More Stories from the Twilight Zone (51 page)

But it's gotta look like it happened on the spur of a red-hot moment.

I glance around sidewise. Nothing but garbage cans. Still holding the pistol on him, I slide over to the nearest one, flip off the cover, rummage around blind—

“Hey, what are you—”

My hand closes around the neck of some kind of bottle, I pull it out, smash the bottom of it against the wall as I roundhouse the rat with my gun hand across the temple. Using the pistol like brass knucks, he goes down like the sack of shit he is.

I don't bother checking to see if he's out cold or not, who cares, I saw open his throat with the broken end of the bottle until the blood's spurting out his jugular, not as easy to do as the movies make you think. Then I wipe the bottle off with a dirty pizza joint napkin from the garbage so the crud'll mask any of my prints I mighta missed, and drop it by his head to make the murder weapon nice and obvious for Homicide, and empty his pockets of cash and smack to supply the motive.

Slick as that, I got it right, and I'm home-free.

“The guilty flee where dead men pursueth.”

I'm staring back at the homicide detective lieutenant.

Suddenly I'm freaking, suddenly I'm shaking. The same trench coat and fedora. The same glasses. The same damn ponytail. Why didn't I see it before?

I see it now.

The homicide detective and the dead snitch have the same face.

Worse, maybe it's just the same
mask.
Because I somehow know there's someone else behind it.

“What's that supposed to mean? I'm not guilty of anything!”

It's like I'm talking to that someone else somewhere else where he's not a homicide cop and I'm not exactly lying.

“But you haven't gotten it all right yet, now have you? And you won't be home-free until you do.”

This dead man's spook, this homicide creep, this nightmare witch doctor,
knows.

And he's right.

Whichever he is, he's got the goods on me to nail me to the gurney with the needle. Like we're playing out the script of some TV show, like in a dream, where you know what's gonna happen but you know you can't do anything about it, that it's gonna rerun forever until you finally get it right.

That he knows.

But he doesn't know that I know what I gotta do now.

Or for some reason he doesn't care. Like it
is
just a TV show he's watching. Like it's all a dream.

Maybe it is. But it doesn't matter, does it? Because one more little detail to take care of and I can't get nailed, and I'm home-free. I know it. And he seems to know it.

And it's not like he hasn't been asking for it, now is it?

I reach under my jacket for the shoulder holster I know is there, pull out my .44 Magnum, and blow him away—

 

—and I wake up standing over the cheap desk with the shrink facedown on it with half his head blown off and the famous smoking gun somehow still in my hand. Hands are pounding on the door; sirens are howling outside for my ass like a wolf pack.

What the hell happened?

To make a long story short of insanity pleas, guilty verdict, appeals, more insanity pleas, that are still going on, I still don't know, even after telling the whole truth to the jury and appeals court judges more times than I can remember . . . I mean, that should be enough to prove I was crazy sooner or later, shouldn't it? It sure convinces
me.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Joe.

But, hey, spend this much time in a solitary cell on death row, and you look to find a bright side.

You could say I finally got it right after all.

At least in the last dream.

Yeah, that's right, after I did, those nightmares never came back.

When I made my bones good and proper, I blew them all away.

 

 

Picture of a man who's found his answer.

Picture of a man who's rid himself of his nightmares.

Picture of a man likely to spend the rest of his life paying the price.

Picture of a man who's escaped from his bad dreams only to awake into a worse nightmare in what we call reality.

Picture of a man who has learned that one way or the other, he'll never escape from his jail cell solitarily confined in the Twilight Zone.

 

A perfect Christmas for Joanne Carlton is giving her family, her grandchildren, and the grandchildren of her extended family a Christmas they will always remember in her home. The smell of cookies fills the air, decorations cover the walls, the tree perfectly in place, wrapped presents already under the heavy branches. And every Christmas card hung except for one. A very special card. An impossible Christmas card that could not exist, yet does, and made this a Christmas Joanne Carlton would always remember as well, for this was the year she received a Christmas card sent directly from the Twilight Zone.

I can't believe you did this, Joanne,” her sister said on the phone. “Just because I can't come to Wisconsin for Christmas doesn't give you the right. It's mean.”

Joanne Carlton leaned against the oven. It was warm with the afternoon's baking. The entire kitchen smelled of vanilla, cinnamon, and cookies.

“I didn't do anything, Annie,” Joanne said tiredly.

“Nice try,” her sister snapped and hung up.

Joanne rested the phone against her forehead and closed her eyes. For nearly fifty years, she had put up with her sister's histrionics, usually laughing them off. Annie was volatile. Annie was temperamental. Annie was the emotional one, while Ginny was the pretty one and Joanne was the smart one.

Joanne was also the oldest and had been, from the beginning, the one everyone expected to be responsible.

But she wasn't responsible for this.

She set the phone back in its cradle, then wiped her hands on the towel she had looped through her belt.

The grandchildren were coming for the annual cookie decorating party, something everyone in her extended family—the family
she
raised, not the one she was raised in—looked forward to. Cookie decorating and then, in four days, Christmas.

Her entire house was spotless. She had decorated every room, and had trees on every floor. In the basement she had set up the white flocked tree she had bought one year when the children were young, upstairs she had the artificial tree that her late husband had once sprayed with pine scent because he couldn't stand the smell of plastic, and on this floor she had a real tree that her son Ryan had begrudgingly helped her put up in early December.

Her house looked like Christmas, felt like Christmas, and smelled like Christmas, and that was what she wanted—a sense of the holiday so strong that years from now, when her grandchildren thought of Christmas, her house would rise in their memories as the perfect place for the perfect holiday.

The children would have their perfect holiday, but for her, some years were harder than others. This was one of the hard years.

She walked into the entry. Christmas cards hung from the garland that looped the mahogany banister leading upstairs. She picked up the pile of cards that had arrived this week, the ones she hadn't had time to hang.

Strike that. The ones she'd been avoiding hanging.

She plucked out a card that had ostensibly come from her father. It looked like a card Daddy would pick out: garish red and green, with Santa and Rudolph on the front. Santa was shaking his finger at Rudolph, whose nose was glowing red.

We can't call your room the Red Light District,
Santa was saying,
and no, I won't explain why.

Inside, the card read
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
, with the “I” dotted by the image of Rudolph's red nose. Underneath was tight precise writing that said simply,
I love you, Button. Merry Christmas. Daddy.

The disturbing part of the card wasn't the slightly risqué slogan or her father's unblemished handwriting (despite his shaking fingers). It was the Christmas letter tucked inside.

She had opened it the day the card arrived and started to read, then stopped with tears in her eyes. Obviously, Annie had gotten one of these letters too and it had upset her as much as it had upset Joanne. Soon, Joanne would probably be getting a call from Ginny, and while she wouldn't be angry—not like Annie was—she would profess a mild shock and dismay over the way that Joanne “of all people” had handled the holiday.

Even though Joanne had had nothing to do with the letter.

She unfolded the piece of paper and leaned against the banister, the garland tickling her neck. The letter looked like every other Christmas letter Daddy had written in his long life.

Joanne would have sworn that it had been typed on the Royal that his mother had given him (at great expense) when he went off to college in 1932. He had used that Royal throughout his life, having the keys repaired when they needed it, and stockpiling ribbons in the 1980s when the demise of the typewriter became apparent.

The arch of the lower case “a” was broken, and the enclosed part of the lower case “e” was filled in because no matter how often he cleaned the keys, he could never get that “e” to work right again.

He—or whoever had done this—hadn't photocopied the letter, like Daddy did in his last two decades. Instead, the letter had obviously been mimeographed.

The ink was slightly blue and blurry. But even if that hadn't tipped her off, the faint smell still embedded in the paper would have. That sharp powerful odor, only approximated these days in
Magic Marker pens, always brought her back to her father's office where she ran the mimeograph machine for him.

He would set up the machine, carefully aligning the typed original with its gluey purple back on the drum. Then she would operate the crank handle, watching as each page appeared, glistening and wet from its contact with the mimeo ink.

She was there every week, copying his pop quizzes and helping with the year-end exams. But she loved mimeographing the Christmas letter because she got to read it first.

Joanne could still remember some of his openings, having studied them as they came through the mimeograph machine, one blurry page after the other:

 

Yes, it is the bleak midwinter and you will probably get this letter after the festivities have ended. Still, the information contained herein doesn't lose its freshness with the passing of the holiday.

 

Or . . .

 

Every year, I look at the snow glistening on our yard, the pine trees providing a nest for the winter birds that gather despite the weather, and I feel the urge to share the triumphs and tribulations of my family with the people whom we love but see only too rarely.

 

When she went away to college, she missed that voice, and greedily snapped up a copy of the Christmas letter as soon as she got home for the holidays.

Annie had inherited her job. Annie had lasted only one year (“Jeez,” she said to Joanne, “you didn't tell me that turning that dang crank hurts your arm.”) before giving the job to Ginny.
Ginny secretly told Joanne that she hated the smell: “It makes me dizzy.”