by Rod Serling
"Done," Chatterje answered. "You will never again be laughed at, yefendi. Never ever. Never, never ever!"
Chatterje took a quick step backward as Jackio moved closer to him.
"You sure?" Jackie asked.
Chatterje touched his forehead. "I am as certain of this, yefendi, as I am that my peers are quite correct." The corners of his mouth turned down. "As a guru, I am a dismal, abject, altogether substandard klutz. A failure, yefendi. That is what I am."
Jackie glared at him. "We'll see," he said. "We'll just see."
He took his fat man's walk to the opening of the alley, then looked across the street, where a shriveled old woman sold flowers from a battered kiosk. "Hey," Jackie shouted at her. "Hey, lady! Ever hear the one about the two Arabs who got on the streetcar?"
The old woman looked at him, startled.
Jackie stepped off the curb. "Well, this one Arab
says to the other Arab—"
Chatterje screamed.
The old woman shut her eyes.
The cab driver went cold all over as he tried to jam on the brake.
There was the sound of a thud and a squish, and then two funny sounds, like twin balloons being punctured as the wheels rolled over Jackie Slater's body.
Pedestrians stood transfixed, staring at the motionless, twisted body of the fat man in the middle of the street.
Moments later there came the sound of an approaching siren.
There were the shocked murmurings of the onlookers.
But no laughter. No laughter at all.
The flower lady cried. Tears rolled down her cheeks and dropped like little liquid petals onto the bunches of violets.
Chatterje's little black shoe-button eyes took in everything. He let his gaze rest on the sobbing flower lady, then toward Jackie Slater's body. Laughter wasn't enough for you, yefendi, he thought to himself. No, indeed—tears you wanted. He took a deep breath and moved in the opposite direction down the street. "It's a moot question," he said to the pink-and-orange-sunset sky. "An altogether moot question."
The thin little sounds of the flower lady faded off, and in their place came the ear-splitting din of the ambulance's siren.
"Shall I continue the miracle route? Shall I perhaps open up a restaurant featuring curried delicacies, or perhaps a sabbatical while I brush up on the guru art?"
Chatterje took a last look at the body of Jackie Slater being lifted onto a stretcher and smiled sadly. "Poor yefendi," he whispered. "At least you have no more choices to make."
Then he continued down the sidewalk, as once again the ambulance's siren sent out its wailing notice of departure, and the big white vehicle disappeared around the corner carrying two hundred and eighty pounds of a late comedian.
Pamela's Voice
It had been an absolutely smashing day, begun auspiciously with his favorite eggs-Benedict breakfast, which he prepared himself, and then washed down with a dainty, exquisite Pinot. He had tiptoed quietly from the house for a brisk and invigorating walk in the clear April morning and then returned before Pamela had awakened. Then he had strung the piano wire across the third step from the top of the stairway, testing it for strength and tautness. Following that, he'd fixed himself a spot of Irish coffee in the study and sat patiently in his favorite leather chair facing the bay window that offered such a delightful view of the incredibly beautiful morning.
At promptly eleven o'clock the bell from Pamela's bedroom began to jangle furiously. He had smiled, picturing her in her hair net, mud pack, chin strap, and all the other nocturnal devices Pamela used to give battle to encroaching age.
He sipped at his coffee, heating the groaning wheeze of the mattress as she left the bed, and then her heavy footsteps to the door, followed by her shrill voice calling his name as she came out onto the upper landing.
"Jonathan? Jonathan, are you down there? Jonathan, why aren't you answering my—"
From the study he heard first her surprised gasp and then her throttled scream. Close behind was a loud thump, and then more thumps as Pamela had come somersaulting down the stairs, her heavy, body picking up momentum, until she had finished her journey on the hard oak floor at the foot of the stairs.
Jonathan came out of the study, to find her sitting uptight against the wall in a welter of silk bathrobe and hanging hair net directly under the severe-looking portrait of her great-grandfather. Her broken neck, rooster-style, left her shoulderblades at an impossible angle; and when Jonathan gently lifted up her head, her still-open eyes, smudged with mascara, glared at him with silent fury under the arched, plucked eyebrows. He had gazed into the dead horse face of his wife, through the cracks of the mud pack and the various creams, and noted that in death, as in life, Pamela was perhaps the ugliest woman on the face of the earth.
But it was odd, he thought, as he walked to the phone to perform the meaningless ritual of calling a doctor, that even in death her mouth was open. There was that yawning cavern with the big yellow teeth, frozen in its accustomed position—parted and agape. He could imagine what was clogged up by the sudden detour in her windpipe—her daily epithets, criticisms, whinings, and multiple angers, precipitously cut off by Jonathan's piano wire.
The burnished mahogany casket reflected the four tall candles as well as the tiers of flowers and wreaths placed around it. And Jonathan, his spare, trim little frame housed impeccably in a silk smoking jacket, sat in his leather chair across the room looking at it. He placed a long cigarette in a holder, lit it, started to put the match into an ashtray, and then, as if reminded by the casket, flipped the match onto the carpet. He then tapped the ashes off his cigarette to land at his feet and leaned back luxuriously. Among the myriad things that Pamela had disapproved of, smoking was near the top of the list. And dropping ashes on the carpet, she had placed in the same category as child beating and infidelity. But there were many things, Jonathan reflected, that Pamela had disapproved of. The candles, Jonathan noted, made the Victorian room brighter than it ever had been. Pamela had lectured him incessantly about wasting electricity. She would walk from room to room, turning off light switches. "When not in use—turn off the juice," she would say. And then she would move into whatever room Jonathan was in and sniff the air. "Have you been smoking, Jonathan?" she would always ask. "Tobacco is one of the most miserable poisons extant. Quite apart from what it does to the body—it fouls the air permanently."
Jonathan smiled as he reflected. Pamela had never known what "permanently" meant until she'd been placed in the box across the room. Pamela had really not known much of anything except how to rage, persecute, complain, and vilify. Jonathan had wished for her death for the first five years, desperately prayed for it for the next five, and actively planned it for the last five. Fifteen years, he thought to himself, fifteen years with Pamela's mouth—that working, smacking, perpetually moving noise box that kept opening and shutting as if on an oiled hinge, giving him no peace, no silence, no escape.
He rose from the chair, dusted some ashes off the lapel of his smoking jacket, and walked over to a small cabinet. From it he took out a bottle of wine tlrat he had formerly hidden in the cellar. He squinted at its label. A light-bodied claret from 1923, which, Jonathan reflected again, had been a fair year. He carried the bottle back over to the chair, and in the process passed Pamela sitting on the sofa. He nodded affably toward her, then stopped in his tracks as a glacier rose from his feet and took a freezing journey up to his brain. Pamela! Pamela sitting on the sofa. He blinked, swallowed, then turned very slowly to look again toward the sofa.
Pamela sat there, slightly transparent and very ghostlike. But she sat there. And there was nothing ephemeral in the voice. It was Pamela's—shrill, grating, enveloping. "Nothing better to do tonight, Jonathan? Just stand there like a bump on a log?"
Jonathan blinked again and stared.
"Look hard enough, and you'll see me. You're blind as a bat, Jonathan."
Jonathan checked the bottle in his hand to see if perhaps he had already drunk from it.
It was still corked and full. He took a deep breath. "Pamela? Is that your voice?"
The specter on the sofa seemed to grow more solid. "Whose voice were you expecting, you idiot? Who else's voice could it possibly be? And don't stand there gaping like an owl."
Jonathan sat down in his favorite chair. Of course, it was Pamela. No one else could fire off that many tired metaphors per minute. And no one's voice could sound like a fingernail across a blackboard like Pamela's.
He carefully put the bottle aside, then forced himself to look directly at Pamela. Yes, it was definitely Pamela. The severe, hating eyes the long tallow-colored face—the gaping open mouth.
"Surprised?" Pamela asked.
"At what?"
The figure on the sofa shrugged. "At my being here."
Jonathan leaned back in the chair. He felt no fear at all. Pamela, the dead apparition, seemed infinitely less menacing than Pamela—that shrewish, pianolegged bane of fifteen endless years.
"Hardly surprised," he said mildly. "In life, my dear Pamela, you arrived every place uninvited. You and that hyena-mating voice of yours."
She seemed totally materialized now, and sat as she had always sat—hunched forward, hands clenched into fists, an open mouth twisted like the bent mouthpiece of a bugle.
"Tell me, Pamela," he said, "how are things up there? Keeping you occupied, are they? Keeping you contented? Are there lives—or rather, afterlives—you can destroy with gossip? Reputations you can filthy up with your dark little suspicions and that kitchen-knife tongue of yours?" He laughed. "Incredible. Really incredible. It never occurred to me, Pamela." He pointed at her. "You're probably not even up there. Most likely you're—" He stopped, pointing a finger at the floor.
"Crazy as a loon," Pamela said. "I'm neither, Jonathan. I'm right here. I've not left, though you did your level best to get me out of the way."
Jonathan looked over at the casket and smiled. "Pamela," he said, "you are out of the way. Resilient, you were. But altogether mortal. And being mortal, my dear, a broken neck did you in nicely." He leaned forward in the chair. "Was it painful? I mean, when you landed at the foot of the stairs—hurt much, did it?"
"Not a particle," Pamela said icily.
"Pity." Jonathan shook his head a little forlornly. "That rather takes the fun out of it. I'd hoped the discomfort would be somewhat prolonged. You know—tit for tat. My fifteen-odd years of, marital agony—against at least a few minutes of some pronounced pain of your own. A real pity, Pamela."
Pamela rose from the sofa. "You had it rough, you did," she screeched at him. "You meandering tomcat, you! Why, I could have had my pick of any man in town! My daddy, God rest his soul, had to bar the doors to keep the swains from forcing their way in."
Jonathan looked up at the ceiling and laughed. "The swains?" he roared. "The swains, indeed. My God, Pamela, they weren't swains. They were a two-platoon system of fortune-hunters and hungry gigolos!"
"So you say!"
"Because it's the truth. Without your big daddy's bank account, you couldn't have gotten a proposal in an all-male penal colony. You couldn't have even gotten an indecent proposition!"
"Now, you listen to me, Jonathan." Her shrill voice, just as always, enveloped the room.
Jonathan simply turned away and lit another cigarette. "I have listened to you, Pamela," he said quietly, "for over fifteen years. I have listened to you to the point of a bleeding ulcer, two ruptured eardrums, and a permanent migraine!"
With this he uncorked the wine bottle, then started to carry it back over to the chest for a glass. Inexplicably, Pamela was standing in front of him. He hadn't seen her move. She just appeared, as if transported from her former place to a point in front of the chest directly in Jonathan's path. He stopped and drew away from her waggling finger.
"You listen to me, Jonathan," she said, "and you keep listening, because I intend to keep right on talking.''
Jonathan shrugged, turned, and retreated back to his chair. Once again he found Pamela standing in front of him, blocking him.
"You were a swine as a husband." Her voice, a constant, perpetual siren shrilled at him, and he found himself staring at that omniscient cave that kept opening and closing. "You were a rotter as a companion—a faithless fancy Dan with all the morals of a Bowery wino!"
Then something exploded inside of him. That mouth of hers . . . that voice of hers clawed a hole in his restraint, and through it poured out all the rage, all the frustration, all the mountainous hatred he had managed to throttle over the miserable decade and a half.
"You bloody bitch, you!" he screamed at her. "Close that big flapping mouth of yours! You think I've risked an electric chair just to suffer more of you? That suet-pudding body of yours—that's one thing. But that voice of yours, Pamela—that voice! That untuned trombone screech that fills the room every time you air your tonsils!"
It flowed out of him—the hot, bubbling waves of venom so long pent up. "That's what made me do it, Pamela. That cacophony of noise—that off-key lunch whistle—that cracked calliope that woke me in the morning and shrieked at me throughout the day and battered my head at night!"
He held out a fist in front of her face. "That's why I murdered you, Pamela. So I wouldn't have to listen to that voice of yours!"
Pamela's laughter filled the room and made him wince.
"Well, now," she said, "fancy that! Poor, sensitive man with the delicate ears! Didn't care for the sound of my voice."
She sauntered back over to the sofa and sat down. "And what do you suppose you're listening to now, Jonathan?" she asked. "Dead, I may be—but what is it you're listening to?"
Jonathan moved over to the casket and leaned against it, again lighting a cigarette. "What am I listening to?" he repeated. He tapped his forehead. "My imagination. That's what I'm listening to. I'm listening, Pamela, to a fantasy. I'm looking at a specter. You—that dumpy, flabby carcass of yours—that pulsating and perpetual nagging—I'm imagining it!"
He let the fingers of one hand move across the polished surface of the casket. "Do you recall what Scrooge said to the ghost of Marley?" he asked her. " 'You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an undone potato. There is more of gravy than grave about you.' Understand, Pamela? You're very likely part of my eggs Benedict—simply a case of stereophonic indigestion!''
He smiled, tapped the side of the casket, then crooked a finger at her. "Why fight it, Pamela? It's beddy-bye time. Permanent beddy-bye time." He looked at his watch. "They'll be coming for you soon."
Pamela's voice sounded puzzled. "Who will?"
"Why, the funeral director and his minions, of course. We're going to convey you to the cemetery."
Pamela stared at him. "How's that again, Jonathan?''
Jonathan's anger fizzled out like a spent firecracker. His voice was patient. "The cemetery, my dear. The repository of the deceased. The tomb . . . the vault · . . the crypt . . . the resting place . . . the ossuary. Dig? Boot Hill, baby."
Pamela sighed. "I swear, Jonathan. You're still the most absentminded man I ever met. Absentminded as a professor."
"I am?" he said, pointing to himself.
"Don't you remember? You buried me months ago."
Jonathan bunked at her. "I did what?" he asked, feeling a funny disorientation.
"I fell down the stairs," Pamela said, "on the seventeenth of April. My funeral was on the nineteenth. And this is August."
Again he blinked at her and tried to remember. How could it be August? The whole thing had happened just that morning. Or had it? He suddenly realized that he was unable to piece together the chronology of the day. He remembered his walk and the eggs Benedict and the piano wire. But was that this
morning? Or another day? Or when was it?
"August?" he repeated.
"August," she answered in an unusually soft voice.
He stared at her for a long moment, took a few steps halfway across the room toward her, then stopp
ed and looked over his shoulder at the casket, jerking his thumb at it. "And . . . that?" he asked, whispering.
He didn't wait for her reply. He turned and walked back over to the casket, feeling the anchor-chain weight of premonition—not wanting to look—but compelled to look, even so.
Pamela folded her arms in front of her. When she spoke, her voice zoomed up to its normal high-pitched, shattering decibel level. "You've only yourself to blame," she bugled out triumphantly. "It's no more than you deserve for so excessively celebrating my demise."
Jonathan peered into the casket. The cigarette and its holder fell to the floor.
Lying there, on tufted velvet, was himself hands folded in peaceful repose.
Pamela's voice formed an obligato to the silent moment. "All that rich food," she scolded, "those late hours, the alcoholic spirits. If I'd told you once, I'd told you a hundred times, Jonathan. You were constitutionally unsuited to the life of indecency and Bacchanalian self-indulgence."
Jonathan stood there, rooted—staring in numb disbelief at his own waxen face in the casket. He was only barely conscious of the fractious screech that came from across the room.
"Would you listen to me, Jonathan? Of course not. Like all the other sound advice I I offered you down through the years, you ungrateftfily ignored it! And don't think I don't know why you married me, you fortune-hunting finagler. You married me for my money, my position, my family, this house—"
Jonathan tore his gaze away from the corpse and turned back toward Pamela. "Pamela," he said, "it isn't just you . . . it's also—"
Pamela filled it in for him. "You, Jonathan. Quite correct. The word is 'ghost.' That's precisely what you are."
What an incredibly strange dream, Jonathan thought to himself as he moved back over to the chair. Nightmare on top of nightmare.
He found her at his elbow. "I reject that," he announced in a slightly quavering voice, "as palpably impossible. I reject you, Pamela. Because when one dies—one either goes up there" he pointed to the ceiling—"or down there." He pointed to the floor.