The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (25 page)

“No,” he screamed. “No.”

Like a hippopotamus in a circus, he scrambled over the bush, tearing his clothes and scratching his face and arms. His wife tried to run toward him, but somebody stuck a foot out and she tripped, sprawling head first on the sidewalk. Another stone whistled through the air and hit Charlie on the back of the head as he raced across his front yard toward his porch. A rock smashed at the porch light and sent glass cascading down on his head.

“It isn’t me,” he screamed back at them as they came toward him across the front lawn. “It isn’t me, but I know who it is,” he said suddenly, without thought. Even as he said it, he realized it was the only possible thing to say.

People stopped, motionless as statues, and a voice called out from the darkness. “All right, Charlie, who is it?”

He was a grotesque, fat figure of a man who smiled now through the tears and the blood that cascaded down his face. “Well, I’m going to tell you,” he said. “I am now going to tell you, because I know who it is. I really know who it is. It’s...”

“Go ahead, Charlie!” a voice commanded him. “Who’s the monster?”

Don Martin pushed his way to the front of the crowd. “All right, Charlie, now! Let’s hear it!”

Charlie tried to think. He tried to come up with a name. A nightmare engulfed him. Fear whipped at the back of his brain. “It’s the kid,” he screamed. “That’s who it is. It’s the kid!”

Sally Bishop screamed and grabbed at Tommy, burying his face against her. “That’s crazy,” she said to the people who now stared at her. “That’s crazy. He’s a little boy.”

“But he knew,” said Mrs. Sharp. “He was the only one who knew. He told us all about it. Well how did he know? How could he have known?”

Voices supported her. “How could he know?” “Who told him?” “Make the kid answer.” A fever had taken hold now, a hot, burning virus that twisted faces and forced out words and solidified the terror inside of each person on Maple Street.

Tommy broke away from his mother and started to run. A man dove at him in a flying tackle and missed. Another man threw a stone wildly toward the darkness. They began to run after him down the street. Voices shouted through the night, women screamed. A small child’s voice protested—a playmate of Tommy’s, one tiny voice of sanity in the middle of a madness as men and women ran down the street, the sidewalks, the curbs, looking blindly for a twelve-year-old boy.

And then suddenly the lights went on in another house—a two-story, gray stucco house that belonged to Bob Weaver. A man screamed, “It isn’t the kid. It’s Bob Weaver’s house!”

A porch light went on at Mrs. Sharp’s house and Sally Bishop screamed, “It isn’t Bob Weaver’s house. It’s Mrs. Sharp’s place.”

“I tell you it’s the kid,” Charlie screamed.

The lights went on and off, on and off down the street. A power mower suddenly began to move all by itself lurching crazily across a front yard, cutting an irregular patch of grass until it smashed against the side of the house.

“It’s Charlie,” Don Martin screamed. “He’s the one.” And then he saw his own lights go on and off.

They ran this way and that way, over to one house and then back across the street to another. A rock flew through the air and then another. A pane of glass smashed and there was the cry of a woman in pain. Lights on and off, on and off. Charlie Farnsworth went down on his knees as a piece of brick plowed a two-inch hole in the back of his skull. Mrs. Sharp lay on her back screaming, and felt the tearing jab of a woman’s high heel in her mouth as someone stepped on her, racing across the street.

From a quarter of a mile away, on a hilltop, Maple Street looked like this, a long tree-lined avenue full of lights going on and off and screaming people racing back and forth. Maple Street was a bedlam. It was an outdoor asylum for the insane. Windows were broken, street lights sent clusters of broken glass down on the heads of women and children. Power mowers started up and car engines and radios. Blaring music mixed with the screams and shouts and the anger.

Up on top of the hill two men, screened by the darkness, stood near the entrance to a spaceship and looked down on Maple Street. “Understand the procedure now? the first figure said. “Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers. Throw them into darkness for a few hours and then watch the pattern unfold.”

“And this pattern is always the same?” the second figure asked.

“With few variations,” came the answer. “They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and it’s themselves. All we need do is sit back—and watch.”

“Then I take it,” figure two said, “this place, this Maple Street, is not unique?”

Figure one shook his head and laughed. “—By no means. Their world is full of Maple Streets and we’ll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves.” He started up the incline toward the entrance of the spaceship. “One to the other,” he said as the other figure followed him. “One to the other.” There was just the echo of his voice as the two figures disappeared and a panel slid softly across the entrance. “One to the other,” the echo said.

When the sun came up on the following morning Maple Street was silent. Most of the houses had been burned. There were a few bodies lying on sidewalks and draped over porch railings. But the silence was total. There simply was no more life. At four o’clock that afternoon there was no more world, or at least not the kind of world that had greeted the morning. And by Wednesday afternoon of the following week, a new set of residents had moved into Maple Street.

They were a handsome race of people. Their faces showed great character. Great character indeed. Great character and excellently shaped heads. Excellently shaped heads—two to each new resident.

From Rod Serling’s closing narration, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” The Twilight Zone, January 1, 1960, CBS Television Network.

Now the CAMERA PANS UP for a shot of the starry sky and over this we hear the Narrator’s Voice.

NARRATOR’S VOICE

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices—to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children...and the children yet unborn.

(a pause)

And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.

FADE TO BLACK

The Lonely

It was like the surface of a giant stove—this desert that stretched in a broiling yellow mat to the scrubby line of mountains on one side and the shimmering salt flats on the other. Occasional dunes and gullies punctuated the yellow sameness with thin, dark purple streaks. But for the most part it looked endless and unchanging; a barren mass of sand that beckoned the heat rays and then soaked them into itself.

The shack was an alien element on the scene. It stood some eighty miles from the nearest mountains. It was built of corrugated metal and had a flat, sloping roof. Alongside it was a 1943 sedan, the metal pitted, windshield without glass, looking as if a wind could blow it apart. And sitting on the metal porch, shaded by the overhang of the roof, was James Corry. He was forty, with a lean, long-jawed face and deep-set, light blue eyes. His hair, once brown, was now a bleached-out thatch that hung dry over his forehead, with streaks of gray at the temples.

Corry was writing slowly and painstakingly in a large diary. Sometimes he paused and squinted out at the desert around him. In the beginning Corry had been able to lose himself in activities—and forget the desert. When he’d put the old car together, for example, he’d been able to work three or four hours at a stretch unmindful of the white orb overhead or even the furnace-like air that sometimes hung heavy and sometimes was thrown at him by the wind in hot gusts.

But that was five years ago when he first was put down here. The old beat-up car had occupied his time. And writing in his diary had done more for him than pass the time. It had been like a survival exercise, in the practice of which a man could train himself to compartmentalize his thoughts, shut out the heat, disregard the loneliness, and somehow make a day go by and then a night and then another day...and then another day...and then another day...

He’d been thirty-five when it happened, on Earth. At odd times it would come back to him, graphic and clear, in actual chronology and vivid, almost unbearable, recall. He could see the dead body of his wife, struck down by a wildly speeding driver. This incredibly beautiful woman, in one violent, shrieking moment, was turned into a thing of horror, to lie, an unrecognizable pulp, on a city street while the drunken maniac responsible careened along to wind up against a lamp post.

Corry saw it happen from his apartment window and dashed out into the street. He took one look at his wife and then ran toward the smashed car. The driver was getting out, his face ashen with a sudden sobriety laced with horror. It had taken only a moment for Corry to do his job. Goaded by a fury, an anger, a hatred, a torment which knew no bounds he strangled the man with his bare hands while onlookers screamed and two large men had been unable to tear him away.

His trial had been brief. The extenuating circumstances surrounding the homicide kept him from the “release pills” that had long ago taken over for gas chambers, gallows, and electric chairs. But often, sitting on the front porch of his desert home, fingers shaking, skin feeling taut, poreless, his whole body somehow mummified and foreign to him, he would reflect that a sentence of thirty-five years on a sandy asteroid could be less compassionate than a swift, painless exit into a black void.

Corry fingered quickly through the pages of his diary from August 1993 back to June of 1990, remembering in another portion of his brain how long that passage of time had taken in actuality.

He looked out toward the distant salt flats. He had started walking toward them three years ago and collapsed three hours away from the shack. He knew then that the heat and the desert were bars and that the area around his home was a dungeon.

He didn’t remember exactly at what point he had become unable to lose himself in writing or doing chores, and the loneliness of the place began to take on an almost physical discomfort. It was an emotional reaction, but it carried with it an ache of body and mind that was deep, real, and constant.

“Banishment” is what they called his punishment. Banishment. Half a lifetime on an asteroid, visited four times a year by a supply ship which stayed, on the average, twelve minutes between landing and taking off. The arrival of the spaceship was like a breath of sanity, a recharging of the mind so that it could function during the next three months.

Corry penciled in the last line of the day’s entry, closed the book and thought with relief that it wouldn’t be long before the supply ship came again. He went over to the car and leaned against it, feeling the heat press against his back, wishing in some strange, illogical way, that he could perspire. At least this would be a manifestation of his body. It would be a remonstrance against the elements. But as it was, his flesh was like the sand he walked on. It took in the heat uninvited and was incapable of reacting.

He reached through the windowless opening of the door and pressed the horn. It gave off a deep, sludgy, raspy kind of noise and then quickly died away. He pressed it again several times, then turned very slowly, leaning against the door, and let his eyes travel the width of the desert beyond. There was a ritual even to loneliness, he thought. Twice a day he went to his car, to look at it, touch the horn, and sometimes sit in the front seat, staring through a glassless windshield, succumbing to a wishful daydream that the car was on a highway and there was some place to go.

Banished.

The word held little meaning for him before his sentence.

Banished.

It meant something now. It meant a heat that was unbearable. It meant a loneliness beyond rationale. A sobbing hunger for someone of his own kind. A shaky, pulsating yearning to hear a voice other than his own.

He went back to the porch, touching the metal railing. It had cooled slightly and this meant that night was coming. He looked down at his diary lying on the metal folding chair. He knew exactly what he had written. His mind could pick up anything now and give it back to him because it was uncluttered, almost a desert itself.