacity of the human spirit."
CLOSE ON TYLER'S FACE
The chilling certainty of utter, spectacular doom washes over him.
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