True, I have been nervous and I have been mad, and I have swirled in maelstroms and trembled in awe at the grotesque and dreary fancies that visit me in the night. I am perhaps the worst of all possible presidents and almost certainly the worst of all possible Poes, but it is and has been my great honor to walk beside you all in our kingdom by the sea. My heart has grown swollen and loud—can you not hear its hideous rhythm?—with the blood of better men, and I take it now with me to be held dear wherever next I go.
As for myself, I am simply Edgar Usher Poe, the President of the United States—and this is my last duty.
S2E8: “UNABLE ARE THE LOVED TO DIE”
Air Date: October 25, 1962
Writer: David Findley
Director: Chester Gee
Synopsis: In the middle of the night, Paul Dearden (played by Edwin Martinsbrook, later of Circus Train! fame) awakens to a low pulsing groan from somewhere above his ceiling, and as he’s staring up, his daughter Penny (Judy Hendricksen) enters the room having also heard the noise.
Wielding a badminton racket, Paul climbs into the attic with Penny watching from the open hatch. He crawls past several boxes and comes finally to the one that is the source of the noise. He nudges it open, and inside he finds a small metal box. A series of lights on top are flashing and an alarm sounds from a speaker on the front.
“What’s that?” Penny asks.
“It’s a ghost detector,” Paul replies.
The episode shifts now to Paul’s childhood when he was the kind of boy who preferred to read scary comic books and magazines about movie monsters. One day he’s observing an abandoned house from the other side of the rusted iron fence, and a girl (Tessa Meadows) walks up beside him.
“Think it’s haunted?” she asks.
“Prob’ly,” Paulie replies.
“Wanna find out?”
So begins Paulie’s great friendship (and later love) with Kat, one expressed in a montage of reading together in the library, searching for flying saucers at night with binoculars in the backyard, and trying to cast spells in the woods. He builds her a ghost detecting machine and together they use it to explore the abandoned house.
On a rickety stair, Paulie nearly loses his balance and Kat catches him. Then she leans in quickly and kisses him.
Back in the present, Paul and Penny are sitting at the kitchen table watching the ghost detector blink and beep.
“The thing is,” he’s explaining, “it never worked. Not once. We went all over with it, every scary house, even the graveyard. Nothing. But we had a great time and never gave up believing. In a way, that’s why you’re here.”
Penny picks up the ghost detector and extends its antenna. “Do you think it might be...”
They stare at the box a moment and then hurry to get dressed. Then they drive all over town with it, Penny leaning outside of the window to hold it high. They follow the pulsing lights and sounds to the zoo, to the beach, to a big tree in the park that they climb to the top, to an ice cream shop, and even the cemetery where they visit a grave.
It’s a long exhausting day, and the lights lead them back home. The batteries inside are clearly fading, and they carry the ghost detector upstairs. There it surges one last time when they set it beside the photograph of Kat on Penny’s nightstand. Paul leaves it there, tucks his daughter in for the night, and kisses her on the forehead.
After he leaves, the light dims faintly in the darkness.
Commentary: David Findley was teased for writing this uncharacteristically emotional episode by both Hugh Kline and Barry Weyrich, and crew members recall vividly that he yelled, “Why don’t you bastards go learn how to have a feeling for a Goddamned change?” before telling them what they could go do with themselves.
The fate of the ghost detector prop is a matter of abiding speculation in the Acres of Perhaps fan community. Not long before David Findley left the show, a well-equipped burglar cut through two padlocked chains, climbed through a window six feet above the ground, and entered a locked storeroom to steal only this prop. Many fans believe this is something Findley might do during one of his famous benders, but others are less sure.
The propmaster, Billy Conrad, commented at the time that he was relieved that it was gone. “It kept going off all the time, batteries or no batteries,” he said. “Piece of crap.”
STORY NOTES
Acres of Perhaps
Even though this is my second book themed around a television show, I promise I didn’t watch that much as a kid.
I grew up in a time when TV shows played on their own schedules, and if you missed them—because you were in school or they were canceled or your dad was watching Benny Hill—they were more or less gone. A lot of the shows I “remember” from my childhood are very different in my memory than reality, either because I read their novelizations first (James Blish’s Star Trek adaptations are ten times better than the show), or because I wrote whole seasons of them in my head. My Alfred Hitchcock Presents is a lot different than yours.
What I did watch every day after school on WTBS was even weirder: Leave it to Beaver. I was fascinated by such a strange family where Ward would repair the toaster’s electric plug with a little good-natured scolding for June about pulling it out by the cord instead of, say, beating her with it like would happen in our house. Ward never hauled off and punched the Beav, and June never lost a pair of glasses to a smack in the face.
Even for the time, though, the Cleavers were a weird fucking family. For one thing, they were called “the Cleavers” like some butcher ancestor from Alsace got renamed coming through Ellis Island. For another, Beav had a strange habit (like me) of imbuing non-sentient things with sentience, like that time he stole a tree from his old house because he was worried it was lonely for being left behind.
“You really think trees have feelings, Beaver?” his friend Larry asks.
“All the trees in Mr. Disney’s pictures have feelings. They yell and scream and chase people around and everything.”
“Aw, that’s just in cartoons. Did you ever have a real tree screaming at you?”
“No.”
But he thinks about it first, and in that pause is everything I write about.
Probably the biggest influence on my writing from television, beyond the thirty total episodes of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Outer Limits I saw as a kid, comes from this idea that the world is plenty strange without the supernatural if you’re perceptive enough. When Beaver Cleaver grew up, he must have found a home in a little Washington town called Twin Peaks. With a name like “Beaver,” how could he not?
My fiction tends to appear in genre magazines, and I’m proud of that. I get a lot of feedback, though, from readers that I don’t “go far enough” or include enough of a “speculative element,” that my stories tend to be more about people imagining the supernatural or strange than experiencing it. Maybe my imagination is too shriveled or stunted to jump all in on a good monster or secondary world, or maybe I’ve gotten a little too good at making this world more entertaining to me with delusion.
Whatever the cause, I’m more fascinated (or perhaps desperate is the word) to see signs of the wondrous in the ordinary that still satisfy my regrettably cynical nature. I want to believe, as Agent Fox Mulder would say.
As I wrote this story, I wondered about the schism in myself between workaday magic (the Barry Weyrich kind) and “inspiration,” which David Findley relies upon. I’ve spent too much of my life pursuing the fast and sexy variety while overlooking the kind that lives in jobs and marriages and mowing the lawn. But as I look through my work, I’m hard-pressed to even remember which stories came about in a sudden burst of lightning and which only trickled in, and I certainly can’t tell the difference between them in quality.
My conclusion? I think they’re largely the same magic, and one just moves more slowly than the other.
Originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction,
July 2015, and T
he Year’s Best Fantasy and Science Fiction: 2016 Edition, Rich Horton, ed.
The Zodiac Walks on the Moon
I first read Robert Graysmith’s book Zodiac when I was fourteen years old, and there’s no question that the titular serial killer figured prominently in the origins of my imagination. For one thing, he seemed to be a crazed criminal genius, sending taunting letters and arcane cryptograms to the newspapers that showed a strange erudition with topics ranging from Gilbert and Sullivan to celestial navigation.
For another, his composite drawing looked very much like my father at the time of the crimes, a big square head with a crewcut and horn-rimmed glasses. Though I consciously knew that my father couldn’t possibly be the Zodiac, the notion helped me adjust to the horrible truth that it was possible for a man as smart as my father to use that intelligence for evil, and that however violent and embarrassing his crimes were, I could at least take consolation that he was, after all, a criminal genius.
I guess that’s all you need to know about my childhood, that I wished my father was the Zodiac because he was the BETTER choice.
As time went on, however, I realized that when you examined the Zodiac case carefully, it was just as likely that he was a lucky idiot as a mastermind. So much of the more sophisticated elements of Zodiac’s crimes, the use of radians and astrology and movie lore and military tactics, could be Graysmith’s interpretations of ambiguous stimuli. If anything, Zodiac’s crimes were the lowest-hanging fruit he could find, culminating in shooting a cab driver in the back of the head like a common mugger. He delivered on none of his threats and eventually faded into obscurity.
By an interesting coincidence, the “lucky idiot” theory made more sense to me after re-contacting my father after twenty years of silence. He too seemed like someone who’d mastered the sound of being smart without any of the substance, and that was an important lesson for me.
Sometimes we can’t figure a person out not because we can’t raise ourselves to his genius but because we can’t lower ourselves to his mediocrity.
The story in this collection largely came about because I reflected on the interesting coincidence that the Zodiac stepped up his public game after the Moon landings, and I wondered what inspiration someone like that would take from our greatest human achievement.
Like Graysmith, I think I’ve given Zodiac way more credit than he likely deserves.
Originally appeared in Nightmare Magazine,
November 2017.
The Leaning Lincoln
This story is slightly true.
In 1983, my father almost certainly wound up an emotionally-troubled man into a shooting spree to kill their mutual enemies — creditors, bankers, and a lawyer.
The man started by fatally shooting his own lawyer (whom he saw as “mishandling” an inheritance case) and was luckily stopped there, but when he was arrested, he was found with a list of other victims not obviously connected to him. He never admitted they were connected to my father.
[I won’t comment on the specifics of the real case out of respect for the victim and his family. I hope I fictionalized it enough not to be offensive, and I hope that though I humanized the killer, I didn’t absolve him of his crime. He was definitely responsible for his own deranged reasons, but there’s a truth most people didn’t know which is that my father helped derange him.]
The man — fictionalized as “Henry” in the story — was kinder and more understanding to me and my family than my father ever was. He took us to the movies and talked about Dungeons and Dragons with me, and yes, he did make me a lead Abraham Lincoln figurine that seemed to bring me bad luck.
As a kid playing with action figures on the back patio, I heard my dad rant to “Henry” about his enemies while “Henry” quietly listened, and in the decades since, I’ve wondered what I should have done or whom I could have told. “Henry” was convicted and died in prison while my father went on to other crimes. He’s dead now, too.
The speculation in this story is the idea that a kid like me, weird and dreamy and superstitious, could find a way to use that to do good in the real world.
I wanted to talk about where magic came from with other readers like me who I know wonder that for themselves. I wanted to talk about how our books and comics and movies and action figures saved a lot of us from terrible things, and I wanted to talk about what we should do with that to pass it on, how we should add science fiction and fantasy to the world instead of just hiding there.
That’s what Scott does in the story, and it’s what I couldn’t quite manage when I was ten. I had to go back in time for another shot at putting my father on trial and convicting him with magic.
Originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction,
October-November 2016.
Night Fever
A question that’s hard to answer for me is where I’m from. I spent the first five years of my childhood in Garden City, New York, the second five in Englewood, Florida, and the third five in Arcadia, Florida. That makes me a curious combination of a 1970s New Yorker, an early 1980s beach-side Floridian, and a late 1980s anti-redneck punk.
Because the point of the question is to get a better sense of who I am as a person, I usually just say I’m from New York even though I left fairly early because my family kind of carried New York with us even to Florida. My mother kept her accent and my father kept his attitude, and I always suspected I was missing out by living in the sticks of Florida.
What I remember from my childhood about New York is that it was fast and it was gray and it was dirty; my mother once admonished me for kissing a train to thank it for carrying us safely to our destination. I remember my sister listening to Shaun Cassidy and Barry Manilow on the radio, I remember playgrounds with black rubber mats atop the concrete, I remember the lights of Rockefeller Center at Christmas, and I remember my grandparents’ house in Flushing. I remember visiting my father at his job at OTB (which I thought was a bank because of how he dressed), and I remember going to Pathmark next door.
I knew one day I’d write about my New York, though I had no idea when or how.
Then one day I posted an off-hand tweet that if Charles Manson had been active in the 1970s instead of the 1960s, it would have been Night Fever coming down fast instead of Helter Skelter. My friend and Clarion classmate Robert Levy said he’d read a story about that, and I immediately deleted the tweet to save the idea for myself.
I was scared to write the story because I wanted it to be authentic. I knew a lot about the Manson case and it was fun to extrapolate it into the 1970s, but I was nervous that my exposure to the city wasn’t enough. My sister spent her time at violin lessons, not Studio 54.
When I started my research, I was surprised at how quickly the things I discovered clicked with my memories of big heavy cars and trash-blown streets, and somehow it wasn’t that hard to feel back at home there. The story didn’t exactly write itself, but it was a comfortable place for most of the work.
If there’s a point to the story, it’s that blaming the Sixties for the Manson crimes is absurd—a person like that would use the tools of any era to assert his will, and there are always forgotten and isolated people to recruit. Leslie Van Houten has a cameo in the story as a journalist because that’s where I suspect she might have ended up if she hadn’t met Manson.
Do I think she should be released? I am certain she (and her other female codefendants) would do no harm if they were out. As for whether that serves the cause of “justice,” I’m not sure we know enough of their hearts either way.
Originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction,
May-June 2017.
Poe at Gettysburg
I was lucky during my senior year at the University of Florida to take a course with Poe scholar William Goldhurst, a large man with much gusto who used to pronounce the author’s name “POW!” It was an evening class, and after his great lectures and readings, it was fun to walk in the dark across campus and live inside my mental Poeland,
though it’s hard to properly brood in shorts and a Gator t-shirt.
Something that surprised me as an English major was how boring the classes were. I enjoyed writing and I enjoyed reading, but the only classes available in that large and busy department during my registration appointments were hard to stitch together with my interests, stuff like 17th century drama and 18th century diarists. It was the class in Poe and another in science fiction that saved my interest in studying literature, and I’m not sure if that’s a blessing or not.
For Goldhurst’s class as an undergrad and in later graduate ones, I researched Poe a great deal—I might well have made him my specialty if I continued in academia—and I always found it fascinating that he took the name “Usher” for his celebrated story from a family that were friends of his parents.
They were theater owners, and I wondered what would have happened if they’d adopted him instead of the Allans. The Poe we discover in his letters was embarrassingly whiny and petulant, and it’s hard to tell what part of that was inborn and what came from his early (and late) abandonments. Would his life have been better or worse with the Ushers? For him or for us?
Poe, like Lincoln, was born in 1809 which means that he could plausibly have survived to see the horrors of the Civil War. Some Poe scholars call his view of slavery “complicated,” but it was no more complicated than that of many others raised in Virginia: he didn’t think that much about it if he didn’t have to, and when he did, he didn’t view it as unnatural. He took on the opinions of the people around him (at least in that) because they were convenient.
If he’d been raised in Kentucky with the real Usher family, there’s no guarantee that his thinking would have been any more liberal. Lincoln was born there, and he came somewhat slowly to his abolitionist views.
There are two reasons I gave Poe the chance to be a hero in this story. The first is that I wanted to play with the idea that we believe what we believe often because of the coincidence of where we’re born, not from logic or reason.
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