The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (14 page)

Martin Sloan, aged eleven, was carried out of the park, his right leg bleeding and mutilated. Martin tried to reach him but already they had carried him off. There was a silence and then a murmur of voices. People began to drift out of the area to their homes. Concession stands closed up. Lights went off. Within a moment Martin found himself alone. He leaned his head against one of the guard poles of the merry-go-round and closed his eyes.

“I only wanted to tell you,” he whispered. “I only wanted to tell you that this was the wonderful time for you. Don’t let any of it go by without enjoying it. There won’t be any more merry-go-rounds. No more cotton candy. No more band concerts. I only wanted to tell you, Martin, that this is the wonderful time. Now! Here! That’s all. That’s all I wanted to tell you.”

He felt a sadness well up inside of him. “God help me, Martin, that’s all I wanted to tell you!”

He went over to the edge of the platform and sat down. Wooden horses stared lifelessly at him. Shuttered concession stands surveyed him blindly. The summer night hung all around him and let him alone. He didn’t know how long he had sat there when he heard footsteps. He looked up to see his father walk across the merry-go-round platform to reach his side. Robert Sloan looked down at him and held out a wallet in his hand. Martin’s wallet.

“I thought you’d want to know,” Robert said. “The boy will be all right. He may limp some, the doctor told us, but he’ll be all right.”

Martin nodded. “I thank God for that.”

“You dropped this by the house,” Robert said, handing him the wallet. “I looked inside.”

“And?”

“It told quite a few things about you,” Robert said earnestly. “The driver’s license, cards, the money in it.” He paused for a moment. “It seems that you
are
Martin Sloan. You’re thirty-six years old. You have an apartment in New York.” Then, with a question in his voice—“it says your license expires in 1960. That’s twenty-five years from now. The dates on the bills—the money, those dates haven’t arrived yet, either.”

Martin looked straight in his father’s face. “You know now then, don’t you?” he asked.

Robert nodded. “Yes, I know. I know who you are and I know you’ve come a long way from here. A long way and—a long time. I don’t know why or how. Do you?”

Martin shook his head.

“But you know other things, don’t you, Martin? Things that will happen.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You also know when your mother and I—when we’ll—”

Martin whispered, “Yes, I know that, too.”

Robert took the pipe out of his mouth and studied Martin for a long moment. “Well, don’t tell me. I’d appreciate not knowing. That’s a part of the mystery we live with. I think it should always be a mystery.” There was a moment’s pause. “Martin?”

“Yes, Dad.”

Robert put his hand on Martin’s shoulder. “You have to leave here. There’s no room for you. And there’s no place. Do you understand?”

Martin nodded and said softly, “I see that now. But I
don’t
understand. Why not?”

Robert smiled. “I guess because we only get one chance. Maybe there’s only one summer to a customer.” Now his voice was deep and rich with compassion. “The little boy...the one I know, the one who belongs here. This is his summer, Martin. Just as it was yours one time.” He shook his head. “Don’t make him share it.”

Martin rose and looked off toward the darkened park.

“Is it so bad—where you’re from?” Robert asked him.

“I thought so,” Martin answered. “I’ve been living at a dead run, Dad. I’ve been weak and I made believe I was strong. I’ve been scared to death—but I’ve been playing a strong man. And suddenly it all caught up with me. And I felt so tired, Pop. I felt so damned tired, running for so long. Then—one day I knew I had to come back. I had to come back and get on a merry-go-round and listen to a band concert and eat cotton candy. I had to stop and breathe and close my eyes and smell and listen.”

“I guess we all want that,” Robert said gently. ‘But, Martin, when you go back, maybe you’ll find that there are merry-go-rounds and band concerts where you are and summer nights, too. Maybe you haven’t looked in the right place. You’ve been looking behind you, Martin. Try looking ahead.”

There was a silence. Martin turned to look at his father. He felt a love, an acme of tenderness, a link, deeper than flesh that ties men to men.

“Maybe, Dad,” he said. “Maybe. Good-by, Dad.”

Robert walked several feet away, stopped, remained there for a moment, his back to Martin, then he turned toward him again. “Good-by—son,” he said.

An instant later he was gone. Behind Martin the merry-go-round began to move. The lights were off, there was no noise, only the shadowy figures of the horses going round and round. Martin stepped on it as it turned, a quiet herd of wooden steeds with painted eyes that went around in the night. It went a full circle and then began to slow down. There was no one on it. Martin Sloan was gone.

Martin Sloan went into the drugstore. It was the one he remembered as a boy, but aside from the general shape of the room and the stairway leading to an office off a small balcony, it bore no resemblance to the place he remembered. It was light and cheerful with strips of fluorescent lights, a blaring, garish juke box, a fancy soda bar full of shining chrome. There were a lot of high school kids there dancing to the juke box, poring over the teen mags in the corner near the front window. It was air conditioned and very cool. Martin walked through the smoke of cigarettes, the blaring rock ‘n’ roll, the laughing voices of the kids, his eyes looking around trying to find any single thing that had familiarity. A young soda jerk behind the counter smiled at him.

“Hi,” he said. “Something for you?”

Martin sat down on one of the chrome and leather stools.

“Maybe a chocolate soda, huh?” he said to the kid behind the fountain. “Three dips?”

“Three dips?” the soda jerk repeated. “Sure, I can make one with three dips for you. It’ll be extra. Thirty-five cents. Okay?”

Martin smiled a little sadly. “Thirty-five cents, huh?” His eyes scanned the room again. “How about old Mr. Wilson,” he asked. “Used to own this place.”

“Oh, he died,” the soda jerk said. “A long time ago. Maybe fifteen, twenty years. What kind of ice cream you want? Chocolate? Vanilla?”

Martin wasn’t listening to him.

“Vanilla?” the soda jerk repeated.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Martin said. “I guess I’ll pass on the soda.”

He started to get off the stool and half stumbled as his stiff right leg was thrust out momentarily in an awkward position. “These stools weren’t built for bum legs,” he said with a rueful grin.

The soda jerk looked concerned. “Guess not. Get that in the war?”

“What?”

“Your leg. Did you get that in the war?”

“No,” said Martin thoughtfully. “As a matter of fact I got it falling off a merry-go-round when I was a kid. Freak thing.”

The soda jerk snapped his fingers. “The merry-go-round! Hey, I remember the merry-go-round. They tore it down a few years ago. Condemned it.” Then he smiled sympathetically. “Little late I guess, huh?”

“How’s that?” Martin asked.

“A little late for you, I mean.”

Martin took a long look around the drugstore. “Very late,” he said softly. “Very late for me.”

He went out into the hot summer day again. The hot summer day that appeared on the calendar as June 26, 1959. He walked down the main street and out of the town, back toward the gas station, where he’d left his car for a lube job and oil change so long ago. He walked slowly, his right leg dragging slightly along the dusty shoulder of the highway.

At the gas station he paid the attendant, got into his car, turned it around and started back toward New York City. Only once did he glance over his shoulder at a sign which read, “Homewood, 1 ½ miles.” The sign was wrong. He knew that much. Homewood was farther away than that. It was much farther.

The tall man in the Brooks Brothers suit, driving a red Mercedes-Benz, gripped the wheel thoughtfully as he headed south toward New York. He didn’t know exactly what would face him at the other end of the journey. All he knew was that he’d discovered something. Homewood. Homewood, New York. It wasn’t walking distance.

From Rod Serling’s closing narration, “Walking Distance,”
The Twilight Zone
, October 30, 1959,CBS Television Network.

LONG ANGLE SHOT

Looking down as the car slowly starts onto the highway. Over the disappearing car we hear the Narrator’s Voice.

NARRATOR’S VOICE

Martin Sloan, age thirty-six. Vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things, but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again.

(a pause)

And also like all men perhaps there’ll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he’ll look up from what he’s doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope—and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there’ll flit a little errant wish—that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth.

(a pause)

And he’ll smile then too because he’ll know it is just an errant wish. Some wisp of memory not too important really. Some laughing ghosts that cross a man’s mind...that are a part of The Twilight Zone.

Now the CAMERA PANS down the road to the sign that reads “Homewood, 1 ½ miles.”

FADE TO BLACK

The Fever

It was this way with Franklin Gibbs. He had a carefully planned, precisely wrought little life that encompassed a weekly Kiwanis meeting on Thursday evening at the Salinas Hotel; an adult study group sponsored by his church on Wednesday evening; church each Sunday morning; his job as a teller at the local bank; and about one evening a week spent with friends playing Parcheesi or something exciting like that. He was a thin, erect, middle-aged, little man whose narrow shoulders were constantly kept pinned back in the manner of a West Point plebe and he wore a tight-fitting vest which spanned a pigeon chest. On his lapel was a Kiwanis ten-year attendance pin and, above that, a fifteen-year service pin given him by the president of the bank. He and his wife lived on Elm Street in a small, two-bedroom house which was about twenty years old, had a small garden in back, and an arbor of roses in front which were Mr. Gibbs’s passion.

Flora Gibbs, married to Franklin for twenty-two years, was angular, with mousy, stringy hair and chest measurements perhaps a quarter of an inch smaller than her husband’s. She was quiet voiced though talkative, long, if unconsciously, suffering and had led a life devoted to the care and feeding of Franklin Gibbs, the placating of his sullen moods, his finicky appetite, and his uncontrollable rage at any change in the routine of their daily lives.

This background explains at least in part Franklin Gibbs’s violent reaction to Flora’s winning the contest. It was one of those crazy and unexpected things that seem occasionally to explode into an otherwise prosaic, uneventful life. And it had exploded into Flora’s. She had written in to a national contest explaining in exactly eighteen words why she preferred Aunt Martha’s ready-mix biscuits to any other brand. She had written concisely and sparingly, because her life was a concise and spare life without the frills or the little, flamboyant luxuries of other women, a life of rationed hours and budgeted moments; thin, skimpy, unadorned, unpunctuated, until the contest, by the remotest hint of variance or color. And then she got the telegram. Not the first prize—that would have been too much. (It happened to be fifty thousand dollars, and Franklin, with thin-lipped impatience, suggested that perhaps had she tried harder she might have won it.) It was the third prize, which involved a three-day trip for two, all expenses paid, to Las Vegas, Nevada, a beautiful room in a most exceptionally modern and famous gambling hotel, with shows, sightseeing tours, and wonderful food all thrown in, along with an airplane flight there and back.