The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (20 page)

He stepped out into the sunlight and went across the park toward a building with a big glass globe in front with lettering on it which read “Police.” He smiled to himself as he went toward it. Head for law and order, he thought. But more than just law and order—head for sanity. Maybe that’s where to find it. When you’re a little boy and lost, your mother tells you to go up to the nice policeman and tell him your name. Well, now he was a little boy and he was lost and there was no one else he could report to. And as to a name—someone would have to tell him.

The police station was dark and cool, split in half by a counter which ran the length of the room. Behind it was the sergeant’s desk and chair and across the far wall a radio operator’s table with microphone and a CW sending and receiving set. To the right was a barred door into a cell block. He went through the swinging door in the middle of the counter to the microphone. He picked it up, studying it, then illogically, as if it were expected of him to go along with the gag, he put on an official radio-car voice.

“Calling all cars. Calling all cars. Unknown man walking around police station. Very suspicious-looking egg. Probably wants to—” His voice broke off. Across the room by the sergeant’s desk, a thin column of smoke drifted lazily up toward the ceiling. He slowly put down the microphone and went to the desk. A big, quarter-smoked cigar was lying in an ash tray, lighted and smoking. He picked it up, then put it down. He felt a tension, a fear, a sense of being watched and listened to. He whirled around as if to catch someone in the act of just that—staring and listening.

The room was empty. He opened the barred door. It creaked noisily. He went into the cell block. There were eight cells, four on each side, and they were all empty. Through the bars of the last cell on the right he could see a sink. Water was running. Hot water. He saw the steam. On a shelf was a razor, dripping wet and a shaving brush, full of lather. He closed his eyes for a moment because this was too much. This was far too much. Show me goblins, he thought, or ghosts or monsters. Show me dead people walking in a parade. Play shrill and discordant trumpet sounds on a funeral horn that jars the stillness of the morning—but stop frightening me with the grotesque normality of things. Don’t show me cigar butts in ash trays and water running in a sink and lather-covered shaving brushes. These are what shock more than apparitions.

He slowly entered the cell and went to the sink. He reached out a trembling hand and touched the lather on the brush. It was real. It felt warm. It smelled of soap. The water dripped into the sink. The razor said Gillette, and he thought of the World Series on television and the New York Giants taking four in a row from the Cleveland Indians. But God that must have been ten years ago. Or maybe it was last year. Or maybe it hadn’t happened yet. Because now he had no base, no starting point, no date or time or place of reference. He was not conscious of the sound of the creaking cell door, as it slowly closed on him, until he saw the shadow of it on the wall inching across slowly, inexorably.

He let out a sob and flung himself across to the door, squeezing through just before it closed. He hung on to it for a moment, then backed away from the cell to lean against the door on the opposite side, and stare across at the now closed and locked door as if it were a kind of poisonous animal.

Something told him to run. Run. Run like hell. Get out. Take off. Get away. It was a whispered command in his inner ear. It was a last ditch order from an embattled mind, assaulted by nightmarish fear that could at any moment lock him rooted to the earth. It was all his instincts screaming at him in the name of safety and salvation. Get the hell out of here. Run! Run! RUN!

He was outside in the sun racing across the street, stumbling over the curb, scratching himself on a hedge as he ploughed headfirst into it. Then over the hedge and into the park, running, running, running. He saw the school building loom up in front of him and there was a statue in front. His motion carried him up the steps to the statue until suddenly he found himself clutching a metal leg of a heroic looking educator who died in 1911 and whose metal visage loomed up in front of him silhouetted against the blue sky. Then he began to cry He looked up at the stillness, the stores, the movie theater, and finally the statue, and he cried. “Where is everybody? Please, for Christ’s sake tell me...where is everybody?”

The young man sat on the curb in the late afternoon staring down at his shadow and the other shadows that flanked him. A store awning, a bus-stop sign, a streetlight post—formless globs of shadow that stretched across the sidewalk in a line. He slowly rose to his feet, looked briefly at the bus-stop sign and then down the street as if in some halfhearted, half-hopeless expectation of seeing a big red and white bus approach, open its doors, let out a crowd of people. People. That’s what the young man wanted to see. His own kind.

The silence had been building all day. It had become an entity all of itself, a pressure on him, an oppressive, hot, itchy, wool-like thing that surrounded and covered him, that made him sweat and squirm and wish he could throw it off and crawl out.

He took a slow walk down the main street—his fortieth or fiftieth walk down that same street since morning. He passed the now familiar stores, looking into the now familiar doors, and it was the same. Counters, goods unattended.

He entered a bank for the fourth time that afternoon, and also for the fourth time, walked behind the tellers’ cages, picking up handfuls of money and throwing them aside. Once he lit his cigarette from a hundred-dollar bill and laughed uproariously at it until suddenly, after he’d thrown the half-burnt bill down on the ground, he found himself unable to laugh any longer. All right, so a guy can light a cigarette from a hundred-dollar bill, but so what?

He walked out of the bank and then crossed the street and headed for the drugstore. There was a two-for-one sale announced on signs plastered across the window. Church bells rang from down the street and this jarred him. For a moment he flattened himself against the side of the drugstore staring wildly toward the sound until he realized what it was.

He walked into the drugstore, a big, square room surrounded by high counters and shelves with many glass display cases running in lines across the room. A big, mirror-backed fountain was at the rear, with pictures of floats and frappes and sodas and malts. He stopped by the cigar counter, helped himself to an expensive one, took off its paper and sniffed.

“A good cigar, that’s what this country needs,” he said aloud as he walked toward the fountain. “A good cigar. A couple of good cigars. And some people to smoke them—”

He put the cigar carefully in a breast pocket and went in back of the fountain. From there he scanned the room, the empty booths, the juke box selectors over each one. And felt the stillness of the place that was totally incongruous with what was in it. It was a room poised for action; a room on the verge of coming alive, but never quite doing so. Behind the fountain were the ice-cream containers. He picked up an ice-cream scoop, took a glass dish from a shelf near the mirror and put two large scoops of ice cream in it. He covered this with syrup, then with nuts, added a cherry and some whipped cream.

He looked up and said, “—How about it, anybody? Anybody for a sundae?” He paused and listened to the silence. “Nobody, huh? Okay.”

He spooned up a large hunk of ice cream and cherry and whipped cream, put it in his mouth and liked the taste of it. For the first time he saw his reflection in the mirror and he was not surprised by what he saw. The face had a vaguely familiar look, not handsome, but not unpleasant. And young, he thought. It was quite young. It was the face of a man well under thirty. Maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, but no older. He studied the reflection. “You’ll forgive me, old pal,” he said to it, “but I don’t recollect the name. The face seems familiar, but the name escapes me.”

He took another bite of the ice cream, rolled it around in his mouth, melted it, and swallowed it, watching these actions in the mirror. He pointed the spoon very casually at the image.

“I’ll tell you what my problem is. I’m in the middle of a nightmare that I can’t wake up from. You’re part of it. You and the ice cream and the cigar. The police station and the phone booth—that little mannequin.” He looked down at the ice cream and then around at the drugstore, then back to his reflection.

“This whole bloody town—wherever it is—whatever it is—” He cocked his head to one side, suddenly remembering something and he grinned at the image.

“I just remembered something. Scrooge said it. You remember Scrooge, old buddy—Ebenezer Scrooge? It’s what he said to the ghost, Jacob Marley He said, ‘You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard. A crumb of cheese. A fragment of an undone potato. But there’s more of gravy about you than grave.’”

He put the spoon down now and pushed the ice cream away. “You see? That’s what you are. That’s what you all are. You’re what I had for dinner last night.” Now the smile faded. Something intense crept into the voice. “But I’ve had it now. I’ve had it. I want to wake up.” He turned from the mirror to the store and the empty booths. “If I can’t wake up I’ve got to find somebody to talk to. That much I’ve got to do. I’ve got to find somebody to talk to.”

For the first time he noticed a card standing on the counter. It was a basketball schedule of Carsville High School, announcing that on September 15th Carsville would play Corinth High. On September 21st, Carsville would play Leedsville. There’d be games on through December with six or seven other high schools—this was all announced matter-of-factly, quite officially, on the large poster.

“I must be a very imaginative guy!” the young man said at last. “Very, very imaginative. Everything right down to the last detail. The last little detail.”

He left the fountain and crossed the room to where there were several revolving pocket-book racks. Titles on the book covers flicked briefly across his consciousness, then disappeared. Murder stories, introduced on the covers by blondes in negligees, with titles like
The Brothel Death Watch
. Reprints of famous novels and gag books. Something called
Utterly Mad,
with a smiling half-wit face, captioned, “Alfred E. Neuman says, ‘What, me worry!’” Some of the books seemed familiar. Fragments of plots and characters made brief excursions into his mind. He absent-mindedly turned the racks as he walked by. They creaked around, sending titles, pictures and covers blurring in front of his eyes, until he saw one that made him reach forward, grab the rack to stop it.

The book’s cover depicted a kind of vast desert with a tiny, almost undistinguishable figure of a human being standing in the middle of it, arms akimbo, staring up toward the sky. There was a dim range of mountains beyond and, seemingly rising from the mountaintops, was a single line title,
The Last Man On Earth
.

The young man riveted his eyes to these words, feeling a fusion taking place between mind and sight.
The Last Man On Earth
. There was something especially meaningful—something of particular significance—something that suddenly made him gasp and whirl the rack around, sending the title off into a blurred orbit.

But when the rack slowed down, the book cover took on clarity again and it was then that he discovered there were many of them. There were many books of the last man on earth. Row after row of tiny figures standing, arms outstretched, on vast deserts, each cover staring back at him as the rack slowed and finally stopped moving.

He backed away from the books, unable to take his eyes away from them, until he reached the front door and briefly saw his reflection in the mirror—a white-faced, youngish looking man who stood at the entrance to a drugstore, looking tired, lonely, desperate and—frightened.

He went out, assuming composure while both his body and his mind pulled and yanked at him. Halfway across the street, he stopped, turning round and round and round.

Suddenly he shouted, “Hey? Hey! Hey, anybody? Anybody see me? Anybody hear me? Hey!”

An answer came after a moment. The deep throated, melodic bells of the church pealed out the notice of the passing day. They rang five times and then stopped. The echo lingered, and then this too faded away. The young man went down the street past the now familiar stores, no longer seeing them. His eyes were open but he saw nothing. He kept thinking of the book titles—
The Last Man On Earth
, and it did something to his insides. It was as if a heavy glob of indigestible food had gone protesting down his throat to settle, leaden and heavy, in his gut.
The Last Man On Earth
. The picture and the words stuck with frightening clarity in his consciousness. The tiny figure of the lone man in the desert, hands outstretched. The indistinct, lonely little figure whose fate was spread across the sky, across the mountain ranges beyond it—the last man on earth. He couldn’t shake that picture, or the words, as he headed toward the park.