Twilight Zone Anthology

by Serling , Carol

  He can tell from their expressions, which are already glazing over, that they think this is a waste of their time. A fight, they’re thinking, maybe a bit worse than he’s telling. She’s got a boyfriend—that’s what they’re also thinking—and now she’s shacked up with him, deciding whether to come back to ol’ Karl or not.

  Oh yeah, he thinks, and almost laughs. She’s shacked up, all right. But it’s kind of a small apartment. . . .

  “Look,” he says to Officer Born-Again while the tall one is writing the report, “you sure you won’t have some coffee? I just made it.”

  The small, freckled one shrugs. “Sure, I guess. Been a long morning already.”

  “There you go.” He pours it out, hands the officer a steaming cup. “How about you?” he asks the other. “Change your mind?”

  The one writing the report shakes his head. “No, thanks, I’m off caffeine. Doctor’s orders.”

  Karl nods sagely. “Yeah, it’s probably not good for any of us, but I figure, hey, what’s life without a few risks?” He’s ready to have a good long chat, actually. He’s all but in the clear and it feels good. His new life starts now. Maybe there’s even a way he can collect Norah’s insurance. . . .

  The smaller cop looks around absently. “Uh, sorry to bother you, but you got cream and sugar?”

  “Milk, hope that’s okay. It’s not expired or anything.” He takes it from the fridge. The sugar he can’t immediately find. “Never use it myself,” he explains, but just then he spots the edge of the sugar bowl. It’s sitting, for some reason, up on top of the refrigerator.

  It is only as he grabs it and something wet slops onto his wrist that he realizes it is still sitting in the dish of water he placed it in to keep the ants out of the sugar. The bowl has been sitting up there all this time, ever since . . . since . . .

  That day. The day he was right about everything—even the sugar.

  Because the moat around the sugar bowl has definitely worked. The ants never got near it. Karl can see that clearly as he sets it down on the table in front of the freckled cop, because there, in full view, perched on a mound that is snowy white except for the crusted bit of sugar at the top that has gone brown with dried blood, lies the severed tip of one of Norah’s fingers, nail and all.

  Ants never take a day off and they always get the job done, but not everyone appreciates their diligence. Just about now, Karl may be wishing he’d chosen a slightly less hardworking insect than the ant to help him out. The grasshopper springs to mind. . . .

  In the course of a long and happy life, seldom do any of us give a great deal of thought to those final seconds of sentience, that all-too-brief interregnum in which we realize that death has arrived. We may have a will, but what of last-second changes of heart? A desire to clarify a point, a sudden wish to make an apology or right an old wrong? We would need only a few seconds, a last breath, to set right an error in judgment, or to speak words by which we can long be remembered.

  Unfortunately, as any newspaper reporter can tell you, no such final opportunities exist. But what if a reporter were to stumble upon a story too good to be true—a small shop suddenly appearing out of thin air, an elegant couple, and a mysterious, rather sinister marmalade cat—a story that leads him to a place where that most precious of commodities may indeed be for sale? A place one enters at one’s own risk, where unforeseen consequences often prove quite unpleasant. A place called the Twilight Zone.

  N

  obody could say, with any certainty, when the little shop on upper Union Street, not terribly far from the stone wall guarding the old Presidio of San Francisco, first opened for business. In and of itself, that touch of uncertainty wasn’t particularly surprising, given not only the shop’s location at the very cusp of where the street changed in character from exceedingly high-rent commercial to absurdly overpriced residential, but also its lack of any sort of eye-catching signage. In fact, the only indication that it was a business at all was the understated gold-leaf lettering on the front door: YOUR LAST BREATH, INC. And the only indication that the shop was open was the appearance one day of a marmalade cat sleeping in the picture window fronting the street. Beyond those two admittedly rather opaque clues, the gold-leaf lettering and the sleeping cat, passersby, whether shoppers on the far periphery of the commercial district or neighborhood residents out for a stroll, were provided with little concrete evidence of much of anything.

  “What, exactly, do you sell here?”

  The shop had been open, or, perhaps more accurately, the cat had been in the window, for two days before the first person, a woman, expensively clad in designer athletic wear and pushing a baby carriage the size and heft of a small automobile, opened the door. Keeping one hand on the baby carriage, she aggressively thrust her head and shoulders through the doorway, leaning forward somewhat precariously as she did so. Standing in the center of the room were a man and a woman, to whom, jointly, the visitor addressed her question.

  “I beg your pardon?” the man responded, his tone of voice distinctly formal and carrying a hint of an accent that neighborhood pundits, after much thought and discussion, would later conclude was Eastern European. Tall, thin, and elegantly handsome, he was dressed in a white linen suit accessorized with a mauve Egyptian cotton shirt, white silk tie, and patent leather shoes with, of all things, white spats. He had emerald-green eyes, short blond hair shot with a hint of gray, and could have been anywhere between thirty-five and sixty.

  “Sell,” the woman in the door repeated, sudden irritation evident in her voice. “What do you sell here? I mean,” she looked from the man to the woman, out to her baby carriage, and then back to the man again, “this is a business of some sort, isn’t it? You must sell something.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” the man said, “but I’m afraid we don’t actually sell anything here.” He looked at his companion and smiled. “Do we, my dear?”

  “Technically speaking, we do not,” she confirmed, returning his smile with a look of affection. Almost as tall as her companion, she wore a simple, black satin sheath dress with three-inch black pumps and, at her throat, a necklace bearing an eight-carat rose-colored diamond. High cheekbones and a deep tan gave her face a vaguely Amerindian look, her exotic beauty heightened by luxuriously thick black hair that fell straight to her bare shoulders. “And certainly not in the mercantile sense to which you,” she turned her head to look directly at the woman with the baby carriage, raising a single eyebrow as she did so, “are alluding.”

  Craning her neck, the woman in the doorway could see that the room contained only, in addition to the couple with whom she was speaking, and, of course, the cat in the window, a nine-foot Bösendorfer concert grand piano, a leather-upholstered love seat, and a matching leather club chair.

  “And in any event,” the man continued, smoothly stepping forward and slowly but firmly closing the door on the inquisitive woman, “in order to better serve our existing clientele, we are able to accept very few,” he paused a beat and looked over at the cat, now awake and watching the proceedings with obvious interest, “very few,” he reiterated, “new customers.”

  Suddenly possessed of an inexplicably urgent need to learn more, the woman waved her free hand even as the door was closing. “But,” she cried out, “you don’t understand. I just want . . .” Her voice trailed off as she realized that she was talking to a closed door and that other passersby were giving her sidelong glances.

  Over the course of the next several days the same scene was repeated any number of times as word began to spread about the mysterious shop with the decidedly exotic couple and the cat in the window. Many were annoyed about being given a rather genteel version of the old-fashioned bum’s rush, but most laughed it off, repeating the all-encompassing Bay Area mantra, only in San Francisco.

  “My name is Roger Sims and, as you can see from my card, I’m a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle.”

  An intense young man in his early twenties, Sims wore
brown corduroy trousers, a rumpled and somewhat threadbare Harris Tweed jacket, and a polyester Hawaiian shirt. He sported wire-rimmed glasses, a Mickey Mouse watch, and badly scuffed white tennis shoes.

  The woman, dressed in a sleek gown of pastel green shantung silk with matching heels, took the proffered business card and, without so much as a glance at the information printed thereon, passed it to her companion.

  “Say, my girlfriend’s got a cat,” Sims informed them, putting forth a hand as if to pet the marmalade cat in the window. The cat quickly extended its right paw, exposing a fearsome-looking set of claws in a warning no less graphic than the weaving, flattened head of a cobra about to strike. “Damn,” Sims exclaimed, snatching his hand out of harm’s way, “that’s not a very friendly cat.”

  “Do you welcome the uninvited touch of complete strangers?” the woman asked. “Furthermore,” she continued after an instant’s pause, “I can assure you that Grace is not merely a cat.”

  “Oh, really?” Sims replied sarcastically. “What is she then?”

  “She owns this business,” the woman said in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. “Laszlo and I are her employees.”

  The man, Laszlo, nodded his head. He wore a bespoke navy silk-and-wool-blend suit, a crisp white shirt that seemed to gleam with an inner light, a blood red raw-silk tie, and mirror-polished cordovan wingtips. His voice, when he spoke, was deep and layered with over- and undertones that gave it an almost choral quality. “We, Clarissa and I, are in fact Grace’s only employees.”

  Sims looked at them for a second before nodding his head and smiling. “Whatever.” His smile faded. “Which brings me to the point of my visit here this morning.” He looked from Clarissa to Laszlo. “What exactly is your business?”

  Laszlo moved gracefully toward the door as if to show the newspaperman out. “I doubt your readers would have the least interest in what it is that we do,” he said. “But we, Grace, Clarissa, and I, nonetheless thank you for your kind interest.”

  “No, no,” Sims said, sidestepping neatly to avoid being herded back out to the street. “Something interesting is going on here and I intend to get to the bottom of it.” He reached into the pocket of his sport coat and took out several photographs. “For instance, ever since you opened you’ve refused to tell people what you do, and yet you’ve had some very interesting visitors, such as,” he handed them the first photograph, “Mrs. Ralph Johnson.” The photo showed an elderly and frail woman being helped into the shop by her uniformed chauffeur. The widow of the late scion of San Francisco’s oldest banking family, Mrs. Johnson was widely reputed to have a net worth somewhat in excess of one billion dollars. “And,” he handed them the second photograph, “Roscoe Wilson.” Roscoe Wilson, a legendary investment banker and Silicon Valley venture capitalist said to be worth almost as much as Bill Gates, was also a much respected and not-a-little-feared political power broker in Sacramento. “And there’s three more here,” Sims continued, handing them the rest of the photos, “all financial pillars of the community, so to speak, and all,” he retrieved the photos and put them back in his pocket, “elderly. Now, I’m going to get this story, one way or the other, so wouldn’t it be better if I got it firsthand, so to speak?”

  Laszlo and Clarissa looked at each other, then at Grace, the cat, then finally back at the young reporter. “Please sit down, Mr. Sims,” Laszlo said, indicating the club chair next to the piano with a slight wave of his hand.

  “Tell me,” Clarissa asked when they were seated, “what would it be worth to you to have one final breath of life?”

  “Come, come, Mr. Sims,” Laszlo interjected upon seeing a look of confusion on the reporter’s face, “as one who asks questions for a living, you should certainly be able to answer one as simple as this.” He paused for a second and smiled at Clarissa. “Imagine, if you can, that death has somehow, say by the occurrence of a stroke or heart attack, as it does for most of us, taken you by surprise. A sudden pain in the chest, a flash of light, and,” he snapped his fingers, “off you go. No opportunity to utter, for example, a long-delayed apology to a loved one you somehow wronged in the past, no chance to issue, perhaps, heartfelt gratitude for a kindness rendered, no final words of wisdom through which you might be remembered by the world at large. Just,” another smile, together with a very Gallic shrug of the shoulders, “an instant of regret followed by eternal darkness. Now, under those circumstances, circumstances, I hasten to remind you, under which the vast majority of us exit this soidisant veil of tears, we, Clarissa and I, ask again, what would it be worth to you to have one final breath?”

  “Do I really look that stupid?” Sims asked, annoyance apparent in his tone of voice.

  “We have no reason to believe that you are possessed of anything approaching a below-average intelligence,” Clarissa replied innocently. “Although,” she smiled brilliantly, “I must say that your clothing choices hardly inspire confidence in a business setting.”

  “My clothing choices?”

  “One seldom sees corduroy worn with Harris Tweed,” Laszlo gently pointed out.

  “And for good reason,” Clarissa confirmed. “You should always be aware that new acquaintances invariably look to such things when forming important first impressions.”

  “Or, as Lord Mountbatten was fond of saying, if one wishes to run with the hounds, one should take care to avoid looking like a fox,” Laszlo added with a chuckle.

  “A brilliant man,” Clarissa said to Sims, nodding her head as if confirming the veracity of her own statement. “One of the first of the royal family in Britain, if not the first, to understand the postwar imperative of realpolitik.”

  “I suppose he was one of your clients,” Sims said with heavy sarcasm.

  “Alas,” Laszlo shook his head sadly, “no. But not for lack of effort on my part, I assure you. Mortality, I’m afraid, was seldom on his mind.”

  “Unlike Herr von Goethe,” Clarissa reminded him.

  “Ah, yes, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.” Laszlo smiled. “Many thought him stiff and formal to a fault, but trust me when I tell you that in the company of a few good friends, well, Herr Doktor Goethe could bend an elbow with the best of them. He was also a man who appreciated the need to ensure that a sudden and unexpected death did not rob him of the opportunity to share his final thought with a soon-to-be grieving world.”

  “And his final words were . . . ?” Sims hated to have to ask but felt compelled to do so.

  Laszlo leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Mehr licht.”

  “Which means?”

  Laszlo leaned back in his seat, unable to hide his disappointment in the young reporter’s ignorance of German. “Where did you go to school?” he asked.

  “Now, Laszlo, don’t be rude,” Clarissa interjected. “It is quite possible for one to be reasonably well educated and yet not have a working knowledge of more than two or three languages.” She looked at Sims. “Mehr licht in English is ‘more light.’ ” She paused and sighed. “Such profundity, such . . .” she paused a beat, searching for the right word, “such opacity.”

  “One could call it a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” Laszlo volunteered, smiling. Seeing the blank look on Sims’s face, the smile faded. “Winston Churchill,” he informed the young reporter.

  “I suppose he was a client,” Sims said. “Churchill, I mean.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Clarissa said, shaking her head sadly. “Mr. Churchill was a difficult man to get to know, socially speaking. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, who I’m pleased to say was a client, Mr. Churchill was a most unclubbable man.”

  “But a fair watercolorist,” Laszlo volunteered. He smiled at Sims. “He painted a charming little landscape for Clarissa.”

  “Of course, unlike Herr Goethe, not everyone who does business with us chooses final words of such philosophical import,” Clarissa said.

  “Indeed not,” Laszlo agreed. “Remember Rachmaninoff?”

  “How could I forget Serge
i?” Clarissa asked. “A wonderful man. Hearing him play that evening at the palace of old Count Orloff, in St. Petersburg . . .” Her voice trailed off and she looked at Sims. “Do you remember his last words?”

  “Somehow they’ve managed to slip my mind,” Sims replied, a sarcastic smile emphasizing his words.

  “My dear hands. Farewell my poor hands.” Looking back at Laszlo, she sighed again. “Artists like Sergei come along only once every few generations.”

  “If then,” Laszlo agreed, nodding his head.

  “You people don’t actually expect me to believe all this, do you?” Sims asked after several seconds of silence had filled the small room.

  “Believe what, Mr. Sims?” Clarissa asked, her eyes wide and questioning.

  “This,” Sims repeated, waving an arm to take in the entire room. “The notion that you two are actually in the business of selling,” he laughed shrilly and shook his head, “last breaths.”

  “Why, Mr. Sims,” Laszlo responded, smiling, “what you believe, and I do not mean to be rude, is of absolutely no consequence. You asked about the nature of our business and,” he shrugged, “we told you.”

  “And just where do you get these so-called last breaths?”

  Laszlo, saying nothing, turned his head to look pointedly at the cat, still lounging in the front window.

  “Oh, right, the cat . . .”

  “Grace,” Clarissa interjected. “Her name is Grace.”

  “As I said a minute ago,” Sims replied angrily, “you people must think I’m stupid.” He stood up and took a small digital camera out of his jacket pocket. “Well, you’ve made a big mistake.” He quickly shot a photograph of Laszlo and Clarissa sitting together on the love seat and another of Grace, staring balefully at him from the window ledge. “What you’re running here is nothing more than a scam, a con designed to frighten old people out of what I presume are large sums of money.” He turned to leave. “See you in the papers,” he said over his shoulder as he walked out the door.