156 - The Montego Hills Scriptwriter

Unnatural Phenomenon: The Montego Hills Scriptwriter

Someone was terrorising a single outlying suburb of a major metropolitan city. He or she wasn’t robbing or killing or directly harming the residents in any way. They were telling them how their lives could turn out, if they’d just follow the script.

It starts with an unobserved delivery, a sheaf of papers written in a spidery hand in red ink and smelling vaguely of lilac. They’re a partial script, like a scene for a television show or play, except that the protagonist is the recipient. It describes them in their life with perfect accuracy and about half of these are retrospective. The rest describe events that have yet to come. If they play their part the scriptwriter, besotted, will continue to shower them with its attention.

This is not true divination, there’s nothing forcing anyone to adhere to the script but unless someone intervenes and goes “off script” it tells exactly how the described event will play out. Someone clued in could use it to get an inside line by carefully adhering to but otherwise working around the work or deviating entirely if the pages predict catastrophe. Most react with revulsion to the stalkery literary portraits, which given that going “off script” is grounds for being abandoned by the scriptwriter as its current muse loses them access to future predictions.

It seems to have quieted for now. The people previously menaced by the scriptwriter mostly breathe easier. The reason for this is that local cat-lady Bernice Callow has been playing her part with vigor. For certain types of people having someone else take the reins is a relief, the scripts which wallpaper the inside of her house tell her exactly how to live. She won’t even dare flinch from the bad ones, doesn’t even conceive that she could.

This would be a largely self-contained tragedy, a lonely old woman withering away in the light of an impending reflection, except for the fact she has spread her interest to others. Contacting studios in Los Angeles with delusions of stardom based on the attention she has received hasn’t provoked the interest of movie studios. It has independently prompted two adepts to pack a bag and make for Montego Hills. The cineamancer and cryptomancer working for rival agencies but unaware of each other have heard of phenomena like this before and want to steal it for themselves.

They have competition on the ground already, one of the scriptwriter’s previous targets, a budding teenage psychopath, is hunting for whoever the scriptwriter is writing for now. Blaming her own deviation from the script for a recent breakup (it honestly wouldn’t have lasted much longer on its own), she will stop at nothing and hurt whoever she has to in order to try to force the scriptwriter to give her a second chance at her possessive love. It won’t, maybe it can’t, but try telling her that.