Sara: daughter, sister, teenager, sophomore high school, frail, pale

Father: paranoid, head of house, quick to anger

Home is three floors, wide open spaces, not a corner or crevice to hide in. Many old looking things which Sara’s mother delighted in. 

Act I Scene I

She was having a disturbing dream but the flashes of memory were quickly trickling right through her fingers like water and all she could do was shake off their ghosts. Sara wakes up with a start her body already in an upright position, telling her to get up. 

SARA (voice over): Something’s wrong. I must have forgotten something…

With white spots still dancing in front of her eyes, she stands up quickly, hastily, urgently, unsteadily from her futon on the floor, causing her to go entirely blinded white for half a minute, but she does not hesitate and instead flows through the house like a shadow, her steps already memorized, not needing her sight at all. 

SARA (voice over): Did I turn off the stove? The oven? Do I smell burning?

Sara swiftly tiptoes down to the kitchen, adeptly without making one floorboard creak something only one with months of practice could accomplish. She crouches in the darkness, muscles tense, every inch of her body painfully aware of her surroundings; the cold stone floor making the hairs on her back bristle, the ferocious hum of the refrigerator likely to wake everyone up, the blinding dim glow of the digital clock on the microwave like a miniature sun lighting her way. 

SARA (voice over) (sneaks to the stove): That’s off.

SARA (voice over) (to the oven): That’s off too. Maybe it’s the doors.

She methodically creeps across the house checking all of six doors that could have been accidentally left ajar or unlocked or unhinged as well as the two garage doors. The house is entirely locked up like a fortress, no way in or out. 

SARA (voice over): I should check on everyone… just to see. 

Sara creeps back up the stairs first to her little sister’s room. She cracks the door open a little wider to see the blankets and sheets strewn on the floor but her sister is safely in bed sound asleep. The windows are closed, blinds drawn, and the closet door slid almost shut just so there is no shadow cast. The ceiling fan is whirring rapidly like sharp rotating blades of steel. Sara slowly gently closes the door tight although her sister likes a gaping inch hole so that the hallway light can stream through before she falls asleep. Now everything is black and Sara didn’t want the dark crawling into her sister’s room.