The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (13 page)

“I just wanted to tell you,” Martin continued gently, now more to himself, “I just wanted to tell you what is going to happen.”

He turned to see the pretty woman beside him again. He closed his eyes and ran a hand over his face, confused, bewildered.

“I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “I really don’t know.” He opened his eyes and dropped his hand. “If it’s a dream—I suppose I’ll wake up!’

He was conscious of the laughter once more, the calliope music, the voices of the children. “I don’t want it to be a dream,” he said. “Oh, God, I don’t want it to be a dream.”

When he looked at the young woman there were tears in his eyes. “I don’t want time to pass, do you understand? I want it to be the way it is now”

The young woman didn’t understand what there was about this man that made her feel such pity. She wanted to comfort him, but did not know how. She watched him turn and walk out of the park, and she wondered about him all the rest of the day, this strange man with the intense look, who stood in the middle of the park, in love with it.

Martin knew where to go now. It was all he knew. Except that something odd was happening to him. Something unreal. He was not frightened. Merely disquieted. He went back to Oak Street and stood in front of his house. Again he felt memories sweep over him. He went up the front walk, up the steps and rang the bell. He was trembling and did not know why. He heard footsteps approaching, the door opened and a man looked at him through the screen.

“Yes?” the man inquired.

Martin Sloan didn’t answer. For a moment he couldn’t speak. Eighteen years ago he’d attended his father’s funeral on a rainy, cold, wind-swept March afternoon and now he was looking into his father’s face on the other side of a screen door. The square jaw, the deep-set blue eyes, the wonderfully etched lines that gave him a look of both humor and wisdom. His father’s face. A face he loved. And it was looking at him through the screen.

“Yes?” His father stopped smiling and the voice became edged with impatience. “Whom did you want to see?”

Martin’s voice was a whisper. “Dad! Dad!”

From inside the house he heard his mother’s voice. His mother was dead fourteen years, but there was her voice. “Who is it, Robert?” his mother asked.

“Mom?” Martin’s voice shook. “Is that Mom?”

Robert Sloan’s eyes narrowed and his lips compressed. “Who are you?” he asked. “What do you want here!”

Mrs. Sloan arrived at her husband’s elbow, took one look at her husband’s face and then stared out at Martin.

“Why are you both here?” Martin asked. “How can you be here?”

Questioning and concerned, Mrs. Sloan looked from Martin to her husband. “Who is it?” she asked. “What do you want, young man?”

Martin shook his head in disbelief, feeling every part of him yearn toward the man and woman who stood before him. He wanted to touch them, feel them, embrace them.

“Mom,” he said finally. “Don’t you know me? It’s Martin. Mom. It’s Martin!”

The woman’s eyes grew wide. “Martin?” She turned to her husband, whispering, “He’s a lunatic or something.”

Robert Sloan started to close the door. Martin tried the handle. It was locked.

“Please, Dad, wait a minute. You mustn’t be frightened of me. My God, how can you be frightened of me?” He pointed to himself as if he represented all the logic in the world. “I’m Martin,” he repeated. “Don’t you understand? I’m Martin. I grew up here.”

He saw the coldness on both faces, the fear, the rejection. He was like a little boy now, He was like a little boy who had been lost and then come home and been stopped at the front door.

“I’m your son,” he said. “Don’t you recognize me? Mom? Dad? Please—look at me.”

The door slammed shut in his face and it was several minutes before he could walk down the steps. Then he paused to look back at the house. Questions assaulted him, questions without form. Questions that made no sense. What in God’s name was happening here? Where was he? When was he? Trees and houses converged on him and he felt the street coming up at him. Oh God, he didn’t want to leave. He had to see his parents again. He had to talk to them.

The sound of a car horn intruded upon him. In the next yard, there was a kid who seemed familiar. He was standing beside a roadster with a rumble seat.

“Hi,” the boy shouted at him.

“Hi!” Martin answered. He went toward the car.

“Nice, huh?” the boy asked. “First one of its kind in town. My dad just bought it for me.”

“What?” Martin asked.

“New car,” the boy’s smile was persistent. “First one of its kind. Beauty, huh?”

Martin looked from the front bumper to the rear light. “Got a rumble seat,” he said softly.

The boy tilted his head questioningly. “Sure, it’s got a rumble seat. It’s a roadster.”

“I haven’t seen a rumble seat in twenty years.”

There was a silence and the boy’s face tried to recapture the enthusiasm of a moment before. “Where you been, mister? Siberia?

Martin Sloan didn’t answer him. He just stared at the roadster. First one of its kind in town, the boy had said. First one. Brand new. A 1934 automobile and it was brand new.

It was night when Martin Sloan returned to Oak Street and stood in front of his house looking at the incredibly warm lights that shone from within. The crickets were a million tambourines that came out of the darkness. There was a scent of hyacinth in the air. There was a quiet rustle of leaf-laden trees that screened out the moon and made odd shadows on cooling sidewalks. There was a feeling of summer, so well-remembered.

Martin Sloan had walked a lot of pavements and thought a lot of thoughts. He knew now with a clear and precise clarity that he was back twenty years in time. He had somehow, inexplicably, breached an unbreachable dimension. He was no longer disturbed nor apprehensive. He had a purpose now and a resolve. He wanted to put in a claim to the past. He went toward the front steps and his foot hit something soft. It was a baseball glove. He picked it up, slipped it on his hand, pounded the pocket as he had years ago. Then he discovered a bicycle propped up in the middle of the yard. He rang the bell on the handlebar and felt a hand enclose his and muffle the ring. He looked up to see Robert Sloan beside him.

“Back again, huh?” his father said.

“I had to come back, Pop. This is my house.” He held up the glove in his hand. “This is mine, too. You bought it for me on my eleventh birthday.”

His father’s eyes narrowed.

“You gave me a baseball, too,” Martin continued. “It had Lou Gehrig’s autograph on it.”

His father stared at him for a long, reflective moment. “Who are you?” he asked softly. “What do you want here?” He struck a match, lit his pipe, then held the match out while he studied Martin’s face in the brief flame.

“I just want to rest,” Martin said. “I just want to stop running for a while. I belong here. Don’t you understand, Pop? I belong here.”

Robert Sloan’s face softened. He was a kind man and a sensitive one. And wasn’t there something about this stranger which gave him an odd feeling? Something about him that—that looked familiar?

“Look, son,” he said. “You’re probably sick. You’ve got delusions or something, maybe. I don’t want to hurt you and I don’t want you to get in any trouble either. But you’d better get out of here or there
will
be trouble.”

There was the sound of the screen door behind him opening and Mrs. Sloan came out.

“Who are you talking to, Rob—” she began to call. She stopped abruptly when she saw Martin.

He ran over to the porch and up the steps to grab her. “Mom,” he shouted at her. “Look at me! Look into my face. You can tell, can’t you?”

Mrs. Sloan looked frightened and tried to back away.

“Mom!
Look at me
. Please! Who am I? Tell me who I am.”

“You’re a stranger,” Mrs. Sloan said. “I’ve never seen you before. Robert, tell him to go away.”

Martin grabbed her again and turned her around to face him.

“You’ve got a son named Martin, haven’t you? He goes to Emerson Public School. The month of August he spends at his aunt’s farm near Buffalo, and a couple of summers you’ve gone up to Saratoga Lake and rented a cottage there. And once I had a sister and she died when she was a year old.”

Mrs. Sloan stared at him wide-eyed. “Where’s Martin now? she said to her husband.

Again Martin tightened his grip on her shoulders. “
I’m Martin,
” he shouted. “I’m your son! You’ve got to believe me. I’m your son Martin.” He released her and reached into his coat pocket to pull out his wallet. He began to tear out cards. “See? See? All my cards are in here. All my identification. Read them. Go ahead, read them.”

He tried to force the wallet on her and his mother, desperate and frightened, lashed out and slapped him across the face. It was an instinctive action, done with all her strength. Martin stood stock still, the wallet slipping out of his fingers to fall to the ground, his head shaking from side to side as if a terrible mistake had been made and he was amazed that the woman couldn’t perceive it. From the distance came the sound of the calliope. Martin turned to listen. He walked down the steps past his father to the front walk. He stood there for a moment listening to the calliope again. Then he began to run down the middle of the street toward the sound of the music.

“Martin,” he shouted, as he raced toward the park. “Martin! Martin! Martin, I’ve got to talk to you!”

The park was lit up with lanterns and street lights and colored electric signs on the stands. A moving path of light from the merry-go-round went round and round and played on Martin’s face as he looked wildly around to find an eleven-year-old boy in a night filled with them. Then suddenly he saw him. He was riding the merry-go-round.

Martin raced over to it, grabbed a post as it whirled past and catapulted himself on to the moving platform. He started a running, stumbling journey through a maze of bobbing horses and a hundred little faces that moved up and down.

“Martin,” he shouted, colliding with a horse. “Martin, please, I have to talk to you!”

The little boy heard his name, looked over his shoulder, saw the man with the disheveled hair and perspiring face coming toward him. He climbed off the horse, threw his box of popcorn away and started to run, threading his way expertly among the rising and dipping horses.

“Martin!” Sloan’s voice called after him.

He was getting closer. He was only ten or fifteen feet away now, but the boy continued to run from him.

It happened suddenly. Martin came within an arm’s length of the boy and reached out to grab him. The boy looked over his shoulder and, unseeing, stepped over the edge of the platform and fell head-long into whirling, multicolored space. His leg caught on a protruding piece of metal that extended from under the platform, and for a shrieking, agonizing moment he was dragged along with the merry-go-round. The boy screamed just once before the attendant, his face a pale mask, reached for the clutch and pulled it back. No one noticed then or remembered later that two screams joined the calliope music as it died away in a dissonant, premature finale. Two screams. One from an eleven-year-old boy, descending through a nightmare, before he blacked out. One from Martin Sloan who felt a piercing agony shoot through his right leg. He clutched at it, almost falling. There were shouts now from mothers and children as they raced toward the little boy lying a few feet from the merry-go-round, face down in the dirt. They collected around him. An attendant pushed his way through and kneeled by the boy. He gently lifted him in his arms and a little girl’s high-pitched voice rose over the crowd.

“Look at his leg. Look at his leg.”