The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (35 page)

“Tonight,” she said, feeling no more pity or fascination, “tonight I’m taking a hog-calling lesson. You know what a hog is, don’t you, Mr. Finchley? He’s a terribly bright fathead who writes for gourmet magazines and condescends to let a few other slobs exist in the world for the purpose of taking his rudeness and running back and forth at his beck and call! Good night, Mr. Finchley.”

She saw his shoulders slump and he was silent. Again she felt compelled to remain because this was so unlike him, so foreign to him not to top her, not to meet her barb head on, divert it, and send one of his own back at her, stronger, faster, and much more damaging. When he finally turned she saw again that his face had an odd look and there was something supplicating, something frightening and something, inconceivable though it was, lonely.

“Miss Rogers,” he said, his voice gentler than she’d ever heard it, “before you do...before you go—” he made a kind of halfhearted gesture, “—have a cup of coffee or something.” He turned away so that she would be unable to see his face. “I’d like very much,” he continued, “I’d like very much not to be alone for a while.”

Edith Rogers came back into the living room and stood close to him. “Are you ill?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Bad news or something?”

“No.”

There was a silence.

“What’s your trouble?” she asked.

He whirled on her, his thin lips twisted. “Does there have to be trouble just because I—”

He stopped, ran a hand over his face, and half fell into a chair. For the first time she observed the circles under his eyes, the pinched look of the mouth, the strangely haunted look.

“I’m desperately tired,” he said abruptly. “I haven’t slept for four nights and the very thought of being alone now—” He grimaced, obviously hating this, feeling the reluctance of the strong man having to admit a weakness. “Frankly,” he said, looking away, “it’s intolerable. Things have been happening, Miss Rogers, very odd things.”

“Go on.”

He pointed toward the TV set. “That...that thing over there. It goes on late at night and wakes me up. It goes on all by itself.” His eyes swept across the room toward the hall. “And that portable radio I used to keep in my bedroom. It went on and off, just as I was going to sleep.”

His head went down and when he looked up his eyes darted around paranoically. “There’s a conspiracy in this house, Miss Rogers.” Seeing her expression, he raised his voice in rebuttal. “That’s exactly what it is—a conspiracy! The television set, the radio, lighters, electric clocks, that...that miserable car I drive.”

He rose from the chair, his face white and intense. “Last night I drove it into the driveway. Just drove it into the driveway, mind you. Very slowly. Very carefully.” He took a step toward her, his fingers clenching and unclenching at his sides. “The wheel turned in my hands. Hear me?
The wheel turned in my hand!
The car deliberately hit the side of the garage. Broke a headlight.—That clock up there on the mantelpiece!”

Edith looked at the mantelpiece. There was no clock there. She turned to him questioningly.

“I...I threw it away,” Finchley announced lamely. Then, pointedly and forcefully he said, “What I’m getting at, Miss Rogers, is that for as long as I’ve lived...I’ve never been able to operate
machines.
” He spit out the last word as if it were some kind of epithet.

Edith Rogers stared at him, for the first time seeing a part of the man that had been kept hidden beneath a veneer and a smoking jacket.

“Mr. Finchley,” she said very softly, “I think you ought to see a doctor.”

Finchley’s eyes went wide and the face and the voice were the Finchley of old. “A
doctor
,” he shrieked at her. “The universal panacea of the dreamless twentieth-century idiot! If you’re depressed—see a doctor. If you’re happy—see a doctor. If the mortgage is too high and the salary too low—see a doctor. You,” he screamed at her, “Miss Rogers,
you
see a doctor.” Fury plugged up his voice for a moment and then he screamed at her again. “I’m a logical, rational, intelligent man. I know what I see. I know what I hear. For the past three months I’ve been seeing and hearing a collection of wheezy Frankensteins whose whole purpose is to destroy me! Now what do you think about
that
, Miss Rogers!”

The girl studied him for a moment. “I think you’re terribly ill, Mr. Finchley. I think you need medical attention.” She shook her head. “I think you’ve got a very bad case of nerves from lack of sleep and I think that way down deep you yourself realize that these are nothing more than delusions.”

She looked down at the floor for a moment, then turned and started out of the room.

“Now where are you going?” he shouted at her.

“You don’t need company, Mr. Finchley,” she said from the hall. “You need analysis.”

He half ran over to her, grabbed her arm, whirled her around.

“You’re no different from a cog-wheeled, electrically generated metal machine yourself. You haven’t an iota of compassion or sympathy.”

She struggled to free her arm. “Mr. Finchley, please let me go.”

“I’ll let you go,” he yelled, “when I get good and ready to let you go!”

Edith continued to struggle, hating the scene, desperately wanting to end it, and yet not knowing how.

“Mr. Finchley,” she said to him, trying to push him off, “this is ugly. Now please let me go.” She was growing frightened.
“Let go of me!”

Suddenly, instinctively, she slapped him across the face. He dropped her arm abruptly and stared at her as if disbelieving that anything of this sort could happen to him. That he, Bartlett Finchley, could be struck by a woman. Again his lips trembled and his features worked. A burning fury took possession of him.

“Get out of here,” he said in a low, menacing voice, “and don’t come back!”

“With distinct pleasure,” Edith said, breathing heavily, “and with manifest relief.” She whirled around and went to the door.

“Remember,” he shouted at her, “don’t come back. I’ll send you a check. I will not be intimidated by machines, so it follows that no empty-headed little broad with a mechanical face can do anything to me either.”

She paused at the door, wanting air and freedom and most of all to get out of there. “Mr. Finchley,” she said softly, “in this conspiracy you’re suffering...this mortal combat between you and the appliances—I
hope you get licked!”

She went out and slammed the door behind her. He stood there motionless, conjuring up some line of dialogue he could fling at her, some final cutting witticism that could leave him the winner. But no inspiration came and it was in the midst of this that he suddenly heard the electric typewriter keys.

He listened for a horrified moment until the sound stopped. Then he went to his study There was paper in the typewriter. Finchley turned the roller so that he could read the words on it. There were three lines of type and each one read, “Get out of here, Finchley.”

That was what the typewriter had written all by itself. “Get out of here, Finchley.” He ripped the paper from the machine, crumpled it, and flung it on the floor.

“Get out of here, Finchley,” he said aloud. “Goddamn you. Who are you, to tell me to get out of here?” He shut his eyes tightly and ran a fluttery hand over a perspiring face. “Why this is...this is absurd. It’s a typewriter. It’s a machine. It’s a silly, Goddamn machine—”

He froze again as a voice came from the television set in the living room.

“Get out of here, Finchley,” the voice said.

He felt his heart pounding inside him as he turned and raced into the living room. There was a little Mexican girl on the screen doing a dance with a tambourine. He could have sworn that each time she clicked her heels past the camera she stared pointedly at him. But as the music continued and the girl kept on dancing, Finchley reached a point where he was almost certain that the whole thing was a product of his sleeplessness, his imagination, and perhaps just a remnant of the emotional scene he had just gone through with Edith Rogers.

But then the music stopped. The girl bowed to the applause of an unseen audience and, when she had taken her bows, looked directly out of the screen into Finchley’s face.

She smiled at him and said very clearly, “You’d better get out of here, Finchley!”

Finchley screamed, picked up a vase, and threw it across the room. He did not think or aim, but the piece of ceramic smashed into the television set, splintering the glass in front to be followed by a loud noise and a puff of smoke. But clearly—ever so clearly from the smoking shambles of its interior—came the girl’s voice again.

“You’d better get out of here, Finchley,” the voice said, and Finchley screamed again as he raced out of the room, into the hall and up the stairs.

On the top landing he turned and shouted down the stairs. “All right! All right, you machines! You’re not going to intimidate me! Do you hear me? You are not going to intimidate
me
! You...you machines!”

And from down below in the study—dull, methodical, but distinctly audible—came the sound of typewriter keys and Finchley knew what they were writing. He started to cry, the deep, harsh sobs of a man who has gone without sleep, and who has closeted his fears deep inside.

He went blindly into his bedroom and shut the door, tears rolling down his face, making the room into a shimmering, indistinct pattern of satin drapes, pink walls, and fragile Louis XIV furniture, all blurred together in the giant mirror that covered one side of the room.

He flung himself on the bed and buried his face against the pillow. Through the closed door he continued to hear the sound of the typewriter keys as they typed out their message over and over again. Finally they stopped and there was silence in the house.

At seven o’clock that evening, Mr. Finchley, dressed in a silk bathrobe and a white silk ascot, perched near the pillow of his bed and dialed a number on the ivory-colored, bejeweled telephone.

“Yes,” he said into the phone. “Yes. Miss Moore please. Agatha? Bartlett Finchley here. Yes, my dear, it has been a long time.” He smiled, remembering Miss Moore’s former attachment to him. “Which indeed prompts this call,” he explained. “How about dinner this evening?” His face fell as the words came to him from the other end of the line. “I see. Well, of course, it is short notice. But...yes...yes, I see. Yes, I’ll call you again, my dear.”

He put the phone down, stared at it for a moment, then picked it up and dialed another number.

“Miss Donley, please,” he said, as if he were announcing a princess entering a state ball. “Pauline, is this you?” He was aware that his voice had taken on a false, bantering tone he was unaccustomed to and hated even as he used it. “And how’s my favorite attractive young widow this evening?” He felt his hand shake. “Bartlett,” he said. “Bartlett Finchley. I was wondering if—Oh. I see. I see. Well I’m delighted. I’m simply delighted. I’ll send you a wedding gift. Of course. Good night.”

He slammed the telephone down angrily. God, what could be more stupid than a conniving female hell-bent for marriage. He had a dim awareness of the total lack of logic for his anger. But disappointment and the prospect of a lonely evening made him quite unconcerned with logic. He stared at the phone, equating it with his disappointment, choosing to believe at this moment that in the cause and effect of things, this phone had somehow destroyed his plans. He suddenly yanked it out of the wall, flinging it across the room. His voice was tremulous.

“Telephones. Just like all the rest of them. Exactly like all the rest. A whole existence dedicated to embarrassing me or inconveniencing me or making my life miserable.

He gave the phone a kick and turned his back to it. Bravado crept backwards into his voice.

“Well, who needs you?” he asked rhetorically. “Who needs any of you? Bartlett Finchley is going out this evening. He’s going out to have a wonderful dinner with some good wine and who knows what attractive young lady he may meet during his meanderings. Who knows indeed!”