Movie Trailer Writing Prompt 4: Spectre

Ellipses

There are no mirrors in the Chateau.

He used to be somebody. Private jets, Turnbull suits, the finest wines, an unlisted number he could call to have anyone on the planet murdered. The simple pleasures. He was a kingmaker, one of the secret chiefs of the world. Now he watches the snow fall, listens as the to the waves of the lake kissing the beach, and waits out the end of his life.

Soon the man will be here. This man who wrecked his life. Not that he bears the man any ill will of course. The wheel turns. Someone, somewhere, decided that he was to be no longer in power, and that was fine,. He never expected to remain on top forever. It had been a good run, full of champagne and national secrets. Who was he to complain? The only thing that bothered him was the punctuation. Some of his colleagues ended their careers in a hailstorm of gunfire exclamation points. Even the period back of the head, execution style, had merits in its finality. What was he? Moldering away in disuse, waiting for the man to come, fading from a question mark to an abstract, indefinite ellipses.

He has been reading. Voraciously. There is little else to do in the cabin but pour through all those dusty volumes from great men of letters he promised himself he'd get to, back when he was a younger man. Every book begs the question at its beginning: will he finish? Will this one instead finally be the book without an ending, his own story truncated before he can reach the end? He dithers in beginnings, then devours, becoming frantic by each book's end, skimming, barely retaining anything. The stories all swim together in his head. He began with adventure tales but grew quickly sick of them. He's turned since, inevitably, to philosophy, trying to construct some context for his actions. It helps, he imagines, to have a coherent argument for when one is about to meet one's maker.

Food comes in cans, where once he'd dined on the rarest of delicacies. Last week he saw a rabbit outside the cabin, and made to hunt it, He sharpened a stick (no guns, he wasn't allowed one anyway) and trudged off into the forest.he could catch the thing, yes, he would skin it, its blood on his fingers like old memories.

Only nothing happened. He was denied the primal triumph of man over rabbit.He merely wandered through the woods a while, growing more uncertain and less determined with every branch-scrape, every distant noise, so he went back to the cabin, ate tinned beef, and drank cheap wine. When he had finished, he returned to the front room, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and waited for the man to come...